On David Quammen's “The Face of a Spider”

八十三週年校慶基礎學術研討會外文組民國九十六年六月一日 

Abstract 

Black Widow as the Abject: 

On David Quammen’s “The Face of a Spider” 

Su, Chiu-hua 

In this essay, I would like to apply Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to the 

discussion of David Quammen’s “The Face of a Spider,” in the hope that the scope of 

the theory may expand from the human world to the natural world. Contemplating 

on the unreasonable phobia of the spider, Quammen’s essay intriguingly links the 

natural creature to its cultural meaning. By doing so, he raises a fundamental 

question: “how should a human behave toward the members of other living species?” 

This echoes the most important concern of the contemporary cultural studies: How do 

we confront the Other. Addressing this concern, Kristeva’s theory of abjection 

argues that the process of producing the other is the condition of possibility both for a 

subject to be formed and for a culture to be sustained. If the basic premise of 

psychoanalysis is to make us recognize the intimacy between self and other, abjection 

goes further to elevate the other to something worth respecting and cherishing. 

Keywords: Kristeva, abjection, Quammen, phobia, human-nature relationships 

In this essay, I would like to apply 

Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to 

the discussion of David Quammen’s 

“The Face of a Spider,” in the hope that 

the scope of the theory may expand from 

the human world to the natural world. 

How do we confront the other is 

probably the most important concern for 

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the intellectuals of the late twentieth 

century. Addressing this concern, 

psychoanalysis has pointed out a 

significant direction: there is always a 

stranger within a subject. The other is 

not outside of the self but inside. 

However, for Kristeva, maintaining only 

that the other is within the subject is not


enough. Her theory of abjection argues 

more radically that the process of 

producing the other is the condition of 

possibility for a subject to be formed. 

If the basic premise of psychoanalysis is 

to make us recognize the intimacy 

between self and other, abjection goes 

further to elevate the other to something 

worth respecting and cherishing. 

While Kristeva’s discussion of 

abjection focuses on the anti-Semitism 

of the western world, here I will try to 

apply it to the attitude of human beings 

toward other species, especially those 

which are despised and abhorred, the 

vermin. In “The Face of a Spider,” 

with the subtitle “Eyeball to Eyeball 

with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” 

Quammen raises a fundamental question: 

“How should a human behave toward 

the members of other living species” (3, 

5). More accurately speaking, what 

kind of attitude should we assume 

toward the non-human species which are 

ugly and detestable to us, ones which 

arouse feeling of disgust and revulsion? 

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The incident depicted in the essay is 

simple: facing a hundred newly hatched 

black widows spreading over his study, 

the author tried to figure out what he 

should do to them. Holding Darwinian 

view that survival has to do with 

“ruthless squashing and gobbling” (6), 1 

Quammen dismissed the idea of 

“ahimsa” (6), a Jainist teaching of 

no-killing, and suggested a direct 

confrontation with the radical otherness 

the black widows stand for. In the 

following passages, I will argue that the 

spiders of Quammen correspond to 

Kristeva’s conception of the abject in 

that the primal fear aroused by them is 

rooted in human being’s impulsion to 

reject and expel the remains of natural 

matrix which homo sapiens is born into. 

At the very beginning of the 

Powers of Horror, Kristeva gives 

definition to abjection: “There looms, 

within abjection, one of those violent, 

1 As to the contribution, or damage, the 

Darwinian view of nature has made to the ethics 

regarding humans and nature is a tremendous 

issue, which cannot be dealt with here.


dark revolts of being, directed against a 

threat that seems to emanate from an 

exorbitant outside or inside, ejected 

beyond the scope of the possible, the 

tolerable, the thinkable” (1). Within 

abjection lies a potential for revolt, 

threatening to subvert the existence of 

the subject from both inside and outside. 

For a subject to be formed, part of me 

must be expelled with violence and 

aggressivity. This turbulent movement 

of ejection and banishment is what 

Kristeva calls the “abjection.” The 

formation of subject is thus based on the 

indistinguishable border between inside 

and outside, for, had it not been for the 

rejected inside which has been pushed 

out, there would never have been a 

subject. The formation of the I is 

always accompanied by violence against 

the other, which is bred within me. 

