King’s Psychological Gothicism
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Shooter, but that Shooter’s name is written everywhere in the house and that
Shooter “had been here . . . had been, or was still” (King, Window 309). It is
then that the remote and deserted summer home at Tashmore Gien comes fiilly
to life and speaks its own language of tumult and destruction.
As the winding staircases to unorganized office space and a messy
living room in Secret Window, Secret Garden are architectural manifestations of
the character’s helplessness and disorientation in general, so do they represent
his repressed unconscious in particular. Mort’s house has to be understood as the
emblematic outer representation of the inner “rooms” of the young man’s
troubled psyche. His madness “occurs because [he] cannot deal adequately with
the forces that surge beneath [his] conscious mind” (Gibbs 11). Similar to the
ending of Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and King’s
famous novel The Shining, Mort’s summer house and once main residence in
Derry fall apart—an allegorical expression for the character’s loss of mind and
identity.
When Mort’s increased madness overshadows every contact with the
real world, Mort misinterprets Amy’s disloyalty towards him as the sole cause
for the continuous reappearance of John Shooter, whose identity he understands
as a recall to SHOOT-(h)ER; to cut “[that] eye from the socket” (Poe 189)7,
which gives him insight into the darkness of his psyche. In order to eliminate the
cause of his intense pain, to suppress the arousing unconscious, and to
reestablish his inner peace, he decides to kill his ex-wife: First, by pulling her
back and attacking her with a screwdriver, then by bringing “the scissors down
in a silver arc” to be finally able to bury her at a special “place in the garden”
(King, Window 369). Now Mort’s second dream has become reality and the
once only imagined, but objectified and distorted desire to kill Amy demands
execution. The fictive comfield has tumed into a real battlefield of physical
survival on the one hand, and a shattered war-zone representing total mental and
emotional breakdown, on the other. The collapse of limits between the realm of
the imaginary and the real is complete.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we can state that Stephen King’s combination of late
eighteenth-century gothic hallmarks with twenty-first Century American family
life and medical as well as psychological phenomena, has given his story Secret
Window, Secret Garden a very uncanny touch and lets it stand out as a literary
masterpiece of psychological horror. It is this particular amalgamation of old
and new, of past and present, of literature and psychoanalysis, which transforms
the familiär into the unfamiliar, lets readers not only wonder but makes them an
integrated part of the exceptional happenings taking place at the summerhouse at
Tashmore Gien. The portrayal of Mort’s unconscious with its symptomatic
formation of guilt and anxiety clearly shows a development from the
supematural to the psychological and medical, which is expressed in Mort’s