Kristeva describes the ‘abject’ as that which breaks down meaning by disintegrating irrefutable, often physical, binaries. Kristeva’s titular work, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), proposes an interesting extension to Sigmund Freud’s notion of ‘the uncanny’, by extrapolating the discomfort suffered by an individual when something is not quite where or as it is supposed to be. Fortunately, there is already extensive literature on this topic, but it was Julia Kristeva’s ‘abject theory’ that first caught my attention. These days, having barely scratched the surface of contemporary feminist discourse but having consumed dozens upon dozens of horror stories, I am fascinated by how these two passions intersect.
Soul murder.Years before I immersed myself in feminist academia, I was a big fan of horror. Sacrificed lives: Kristeva on women and violence Uneven developments: The ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the double-bind Roudiez (Trans.)īlack sun: Depression and melancholia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992īearing the word: Language and female experience in nineteenth-century women’s writing The violent effigy: A study in Dickens’ imaginationĭickens, C. This threatening construction of women’s sexuality derives from an imbalanced focus in the male psyche on the repulsion aspect of abjection, a focus socially inscribed as a threatening power, which is used to justify violent usurpations of the feminine in masculine constructions of gender.ĭesire and domestic fiction: A political history of the novelĭissenting women in Dickens’ novels: The subversion of domestic ideology Reading Oliver Twist through the lens of Kristeva reveals the ways in which Sikes, Nancy’s murderer, psychically links her sexuality to the fatal potential he perceives in her body. In this essay, I show how these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which I call the “abject response.” Applied to literature, a study of the abject response explains why sexually active female characters, such as Nancy, the prostitute, in Oliver Twist, suffer extreme acts of physical violence: not simply because they are sexual, as critics of Victorian domestic ideology most often argue, but rather because their particularly female bodies give them an agency which threatens to destroy the mastery of women on which Victorian male identity is based. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject’s primal, psychological relation to the mother.
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