Abjection as Gothic and the Gothic as Abjection

Abstract

Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) has had a profound effect on the analysis of Gothic works. Building on Freud, Lacan, and others, it posits a "throwing over" of the deepest anomalies at the roots of human being - the inseparable intermingling of life and death and self and other at the moment of birth - into what seems an alien, other figure (the 'abject', such as Frankenstein's creature) so that the abjecting subject can construct a wholeness of consistent identity over against it. This process, as Slavoj Zizek has emphasized, is even a socio-cultural one, whereby populations abject underlying social conflicts into supposedly alien others. The abject figures in many Gothic works, then, are fear-inducting sites prompting terror or horror because they enact this scheme. In fact, they do so because the whole idea of abjection hearkens back to the very nature of Gothic symbol-making from Horace Walpole on.