earticle

영어

This paper is designed to examine how women take a stance against patriarchal society and were branded as subjects of aversion that poses a threat to the society. And this process of forsakenness as disgusted images is explored through Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abject’. According to Kristeva, an abject object poses a threat to the existence of a subject and it is to be detested and denied. I intend to analyze a work by a feminist playwright, Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart through the concept of ‘abject’. The three sisters in the play are described as abject in society. The oldest, Lenny has a shrunken ovary and she deviates from the boundaries of ‘normal’ women who can bear children. The middle one, Meg was banished from a small town in the South because she refuses to be an idealization of a meek and elegant Southern lady. The youngest, Babe cannot stand the physical and psychological abuse from her husband and shoots him, making her an abject character who directly challenges the patriarchal order. The three sisters also consider themselves as abject and opt for a life of isolation and exclusion. However, fluid characteristics of abject that hover between the boundaries help the sisters to acknowledge themselves as changeable subjects. Even though, it is evident that abject independence as a disparate other poses a threat to subjects who are fixed in their ways in the standardized society, abject can be defined as an object placed between ambiguous boundaries that we have no choice but to embrace in the end for being most true to the subject.