Margaret White (née Brigham) is a fictional character created by American author Stephen King in his first published horror novel, Carrie (1974), where she is the main antagonist. Margaret is a deluded, abusive and fanatically religious mother who thinks almost everything is sinful, especially when related to the female body or sex. Her daughter, Carrie White, has the power of telekinesis, which causes Margaret to think that Carrie is a witch. Novel In the novel, Margaret is a formerly beautiful Christian woman who always dresses in shapeless black clothing. She works full-time at a laundromat and has held her job for many years. She often maims herself, or uses various other ways to harm herself, during times of great stress. Once, her daughter Carrie dreamed that Margaret had given herself a hysterectomy after battling the Devil. She was born Margaret Brigham. Her father was killed in a gun battle and she began attending a fundamentalist church group to deal with the loss, quickly becoming a religious fanatic. Her mother remarried a man named Harold Allison, but Margaret denounced them, believing that they were living in sin. In 1960, she met her soon-to-be husband, Ralph White. Margaret later tells Carrie she had sex with Ralph before marriage. She wanted to kill herself afterwards and fell down the stairs to induce a miscarriage. After they married, Ralph vowed that their indiscretions would never recur, but one night Ralph tried to seduce Margaret before she threw him out of the house. He returned drunk and had sex with her in a bizarre form of marital rape that Margaret both hated and enjoyed. This resulted in the conception of Carrie. In February 1963, seven months before Carrie's birth, Ralph was killed while working on a construction site (though it is mentioned in the novel that Ralph stopped Margaret from killing the infant Carrie when she started exhibiting her powers early in her life, implying that he died later on). Margaret gave birth to Carrie while in her house without medical assistance, causing Margaret to lose some blood. Her relationship with her daughter was extremely abusive from the time Carrie was a baby. This deeply affected Carrie throughout the years, putting great strain on her by homeschooling her into becoming a part of her fundamentalist community. Whenever Margaret believed that Carrie had sinned at school, she would throw her in a specially decorated closet to