Gerald's Game

“But, and this was odd, another part of her really didn’t want to escape the tilted, foggy corridor at all. This part suggested that she’d be a lot better off staying here. That if she left she’d be sorry. So she did stay for awhile.”

Jessie is caught between the instinct to fight for her survival and the learned behavior of giving up. It is clear that she usually backs down from disagreements with Gerald, but she is now in a position where giving up means dying. Though part of her would prefer to deny the situation at hand, she only allows herself the comfort of giving up for a moment before returning to the present situation.

“The sound of her own screaming voice almost sent her into another panicky, convulsive interlude, and the scariest part wasn’t Gerald’s continued failure to move or respond; it was the realization that the panic was still there, still right there, restlessly circling her conscious mind as patiently as a predator might circle the guttering campfire of a woman who has somehow wandered away from her friends and gotten lost in the deep, dark fastnesses of the woods.”

The language of this passage uses personification to indicate that Jessie’s panic is more like an animal, but the contextual information also conceptualizes this panic as a man preying on a lone woman. Given that Gerald just attempted to assault Jessie, it is fitting that King conceptualizes panic itself as a man. In this moment, King indicates that Jessie’s panic will not be relieved until she can free herself, even if she is able to hold off the panic for brief periods of time.

“Still, it was nice to remember something good about the man with whom she had spent so many years, and the memory of the way he had sometimes fallen asleep beside her after sex was a good one. She hadn’t liked the scarves and had come to loathe the handcuffs, but she had liked looking at him as he drifted off; had liked the way the lines smoothed out of his large pink face. And, in a way, he was sleeping beside her again right now…wasn’t he?”

This passage explores the apparent contradiction between acknowledging an unhealthy relationship and still feeling a bond or connection with a problematic partner. Though Gerald was never a satisfactory spouse, Jessie is torn by her memories of the marriage’s more pleasant moments. However, even the pleasant memory of Gerald sleeping after sex is paired with the memory of the scarves and handcuffs that Jessie resents.

“What it smelled was blood. The scent was both strong and wrong. In the end, the dog’s extreme hunger tipped the scales; it must eat soon or die. The former Prince began to walk slowly down the hall toward the bedroom. The smell grew stronger as it went. It was blood, all right, but it was the wrong blood. It was the blood of a master. Nevertheless, that smell, one far too rich and compelling to deny, had gotten into its small, desperate brain. The dog kept walking, and as it neared the bedroom door, it began to growl.”

By exploring Prince’s perspective, King also addresses Gerald’s earlier perspective when he decided to assault Jessie. Part of the novel’s message focuses on the problematic ways in which men are socialized to view women, and Prince is very much personified as a human male throughout the text. Like Prince, Gerald knew that he should not assault Jessie, but the fact that she was in a vulnerable position led him to take advantage of her situation, much like how Prince does in eating Gerald’s body with Jessie right in front of him. In both cases, the perspective is not about what is right or wrong, but what the perpetrator can do without consequence.

“When all the normal patterns and routines of a person’s life fell apart—and with such shocking suddenness—you had to find something you could hold onto, something that was both sane and predictable. If the organized swirl of blood in the thin sheaths of skin between your eyeballs and the last sunlight of an October day was all you could find, then you took it and said thank you very much. Because if you couldn’t find something to hold onto, something that made at least some sort of sense, the alien elements of the new world order were apt to drive you quite mad.”

This passage holds a double-sided wisdom for Jessie, as she is both centering herself on the pattern in her mind and avoiding the situation at hand. As with most of Jessie’s observations of her present situation, the meaning of the observation holds a different meaning for her past. In this case, her trauma as a child operates similarly to the present handcuff situation. However, in the past, Jessie’s ability to center herself has also led her to avoid confronting her trauma. Though she never lost her sanity, she now has psychological problems that developed because of her repression of her traumatic memories.

“It was as if she had been afforded a momentary glimpse behind the carnival; had been allowed to see the gray and empty fields of autumn that were the real truth: nothing but empty cigarette wrappers and used condoms and a few cheap broken prizes caught in the tall grass, waiting to either blow away or be covered by the winter snows. She saw that silent stupid sterile world waiting beyond the thin layer of patched canvas which was all that separated it from the razzle-dazzle brightness of the midway, the patter of the hucksters, and the glimmer-glamour of the rides, and it terrified her. To think that only this lay ahead for her, only this and nothing more, was awful; to think that it lay behind her as well, imperfectly hidden by the patched and tawdry canvas of her own doctored memories, was insupportable.”

