Gowdy's Literary Theory Of Abjection

Barbara Gowdy’s collection of short stories from We So Seldom Look on Love revolves around the foils and tropes of the disabled child, or those who are coined as the ‘other’. This essay will focus on Gowdy’s short story “Body and Soul”, which can be read in regards to the Julia Kristeva’s literary theory of abjection. This is because the short story begins with Terry’s abjection as an infant, and ends with Julie being disposed to a psychiatric home. Arguably, Gowdy’s short story can be perceived of how the disable-bodied individual is rejected, and repressed within society, because they are labelled as the vulnerable. Arguably, the status of being recognized as vulnerable is because of the individual’s physical difference, which consequently …show more content…
However, both girls who are figuratively rejected from society in different ways. The cause of Terry is abjection is because of her purple birth mark, and her blindness; the birthmark aesthetically damages her chances of being adopted, whereas the blindness impairs her quality of life. Ironically, Terry’s blindness, which should be her focused disability is depicted a lesser problem in comparison to the purple birthmark. This is first demonstrated when the nurses “dressed her up, and dabbed makeup on her birthmark to give her a fighting chance” (Gowdy 4). Problematically, the purple birthmark becomes the label that signifies Terry as the ‘other’, in comparison to her blindness that impacts her quality of life. Gowdy creatively characterized Terry as a figure that is both visually, and aesthetically disabled. Arguably, this could mean that able-bodied people would prefer a disabled child, over an aesthetically disabled child. This can be emphasized with Kristeva’s idea of the physicality of leprosy. “The disease visibly affects the skin, the essential if not initial boundary of biological and psychic individuation. […] the abomination of leprosy becomes inscribed within the logical conception of impurity to which I have already called attention: intermixture, erasing of differences, threat to identity” (Kristeva 101). Terry’s physical blemish is not as severe to the case of leprosy; however, it is how Terry appears differently to society, which aids in her abjection until she is ‘normalized’. Terry’s birthmark is a signifier that she possibly possesses a contagious symptom, in effect this is what causes the repulsion in the able-bodied person to be unlikely to adopt Terry. However, the irony is Terry’s birthmark is nothing but a skin blemish, arguably it is the visual disability since it becomes problematic for her. Additionally, the