Theories on motherhood in the essay “Stabat Mater” (Kristeva 1987, 234–264) as well as her writing on abjection in Powers of Horror (Kristeva 1982) have stimulated new directions in American literary studies. Both Hortense Spillers (2003) and Jack Halberstam (2012), among others, draw on Kristeva’s theory in significant ways in their writing on literature and race. Considering Spillers’s and Halberstam’s work in their connection to her theory enables a psychoanalytic approach to address especially the race question hovering over literary studies and beyond. In building on the work of Kristeva, these two critics reshape our understanding of the related questions of the human as well as of American national identity and demonstrate the compelling beauty of literary texts. In this chapter, I will examine Kristeva’s presence in Spillers’s and Halberstam’s writing. My examination considers these texts as literary criticism with the potential for reducing racial discord in the body politic. Given that psychoanalytic writing by definition turns primarily inward, I will necessarily discuss how best to understand past and present mistakes in understanding, confronting, and dealing with internal conflict.
The psychoanalytic model is valuable precisely because it locates the sources of human activity in the psyche. The implication here is that ultimately, we are in control, or at least have the possibility of understanding, confronting, and reshaping unconscious motivations, that is, of rendering them conscious, along with the behavior and phenomena to which they lead. This potential and desired outcome is in fact the reason for my examination of Kristeva’s impact on literary studies in this volume. Her work in “Stabat Mater,” Powers of Horror, and beyond is substantive and prolific. It has engaged American studies in critical dialogues in an impressive array of fields including literature, film, philosophy, and religious studies as I will discuss in the chapters that follow.
To consider one of the best examples, taken as a whole, Spillers’s Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003) implies a careful psychoanalytic critical theory and practice. The University of Chicago Press states (back cover) that she “is best-known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory.” In more precise terms, this chapter will show that her writing in this volume builds upon Kristeva’s version of Freud to better address questions of race. Considered together, Spillers’s essays provide an important instance in my examination of Kristeva impact, though they appear somewhat unconnected and directly mention her work only a few times in connection with motherhood. Black, White, and in Color includes indirect references to abjection, as Kristeva understands it, in the analysis of African-American fiction throughout the volume, along with explicit discussion of her ideas on motherhood in “Stabat Mater” in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry and especially Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (Spillers 2003, 133, 288–290).
In terms that point to Ellison’s Invisible Man as a model of successful storytelling, Spillers indirectly refers to Kristeva’s theory of abjection in analyzing Toni Morrison’s Sula as a novel communicating the protagonist’s failure to tell her story (Spillers 2003, 8–9, 93–118, 1983). Building on Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” Spillers’s fifth chapter in this volume, “An Order of Constancy: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine” (2003, originally appeared in 1985, 131–151), examines motherhood as a paradoxical overlapping of nature and culture in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry and its complex links to Anglo-American traditions. Spillers returns to the influential essay on motherhood and its contradictions in the eleventh chapter, “Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading” (2003, 1993, 277–300) with a brilliant analysis of Paule Marshall’s novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, as an exploration of black women’s lives and their relations with children. The intricate paradoxical web of biology and culture as Kristeva presents motherhood in the West enables Spillers to understand, for example, Marshall’s depiction of a seemingly minor character, the anonymous Canterbury woman, and her failure to comprehend her story adequately or to articulate it to her lover (Spillers 2003, 279–287, 289–294, 296–298). In this reading, the Canterbury woman’s loss of her child combined with her limited education and paltry financial resources means that her life, including the way in which the Father of her child tries to destroy her toy dolls, would go unheard were it not for Marshall’s compelling fiction. It is thus because of psychological, physical, and social conditions linked to motherhood that the character is unable to understand the truth of her experience and to recount it, while the author herself is.
On the one hand, Spillers focuses on Kristeva’s theories of motherhood in her reading of Marshall. A careful study of Black, White, and in Color, as I will show, reveals the influence of Kristeva idea of abjection as well and the ways in which it derives from relations to the Mother. Halberstam’s Skin Shows, on the other hand, recognizes primarily the theorist’s useful theory on abjection without examining its links to the Mother. He demonstrates how it brings insight to Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an embodiment, confrontation, and critique of racist behavior and attitudes in 1897.
According to what may be Kristeva’s clearest and fullest discussion on the topic in the first section of Powers of Horror, abjection is a complex experience deriving from the infant’s feelings of attachment and repulsion for the Mother’s body at the time of terminating symbiosis with her at birth. Resurfacing later in life, these emotions and sensations develop into psychic conditions in which the individual, recognizing the Father’s authority, acquires the ability to function rationally and to speak in a reasoned manner. This process of development and acquisition will be less or more difficult. For some, it will remain impossible. Thus, abjection in Kristeva’s theory takes on precise definitions going well beyond and overlapping the more general idea of severe depression. Fundamental in her understanding of the concept is the undeniable impact of Judeo-Christian traditions linking women to the body as impure (Bové 2006, 6, 83–86, 91).
Halberstam analyzes Kristeva’s writing on abjection, the Jews, and Céline’s fiction as a critical study of problems of race and gender. According to his reading of Stoker’s monstrous tale, an interpretation inflected by Powers of Horror, the protagonist, Jonathan Harker, represents the patriarch par excellence, intent on purging the world of non-white, bisexual desires in the form of Dracula, whom he perceives as a threat to the racial and gendered hierarchies of Western societies especially in the nuclear family.
Halberstam’s interpretation, despite his at times reductive and critical comments on Freudian thought, brings a psychoanalytic perspective to Stoker. Skin Shows problematizes Western ideas of “white,” “Jewish,” “gypsy,” “masculine,” and “feminine,” and especially distinctions between good and evil as well as between subject and Other. For Halberstam, Stoker’s novel goes beyond the reading of Dracula as the epitome of evil and violence tout court to show how English and American cultures unconsciously construct the foreigner, homosexual, and especially those with non-white characteristics, as morally reprehensible.
Spillers and Halberstam focus on fictions set outside the most powerful Anglophone countries and indict colonial and postcolonial hierarchical behaviors that are quintessentially Anglo and more recently primarily American. Marshall does not give a precise location for The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. The setting resembles that of Grenada or Barbados in the 1950s, highlighting the presence of an English cane factory along with American social science researchers on the Caribbean island. For Stoker, Dracula’s location, in London and Transylvania, also has a focus on England and the United States. In this way, both critics choose novels that use setting to reinforce their insights in a dialogue on the treatment of the Other both outside and within the psyche. Without making explicit reference to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory in their criticism of the United States, Spillers and Halberstam share her critique of the United States’ brand of Christian materialism. The prevalence of a white, heterosexual, Christian identity for the capitalist nation depends in part on racism, sexism, and Protestant intolerance deriving in part from a Puritan history.
In a particularly clear and...