This passage is an analogy for womanhood, as King compares reality to a carnival and posits that most people only see the bright lights and fun games on the surface rather than the seediness beneath. This passage therefore revels in imagery of dirt, grime, and emptiness, which is akin to the environment in a carnival’s wake or the areas surrounding a carnival that are not meant for the eyes of its guests. The glimpse that Jessie catches of how widespread trauma is among women because of male behavior is more than she can handle, and it causes her to envision a future of more abuse.

“The most obvious answer to that question was also the most unappetizing: because there was an enemy inside, a sad, bad bitch who like her just the way she was—handcuffed, aching, thirsty, scared, and miserable—just fine. Who didn’t want to see that condition alleviated in the slightest. Who would stoop to any dirty trick to see that it wasn’t. The total solar eclipse lasted just over a minute that day, Jessie…except in your mind. In there, it’s still going on, isn’t it?”

Here, Jessie understands more about her own position and the guilt she feels about the abuse she suffered as a child. She sees herself as being at least partially at fault for her father’s actions, as well as for the breakdown of her family. This perspective leaves a part of her feeling that she deserves punishment for her father’s decision to abuse her. Ruth’s voice acknowledges this dynamic most directly by noting that feels that her current position is a justified result of that trauma.

“She whirls, expecting to see her father. He did something like this to her during the eclipse, a thing she supposes the whining Cult-of-Selfers, the Live-in-the-Pasters like Ruth and Nora, would call child abuse. Whatever it was, it will be him—she’s sure of that much—and she is afraid she will exact a terrible punishment for the thing he did, no matter how serious or trivial that thing was: she will raise the croquet mallet and drive it into his face, smashing his nose and knocking out his teeth, and when he falls down on the grass the dogs will come and eat him up.”

Even in the context of Jessie’s dream, she isolates her trauma to the external forces of Ruth and Nora, noting that they would call what her father did “abuse,” and thus implying that Jessie herself would not consider it to be abuse. Nonetheless, she mixes the blame across Ruth, Nora, herself, and her father, for just as she calls Ruth and Nora names and expects punishment for herself, she also plans a violent revenge on her father. She also conflates her father and Gerald, by envisioning dogs eating her father’s corpse, as Prince is eating Gerald’s.

“And it doesn’t matter, she thought. It was just a dream after all. I mean, all those heads sticking out of heads? Dreams are supposed to be symbolic, of course—yes, I know—and I suppose there might have been some symbolism in this one…maybe even some truth. If nothing else, I think that now I understand why I hit Will when he goosed me that day. Nora Callighan would undoubtedly be thrilled—she’d call it a breakthrough. Probably it is. It doesn’t do a thing about getting me out of this fucking jail-house jewelry, though, and that’s still my top priority. Does anyone disagree with that?”

This passage highlights that Jessie is capable of consciously confronting her past trauma to a point. She can acknowledge the symbolism of her dream, in which men’s hands are seen as instruments of trauma, and she can even acknowledge the significance of the dream in relation to her prior therapy. However, it is Nora who would be “thrilled,” not Jessie, and she is not willing to see the relevance of the dream to her present situation. As long as a part of her feels guilty for the abuses she suffered, she will not be able to release herself from her current situation.

“Either she knew better or she refused to see the truth, and you arrived at the same conclusion no matter which answer you decided was the right one: when forced to choose between believing the ugly old woman who lived up the road from them in the summertime and her own daughter, Sally Mahout had chosen Pooh-Pooh breath. Good deal, huh? If I’m Daddy’s girl, that’s why. That and all the other stuff she says that’s like that. That’s why, but I could never tell her and she’ll never see it on her own. Never in a billion years.”

As Jessie looks back on her relationship with her mother, she sees how her mother’s animosity played a role in pushing her and her father together. However, Jessie is misplacing her irritation with Sally, as Sally ultimately wanted to keep Tom and Jessie apart. Sally’s own frustration was with the ways in which Tom and Jessie were able to make Sally look foolish or cruel, and this hidden dynamic renders Tom an even more antagonistic presence in the family, even before the day of the eclipse.

