the desire to be abhorrent
on abject literature, ladylikeness and unholy bodies
‘Our unshakeable belief in women’s essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing.’
– Chelsea G. Summers ‘A Certain Hunger’
In her memoir, Rebecca Solnit refers to womanhood as being an ‘art of non-existence,’[1] and it’s an art that I’ve found myself becoming increasingly aware of. The way of which women and girls move through the world is calculated game which necessitates perfection. It’s cursed with silence and solitude, and a constant inner nag; one that tells you how to act, how to look, and how to shrink yourself both from and for men. I think of Solnit’s proposal of non-existence as being not only a literal one—in the way we curl into ourselves and seek invisibility among our male counterparts— but also an existence related to our psyche. Time and coaching from matriarchs has melded us into new beings, hyperaware of how we fit into the spaces we occupy; often losing sight of ourselves in a more intimate way. Our non-existence carries, and it consumes, and if we’re lucky, it dies without taking the part of us that really does exist with it.
It was the spring of 2021 when I began working as a bookseller that I saw the repercussions of this subtle art of non-existence play out within the literary sphere for the first time. In being exposed to the wider realm of publishing I realised that women were taking up more space than ever both on and off the page, and they were doing so ferociously. There was a long-cultivated anger hidden between lines of prose that was morphing into a more obvious version of itself. I watched from behind the yellowing countertops as a new wave of literary feminism came to fruition. It culminated in the pages of books that we received and sold, and later too I found, on the internet. The very idea of what it meant to be a woman was being challenged right there within the rows of books, and it enthralled me.
To gain clarity one may need to think of the world in the way I often did. Think of what is monstrous, unsafe, disgusting, repulsive, and think of those small moments in which the world seems larger than your shrinking body could ever fill. I felt—and still do— that women have spent their lives being constricted and moulded into a digestible shape by the heaviness of our existence. We’ve been tricked into believing ours is to be a meek existence, and so our very beings have been flattened into the skin of the earth by the weight on our shoulders. I think back to when I was a child, to when I was briefly unburdened, and yet how anger still raged within me. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, strangers even; all spoke demands dripping with obligation. It was a necessity to them that I cross my legs, or that my feet be planted firmly into the ground until they sank through the soles of my shoes and hardened there like concrete, lest the men around me see the skin of my thighs under my school dress. Yet even at that age—around age nine was when it peaked—my responses were full of rage. I feigned apathy to the women around me, telling them that it was ‘their [men’s] problem if they wanted to look’ so often that I felt like a broken record. And it wasn’t that I didn’t care, in fact I cared very deeply about it, it made me feel debased and uncomfortable. It was more so that even at that young age I knew that I wasn’t the person that should be held accountable for my own violation. My non-existence was a symptom of upbringing too, not only was it a rule enforced in effort for me to shrink from men, but to shrink for them. Looking back on these occurrences it seems that there was always an undertone of manners that were being enforced into it. Folding one knee over the other and crossing my legs at the ankles protected me from prying eyes, yes, but it was a symbol of poise, and in a way, I fear that it almost made me seem older and more alluring to these men that were already bent on my sexualisation. My body was growing and yet I was shrinking and I didn’t know it.
Rage is a thing built into us by a wretched society, and one passed down almost unconsciously from our mothers and matriarchs as they teach the same lessons that they learnt. Through girlhood we are taught the importance of being ‘ladylike’; a thing only existing to turn us into something men can stomach and desire. It was not only our matriarchs that taught us this, but also our environment. It was movies, it was books, toys, even the games we played in primary school. It was the division between how girls and boys were treated in almost every instance that showed us that we were different. It’s the very centre of feminine socialisation that corrupts the soul and sows the first seeds of a flame in a girl. While the culture seems to be changing now, almost anything—varying depending on your age— you can think of in our childhood years was gendered in a way that engrained in girls the idea of fragility, femininity, and softness. Our desires were, and still are, dismantled despite being natural, and therefore we are forced into the belief that we must cross our legs, leave the room if we need to fart or burp, and certainly never say a word about vomiting or defecation. All these actions have always been presented to us in a distinctly different way from how men and boys came to understand them. And so, as women and girls, in exploring our own naturality we are isolated by it.
