The picture (novel)

The picture is a novel by the American author Stephen King from 1995.

action

In the novel Das Bild - Rose Madder by American bestselling author Stephen King, the focus is on an abused woman named Rose McClendon, who has been married to a violent cop named Norman Daniels since she was eighteen. Already on her wedding night she sees his real face, because he bites her shoulder so hard that she is bleeding. Norman “always talks to her close up”, which means that he inflicts pain on her and abuses her . He always seeks and finds a reason to take his anger out on her. For example, if there is only a crease in his shirt or if she only forgot to make the bed once. Then he “speaks to her up close,” as he puts it metaphorically when he brutally beats her. After such a beating, Rose suffers a miscarriage , which her husband only laconically comments that she could get pregnant again. Almost worse is the cruel abuse he does to her with a tennis racket. As a cop, he knows very well how to pass off her injuries as a result of accidents and knows that he is safe from prosecution since no colleague would investigate him, and Rose does not have the courage to tell the doctors the truth anyway.

After 14 years of marriage in hell and after discovering a small red drop of blood on the pillow while pulling the bed, Rose spontaneously finds the strength and courage to flee from her abusive husband. When he is on duty, she steals his credit card and goes to the bus station, completely frightened. After buying a ticket to a city more than 1,300 miles away, she throws the card into the nearest trash can to be on the safe side so that it is not tempted and cannot be located at the destination by carelessly withdrawing money. At the point of arrival she discovers an information booth with a sign that says "Help for travelers". She tells the servant there, a man named Peter Slowik, her life story, whereupon he gives her a card with the address of a women's shelter called "Daughters & Sisters". She finds shelter there and slowly learns to develop self-confidence again and to enjoy her freedom. After a few weeks, she even finds a job in a hotel so she can take care of herself.

One day she enters a pawn shop where she wants to exchange her wedding ring for a picture to furnish her own room. There she experiences her first disappointment when the owner, Bill Steiner, tells her that the stone in the ring is not real. As she looks around, she accidentally discovers a picture that speaks to her immediately and is signed with the name Rose Madder. It is a landscape painting that shows the back of a woman in a red dress. Rose instinctively wonders if it is a coincidence that the painter has the same first name as her, and something tells her that the woman in the picture is Rose Madder herself. Although the ring is not very valuable, she can exchange it for the picture with Bill Steiner, who is slowly falling in love with her. Overjoyed, she leaves the pawn shop, and when she is back on the street, she is suddenly approached by a man named Rob Lefferts, who puts a small book in her hand and asks her to read a few passages from it. He is so enraptured by her talent for reading that he spontaneously offers her a job at a publishing house.

Her husband Norman has meanwhile been promoted because he helped break up a drug ring. None of his colleagues suspects that he is not only a brutal husband, but also a murderer, as he had only recently strangled a prostitute because she appeared to him like his wife Rose for a brief moment. What makes his hatred of his wife even worse is that she just left him and stole his credit card as well. And both were his property. When money was withdrawn with his card, he has a hot lead that leads him directly to a homeless person. Norman, who has so much strength in his hands that he can even break open a tennis ball with his fingers, soon discovers the identity of the young man who used the card, and after squeezing his testicles on a park bench, he admits for finding it in a rubbish bin at the train station. Now he has the longed-for track on which he can build. He drives to the train station and there he receives information from the ticket seller Oliver Robbins where the bus was going with his wife. He goes there immediately. When he arrives at the destination, he discovers the help desk and consequently assumes that Rose had turned to the employee there. He learns Slowik's name and address and first of all decides to take a hotel room. The next day he seeks out Peter Slowik, whom he dragged into his own cellar and tortured until he got all the information about his wife's whereabouts. Peter Slowik does not survive the torture and Norman realizes that he left so many forensic tracks during his frenzy that the local police will soon come up with him as the perpetrator. But he doesn't care anymore. When he visits a hairdresser and he doesn't cut his hair quickly enough, he becomes noticeably angry and toyed with the idea of ​​killing him too. However, after seeing that the man had done a good job, he apologizes to the man in a surprising fit of last humanity and gives him a generous tip.

