SOURCE: "Donna Trenton, Stephen King's Modern American Heroine," in Heroines of Popular Culture, edited by Pat Browne, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987, pp. 91-100.

In the following essay, Senf discusses the female protagonists of King's Cujo and asserts that "Donna especially in her display of courage becomes a new American heroine, a strong woman with whom women in the twentieth century can be proud to identify."

For the past ten years Stephen King has been an enormously popular writer, and part of the reason for that popularity is the fact that his books feature ordinary human characters with whom the reader can readily identify. Moreover these ordinary people become heroes and heroines because they confront unspeakable horrors with courage and conviction.

By far the strongest of King's heroines is Donna Trenton in Cujo. To establish her as a modern American heroine, King does two things: First he...