Fences and Boundaries: Abjection in Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Beyond

Abstract

It is the breaching and breakdown of boundaries between self and Other which create what Julia Kristeva terms abjection. This breakdown is paralleled in the boundary-blurring development from childhood to adulthood.The zombie may be the most abject of all the monsters that populate the realm of horror. Zombies are both of us, possessing human bodies and histories, yet fundamentally Other in their lack of speech, consciousness, or control. Kristeva’s theory of abjection does much to outline the repulsiveness of the walking corpse in Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth. But analysis of the physical and narrative structures of the novel outline this same repulsion in the coming of age aspects of the novel. Fences and boundaries consistently form these structures in the novel and are the basis of analysis. With these analytical techniques in place we can finally see how fences and boundaries may be used in similar ways in other contemporary Young Adult novels.