Charlotte Scott on Kristeva's “ick” & “abject,” Much Ado, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet implications
I am reposting some thoughts from Charlotte Scott, who extends some ideas of Julia Kristeva regarding the “ick” and the “abject”: [1] Charlotte writes, “Whilst the abject may be those things, fluids, forms, faeces that we ‘thrust aside in order to live’, (Kristeva) the ick is what we reject in order not to become.” Often we may fail to attend closely to the elements she identifies in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night: We feel a cathartic effect as we view or read the plays, but at times we may become too familiar with them, or with scholarly theories that address them. But when people like Charlotte Scott draw attention to them like this, following a kind of golden thread (Blake) [2], we become defamiliarized (Viktor Shklovsky) enough to give it fresh attention. In Hamlet, Claudius, as murderer of his brother and usurper of the throne, would greatly prefer that Hamlet “thrust aside” his mourning “in order to live,” and Gertrude joins him in discouraging Hamlet’s m...