The Animal as Abject: Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection in Ted Hughes’ Bestiary Poems

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Ted Hughes’ poetic depiction of animals, arguing that Hughes’ bestiary poems construct the animal as a site of both fascination and repulsion, a manifestation of the abject. Drawing on Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982), the study situates Hughes’ animal imagery within the psychic drama of abjection, where boundaries between the human and nonhuman, the sacred and the profane, are repeatedly transgressed. Through close readings of poems from collections such as “The Hawk in the Rain”, “Thought Fox” and “Crow”, the paper examines how Hughes’ depictions of violence, instinct, and corporeality expose the instability of human subjectivity. The animal in Hughes’ work becomes not just a symbolic natural vitality or mythic power, but as an uncanny image of the human self in its most primal, forbidden, and destabilizing aspects. Ultimately, the paper argues that Hughes’ bestiary functions as a poetics of abjection, articulating a modern anxiety about the dissolution of boundaries between the human and the animal, the self and the other, the living and the dead.