Chris Hargensen: The girl who turned her punishment into a debt Carrie had to pay

Carrie (1974), Stephen King’s first novel, opens in the gym showers at Ewen High School in Chamberlain, Maine. Carrie White gets her first period and no one has ever told her what it is: she thinks she is bleeding to death. Her classmates don’t help. They surround her, pelt her with tampons and sanitary napkins and chant at her to plug it up. Leading them is Chris Hargensen: seventeen, pretty, popular, the daughter of an influential lawyer and the girlfriend of Billy Nolan, a boy with a bad reputation. The gym teacher, Rita Desjardin, punishes the girls with a week of after-school exercises: anyone who skips will be suspended and lose her prom ticket. Chris refuses to serve the punishment and loses the prom. From then on she sees not a penalty but a debt. Billy and his friends kill two pigs on a farm, haul the blood in two buckets up to a beam above the stage and, on prom night, when Carrie is crowned queen, Chris pulls the rope. What follows is the catastrophe everyone knows. The story returns now with Mike Flanagan’s series for Prime Video, released in full on October 7, 2026, in which Alison Thornton plays Chris.

// The theoryFive excuses for not feeling guilty

In 1957, Gresham Sykes and David Matza published “Techniques of Neutralization” in the American Sociological Review, a response to Albert Cohen’s subcultural theories. If young offenders truly had values of their own, opposed to society’s, they would feel no guilt or shame when caught, and many do. They also admire honest people and choose their victims carefully. Sykes and Matza concluded that the offender shares conventional morality but learns to switch it off with excuses that work before the act, not only after it. They described five: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim (“she asked for it”), condemnation of the condemners and appeal to higher loyalties. In Delinquency and Drift (1964), Matza added the idea of drift: the young person is bound neither to crime nor to the rules, and moves between them as far as the excuses allow.

// The subjectThe girl who always had a lawyer

King builds Chris through the documents that make up the novel, from official reports to Sue Snell’s memoir, and through three key scenes. The first, in Part One, is the shower scene: Chris is not the only one throwing napkins, but she is the one calling the tune. The second comes soon after, in the office of the principal, Henry Grayle. Hargensen arrives with an expensive suit, a flawless smile and the confidence of a man used to winning. Grayle does not give way, makes it clear that the school can fight back too, and the lawyer withdraws. It is the first time her father’s money and influence fail to get Chris off the hook. The third takes place on prom night, in Part Two. Chris waits hidden beside the stage with Billy and, at the moment of the coronation, pulls the rope. The blood falls on Carrie, and one of the buckets strikes Tommy Ross on the head; he will not survive the night. Spoiler: hours later, outside the Cavalier roadhouse, Billy drives his car at Carrie, but she seizes control of it with her mind and smashes it into the wall. Chris dies without ever giving her side of the story.

// The crackDo you need an excuse if there is no guilt?

Neutralization presupposes someone who feels the pull of morality and needs to silence it. Chris barely shows that pull. The character who truly fits Sykes and Matza is Sue Snell, who also threw napkins in the showers, feels guilty and tries to make amends by asking her boyfriend, Tommy, to take Carrie to the prom. Chris looks more like the hardened offender the theory explains less well. There is also a causal problem the research has not solved: it is hard to show whether excuses come before the act and make it possible or are rationalizations after the fact. Maruna and Copes (2005) concluded that the theory explains why behavior persists better than why it starts. In Chris’s case there is no way to know, because the novel never lets her speak afterward.

There is a second crack. Sykes and Matza had individual excuses in mind, but Chris’s cruelty is a group product: the chorus in the showers, Billy’s gang at the farm and the plan for the vote to crown Carrie and Tommy. That spreading of responsibility across many people is better described by Albert Bandura’s moral disengagement, which partly overlaps with neutralization. And the most effective excuse is made not by the teenager but by an adult: the father who turns a penalty into an injustice.