Gerald kills his brother and lives as outcast in his own mind. Lawrence writes this book in isolation, on the heels of The Rainbow's destruction. England casts out Women in Love, refusing to publish it. America prosecutes for obscenity. Every single character undergoes repeated bouts of nausea . . . not even a child, such as Winifred, is immune to the soul-killing times. .
In tracing these references, I begin to make a distinction between abjection of the Other and abjection of the self. As an experience of horror in the face of effluvia, corpses, outcasts, and war--abjection is something we all regularly experience, but self-abjection is a much more serious condition. It is the progression from identifying the abject to identifying with the abject. .
We can better understand abjection by comparing it to terms with which we are more familiar: neurosis and psychosis. Whereas neurotics and psychotics' fundamental psychic opposition is conscious/unconscious, the abjected person's is I/Other or Inside/Outside (I will use the term "abjected person" from here on to describe one who lives in a continuous state of threat from the abject.) (Kristeva 7). Likewise, whereas the fundamental activity in neuroses is negation (as in denial, transgression, and repudiation), the fundamental activity for an abjected person is exclusion. The unconscious contents which the abjected person finds threatening remain excluded, but "not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object," (Kristeva 7). Therefore, contents that are normally unconscious in neurotics become explicit, if not conscious, in borderline cases of abjection. In some sense, abjected persons are always, "borderlines," because their psyches constantly dance on the boundary between what they have and have not excluded. Policing their mental categories, slippery as they are, keeps them very busy.