The Fear of Losing Control: Analyzing the Maternal Body, Motherhood, and the Zombie Apocalypse in Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth

• Main Authors: Lin, Hsin Ying, 林欣瑩
• Other Authors: Timothy Fox
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/71284785341982946576

碩士 === 佛光大學 === 外國語言與文化學系 === 101 === This study interrogating Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth, a young adult novel within the horror genre, explores the essential issue in the novel — the fear of losing control by adopting primarily psychoanalytical approaches of Jung’s theory of archetypes and Kristeva’s concepts of abjection. It recognizes the forest as a fundamental space within the text, suggesting that the forest is in its own way symbolic of the maternal body. By reading the forest as a maternal body and the female protagonist’s escape as the process of pregnancy, I hope to shed light upon the novel’s apparent suggestion of a parallel between the zombie — that monstrous icon of postapocalyptic fiction — and the maternal body. In Ryan’s work, zombification has a great deal in common with pregnancy and motherhood, especially insofar as both “monstrous” bodies challenge the ability to maintain an individuated or empowered subjectivity. By recognizing the protagonist’s journey of escaping as the experiences of pregnancy, Mary represents a mother who cross-casts the “object” of primal repression and deals with Jungian’s Mother complex. This study will argue that the exclusive experiences of motherhood and pregnancy for women are also the precious opportunities to return to the “chora” and to confront the nourishing and murderous maternal body. The text adopts the perspective of a female narrator experiencing and expressing anxiety about the loss of control/zombification — in particular bodily or physiological control. Closely connected to questions of female bodily control are considerations such as pregnancy, birth and motherhood. As a “zombie postapocalyptic fiction,” Ryan’s work marches toward a denouement that is unique in the protagonist-narrator’s realization of a proud, meaningful, and mature feminine identity. This is the expected result of this project’s interrogation of three female protagonists and their struggles within the womblike forest infested with hordes of cannibalistic zombies.