Amityville Horror, the 23
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A the shape of an awe-inspiring agency of guilt, Abjection the repressed fi gure of maternal authority ELISABETH BRONFEN returns either as an embodiment of the Holy Mary’s sublime femininity or as a monstrous As an adjective, “abject” qualifi es contemptible body of procreation, out to devour us and actions (such as cowardice), wretched emo- transform us into the site for further grotesque tional states (such as grief or poverty), and self- breeding. By drawing attention to the manner abasing attitudes (such as apologies). Derived in which a cultural fear regarding the uncon- from the Latin past participle of abicere, the trollability of feminine reproduction has con- word has come into use within Gothic studies sistently served as a source of horror, abjection primarily to discuss processes by which some- has proven a particularly resonant term for a thing or someone belonging to the domain of study of Gothic culture. the degrading, miserable, or extremely submis- The abject is not to be thought of as a static sive is cast off. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror concept, pertaining to something monstrous (1982) fi rst introduced abjection as a critical or unclean per se. Instead, it speaks to a thresh- term. Picking up on the anthropological study old situation, both horrifying and fascinating. of initiation rites discussed by Mary Douglas in It involves a tripartite process in the course of her book Purity and Danger (1966), Kristeva which forces that threaten stable identities addresses the acts of separation necessary for come again to be contained. For one, abjection setting up and preserving social identity. Her entails an exclusion of that which blurs the debt to Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo boundary between self and other, so that, by (1913), in turn, consists of drawing attention virtue of this separation, subject positions can to the psychic implications of such processes again be clearly drawn. At the same time, it is of differentiation, even though foregrounding also understood as a symptom drawing on that abjection involves both collective and indi- a cultural fear of the feminine reproductive vidual identity formations. Pointedly, Kristeva force, rendering the maternal body monstrous refi gures the murder ofCOPYRIGHTED the father, so seminal so that MATERIAL it can be cast off. Finally, abjection also to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus scenario, by involves the way in which a body that must foregrounding instead the manner in which be abjected – for the alleged health of the psychosocial identity is determined as much by individual or the community – is declared an act of separation from the maternal body. to be alien and can thus, in good conscience, While, according to Freud, mythic narratives be expelled. It is useful to recall: only once bring back the murdered primordial father in Frankenstein’s Creature is declared to be a The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, paperback edition. Edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith. © 2016 John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley and Sons Ltd. 2 abjection monstrous body does it indeed become a stray ity. The paternal scientist, who clandestinely who will return to haunt the world of its cre- wants to import members of this alien culture ator with ruthless vengeance. In the process of so that his research might benefi t the war abjection, two attitudes thus come to be con- industry, is ironically on the side of the mon- joined. One the one hand, the bodies to be strous mother, whose reproductive facilities he abjected are declared horrifi c; on the other, the seeks to appropriate. Indeed, the abject Alien act of abjection is itself monstrous precisely mother, albeit unwittingly, blurs the boundary because it targets a fi gure that, by undermining between a masculine war industry and femi- clear boundaries, must be cast off. In other nine monstrous creation only to disclose their words, only because those foreign bodies that mutual implication. By resiliently giving battle are to be abjected are encoded as being a hor- to this monstrous progenitrix, although doing rifi c threat to the self or the community can we so against the covert intentions of her boss, overlook the fact that the agents of abjection, Captain Ripley, in turn, herself uncovers the working under the auspices of a regeneration blurring between the very terms that set up the of stable identity borders, are equally violent. process of abjection. In the decisive moment A resonant representation of abjection as we see her rising to the spaceship’s deck, in one a process by which the individual and society arm the phallic rifl e she has put together and come ceaselessly to redraw the boundaries in the other the little girl for whom she fondly between them (even while being forced to rec- cares. Over her warrior body, paternal war ognize the fragility of this enterprise) can be machinery again comes to be crossed with found in Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992). At the maternal love, rendering visible how the act of beginning of the fi lm, Captain Ripley wakes up abjection and its object can never be neatly to discover that the queen Alien, whom she separated. thought she had successfully vanquished in Such inability to distinguish between subject the previous episode, cannot fully be cast away. and object explains why abjection should not, The monstrous adversary has impregnated her according to Kristeva (1982), be thought of in so that she is herself now carrying a baby Alien terms of narcissism, and why it entails a differ- inside her body. Typically of the ambivalence ent libidinal economy than that of love. While contained in the concept of abjection, Ripley abjection may result in a transference of affec- fi nds herself on both sides of the battle. Even tive energies, it involves an object whose status though she acts under the auspices of a sym- is unclear, too close to be assimilated into an bolic system that designates those foreign to it object of desire. Instead, declared to be a radi- to be abjectable, she is herself a liminal fi gure, cally excluded object, the abject body contin- positioned between the Aliens and the inhabit- ues to challenge the authority that called for it ants of Earth. Indeed, the Alien trilogy is pre- to be cast off. Positioned on the edge of a reality mised on a key aporia built into the concept of that, were it to be fully acknowledged, would abjection. The pure and the impure can never be utterly destructive, the abject, as Kristeva be neatly severed because dangerous foreign notes, “takes the ego back to its source on the bodies that trouble neat identity categories are abominable limits from which, in order to written into the very fabric of all stable notions be, the ego has broken away.” Abjection, she of identity. The precursor to Alien3, Aliens adds, is “an alchemy that transforms death (James Cameron, 1986), sees Ripley so drawn drive into a start of life, a new signifi cance” by the Alien mother that in the fi nal show- (1982: 15). This dual move is perhaps rendered down, even though she could have safely nowhere as clearly in Gothic texts as in the escaped, she chooses instead to return to her fascinating horror a corpse inspires. To assert adversary’s lair. Her fascination with this individual and collective survival entails casting embodiment of horror places her in the cross- off death by drawing its force to the body of a fi re of two equally dangerous fi gures of author- deceased that can then be symbolically expelled abjection 3 with the help of codifi ed burial rituals. Yet, mark a reinsertion of control and with it a implicitly inscribed in such renewal is an redrawing of the boundary between affective acknowledgment of what threatens individual identifi cation with and self-conscious distanc- and collective self-assertion. Abjection thrives ing from the experience of abjection the fi c- on troubling the line that demarcates life tional text evokes. As a performance of the from death because, while the life of the subject fragility upon which individual and collective (as that of the community) is dependent on identity is based, abjection is sustained by its ability to cast off death, life is also measured a counter-directional move. Even while the by the fact that it is constantly threatened by abject confronts us with fascinating if trou- death. bling situations where psychic stability threat- Equally seminal for Gothic culture is the ens to dissolve and we risk falling back under manner in which abjection fi nds an articula- the sway of a stifl ing all-encompassing mater- tion in two forms of psychic transformation, nal power, it calls for a combat that inevitably namely the bodily symptom and sublimation. culminates in rejection. The fi nal battle in The former, Kristeva suggests, could be seen as Aliens has Ripley on the ship’s deck both touch- a “non-assimilable alien, a monster,” which “the ing and fi ghting off the mother Alien, coming listening devices of the unconscious do not ever closer in her embrace until she is able to hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside jettison her ferocious enemy into the bottom- the paths of desire.” Monstrous bodies can less darkness of the sky. fruitfully be seen as symptoms of an anxiety Gothic texts that celebrate abjection as regarding the fragility of identity boundar- much play with a breakdown of identity ies because they embody a blurring between boundaries as they play to the authority of human and inhuman rather than representing redrawing these, even if in full knowledge in symbolic language the anxiety such destabi- of the fragility such recuperation entails.