[Editorial] Wendy Torrance Isn’t a Butt-Kicking Babe, And That’s Ok

Wendy Torrance, the lead female character in Stanley Kubrick’s great horror tour-de-force, The Shining (1980), is one of the most famous women in horror history.

We as fans know her favourite colours (pink and gold); her preferred entertainment material (prophetically, horror movies and ghost stories) and the fact that she's a smoker of ‘slim’ cigarettes. 

As played by 80s actress Shelley Duvall, she’s also supposedly a basket-case, a ‘screaming dishrag’ (in the opinion of Stephen King, author of the novel the film is based on), and a retrograde throwback to misogynist, pre-feminist depictions of women. At least those are the kinds of things that her many, many critics say about her.

What the Wendy-haters seem to forget is that, despite her antediluvian crying and shrieking, Kubrick's/Duvall's Wendy wins in the end, and without even sustaining a single scratch on her distinctive physique. She succeeds in protecting her son, Danny, from the evil forces trying to benefit from his ‘shining’ ability, while her deranged  husband freezes to death in a snowy hedge maze. Meanwhile, in King's novel, Wendy is beaten nearly senseless with a roque mallet and almost killed off by a temporarily possessed Dick Hallorann, so who really is the misogynist here — King or Kubrick?

Shelley Duvall's Wendy commits what is apparently an unforgivable sin for a horror protagonist in this post-feminist era — she’s not a Butt-Kicking Babe (BKB). You know the BKB type: she’s beautiful, she’s ‘feisty,’ and she often physically dominates grown, muscular men who outweigh her by 80 pounds — usually without disturbing her perfectly arranged hair and make-up. She’s also not very relatable to most female viewers, as artificial in her way as the fainting hothouse flowers of much of pre-feminist 20th Century horror are in theirs. 

Duvall’s Wendy isn’t ‘feisty.’ She knows her physical and emotional limitations very well. She’s not conventionally beautiful; she’s frail to the point of anorexia and her hair becomes noticeably dirty and stringy over the course of the film. Her best facial features are her huge, dark eyes, which look like a child’s or puppy’s eyes — so well-suited to registering fear and generating empathy from the audience. Which is likely one of the reasons why Kubrick cast Duvall in the role to begin with. 

Wendy isn't a fainting hothouse flower, but she's the last thing from a Butt-Kicking Babe. For one thing, she's a traditional wife and mother —  one who puts her husband and child first, and one who acts endearingly human and ordinary. She sneaks a cigarette when she’s anxious; she eats peanut-butter sandwiches; she wears quirky, mismatched clothes. And she reacts in a completely normal way to being terrorized by a psychotic, once-loved husband wielding an axe or yelling that he wants to bash her brains in — she cries, she screams, she runs, and she hides. 

Still, she wins. She outsmarts Jack/the evil spirits at almost every turn: from locking Jack in the larder, to slashing his hand with a butcher knife, to helping Danny get away from the Overlook through the bathroom window. Wendy shows us that even timid and seemingly weak people can be strong when lives depend on it. 

The Other Wendy 

In contrast to Duvall’s Wendy is the ‘other Wendy’ portrayed by Rebecca De Mornay, in the largely forgotten 1997 television miniseries of The Shining, which was directed by Mick Garris and written and executive-produced by King himself. King famously hated the Kubrick film and produced the miniseries to show the world what the story is ‘supposed’ to be like. It’s not a bad effort and is popular with King’s fans, but it’s a far cry from the soul-searing, immersive epic that Kubrick created.

De Mornay is much closer to the Wendy of the book. She’s blonde, she’s conventionally beautiful, she’s cool as a cucumber. One look at her and you pretty much know she can take care of herself, and she manages to keep her hair and make-up looking good while doing it (no stringy, dirty locks for her!) She’s not exactly at Lara Croft levels of butt-kicking, but she’s more similar to the BKB stereotype than Duvall’s Wendy. What’s more, her trauma at the hands of  Jack, in contrast to Duvall’s, isn’t scary — not one bit. I’ve seen the miniseries at least twice and the most memorable scene for me is the campy cameo that King does as a ghostly bandleader in the ballroom. I struggle to think of any notable moments involving Rebecca De Mornay, aside from her perfect hair and cosmetics, even though she’s quite a talented performer. That’s because it’s just not scary watching a Butt-Kicking Babe go to work against an evil force; we already know that the BKB will win in the end. 

Most horror movies essentially are about a stronger person or entity terrorizing a weaker one. Without that element, there’s not usually much to hang a story on. Which is why the scariest horror films are about dangers that envelope children, injured people  and yes — fragile, vulnerable women. No matter how much we wish ‘the rules’ to be different, that’s just the way it is; I didn’t write them. The audience looks at the terrified woman (or even the temporarily disabled man — think Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window) and holds their collective breath. How the hell is that meek, frightened woman going to see off that axe-waving monster? The suspense ratchets up the more desperate and hysterical the potential victim becomes. Then, at the end, the audience is comforted when the scaredy-cat actually wins, finding solace in the knowledge that there are different ways of being strong. One doesn’t have to be in-your-face fierce to access that strength. 

I hate to use the word ‘iconic’ to describe Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy Torrance. This word is so over-used today that it has lost most of its impact. But I can’t think of another term that’s as descriptively apt in this case. Like it or not, Duvall’s Wendy is so seared in the public’s conscience as ‘the’ Wendy that a Shelley Duvall look-alike/sound-alike actress (Alex Essoe) was cast to play her in Mike Flanagan’s 2019 sequel to The Shining, Dr. Sleep. The public most likely wouldn’t have accepted any other choice. In the audience's final analysis — which is the only one that counts— the ‘screaming dishrag’ takes it all over the Butt-Kicking Babe. 

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