The part of me which is rejected, the 

abject, has nothing to do with its essence, 

but with the security of identity, border 

and regulation. Therefore, abject 

should not be confused with object. It 

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“has only one quality of the object—that 

of being opposed to I” (1). While 

object settles me in the context of 

meaning, abject “draws me toward the 

place where meaning collapses” (2). 

Those heterogeneous elements which 

elude symbolic regulation fail to provide 

meaning, and therefore should be 

expelled. Different from Freud and 

Lacan, who believed that the formation 

of the subject is induced through 

Oedipus triangle, Kristeva contends that 

the process of emanation and rejection, 

the mechanism of “exclusion” (6), 

happens even earlier than the time when 

father intervenes in mother-child 

symbiosis: “Abjection preserves what 

existed in the archaism of pre-objectal 

relationship, in the immemorial violence 

with which a body becomes separated 

from another body in order to be” (10). 

The act of pushing away mother’s breast 

itself is already a symbolic gesture; 

hence, the birth of a subject is not 

registered through the acceptance of the 

Name of the Father, but through the


abjection of maternal body and the 

related defilement. Abject, no matter 

what is pinned down to it, implies a 

primal fear toward femininity and 

corporeality. Further, the process of 

abjection is an ongoing process, 

continuing throughout human life. 

Whenever the subject feels insecure 

about his own identity, he has the urge to 

push away the abject. 

More importantly, this urge of 

pushing away abject does not only 

contribute to the figuration of the I but 

also the establishment of human 

civilization. According to Kristeva, 

every culture has its own method of 

dealing with the sense of abjection. 

She argues that some religious rituals, 

for instance, can be regarded as the 

performances of abjection. Through 

the rituals of banishing the unclean, the 

stability of a culture is sustained. In 

the modern era, when religion loses its 

throne, the act of writing ascends to the 

rescue of cultural security. “In a world 

in which the Other has collapsed, the 

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aesthetic task—a descent into the 

foundations of the symbolic 

construct—amounts to retracing the 

fragile limits of the speaking being, 

closest to its dawn, to the bottomless 

‘primacy’ constituted by primal 

repression” (18). The linkage between 

abjection and cultural phenomena makes 

Kristeva’s discussion especially 

productive, since objects excluded and 

despised can be understood through its 

cultural context. It may help explain 

why some objects are treated as abject in 

certain cultures but not in the others. It 

is not the essence of the objects that 

determines people’s attitude. The urge 

of abjection is usually aroused by the 

chaotic primitive elements threatening to 

subvert the foundation of the symbolic 

construction. For the establishment of 

a cultural subject, the banishment of 

primitive maternal elements is 

necessary. 

Abjection is manifested in a variety 

of cultural milieux, some cruel, some 

artistic, depending on how the cultural


being decides to deal with the abject. 

In this essay I would like to put my 

emphasis on the phobia of spider 

described in Quammen’s “The Face of a 

Spider.” Seeing nearly a hundred black 

widow spiders strewing over his desk, 

Quammen wrote, “It was a vision of 

ghastly, breathtaking beauty, and it 

brought on me a wave of nausea” (3). 

The sight of a hundred newly hatched 

baby spiders arouses a feeling of both 

indescribable attraction and revulsion, 

the sense of the abjection. Subject is 

drawn to it, but has to reject it. 

Obviously, spider is the abject, which is 

feared and despised not because of the 

danger it poses to man but because of its 

radical otherness. As Quammen 

observes, while snakes and mosquitoes 

cause tremendous death tolls every year, 

the black widow is relatively harmless. 

Compared to other non-human species, 

such as snail, bull snake, or carp, the 

feature of a spider is distinguished by its 

radical alterity: “The face of a spider is 

unlike anything else a human will ever 

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see. The word ‘ugly’ doesn’t even 

begin to serve. ‘Grotesque’ and 

‘menacing’ are too mild. The only 

adequate way of communicating the 

effect of a spiderly countenance is to 

warn that it is ‘very different,’ and then 

offer a photograph” (7). Even so, when 

one confronts the face of a spider, words 

fail to communicate. It draws the 

subject “toward the place where the 

meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). 