Meanwhile, Rose returns to the women's refuge, where the hand-to-hand combat trainer Gertrude Kinshaw, who is employed there, is teaching a newly arrived woman techniques for self-defense. Rose reports enthusiastically about the new developments and shows the picture she received for her ring. Anna Stevenson, with whom she became friends, has good news for her. She found a room for Rose that she can move into the next day. After equipping it with her few resources, she still doesn't know where to hang the picture. As she approaches, she discovers, confused, that the image has apparently changed. The landscape on it suddenly appears much larger and more lifelike than before. Then she is torn from her thoughts by a knock on the door. Bill Steiner, the owner of the pawn shop, stands in front of the door with a large bouquet of flowers and stops, shocked. Rose is holding a large and heavy tin can in her hand in case her husband might be at the door. Rose tells him nothing about her husband apart from the name, but Bill immediately suspects that she is on the run from him. Rose lets Bill take her to dinner and falls in love with him. He persuades her to have a picnic the following Saturday, which she immediately agrees to. But then she remembers that that Saturday the annual Daughters & Sisters picnic takes place where she is supposed to help. Bill offers to accompany her there, to which she immediately agrees. When he brings her back home, Rose thinks the picture has changed again, and slowly she begins to doubt her sanity. She lies down in bed and suddenly thinks she hears the chirping of crickets, accompanied by a rumble of thunder. It also smells of freshly mown grass. Then her eyes close.

The next day, Rose visits a café after her lecture was a complete success and the publisher offered her a lucrative contract. Happy about it, she has no idea how close she escaped her husband. He saw her as he passed the café, but since she had lost a lot of weight and colored her hair, he did not recognize her and walked past her. When she arrives home shortly afterwards, she finds a living cricket and shortly afterwards two more already dead crickets, of which she cannot explain how they got into her room. They lie directly under the picture, and when Rose takes it off she discovers a crack on the back, which she widened with a knife. More crickets as well as ants and grass fall out of the gap and even dung from a grazing horse. Before she can restrain herself, the phone rings and Anna Stevenson tells her that someone brutally murdered Peter Slowik. She immediately suspects who is behind it and calls Bill Steiner. She advises him to stay away from her, but since she tells him nothing about Norman, he doesn't understand. When she finishes a lecture early, Bill is already waiting for her in front of the studio and Rose decides to let him in. But when he continues to stand by her and renews his offer to accompany her to the picnic, she is overjoyed.

In the evening she talks to her neighbor Anna Stevenson, whose husband was also recently murdered. Disturbed by the conversation, she cannot fall asleep for a long time. When she manages to do it, she wakes up a short time later and is amazed to see how her picture, which is leaning against the wall, has now expanded across its entire width. A wind blows towards her from there and, as if in a trance, she approaches the picture and finally enters it. When she looks around, she expects to see her room; instead, in the middle of the landscape in which she is now, all she sees is an easel with a picture on it showing her room and herself, as she is just leaves.

Then she is suddenly approached by a woman who urgently warns her not to look Rose Madder directly in the eyes because she is crazy. Rose Madder, on the other hand, points to a temple with a labyrinth and gives her the task of saving her baby from a bull there, as she cannot enter the labyrinth herself. Then she warns Rose Madder of a tree that is in the labyrinth, but whose fruits she should not eat under any circumstances. However, she must pick up his seeds from the ground and keep them well. Likewise, she would come across a brook, from which she should neither drink nor otherwise come into contact with it. She absolutely had to cross it on the stones in it. Otherwise she would forget everything that ever happened in her life. But above all, she would have to be careful of the bull in it. He would be called Erinyes and immediately smell her menstrual blood. "I repay" are the last words Rose hears from her before she enters the temple.

