Am I Making You Feel Sick? Philosophising Ethel Cain
A dive into the theory of abjection through the lens of Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter
There are three things that I could talk about for hours on end to anyone bored enough to listen: melancholy indie pop music, niche feminist philosophy, and gory murder stories. Naturally, then, when I came across Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain in late 2022, I was transfixed. Here it was, an entirely unsettling amalgamation of my three passions; it quickly became the subject of an intense hyper-fixation, and prompted some seriously concerning and probably incriminating Google searches.
Preacher’s Daughter is the critically acclaimed debut album of singer-songwriter Hayden Silas Anhedönia, and centres on the fictional story of Ethel Cain, the daughter of a Southern evangelical preacher who (spoiler alert!) runs away from her abusive father, only to meet a gruesome end at the hands of a cannibalistic psychopath. The lore of Preacher’s Daughter is quite remarkable. Cain flees the Deep South to escape her sociopathic father and the corruption of the religious institution he represents. On her journey, she meets another lone traveller named Isaiah; the two fall in love, and decide to drive cross-country to California to start their new life together. Unfortunately, Cain’s love story is tragically short-lived. Isaiah drugs her, prostitutes her, tortures her, murders her with a shotgun, stores her corpse in his freezer, and later cannibalises her.
“The abject: the border between ordered society (the ‘symbolic’) and the subconscious, carnal impulses of the individual (the ‘semiotic’)”
Disturbed? Yeah, I was too. A heavy, sinking feeling pitted itself in my stomach for days after I listened to Preacher’s Daughter for the first time, but it wasn’t until I encountered the work of feminist philosopher, Julia Kristeva, that I was able to give that feeling a name. According to Kristeva, I was facing, and physically reacting to, the abject: the border between ordered society (the ‘symbolic’) and the subconscious, carnal impulses of the individual (the ‘semiotic’).
The notion of abjection was borne from Kristeva’s critique of the hyper-fixation on masculine relations in traditional psychoanalytic thought. Where theorists like Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan focused almost exclusively on the father-son struggle in their respective analyses, Kristeva sought to recentre the mother and her role in a child’s development of subjectivity. To achieve this, she emphasised the significance of the symbolic and semiotic in the child’s attainment of a subject-other distinction. According to Kristeva, the symbolic is the realm of patriarchal language, culture and society, and maintains ‘the order of borders, discrimination and difference’. Essentially, you participate successfully in the symbolic when you stay in your lane and keep your head down — you abide by formal laws and social conventions, you avoid going to the bathroom in the street, you refrain from murdering anyone. In direct tension with the symbolic is the semiotic, which Kristeva outlines as ‘the matriarchal aspect of language that shows the speaker’s inner drives and impulses’. You engage with the semiotic when you derive pleasure from participating in activities (*ahem*) that are reflective of your carnal desires. It is important to note that engagement with the semiotic is not inherently sexual, nor is it always innocuous; for the psychopaths of the world, yielding to one’s deepest urges would likely be violent or disturbing in nature. Look at Isaiah, for example; in submitting to his subconscious desires, he incited harm on another person for his own pleasure. According to Kristeva, whenever one’s instinctual, subconscious urges (the semiotic) threaten to upset and/or harm society (the symbolic), we face the abject.
The abject is characterised by disruption, and is found in that which, ‘disturbs identity, system, order… [it is] the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’. Due to its existence outside of the symbolic, facing the abject is deeply traumatic, and often prompts a physical reaction, as with waste, bodily discharge, filth, or death. Think of that time you saw a decaying animal on the side of the road on your morning hot girl walk, or the time you watched that really gory horror movie with your sadistic little brother who loves freaking you out, or the time you stupidly stood underneath a show ride at the Ekka and got drenched with a lovely spray of vomit. How did you feel? Did your stomach turn, did you scowl and turn away, did you break into a sweat, did you dry heave? It is this physical, instinctual repulsion and disgust that delineates the abject.
