Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and Lord of the Flies

While I was reading Kristeva’s essay, my mind was constantly flooded with images from Lord of the Flies, which I have read with a class fairly recently. I had an uncanny feeling (in a perhaps more colloquial meaning of the word) that the novel was haunting me and asking for a Kristevan interpretation with the help of the notion of abjection. At the same time other theorists’ concepts also kept cropping up, notably Foucault’s heterotopia and ideas of transgression and excess by Stallybrass and White, as well as Butlerian crossdressing. In this short essay I want to argue that Lord of the Flies is more than just a novel reworking the myth of the Fall.

The novel begins with a literal fall from the sky of a group of boys. It is a heterogeneous group consisting of boys of different ages and from different classes. Seemingly they are homogeneous from the point of view of their gender but I will argue later that it is indeed not so. Their arrival marks a symbolic wound in the surface...