‘Are you weaker than a woman, weaker even than a mother?’: Abjection and Infanticide in Dead Europe and Drift
Abstract
'To discuss Dead Europe with Brian Castro's Drift, I return to Kristeva's claim that abjection is always rooted in our relation to the mother. She explains that abjection preserves, 'the immemorial violence with which the body becomes separated from another body in order to be' (10). Despite this connection, responses to Tsiolkas's fiction have neglected the role of the mother, a silence that impairs our ability to account for the abject in his work.
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Published 1 October 2007 in Volume 23 No. 2. Subjects: Abjection, Contemporary literature, Infanticide, Motherhood, Christos Tsiolkas, Brian Castro.
Cite as: Van Den Berg, Jacinta. ‘‘Are you weaker than a woman, weaker even than a mother?’: Abjection and Infanticide in Dead Europe and Drift.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2007, doi: 10.20314/als.7d435e84bd.