Abjection

• Abjection means “the state of being cast off.”
• Julia Kristeva is the key figure in the study of abjection.
• Kristeva describes abjection as the feeling when an individual experiences, or is confronted by (both mentally and as a body), what Kristeva calls one’s “corporeal reality,” or a breakdown of the distinction between what is self and what is other.
• For example, looking at a corpse and recognising one’s mortality, or in Keats’ poem ‘this living hand now warm and capable’, in which he looks at his hand and recognises it as an object that will one day be lifeless.
• Both texts deal in different ways with what it is and means to be a person: both explore how one’s self as a physical entity and one’s self as a psychological entity – a mind – are different, but also how others treat them as not different.
• Frankenstein explores what we mean by ‘human’: Victor often makes judgements of a person’s self – their morals, their goodness – from their physical appearance (not just the creature, but many characters). But in the novel itself we see this distinction problematized and interrogated
• The distinction between self and body is in some ways not recognised by the Gileadean regime: handmaids are all body in terms of their value, function and the way they are perceived.
• In Gilead, The self is only considered to the extent that it might impact upon the body, rather than the wellbeing of the self being worth considering in and of itself.
• Offred herself often views her body as abject, creating distinctions between her abjected physical body as ‘other’ and her self, sometimes as an inevitable response to Gilead’s valuing of her only as a body, and sometimes as a deliberate mechanism of psychological self-preservation.
• Abjection has also been used in social-critical theory to describe how marginalised groups are ‘abjected’ within society
• We see this in how the creature is abjected, and how the Children of Ham are abjected within Gilead, sent to ‘National Homelands’ (echoing the treatment of native Americans in the past being placed on ‘Reservations’).