Wendy Torrance

The book Characters in 20th-century Literature wrote, "Wendy Torrance is a traditional wife and mother whose energies focus on the safety of her child. Although she is primarily concerned about the physical damage Jack might do to Danny, she knows that certain elements in her own upbringing may affect her performance as a mother—notably the influence of her own resentful, highly critical mother."[8]

In an interview with Roger Ebert, Duvall described working with Stanley Kubrick as "almost unbearable" and said that despite all of the stress she endured during the extensive shoot her performance was overshadowed by the fame of Kubrick, stating, "After I made "The Shining,' all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn't there..."

In A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Phillip Kolker[9] states, "On the generic level, Wendy is a stereotyped horror-film character, both the instigator and the object of the monster's rage. But she transcends her generic role, protects herself, and destroys the monster. Wendy assumes the "masculine" role in a wonderful symbolic gesture... Getting up to go to Jack, she moves to the rear of the frame and silently, so far back in the composition that it takes some attention to notice it, picks up a baseball bat, with which she will beat down her violent husband. The figure oppressed by the phallus steals it in order to control it. Later, when Jack attempts to smash his way into the bathroom where Wendy and Danny are hiding. she stabs his hand with a large knife, an act of displaced castration that further reduces Jack's potency and threat. The patriarch is hurt with his own weapons, diminished by an acting out on him of his own worst fear if losing his power. Wendy becomes a prototype for the "final girl" who Carol Clover recognizes as the saving figure in contemporary horror."

King, who dislikes Kubrick's 1980 film, criticized the way Wendy was adapted, calling her "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film."[10] In American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, Dale Bailey[11] calls the novel version of the character a "modernized gothic heroine".