Elizabeth Bishop: Abjecting the Other and Estranging the Self

Abstract

This research sheds light on Elizabeth Bishop’s demonstration of Julia Kisteva’s psychoanalytic concept of “Abjection” and “Estrangement” within the “maternal” space called semiotic chora. This maternal space exhibits abjection and estrangement within the fluid images in the poetic collections – Questions of Travel and Geography III. The mother-child bond celebrated in Bishop’s earlier collections culminates into the process of separation of the child from the mother, and subject from the object. Bishop’s separation from her mother forms new meanings for herself, which resist the identity of the mother, who is no more part of the subject, but an entity outside. Bishop has confronted her mother’s existence on the border of her identity. Yet the struggle to reject the mother’s body, in order to create an “I” becomes an ongoing process, which makes Bishop, as the subject, estranged to her own self. The ambivalent relationship with the mother, being outside the subject, speeds up the process of identity formation of the poet as subject. This, consequently, makes the subject confront her strangeness, owing to the multiplicity of meanings.