Rita Desjardin

Rita Desjardin, usually addressed as Miss Desjardin, is the gym teacher at Ewen High School and one of the adults most directly involved in Carrie White’s transformation from a mocked, isolated student into the agent of catastrophe. She first encounters Carrie through the school’s disciplinary machinery: impatient with her slowness, complicit in the school’s rough habits of correction, and capable of striking her. Yet she also becomes the first adult at school to understand what the shower-room incident actually was, to recognize the cruelty directed at Carrie, and to offer her a genuine if belated gesture of inclusion. Her arc is therefore defined by an unstable movement from institutional authority toward ethical recognition, followed by the failure of recognition to arrive soon enough.## Identity and PositionMiss Desjardin is presented as a young, physically capable gym teacher whose appearance contrasts with the students’ expectations of feminine glamour. She wears blinding-white shorts, has muscular but unobtrusive legs, and carries a silver whistle won in a college archery competition. The details establish her as a figure of bodily discipline: she supervises showers, classes, and student conduct, and her authority is expressed through brisk gestures, commands, and physical presence. At the same time, she is not simply an abstract representative of the school. The narrative exposes her irritation, her ordinary prejudices, and her capacity to remember and revise her own behavior. In the shower room, she tells Carrie to hurry because the bell will ring in five minutes, using a sharp question about whether Carrie is waiting for “Doom” rather than recognizing the crisis unfolding around her. Carrie’s dazed response produces more laughter from the girls, and Miss Desjardin leaves after gesturing impatiently for her to move.Only after Carrie has stepped from the shower do the girls see the blood running down her leg. Miss Desjardin then returns when Carrie collapses into one of the shower compartments, groaning helplessly and appearing terrified. Sue Snell realizes that this is probably Carrie’s first menstrual period, but the scene has already become an uncontrolled spectacle. The teacher’s arrival interrupts the girls’ collective cruelty without immediately undoing it.## Response to the Shower-Room IncidentWhen the other girls have gone to their Period Two classes, Miss Desjardin uses what the narration calls the standard tactic for hysterics and slaps Carrie across the face. The action is both disciplinary and revealing. She is a first-year teacher who still believes she thinks all children are good, yet the scene shows that her belief coexists with a reflexive contempt for the supposedly difficult child. The narrative notes that she would deny regarding Carrie as a fat, whiny burden, but her conduct exposes precisely the emotional violence that her professional self-image conceals. Her authority initially reproduces the same structure of humiliation that has already made Carrie an object of ridicule.She nevertheless takes practical responsibility once the immediate spectacle has ended. Fifteen minutes later, she leads Carrie through the empty school halls to the office. Carrie’s shrieks have stopped, but she continues to weep steadily. Miss Desjardin places the napkin herself, cleans Carrie with wet paper towels, and gets her back into her plain cotton underpants. She tries twice to explain the commonplace reality of menstruation, but Carrie covers her ears and keeps crying. The teacher’s care is concrete rather than sentimental, yet it remains limited by the gap between adult knowledge and Carrie’s terror. Miss Desjardin understands the bodily fact; Carrie experiences it as a catastrophe for which she has no language or preparation.Afterward, Miss Desjardin tells Mr. Morton that Carrie has had her first period in the shower and emphasizes that Carrie is unusually old for a first menstruation, which made the experience especially traumatic. Her explanation identifies the event as a crisis of ignorance and neglect rather than an act of misbehavior by Carrie. That recognition becomes more forceful when the school’s response is discussed.