Abjection

As an adjective, “abject” qualifies contemptible actions (such as cowardice), wretched emotional states (such as grief or poverty), and self‐abasing attitudes (such as apologies). Derived from the Latin past participle of abicere , the word has come into use within Gothic studies primarily to discuss processes by which something or someone belonging to the domain of the degrading, miserable, or extremely submissive is cast off. Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1982) first introduced abjection as a critical term. Picking up on the anthropological study of initiation rites discussed by Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (1966), Kristeva addresses the acts of separation necessary for setting up and preserving social identity. Her debt to Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), in turn, consists of drawing attention to the psychic implications of such processes of differentiation, even though foregrounding that abjection involves both collective and individual identity formations. Pointedly, Kristeva refigures the murder of the father, so seminal to Freud's notion of the Oedipus scenario, by foregrounding instead the manner in which psychosocial identity is determined as much by an act of separation from the maternal body. While, according to Freud, mythic narratives bring back the murdered primordial father in the shape of an awe‐inspiring agency of guilt, the repressed figure of maternal authority returns either as an embodiment of the Holy Mary's sublime femininity or as a monstrous body of procreation, out to devour us and transform us into the site for further grotesque breeding. By drawing attention to the manner in which a cultural fear regarding the uncontrollability of feminine reproduction has consistently served as a source of horror, abjection has proven a particularly resonant term for a study of Gothic culture.