They are immediately attacked by disturbing visions, such as Norman's face, which seems to haunt them. Still, she goes on and comes across the stream that Rose Madder told her about, and she is immediately overcome with excruciating thirst. But by thinking about her love for Bill, she can resist the temptation to drink from him. As she walks on, she comes to a garden where everything seems dead, except for a single tree, and Rose knows immediately that it is the one Rose Madder warned her about. She picks up the seeds that lie under him and pockets them as she was told. Finally she discovers a sign that is set up above a staircase and is written on the "labyrinth". She goes down the stairs until she reaches the entrance. When she hears the baby screaming, she enters. Now she realizes what she needs the seeds for. Every few meters she drops you so that she can find the way back. In the middle of the labyrinth she finds the little girl who immediately reaches out to her. Then she hears the roar of the bull, but thanks to the seeds that have been scattered, she quickly finds her way back, although the bull is hot on her heels. Once at the top, she hands the baby over to Rose Madder, although she is not comfortable with the idea of ​​leaving the child in the care of a madwoman. But she is assured that nothing will happen to the baby. In return, Rose Madder gives her her gold bracelet, which she wears on her wrist. Then the picture sends her back to her room, where she immediately goes to bed and falls asleep. Memories keep coming back in her dreams, and when she wakes up, she realizes with dismay that she is naked, but above all that the picture has changed tremendously overnight. The sun is now shining over the previously gray landscape and something also seems to have changed on Rose Madder herself. Startled, she takes the picture and puts it in her closet. At the morning business lunch, she is offered a lucrative contract, but her mind wanders and she thinks of the strange nightmare that night. Then she suddenly remembered what had changed about Rose Madder. When she acquired the picture, she was wearing a gold bracelet. This had now disappeared from the picture. When she returns to her room, she finds it, along with some seeds, under her bed, and Rose Madder's words spontaneously come back to her mind: "I will repay."

Norman knows that he is slowly losing his mind and that his previous life is over. When leaving his hotel, he picks up a few chunks about the picnic in the women's shelter and now decides to ring in the finale. He steals a car and as a disguise he gets himself a wheelchair to mingle with the guests at the picnic as a paraplegic ex-soldier. He also buys a stun gun and finally has his head shaved by the hairdresser he has already visited. He hopes to watch Rose and follow her to her apartment, where he can slowly torture her to death.

Meanwhile, Bill picked up Rose on Saturday with his motorcycle and they had a picnic by a lake. Rose feels like she has never been so happy, and Bill wants to show her something very special when taking a walk. Under the roots of a fallen tree, which unpleasantly reminds Rose of those from her dream, lies a vixen suckling her four young. The vixen stares at Rose and never takes her eyes off her, so that she gets the feeling that Rose Madder is staring at her. Rose eventually asks Bill to take her to the Daughters & Sisters picnic on time.

Norman is already there, but despite his disguise, he is recognized by martial arts trainer Gertrude Kinshaw, who sets out to teach him a lesson. But first she has to go to the toilet and unexpectedly meets Norman, who also went there with his wheelchair. It comes to a fight with Gertrude Kinshaw and he receives a beating from the woman trained in hand-to-hand combat, who afterwards has to be hospitalized despite everything. Norman has a hard time taking this humiliation and his own mind is now finally darkened. When he sees a boy with a bull mask, he tears it off his head and puts it on himself. The mask, mimicked by a cartoon character, hugs his face immediately, but he thinks that is still better than being recognized too early. In fact, it doesn't take long for Rose to come back from the police station, to which she had fled after learning of the incident with Gertrude Kinshaw. When Norman discovers that she is in the company of a stranger, he follows the two of them to the house where she now lives. Furious with anger, he rushes at Bill Steiner and fights with him. Rose, who suddenly only feels anger at her husband, throws a clothes rack at him and can free Bill from his stranglehold. With one kick she breaks Norman's nose and pulls the almost unconscious Bill into her apartment. She instinctively holds Rose Madder's gold bracelet to the picture and so she and Bill enter the painting again.

