Psychoanalytic Echoes: Kristeva's Abjection in the Narrative of Beloved

Kristeva’s description of motherhood as a "demented jouissance," the pleasure of the pain, reveals the ambivalence of love and hate relationship as the child attempts for individuality by detaching from her mother and a woman within herself. It is an excruciating experience for both mother and daughter since the female identity is not delimited, autonomous, separated, or individuated. Morrison’s Beloved is saturated with conversations that signal actual utterances in the real world, manifesting Kristeva’s concept of abjection through mother-daughter conversational analysis. This study is concerned with how conversational language in terms of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and lexico-syntaic choices can be a psycho-linguistic indicator of psychological functioning. Specific linguistic style, lexical choices, or syntactic variations used by characters implicate psychological tendencies and inclinations since the mental function is a constituent of the textual structure. This article intends to broaden the insights regarding Kristeva's notion of “abjection” in mother-daughter relationship.