It was in the spring when I discovered this literary subgenre of many names; ‘female rage,’ ‘unhinged women,’ ‘grotesque women,’ and so on, that I felt that I wasn’t the so called ‘crazy’ one anymore when I fought back against this suppression of naturality. There were a few notable novels that stood out among the sea of them, it was Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, and Chelsea G. Summer’s novel A Certain Hunger that were consuming me most. I was finding in the months after being exposed to these authors that my own writing was continuing to revert to this idea of women and the space—and sometimes lack thereof—that we occupy through our lives. As another birthday passed, and I moved further from being able to call myself a ‘girl’—if I even still could—I was being compelled to explore the ways of which my body and my mind had spent so long playing the role of the feminine woman. In my search I turned to non-fiction, and within that I came across Julia Kristeva’s essay Powers of Horror. Kristeva proposed the idea of the abject: a thing which ‘disturbs identity, system, [and] order,’[2] or in other terms; a thing cast off from society. Kristeva wrote that the enthralling nature of the abject is a side effect of its catharsis, and she spends time centring on the role of a woman as an abject being herself, leaving no doubt to the reader of the inherent feminist qualities woven throughout the theory. The abjection of uncleanliness—which Kristeva proposes to be ‘the most elementary’[2] form— was what interested me the most. It was the very basis of this strangely innate societal need for women to be ‘ladylike’ entities. The body’s intrinsic urge to squirm at and reject faeces, vomit, blood, farting, burping, and even cursing, was underpinning this constriction of female desire. I admit that I have always been open to mention of these urges, in fact I tend to revel in my own naturality while it stays almost repulsive to both the men and women around me. And so, I realised that in my own life I was becoming an abject being myself as my openness about bodily impurities was perceived as something grotesque. ‘The in-between, the ambiguous’[2] presented in these novels was cathartic to me simply because it was nothing; there’s no rules within the abject, there’s no expectation, and none of that need become the woman that I had spent so long fighting. And so, there was now a name that I could confidently associate with these novels among the sea of different ones, and a feeling that maybe I wasn’t the only person that felt a connection with them beyond just their literary merit.
In A Certain Hunger, the main character Dorothy is unapologetic and swimming with sheer egoism. She takes both pride and pleasure in her recollections of the men she has had sex with, murdered and cannibalised. Similarly, in Eileen the titular character is unforgiving in her descriptions of her own violent intrusive thoughts, bowel movements, and blood. Eileen and Dorothy are as abject as I can imagine a woman can be. There's something so curiously pleasing about seeing these women so powerful. They are the antithesis of everything we women are raised to believe we should be, and they do it with pleasure, with raw strength and even, at times, with malice for man and the world around them. The abject is seeping into literary fiction and spitting out strong women who connect with their audience in a way that was likely unprecedented. The genre’s catharsis often stems from the writing’s unforgiving portrayal of the grotesque, which is usually done with indifference and acceptance of it’s existence; a stark and welcomed change from the societal view of it. Girlhood and womanhood are innately abject experiences, not only in our being cast off from society, but in the regularity of blood and gore that comes with menstruation and pregnancy. And so, it’s often—at least for the women around me—that a feeling of loneliness follows us through our years, and it’s women like Dorothy and Eileen that make us feel that little bit less alone. Because no matter how disturbing they may be, or in their fictional nature, they have still come from the mind of women, and even if it’s small, most women can relate to these characters and their experiences, and maybe even feel empathy for their actions. ‘Draw me toward the place where meaning collapses,’[2] Kristeva writes. These women reject a society which rejects them. I mention again that incredible heaviness of suppressing a side of our human selves, and I scream that it’s one that often men are allowed to let pour from themselves freely, and despite these novels’ fictional nature, these women have been able to shake that weight off themselves. The heaviness forces our rage to settle and strokes the flames of it within our bellies, but Eileen and Dorothy—while extreme and illegal examples— propose that a woman does not have to be as palatable as the world has told her to be.