Norman runs up the stairs, slams the door of her apartment, and follows Rose and Bill into the painting. Dorca, a woman who greeted Rose on her first visit to the painting, urges her to come along immediately. Dorca instructs her to put on a red dress and not to ask why. When Rose then looks in the mirror, she realizes that she has almost become Rose Madder's image. To Bill's astonishment, she irritates Norman by hurling screams in his direction, irritating him to the extreme. Then she runs into the temple and the labyrinth and lures Norman after her. Rose meets Rose Madder again in the labyrinth, who turns her back and advises her to go down a few steps so as not to have to watch what is about to happen to Norman. Rose obeys her instructions, then Norman rushes after and sees Rose again, this time kneeling in front of a tree. She mocks him again, then turns to him. Norman remains frozen, because under Rose Madder's skin there is now a huge spider, whose claws suddenly break through the body and reach out to him. One of them tears his tongue out of his open mouth and finally the whole spider has worked its way out of her and falls upon him. Rose hears Norman's long screams, and when she dares to look again, Rose Madder kneels again and plants seeds in part of his corpse. She throws the rest down the stairs to the labyrinth. She sends Rose back to Dorca, and Rose then puts her own clothes back on there. Then she meets Rose Madder again. She advises Rose to take good care of her new husband. And she shouldn't forget the tree. Rose has no idea what her protector means by this, but she receives from her a small bottle with a liquid that she needs for Bill and is sent back to her world again. At the same moment that Rose and Bill prepare to obey their instructions, Rose Madder becomes angry again and partially turns back into a spider again. Then she tears Rose's golden bracelet from the wrist and urges her to hurry, because she doesn't know how long she can control herself.

When Rose and Bill are back and she looks at the picture from her room, it is just an ordinary painting. While Bill is in the bathroom, she fills him a glass with Coke and drops a drop from Dorca's bottle into it. She realizes that this is water from the River of Oblivion that she warned Rose Madder about. When Bill returns and finishes the glass, the drop works immediately. Bill forgot everything he should forget. Then she goes to the bathroom and throws the seeds she found in the maze into the toilet. However, one of them sticks to your hand and cannot be removed. Then she remembers Rose Madder's admonition: Under no circumstances should she forget the tree. She still doesn't understand, but is now convinced that it must have something to do with that last seed. Using Norman's police ring, she throws the seed into her handbag. After that, she can have her hairstyle done again as before. She no longer needs her Rose Madder performance. Now she can live as a rose without fear again. In the fall, Bill asks his rose for her hand, right in the picnic area where they first kissed. Rose accepts his proposal, and their daughter, who is born nine months later, is given the name Pamela Gertrude Steiner.

Your life is normal at first. But then, two years after the birth of her daughter, Rose suffers more and more from unprovoked fits of anger. It seems to her that Rose Madder is taking possession of her again. Rose lets the pent-up anger out of her by practicing baseball hits with all her strength in a so-called batting cage. Soon these outbreaks began to affect her work as well, and when she tried to drink a coworker's blood by biting her throat in a fit, she didn't know if she wasn't going as crazy as her husband. She only knows one thing, and that is that she must get rid of her alter ego, Rose Madder, immediately. Then she suddenly remembers the tree that Rose Madder must have meant. She drives alone to the place in the picnic area where she and Bill watched the fox family. In fact, the old vixen is still there and she can feel the animal watching her closely and watching as Rose digs a small hole and sinks the last seed into it together with Norman's police ring. This seems to have finally broken the spell, because since the planting she has never suffered from fits of anger. Every year she visits the tree and the old vixen watches her again and again.

Links with other works

• Rose Daniels enjoys reading Paul Sheldon's books (from Sie ); In the picture she reads Misery's journey , a book that was not mentioned in you - has Paul found pleasure in his misery again?
• The somewhat wild-looking girl Cynthia Smith, who is also involved in a fight with Norman, can also be found in Desperation and Regulator .
• A changing image also plays a central role in The Street Virus Moves North (collection In the Cabinet of Death ); In The Dark Tower , Patrick Danville has the gift of drawing magical pictures; King's novel Wahn is also about painting (see also Memory ).

Others

• In his autobiographical non-fiction book Life and Writing , King named the picture together with the novel Schlaflos as examples of, from his point of view, “novels designed on the drawing board” and “awkward, endeavored attempts”.
• Rose Madder (original title of the novel) refers to the color of the dress of the woman in the title picture, obtained from the madder ; King plays with the similarity of the term to mad (crazy, furious).

Literature and web links

• Stephen King: The picture: Roman . Unabridged edition, 1st edition, from the English by Joachim Körber, Ullstein Tb, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-548-26333-5
• Detailed table of contents in KingWiki