42
Populär Culture Review
Beaumond, hopes to close “a huge door on a room full of monsters” (King,
Shining 179) to liberate himself from his painful past, to be able to re-focus on
his work, and to surmount his writing block. From this it follows that Mort, like
his flctional predecessors, is consciously or unconsciously longing for
something lost—his ambition and capability to write—the outer manifestation of
his desired inner peace.
Although it seems that Mort consciously chooses remoteness and
silence for a new beginning in his private and Professional life, his decision to
move to Tashmore Gien is not based on any firm evaluation of his present
Situation. In contrast to Jack Torrance who reflects upon and then decides to
relocate to the Overlook Hotel in order to overcome his writing block, Mort does
not take action by consciously moving to Tashmore Gien. He passively retreats
to a very familiär location and by doing so, falls into the place of the marital
past. Instead of actively looking for something consoling and new, Mort
unconsciously retums to something very scary and old, even older than his past
relationship with Amy. He retums to his unconscious.
House of Madness
Full of memories of his life with Amy, the solitary summerhouse at
Teshmore Gien soon becomes Mort’s resort of mouming as well as his refuge to
another world. However, instead of finding peace, he encounters physical and
psychological pain. He suffers from his current every day life and from the
betrayal of his wife Amy in combination with his incapacity to write. Even
though he desires to work, he is incapable of doing so. He has not “written
anything worth a damn since he [has] left Amy” (King, Window 246). But what
prevents him from writing?
The obvious answer to this question is that the most recent tumults of
his private life have traumatized him and have provoked his writing block. A
psychological evaluation of the young man’s Professional lameness and state of
mind shows that the divorce from his wife Amy has triggered the writer’s
extreme frustration, serious self-doubting, self-discrediting, hypersensitivity to
criticism, lack of self-confidence, extreme procrastination, and suffering from
betrayal. These are all Symptoms of his depression, erroneous self-contempt, and
increasing self-hate, which he unconsciously but progressively projects on his
environment.
However, it needs to be noticed that Mort’s suffering from inner unrest
actually goes back to his Student years, when Mort once betrayed one of his
fellow students, John Kintner, by Publishing his story under Mort’s name. As
Amy cheated on Mort, Mort deceived John Kintner. Even though Mort does not
make this connection and misreads his current psychological imbalance and
Professional lameness solely as a consequence of his matrimonial loss, Mort’s
plagiarism and Amy’s disloyalty have to be seen as one unit that forces the
writer to reevaluate “what’s right and what’s fair” (King, Window 273). While
Processing his wife’s betrayal, Mort also confronts his long-repressed guilt