It seems like there's something really troubling there, but what is it?
We never really find out, do we, which is part of what makes the story so unsettling. There's also a really disturbing whiff of that weird Victorian eroticization of the innocence of children here: it's "virgin or whore," but applied to little kids. Miss Giddens automatically assumes that Miles is somehow himself "corrupt," but from what he says here, it sounds as if he could have been a would-be whistle-blower to some serious abuse going on at his school. There's just no way of knowing, but simply by virtue of their apparent exposure to something less-than-innocent, the children must be viewed as themselves corrupted, complicit, bad.
Of course, Miss Giddens' relationship with Miles is really disturbingly sexualized anyway, which I think does get back into that cultural territory of frustrated single women being viewed simultaneously as pathetic and as dangerous, sexually inappropriate, sexually predatory.
I agree-and also that Book!Jack shows some of these same tendencies.
The scene I was specifically thinking about in The Shining (and again, I've got to paraphrase here rather than cite, sorry) was that chapter in which Jack encounters the wasp's nest on the roof of the hotel. Jack makes the wasps a metaphor about his life, but it's a really bad metaphor, because it's one that serves primarily to absolve him of any responsibility for his own actions. ("When the wasps sting you, what can you do? You're not responsible for how you behave when wasps sting you.")
The chapter's mainly taken up with a flashback, in which we're shown how Jack continues to try to lie even to himself about his culpability in a past event ("I swear to holy God, I didn't set that timer ahead". . . . "I didn't set the timer ahead, but if I had done, it wouldn't have been out of envy or spite, but out of pity". . . ."Okay, so maybe it's possible that I set the timer ahead, but if I did - which really, I'm almost certain that I didn't - it only would have been a few seconds, tops...") The nature of the internal monologue serves to reinforce exactly what is so flawed about the meaning which Jack has imposed upon the wasps. It's, uh, not particularly subtle. But then, this is King we're talking about - subtlety is not his strong point, bless him.
Of course, the wasps come back. Jack kills them, but they come back, just as we as readers know they're going to. It's one of the landmark events in the sequence by which the Overlook becomes more and more activated, more and more "alive," as the story progresses. But I always find myself wondering when I read the book: if Jack hadn't invested all of that meaning into the wasps' nest, if he hadn't projected his psyche onto the wasps by making them metaphor, would they have come back to life at all? Or, if he'd made them a less flawed metaphor, a metaphor less capable of leading him astray, would they have come back? I'm not entirely sure that they would have.
Jack is a writer, so he falls firmly into that category of Over-Imaginative Haunted House Protagonist. Unlike Movie!Jack, though, Book!Jack is capable of producing fiction. But what I take away from this sequence is that it's not just fiction that powers the batteries of the haunted house: it's specifically self-serving fiction. Not metaphor, but bad metaphor.
Re: Part II
We never really find out, do we, which is part of what makes the story so unsettling. There's also a really disturbing whiff of that weird Victorian eroticization of the innocence of children here: it's "virgin or whore," but applied to little kids. Miss Giddens automatically assumes that Miles is somehow himself "corrupt," but from what he says here, it sounds as if he could have been a would-be whistle-blower to some serious abuse going on at his school. There's just no way of knowing, but simply by virtue of their apparent exposure to something less-than-innocent, the children must be viewed as themselves corrupted, complicit, bad.
Of course, Miss Giddens' relationship with Miles is really disturbingly sexualized anyway, which I think does get back into that cultural territory of frustrated single women being viewed simultaneously as pathetic and as dangerous, sexually inappropriate, sexually predatory.
I agree-and also that Book!Jack shows some of these same tendencies.
The scene I was specifically thinking about in The Shining (and again, I've got to paraphrase here rather than cite, sorry) was that chapter in which Jack encounters the wasp's nest on the roof of the hotel. Jack makes the wasps a metaphor about his life, but it's a really bad metaphor, because it's one that serves primarily to absolve him of any responsibility for his own actions. ("When the wasps sting you, what can you do? You're not responsible for how you behave when wasps sting you.")
The chapter's mainly taken up with a flashback, in which we're shown how Jack continues to try to lie even to himself about his culpability in a past event ("I swear to holy God, I didn't set that timer ahead". . . . "I didn't set the timer ahead, but if I had done, it wouldn't have been out of envy or spite, but out of pity". . . ."Okay, so maybe it's possible that I set the timer ahead, but if I did - which really, I'm almost certain that I didn't - it only would have been a few seconds, tops...") The nature of the internal monologue serves to reinforce exactly what is so flawed about the meaning which Jack has imposed upon the wasps. It's, uh, not particularly subtle. But then, this is King we're talking about - subtlety is not his strong point, bless him.
Of course, the wasps come back. Jack kills them, but they come back, just as we as readers know they're going to. It's one of the landmark events in the sequence by which the Overlook becomes more and more activated, more and more "alive," as the story progresses. But I always find myself wondering when I read the book: if Jack hadn't invested all of that meaning into the wasps' nest, if he hadn't projected his psyche onto the wasps by making them metaphor, would they have come back to life at all? Or, if he'd made them a less flawed metaphor, a metaphor less capable of leading him astray, would they have come back? I'm not entirely sure that they would have.
Jack is a writer, so he falls firmly into that category of Over-Imaginative Haunted House Protagonist. Unlike Movie!Jack, though, Book!Jack is capable of producing fiction. But what I take away from this sequence is that it's not just fiction that powers the batteries of the haunted house: it's specifically self-serving fiction. Not metaphor, but bad metaphor.