So, what does the abject have to do with women, and with mothers more specifically? For Kristeva, patriarchy essentially renders the woman’s body as the epitome of the abject, a notion which is perpetually reinforced through masculine ideas of subjectivity. She argues that in the patriarchal symbolic, a child can only attain subjectivity when it separates itself from its mother. The child must engage with abjection in order to achieve autonomy; it must abject, or move away from, the maternal body, to gain entry to the symbolic order. For Kristeva, the process of weaning is one of the first instances in which a child learns to abject its mother. The child is taught that in order to attain autonomy and gain entry to society, it must physically and metaphorically separate from its mother and the sustenance she provides. The weaning process signals the start of the breakdown of the mother-child bond, which explains why the cessation of breastfeeding is often accompanied by intense feelings of distress and melancholy for the mother. Kristeva argues that through the weaning process, the mother becomes the first site of abjection for the child-as-subject; in abjecting the maternal, the child attains an identity, or a position within the symbolic, and learns to fear the corporeality of the maternal body from which it has become separated. However, thanks to the omnipresence of our old faithful pal, Patriarchy, the impressionable child gets confused, and comes to equate the maternal body with the woman’s body. This confusion ultimately results in what Kristeva terms ‘misdirected abjection’, which sees the woman’s body rendered as the biggest threat to the symbolic order.
“The maternal body is viewed not only as a site of repugnance, but as an inevitable, ubiquitous threat to the symbolic”
For Kristeva, the unique functions of the woman’s body pose a serious risk to the patriarchal symbolic. Menstrual blood is arguably the most concerning of these threats; it alerts us to our proximity to the abject, and serves as a truly horrifying reminder that we were all born from women (yuck!). The symbolic attempts to jettison the abject by emphasising strong borders between purity and impurity, and establishes ‘obsessive rituals’ to minimise the threat of the abject on society. Those ridiculously tone-deaf period product advertisements are a great example of this. Have you noticed how in these commercials, pad or tampon absorbency is always demonstrated with a mysterious blue liquid? This is because the use of a red liquid would be too disturbing, it would too closely resemble blood, and would thus elicit too strong a physical reaction from the audience. In Kristeva’s terms, period product advertisements represent an attempt by the symbolic to restrict, move away from, and expel all expressions of the abject; rituals like menstrual sanitation become an illustration of ‘the boundary between semiotic authority and symbolic law’. However, despite efforts made by the masculine symbolic to cast out the abject, Kristeva emphasises that it always persists, and thus the symbolic is perpetually threatened by an eruption of the semiotic when it encounters the abject. The story of our poor Ethel Cain serves as a fantastic example of what happens when this threat is realised.
Abjecting the mother’s body: ‘Family Tree (Intro)’
The first track of Preacher’s Daughter, ‘Family Tree (Intro)’, opens with a ‘murky recording of a Southern preacher… extolling the significance of the mother as an icon’ and outlines the intergenerational trauma that Cain has suffered at the hands of her deeply pious family and their Christian faith. The track introduces a core theme that will be expressed and developed further in the album: the notion of the mother as the antithesis of divinity. Anhedönia draws on the story of the Holy Family as the paradigm of paternal transcendence and maternal immanence; Jesus is bound inextricably to materiality via his human mother, and is thus reminded of his proximity to the abject through her. This is articulated eloquently in the second verse of ‘Family Tree (Intro)’:
Jesus can always reject his father
But he cannot escape his mother’s blood
He’ll scream and try to wash it off his fingers
But he’ll never escape what he’s made up of.
Here, Cain integrates two sources of the abject: the mother’s body, and blood. The maternal body is simultaneously described as both a site of disgust, and as an omnipresent reminder of one’s own mortality. In ‘Family Tree (Intro)’, the father is representative of transcendence and subjectivity, and can thus be separated from the child; in Kristeva’s terms, the father becomes bearer of the ‘symbolic light’ that allows the child to attain autonomy and, subsequently, abject the mother. Kristeva’s contention that the maternal abject always threatens the masculine symbolic order is also exemplified in this track. The realisation that one was born from the mother, and will thus always be tied to corporeality and immanence, elicits a physical reaction; in this example, the subject screams, and ultimately seeks to cleanse himself of the abject to retain his selfhood and his place in the symbolic. ‘Family Tree (Intro)’ encapsulates Kristeva’s theory of maternal abjection, and demonstrates how the maternal body is viewed not only as a site of repugnance, but as an inevitable, ubiquitous threat to the symbolic.
