Archaic, Phallic, and Castrated: Revisiting Stephen King’s The Shining through the Trope of the Monstrous Mother and its Manifestations

Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977) has often been considered a contemporary classic that updates the nineteenth-century ghost story and narratives of haunted houses, while it reflects latent fears about the collapse of the traditional family, and the threat to hegemonic masculinities upon the rise of feminist studies. Drawing on Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine, it is feasible to reinterpret one of King’s most iconic novels as a representation of latent male fears of the trope of the monstrous mother in its different representations. It may be thus argued that, from a male perspective, the archetype of the monstrous mother derives from patriarchal motherhood, as a male interpretation of the ancestral and primal dread toward the maternal power of life generation and destruction as well as toward the primordial role of the mother during the preoedipal and oedipal phases of development. This article offers an analysis of King’s novel The Shining focused on the trope of the monstrous mother, as a result of patriarchal motherhood in its diverse manifestations, encompassing the archaic mother, the phallic mother, and the castrated mother.