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One of the most recognizable pieces of English literature shows its author’s fas-cination with the abject: the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet frequently visits the boundaries that Julia Kristeva explores in her essay “Approaching Abjection.” Without the academic terminology to quantify Kristeva’s definition of the abject, Shakespeare articulates the subconscious process of abjection to surprising depth through the reaction of Lord Capulet to his daughter’s faked death; moreover, a careful analysis of his characters‘ motivations reveals an interesting intersection of nightmares: marriage itself, when bro-ken from tradition, is abject. Though Kristeva argues that death is the utmost abject, Shakespeare suggests that marriage is not only abject as well, but parallel to the nature of abjection seen in death.

In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva explores the element of the horrific, and the abject arises as an explanation for a particular reaction of disgust. What is abject is not simply an external object that conjures unpleasant feelings; it is situated identifiably between the subject and the object: “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (Kristeva 2). In other words, the blurring of boundaries is a key aspect of the abject. To further de-fine the difference between the abject and a disgusting object, Kristeva uses the exam-ple of excrement. Because human waste was once inextricably a part of the subject’s body before its expulsion, it certainly “belongs” to no other person than the one who ex-pelled it, but the waste itself is not the subject, either—it is “[a] ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing” (2). When the thought arises that the act of expelling the excre-ment the same as “expel[ling] myself, I spit myself out...

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...are subtly approaches. From beneath the surface of Capulet’s grief for his daughter’s death emerges his true nightmare—that his daughter might marry against his consent and outside of the traditional marriage norms. If the abject is “what does not respect borders, positions, [or] rules,” then Juliet’s secret marriage to Romeo is the terrifying reality from which Capulet is sheltered by Friar Laurence’s plan. The corporeal fusion during marriage is manageable when controlled by tradition, but when violated by death or a “shameless rapist” (in the case of Romeo), marriage be-comes abject, making Juliet the “in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” that Capulet fears most; or, as Friar Laurence states, the abject marriage is like “[t]he sweetest honey [that] / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, / And in the taste con-founds the appetite” (Kristeva 4; 2.6.11-13).