“Unpleasant things, demeaning things, painful things…they would all go away eventually if you ignored them enthusiastically enough, that was the Goodwife’s view. It was a voice apt to stubbornly insist that even the most obvious wrongs were actually rights, parts of a benign plan too large and complex for mere mortals to grasp. There would be times (mostly during her eleventh and twelfth years, when she called that voice Miss Petrie, after her second-grade teacher) when she would actually raise her hands to her ears to try and blot out that quacking, reasonable voice—useless of course, since it originated on the side of her ears she couldn’t get to—but in that moment of dawning dismay while the eclipse darkened the skies over western Maine and reflected stars burned in the depths of Dark Score Lake, that moment when she realized (sort of) what the hand between her legs was up to, she heard only kindness and practicality, and she seized upon what the voice was saying with panicky relief.”

Further characterization of Goody’s voice as a character appears in this passage, as Jessie highlights how Goody’s voice is informed by the seemingly “rigid” or “serious” women in her life. Although Jessie associates the voice with Miss Petrie, Goody is more accurately a representation of Sally, Jessie’s mother, since both display the common trait of accepting a disadvantageous position. However, as Jessie notes, the Goody voice places blame on Jessie and thereby allows her to minimize her trauma, divert blame away from Tom, and maintain her love for her father.

“Oh, that’s too much, she thought. If he’d raped me, maybe it would be different. But what happened on the deck that day was really just another accident, and not a very serious one, at that—if you want to know what a serious accident is, Jess, look at the situation you’re in here. I might as well blame old Mrs. Gilette for slapping my hand at that lawn-party, the summer I was four. Or a thought I had coming down the birth-canal. Or sins from some past life that still needed expiation. Besides, what he did to me on the deck wasn’t anything compared to what he did to me in the bedroom.”

This kind of relative measuring of Jessie’s trauma is the crux of her insistent denial of her feelings and her experiences. She usually confronts her trauma by deflecting her thoughts to other sources of pain and discomfort, such as her present situation on the bed. Interestingly, it is her inability to confront the past that hampers her in the present, and in this passage, she finally understands this dynamic. Instead of dwelling on the specificity of “rape” as an action, she progresses in her confrontation of the trauma by refocusing on her father’s manipulation following the assault.

“He had looked away when he said that, she remembered. All the time he had been deliberately driving her into hysterics of guilt and fear and impending doom, all the time he had been making sure she would never say anything by threatening to tell everything, he had looked right at her. When he offered that last apology, however, his gaze had shifted to the crayon designs on the sheets which divided the room. This memory filled her with something that felt simultaneously like grief and rage. He had been able to face her with his lies; it was the truth which had finally caused him to look away.”

Jessie has three contradictory views of her father: one in which he is a loving man, another in which he is a dangerous predator, and a third in which he is a sad, pitiable figure. In this passage, the pitiable side of him conflicts with her understanding of him as a predator, and she realizes the shame that Tom felt after the assault. However, this shame does not absolve him of guilt, but it does cause Jessie to feel grief at his lack of control and rage at his deliberate manipulation.

“She had seen spit; she had thought spunk. No, that’s not true, she thought, but she didn’t need to summon Ruth to play devil’s advocate this time; she knew it was true. It’s his goddam spunk—that had been her exact thought, and after that she had ceased thinking altogether, at least for awhile. Instead of thinking she had launched that reflexive countering movement, driving one foot into his stomach and the other into his balls. Not spit but spunk; not some new revulsion at Gerald’s game but that old stinking horror suddenly surfacing like a sea-monster.”

Jessie confronts the ways in which her past trauma has changed the course of her life recognizing that her internalized fear of sexual assault that led to her actions in response to Gerald’s attempted assault. While this internalized fear might have been correctly placed as Gerald was certainly in the wrong, the situation forces her to reconsider the choices she has made in her life that may also have been influenced by the assault that occurred in 1963. Though her instinct is to reject this analysis of her own life, she finds that she cannot deny the influence that her trauma had in her decision to kick Gerald. These contemplations likewise allow her to consider how else her trauma may have influenced her past actions.

“Jessie had nodded solemnly at all this, keeping her belief that the idea was mostly sentimental Aquarian/New Age slop to herself. She had liked Nora, after all, and although she thought Nora had held onto a few too many sets of mental love-beads from the late sixties and early seventies, she was clearly seeing Nora’s ‘child inside’ now, and that seemed perfectly all right. Jessie supposed that the concept might even have some symbolic validity, and under the circumstances, the stocks made a hell of an apt image, didn’t they? The person in them was the Goodwife-in-waiting, the Ruth-in-waiting, the Jessie-in-waiting. She was the little girl her father had called Punkin.”

