From Big Sticks to Talking Sticks

Abstract

The article reads Stephen King's The Shining as a story of anxiety about family, work, and masculinity in twentieth-century America. It is Jack Torrance's emotional life as a man and the sticks, big and talking, that he can choose from to express in life the answers—in 1977, during the heyday of post-WWII feminism and the birth of the men's movement—to the basic questions: how and where to be a man? The kinds of work available to Jack—caregiver to his son, caretaker of the hotel, husband-provider, teacher, and the always-suspect occupation of imaginative writer—direct his life as a man and organize the overarching narrative of wounded and wounding masculinity at the heart of this haunted-house story.