Julia Kristeva's Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection '

Dr. Robert Ledgard is a plastic surgeon who loses his wife and later loses his daughter. Both commit suicide. His wife gets burns from a car accident and cannot deal with her appearance then kills herself. Later, his daughter nearly got raped in his family party. Even though he did not rape his daughter, Ledgard thought his daughter got raped. He feels guilty about both situation (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The moment Ledgard thoughts his daughter got raped

Therefore, too many traumatic events cause him to lose his mind. Ledgard became more controlled and cold person. After his daughter’s death, he wants to take revenge from the person that he thinks raped her daughter. Thus, this succesful plastic

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva emphasizes the significance of skin and the role of the mother in establishing an attachment of self through touching (Kristeva, 1982). With contact, the mother helps the infant for recognizing a skin. Vera’s skin does not “belong” to herself but to Robert (like mother), and she feels in prison inside her own body. To my point of view, that is why Vera could not feel anything about her skin. Her lack of skin sensation may mean that she experiences being the object she has become—Robert’s creation—and her self-harm behavior can be seen as her attempt , to feel something - anything. Vera’s beige and thick bodysuit functions as a second skin, imprisons her inside her own body and restricts her off from contact with the real world (Figure

Ledgard to create a skin which has the ability of resisting the pain. He might try to give her wife the comfort she could not had and to repair the damage of burn from the accident that she experienced.

As movie progresses, we see that Dr. Ledgard tries to flourish this young women’s femininity even though Vera’s refusal to adapt her newly created female identity. In my opinion, this action may be explained by two reasons. The first reasons is that Dr. Ledgard tries to make a complete woman out of rapist and the second reason, he wants to have revenge and give punishment for having sexually abused his daughter. Out of nothing, Dr. Ledgard creates his wife.

Vera had a chance to see herself in a mirror (Figure 5). In my point of view, she passes to mirror stage as Lacan proposes, he says that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I" (Zuern, 1988). However, she could not easily accept her body and her new feminine