Jessie’s rejection of Nora’s therapeutic advice relates to the social stigma against therapy and underpins her repression of the trauma she suffered as a child. The image of her child-self in a pillory implies that the guilt and shame she felt as a child has carried into her adult life. The idea of Punkin being a young Goody, Ruth, or Jessie shows that trauma can affect anyone, and it also reveals that the seemingly disparate personalities in Jessie’s mind are actually parts of the same cohesive identity.

“Because maybe there is a God, she thought, and He doesn’t want me to die here on this bed like an animal in a leg-hold trap. It makes sense, when you stop to think about it. I picked that jar up off the shelf when the dog started chewing on Gerald, and then I saw it was too small and too light to do any damage even if I managed to hit the dog with it. Under those circumstances—revolted, confused, and scared out of my mind—the most natural think in the world would have been to drop it before feeling around on the shelf for something heavier. Instead of doing that, I put it back on the shelf. Why would I or anyone else do such an illogical thing? God, that’s why. That’s the only answer I can think of, the only one that fits. God saved it for me because he knew I’d need it.”

Though Jessie attributes the jar to God, she seems to forget the actual reason why she, and no one else, put the jar back on the shelf. The answer is in Chapter 20, when Jessie similarly places the glass back on the shelf: “neatness counts” (248). Jessie saves the jar and the glass because of her mother’s influence on her upbringing, which involved a need to maintain order and cleanliness. As with many elements of the novel, aspects of Jessie’s past, such as her largely negligent mother, play a niche role in aiding her escape from the handcuffs.

“The old Adam—and maybe that was all it was, as simple as that. A father who had half-consciously arranged to be alone with his pretty, vivacious young daughter, thinking all the while There won’t be any harm in it, no harm, not a bit of harm. Then the eclipse had started, and she had sat on his lap in the sundress that was both too tight and too short—the sundress he himself had asked her to wear—and what had happened had happened. Just a brief, goatish interlude that had shamed and embarrassed them both.”

This passage is part of a traditional, patriarchal perception of masculine sexuality that displaces the blame of sexual assault onto a pseudo-mystical, quasi-psychological assumption that men cannot restrain themselves. Looking at the assault through this lens, Jessie is again trying to excuse her father of some blame for assaulting her, but the practical points that Ruth’s voice brought into the discussion earlier stand out, such as the fact that Tom told Jessie to wear the sundress. Crucially, Jessie is beginning to understand that Tom’s actions, not her own are the reason she feels shame and embarrassment.

“Her foot thumped against something. She looked down and saw she had kicked Gerald’s plump right shoulder. Blood pattered down on his chest and face. A drop fell in one staring blue eye. She felt no pity for him; she felt no hate for him; she felt no love for him. She felt a kind of horror and disgust for herself, that all the feelings with which she had occupied herself over the years—those so-called civilized feelings that were the meat of every soap-opera, talk-show, and radio phone-in program—should prove so shallow compared with the survival instinct, which had turned out (in her case, at least), to be as overbearing and brutally insistent as a bulldozer blade. But that was the case, and she had an idea that if Arsenio or Oprah ever found themselves in this situation, they would do most of the things she had done.”

In this passage, Gerald is not a person anymore, but an inanimate thing, as is implied when Jessie thumps against an unknown obstacle, a “something,” before idly noting that it is Gerald’s shoulder and looking at his chest, face, and one eye. Each of these detached observations reflects the larger message of this quote, in which Jessie is removed from the “civilized,” structured life that she led before this moment. Gerald’s former status as her husband is no longer relevant. Neither does it matter that he is at fault for their situation, for the only focus that Jessie can currently afford is one of survival.

“She thought she would never again experience anything as deeply satisfying as those first few swallows of cold water from the gushing tap, and in all her previous experience, only her first orgasm came close to rivalling that moment. In both cases she had been totally commanded by the cells and tissues of her physical being for a few brief seconds, conscious thought (but not consciousness itself) wiped away, and the result had been ecstasy. I’ll never forget it, she thought, knowing she had forgotten it already, just as she had forgotten the gorgeous honeyed sting of that first orgasm as soon as the nerves had stopped firing off. It was as if the body disdained memory…or refused the responsibility of it.”

The dominant thought in this passage is that certain feelings are comparable in terms of intensity, but the two critical elements to consider are how Jessie links life-saving water to her first orgasm and how she acknowledges the process of forgetting physical feelings. Much of the story deals with the pervasive nature of sexuality, and Jessie, too, seems to link non-sexual feelings and thoughts to sexuality, often in the form of jokes and offhand comments. Combined with the acknowledgement that the body often forgets physical feelings, this passage establishes that the conditioning and psychology of sex is much more long-lasting than the physical aspects of it. Though the memories of Jessie’s trauma are largely rooted in the senses, her psychological trauma forms the crux of the plot of the novel.