## Discipline, Responsibility, and Institutional ConflictThe following Monday, Miss Desjardin returns to the locker room and finds the girls dressing in subdued silence. She has been unable to forget Carrie’s image: the screaming, blubbering girl with a wet napkin pressed against her body. When Chris Hargensen attempts to storm past her, Miss Desjardin slams Chris against the dented olive-colored lockers. Chris protests that the teacher cannot hit the students and threatens that she will be dismissed. The confrontation shows Miss Desjardin responding to one form of abuse with another form of force, but it also marks her refusal to let the shower-room incident disappear into ordinary school gossip.The punishment she wanted was three days’ suspension and refusal of prom tickets. She tells the girls that the office has chosen the punishment instead, making clear that the official decision is not her own. Her proposed sanction would have struck at the students’ social lives and access to the Spring Ball, revealing that she understands the prom as the point at which the school’s privilege and hierarchy can be made to feel consequences. The distinction between her proposal and the administration’s decision also places her between institutional authority and the students’ parents. When John Hargensen challenges the school over the treatment of his daughter, Henry Grayle redirects the discussion to the original offense: about ten girls threw sanitary napkins at Carrie while she believed she was bleeding to death, called her “a dumb pudding,” told her to “plug it up,” and subjected her to obscene gestures. Miss Desjardin’s account of the incident helps make that buried violence legible, even though her own earlier slap complicates any claim to uncomplicated moral authority.## Recognition at the Spring BallAt the Spring Ball, Miss Desjardin appears not in gym clothes but in a glimmering silver sheath, with her blonde hair up and a simple pendant at her neck. The transformation matters because Carrie sees her not merely as a teacher who once entered the shower room, but as a woman participating in the same social ritual that Carrie has long been denied. When Carrie turns and recognizes her, the memory of the shower-room incident passes between them without spoken explanation: Carrie remembers being naked, screaming, and bloody, while Miss Desjardin recognizes the memory in her face.Miss Desjardin offers the first direct reconciliation. She tells Carrie that anything that happened before is forgotten and that she wanted Carrie to know this. Carrie answers that she cannot forget it, then stops herself from claiming that she blames no one. The admission she withholds is crucial: the past is not erased merely because an adult now wishes it to be over. Carrie says that it is over, but the statement is presented as controlled and incomplete rather than as true forgiveness. Miss Desjardin then recalls her own prom, including the awkward height difference, the mismatched corsage, and the broken tailpipe of the boy’s car. She remembers the evening as magic and asks Carrie whether the occasion feels that way for her. The exchange attempts to place Carrie inside a shared adolescent tradition, but it also underscores the distance between Miss Desjardin’s nostalgic embarrassment and Carrie’s experience of a social world that has made her body into a public target.## Failure of Protection and Narrative SignificanceDuring the disaster at the Spring Ball, Miss Desjardin runs toward Carrie, apparently trying to help. Carrie, however, sees her face as filled with “lying compassion” and imagines that beneath it the real teacher is laughing with cruel, old-maid ribaldry. In Carrie’s perception, the earlier encounter in the shower room has fused with the entire history of watching and mockery. The teacher’s attempt at rescue is therefore interpreted through the accumulated structure of humiliation rather than through its immediate intention.Miss Desjardin speaks to Carrie and begins to say that she is sorry, but Carrie strikes out with her newly unleashed telekinetic power and sends the teacher flying against the wall beside the stage. The action is a decisive reversal of their relationship. Earlier, Miss Desjardin’s hand had struck Carrie; now Carrie’s power rejects the teacher’s offered assistance and turns physical force back upon her. The reversal does not prove that Miss Desjardin’s compassion was false. Instead, it demonstrates how completely the social world has destroyed Carrie’s ability to trust an adult gesture, even one that may be sincere. The narrative makes Desjardin a tragic measure of delayed responsibility: she can recognize Carrie, clean her, defend her, punish the girls, and finally approach her with sympathy, but none of those actions can undo the shower-room spectacle, the years of staring, or the institutional pattern that taught Carrie to expect ridicule. Her role connects the ordinary mechanisms of school discipline to the supernatural catastrophe that follows. The telekinetic disaster is not caused by her alone, but her failed rescue shows that personal decency, when separated from timely protection, cannot repair violence already made public and permanent.