Abjecting the woman’s body: ‘Strangers’
As the final track on Preacher’s Daughter, ‘Strangers’ offers a deeply unsettling conclusion to Cain’s story and outlines a more evocative, disturbing description of the abject by intertwining two of its most heinous epicentres — the woman’s body, and the corpse. After being drugged, prostituted, and murdered by Isaiah, Cain returns to her worldly body for a final time to discover he has brutally cannibalised her:
Freezer bride, your sweet divine
You devour like smoked bovine hide
How funny, I never considered myself tough
…
You’re so handsome when I’m all over your mouth.
Anhedönia creates an unnerving contrast between the abject and the performance of womanhood in ‘Strangers’; even after being privy to the most disturbing of horrors at the hands of Isaiah, Cain is still desperate for his approval, and ultimately eschews any subjectivity to please him one last time. She is hyper-aware that her body is a source of abhorrence, and is concerned that her corpse will not satiate her attacker. Thus, she seeks his reassurance, and pervasively asks him if she is ‘no good’, if her earthly remains are ‘making [him] feel sick’. The disquiet tragedy of ‘Strangers’ is only amplified by the context of the track that immediately precedes it, ‘Sun Bleached Flies’. In the track, Cain finally attains a sense of autonomy, after enduring a litany of trauma at the hands of abusive individuals and institutions. To utilise Kristeva’s terminology, ‘Sun Bleached Flies’ represents Cain’s transcendence from the masculine symbolic; upon her ascension to heaven, she laments that until now, she had only ever ‘watched [her] life go by from the sidelines’, but comes to find that in transcendence, she can speak freely about her experiences and regrets. In ‘Sun Bleached Flies’, Cain embodies the woman-as-subject.
This newfound subjectivity is drastically short-lived, however, when Cain descends back to her earthly remains in ‘Strangers’. She narrates the track as the literal flesh Isaiah has consumed from her decomposing body; by speaking from within his stomach, Cain again assumes the position of woman-as-object. She is torn from transcendence, back to immanence, and thus comes to epitomise the abject. Kristeva’s notion of the woman’s body as the primary site of abjection in the masculine symbolic is captured poetically in ‘Strangers’, and Cain’s delivery evokes an instinctual repulsion within the listener. It is this bodily, corporeal reaction that ultimately characterises the abject, and renders the woman’s body as a perpetual site of immanence.
It is eerily poetic that the closing lyrics of ‘Strangers’ are an ode to Cain’s mother, who will likely never come to know the tragic fate of her daughter. Cain’s final words bring her story full-circle:
Don’t worry about me and these green eyes
Mama, just know that I love you
And I’ll see you when you get here.
In death, the mother-child relationship becomes inverted; Cain expresses an almost maternal concern for her mother’s welfare, and again forgoes her own subjectivity to offer comfort and reassurance. Despite the album’s title, we find that Preacher’s Daughter is, fundamentally, a poignant tribute to the mother-daughter relationship. The mother-daughter symbiosis plays a crucial role in Anhedönia’s story, even beyond the character of Ethel; she refers to her fanbase as the Daughters of Cain, and describes herself as Mother Cain in her social media handles. It is rumoured that her next album is set to chronicle the narrative of Ethel’s mother, Vera, the release of which will inevitably lead to another intense hyper-fixation and possibly a follow-up to this article. Ultimately, Preacher’s Daughter exemplifies how the maternal and feminine bodies are abjected under patriarchy, and offers a powerful recentering of the mother through Cain’s narration. You simply cannot tell me that Julia Kristeva would not stan Ethel Cain.
You can stream Preacher’s Daughter here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. And remember: don’t talk to strangers, or you might fall in love.
This article was written by Grace Tschui. Grace is a current PPE student More importantly, she is a gatekeep sun with a gaslight moon and girlboss rising. This is her first article for statecraft!
Thank you to Devika Moss and Phoebe Meyer Elks for editing this piece.