“If there were real people living in those snow-globes where you can shake up a blizzard at any time you want to, they’d see this weather all the time, she thought, and laughed. This sound was as fabulously strange to her ears as that feeling of joy was to her heart, and it only took a moment’s thought to realize why: she hadn’t laughed at all since the previous October. She referred to those hours, the last ones she ever intended to spend by Kashwakamak (or any other lake, for that matter), simply as ‘my hard time.’ This phrase told what was necessary and not one thing more, she felt. Which was just the way she liked it.”

This passage links Jessie’s refusal to detail her experience in October and the lack of laughter in her life since that time. Now that she is writing a letter to Ruth documenting her experience, her ability to laugh has returned, and although the jokes she laughs at range from nonsensical to morbid, the process of confronting her trauma in the letter allows her to regain a sense of safety. Even though she does not want to go to any lakes ever again, the real confrontation is not localized but internal to her own psychological well-being, and laughter is a sign that Jessie is mentally recovering.

“He was smiling, but it was a less winning smile that time, I’m afraid. It was the kind of smile men always seem to get on their faces when they’re thinking about how silly women are, and how it should really be against the law to let them out without keepers. ‘You came to the conclusion the line was cut after checking one phone—the one in the bedroom—and finding it dead. Right?’ That wasn’t exactly what happened and it wasn’t exactly what I’d thought, but I needed—partly because it seemed easier, but mostly because it doesn’t do much good to talk to a man when he gets that particular expression on his face.”

Even Brandon, whom Jessie repeatedly claims to like and respect, is vulnerable to exhibiting the same pattern of toxic masculinity that underpins the novel. Recalling the joke from the early portions of the novel regarding women as a life support system for a vagina, Brandon dismissively addresses Jessie’s concerns by implying that she is incompetent. Jessie’s reaction to this treatment is not significantly different from the way she handled her marriage, for she largely let Gerald do as he pleased, only stepping in strongly on occasions that she felt were most important. With Brandon, too, Jessie chooses not to contradict him, seeing that he has already resolved to disregard her opinions and experiences.

“Jessie stopped for a moment, breathing so hard and fast she was almost panting. She looked at the words on the screen—the unbelievable, unspeakable admission on the screen—and felt a sudden strong urge to delete them. Not because she was ashamed for Ruth to read them; she was, but that wasn’t it. What she didn’t want to do was deal with them, and she supposed that if she didn’t delete them, she would have to do just that. Words had a way of creating their own imperatives. Not until they’re out of your hands, they don’t, Jessie thought, and reached out with the black-clad index finger of her right hand. She touched the DELETE button—stroked it, actually—and then drew back. It was the truth, wasn’t it?”

Contrasting Jessie’s laughter, her desire to delete a portion of her letter, specifically the one in which she notes that she would have had sex with Joubert to get out of the handcuffs, highlights the more challenging aspects of confronting her trauma. Though writing down the experiences is therapeutic, they are still horrible events that she needs to reconcile with her sense of self. The idea of “dealing” with the words reflects the confrontation inherent in detailing her experiences in the letter, and although it is difficult, it promises to relieve her of the weight of the trauma that she has carried with her since the incident in the lake house.

“He was going to hold onto the idea that the whole thing was simply my imagination, seizing on the Joubert case to explain a particularly vivid hallucination I’d had while I was handcuffed to the bed. And that insight was followed by a second one, an even clearer one: that I could do it, too. I could come to believe I had been wrong…but if I succeeded in doing that, my life would be ruined. The voices would start to come back—not just yours or Punkin’s or Nora Callighan’s, but my mother’s and my sister’s and my brother’s and kids I chummed with in high school and people I met for ten minutes in doctor’s offices and God alone knows how many others. I think that most them would be those scary UFO voices.”

In this passage, Jessie ties the voices to the trauma she has experienced in the past, noting that the voices were prevalent in her childhood immediately following her father’s assault, and realizing that pretending that the lake house incident did not happen will not prevent her from suffering the psychological harm of the trauma. In fact, ignoring the trauma will likely lead to the same process of increasing pain that Jessie suffered after repressing her father’s assault. For Brandon, it is easier to avoid thinking about Jessie’s trauma, because he has not lived it, but for Jessie, pushing forward with her confrontation of Joubert is a crucial step in recovering.