Thanks to its movie adaptation, most of us know this story by its shortened title, The Shawshank Redemption, but the book actually has three parts to its title:
- Rita Hayworth: movie star and incredible hottie of yesteryear.
- Shawshank: a make-believe prison in Maine
- Redemption: meaning, um, redemption.
Put them all together and you have the book's full title: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.The title refers to Andy's escape, as well as a shout out to one of the ways he makes life bearable in prison. Even so, it's a weird collection of words—weird enough for the movie to cut a few words from its title—and it doesn't make a lot of sense until you read the book.
That's sort of the point. King wants you to ask some questions to lead you into the narrative. What's a Shawshank? Do people get redeemed there? Does it do the redeeming? How? And how does an old-time pin-up girl figure into it? They're good questions, good enough perhaps to make us open the book and read it to find out the answers. Most good books have a hook to get us started and this one puts it right there in the title.
More to the point, the word "redemption" probably refers to the way Andy redeems this injustice that has happened to him. He's chucked in jail for a crime he didn't commit. He's chased around by rapists, forced to do free tax work for the guards and generally subjected to the worst kind of treatment imaginable. Yet, he finds a way to keep it all from getting to him. He keeps that secret light in his soul, and he helps the other cons feel it too:
He strolled off, as if he was a free man who had just made another free man a proposition. And for a while just that was enough to make me feel free. Andy could do that. (375)
You might be wondering, "But why Rita Hayworth?" Good question. It might be that King is partial to red-heads or that he really, really digs Rita's movies. More likely, however, is that it's simply the fact that Rita was a well-known pin-up girl in the 1940s when Andy gets thrown in jail. Using Ms. Hayworth instead of a more modern pin-up girl lets King lay the seeds for the long passage of time that Andy spends in prison. Start with Rita, move up to Marilyn, and before you know it, thirty years have gone by. Putting Rita's name in the title makes for a quick and easy way to give the story quite a bit of context, as well as leading readers to ask the whole "What the heck is this about"? question that leads them to pick up the book in the first place.