King’s Psychologicai Gothicism
in S ecret Window , S ecret G arden : Repression,
Illusion and Parasomnia, or . . . How Well Did
You Sleep?
Introduction
Like The Shining (1977), The Dark Half (1989), and The Bag o f Bones
(1998), Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990) teils a story of a writer who
suffers from a recent writer’s block, emotional distress, and irrational anxiety
attacks due to happenings in his past. Similar to Jack Torrance in The Shining,
Mike Noonan in Bag o f Bones, and Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half, Mort
Rainey, the main character in Secret Window, Secret Garden, is haunted by
uncontrollable exterior and interior forces which he is incapable of
understanding or explaining. They are forces that at a first glance seem to belong
once again to Stephen King’s adapted catalog of late eighteenth, early
nineteenth-century gothic fiction including seemingly supematural occurrences
and figures, the phenomenon of the haunting past, an isolated residence, a gothic
villain pursuing a young woman, a mad man losing control, and the overall
Sensation of danger and fear.
However, Stephen King created something unfamiliar and new.
Through his combination