Recently, I asked many of the women around me if I was the only one feeling constrained by the expectations of femininity. Among them, there was a unanimous feeling of pressure to be that well-mannered woman that I had grown to despise. While many of them had personal stories of direct teaching of ladylikeness in the way that I had, there was a consensus that we had all picked up small, unspoken things in different places. These women were different ages, race, economic status, had different backgrounds and family lives, and yet we all shared that macerating pressure of non-existence. It’s that unfortunate omnipresence that I believe to be the cornerstone of the recent surge of abject literature and its popularity. It’s no surprise that the modern woman is finding herself increasingly drawn to these characters. In a world where society—which is arguably still a patriarchy— is still wrought with clear, heavily gendered lines, and where global powers still debate the rights of women and their bodies, the political aspect of the catharsis of relatability is impossible to ignore. I argue too that lots of our shared burden comes from fear; there’s a hope that if you withdraw in the way you were taught—when you glue your legs together and tug at the hem of your skirt— then you exist less, you’re invisible to the eyes of men and therefore cannot be, or are less likely to be harmed, which unfortunately we know not to be true. Solnit often refers to the existence of a woman in an age of violence against her fellows as living through a sort of war, that ‘even if you weren’t killed, something in you was.’ [1] So as the days go by and there are more and more ruthless rights violations, when there are more murders, and rapes, that fire born of anger and kindled since birth, begins to explode, and we search for that avenue to let it burn something other than ourselves.
All of this was coming to me at a time in my life when everything was changing, and so by extension so was my idea of what it meant to be a woman. I’d always been quite a forthright, maybe even aggressive feminist in my youth, before I even knew what the word was, or that there was a reason outside of myself and my own experiences to be one. It was only in these past few months that I decided to reject the aspects of ‘ladylikeness’ that I could recognise and was discomforted by. Solnit writes: ‘we were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves.’ [1] In embracing the abject nature of being cast off I could reject that training. I was finding power in living for myself, and happiness by extension. It was becoming clear to me as these novels grew in popularity that a woman can become something more than a thing easily stomached and that other women felt the same as I. As our nature is stripped down to the core between the pages of a book, we begin to see what we can be, and what we could have been all these years.
In my time of change and discovery I felt a curious relation to Woman, Eating’s main character Lydia. Through the novel she—a vampire—struggles between two sides of herself in a way like how I was: ‘the splitting of my identity between devil and God, between impure and pure.’[3] She spends the novel in a limbo in which she tries to decide whether to be good, to be a human, or to succumb to her self-described uncleanliness and drink the blood of a man. Lydia was caught between the decision to be pure and clean in the way society expects, or to be impure and remove herself from the expectations of a human woman. And in the end, she chooses impurity, and she is all the better for it.
It’s that suppressed anger built into us, and a world weighing on the shoulders of a nine-year-old that I remember when I pick up these novels. The indignation of feminine socialisation weaves its way through my bones, and I have no doubt that while its thread may burn and leave me untethered that the fibres will scar my insides and char them with an undying rage. The ugliness and madness of a woman existing only within the page of a novel acts as water to the flame, and as another pair of hands lifting that weight off the shoulders of the girl I used to be. These books are akin to a mother that does not ask us to meld our feet into the crust of the earth. And so, we women have realised that there is an odd beauty within this genre of literature, and we invoke that insatiability we know so much about and consume the printed words and meld them like clay onto our bodies and our minds; hoping maybe, that it can soothe the scars. Abjection is cathartic, yes, but there’s a different power it gifts me; it induces a fearlessness, and above all, the idea of living simply for myself.
[1] Solnit, Rebecca. Recollections of My Nonexistence. Penguin Books, 2020.
[2] Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1984.
[3] Kohda, Claire. Woman, Eating. Little Brown, 2022
This is brilliant, I felt my head nodding at every other line. Abject feminist literature is the best thing to grace the literary scene the past few years and I seriously need a bigger book buying budget to keep up! Thank you for sharing such a thoughtfully written piece ☺️
i loved this essay so much—glad i happened upon it!