Self and Culture in Struggle: Footprints of Kristeva’s Abjection in The Innocent Wife

Postmodern fiction is a popular genre which is not exempt from inculcating ideologies. Since culture restricts the humanistic nature of the individuals and imposes its socio-politically constructed ideas on them, cultural theorists have concentrated on different methods to make people aware of their humanistic power and liberated individuality. Amy Liyod’s The Innocent Wife depicts a world filled with struggles of nature with culture, and characters who reveal benign intentions throughout the plotline, but are doomed to act maliciously in specific circumstances due to cultural interactions and social expectations. As a cultural critic, Julia Kristeva pinpoints the notion of the abject to magnify the phase in which the self experiences a frustrating helplessness in the confrontation with its other. The other, which can be attributed to the symbolic codes of a given culture, is ultimately a manipulative agent striving at molding individuals into subjects serving the dominant political and economic interests of the society. While this guarantees the survival of communities, a significant immolation of subjects’ unique individuality and selfhood is entailed in the process the side effect of which is the appearance of dysfunctional individuals who are rejected both by the society and their own true selves. The significance of applying Kristeva’s theory to the society of the aforementioned fiction lies in decoding the injustice imbued in social assumptions. By scrutinizing the cultural impositions, I hope to proclaim the necessity of re-thinking cultural presumptions and re-considering the inclinations of pure humanity. Keywords: Kristeva, cultural boundary, abject, frustration, subject, ideology.