What makes black widow spider an 

abject? The cultural inscription, rather 

than the essence of the spider may 

answer the question. In western culture, 

the black widow spider represents an 

idée fixe that the female spider gnaws 

the male off after copulation. This 

insect behavior is appalling in human 

eye. Intriguingly, it gears to the fear of 

the female body in the patriarchal 

society. The naming of the “black 

widow” reveals human effort to capture 

the unimaginable and unthinkable 

through the symbolic web, which is 

functioned under the Name of the Father.


The absence of the father, which the 

word “widow” implies, paradoxically 

strengthens the potency of the Name of 

the Father and fortifies the incest taboo. 

Since obtaining the desired object, the 

mother, means the death of the subject, 

the exclusion of everything related to 

maternal status is necessary. Therefore, 

the phobia of the black widow involves 

a deep fear toward maternity and 

femininity. However, I would like to 

argue that this fear cannot be adequately 

explicated through the working of the 

symbolic. The fear of the mother roots 

deep in the primal relation between 

mother and child, the necessity of the 

child to reject the part of itself that 

belongs to the (m)other--abjection. 

In “The Face of a Spider,” 

Quammen associates the idea of the 

mother with the black widow. The 

reason why there were a hundred baby 

spiders frolicking on his desk was that a 

pregnant female black widow had 

woven a net and waited for the eggs to 

be hatched in his study. “…[S]he had 

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gotten pregnant. She had laid her eggs 

into a silken egg sac the size of a Milk 

Dud and then protected that sac 

vigilantly, keeping it warm, fending off 

any threats, as black widow mothers do” 

(4). Pregnancy, as Elizabeth Grosz has 

pointed out, is also like abjection in that 

it is a “borderline phenomen[a], blurring 

yet producing one identity and an 

another” (95). If the symbolic ensures 

the stability of identity, pregnancy, then, 

challenges the validation of the 

self-enclosed identity through 

corporeality. This explains why in a 

patriarchal society things related to 

women’s ability of giving birth are 

usually covered by mysteries and taboos. 

Grotz goes further to maintain that the 

female body capable of generating 

another body reminds human subjects 

their root in the natural world. “Like 

the abject, maternity is the splitting, 

fusing, merging, and fragmenting of a 

series of bodily processes beyond the 

will or control of the subject. The 

woman-mother finds that it is not her


identity or value as a woman which 

maternity affirms, but her position as 

natural or as a hinge between nature and 

culture” (96). Abjection, the child’s 

movement of pushing away the mother 

in order to distinguish the self from the 

other, is also the cultural subject’s 

rejection of his own corporeality and 

mortality for the purpose of establishing 

a barrier between nature and culture. 

Therefore, if Anna Smith is correct by 

saying that “[p]hobia is a condition 

where its subject dreads maternal fusion, 

but equally fears separation from the 

mother” (158), the phobia of the black 

widow spider can be understood as 

subject’s dual dreads of fusion with and 

separation from nature. 

Abjection is sometimes manifested 

through the fear of pollution. 

Employing anthropologist Mary 

Douglas’s theorization of defilement, 

Kristeva notes that the desire of the 

patriarchal culture is to sustain the 

border of the sex. She indicates that an 

object is regarded as an abject not 

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because of its essence but because of its 

potential to harass the border. 

“…[F]ilth is not a quality in itself, but it 

applies only to what relates to a 

boundary and, more particularly, 

represents the object jettisoned out of 

that boundary, its other side, a margin.” 

(Original italics; Kristeva 69). Objects 

exemplified as abject here are things that 

might cause pollution and contamination, 

such as menstrual blood and feces. 

Both of menstrual blood and feces 

signify the alternative power to the 

father—“Maternal authority” (Kristeva 

72). The defense against these objects’ 

pollution refers to the watertight guard 

for sexual difference in patriarchal 

societies, suggesting the fear toward 

women and their power of procreation. 

Despite the fact that reproduction is 

elemental to the survival of a society, 

women’s ability to give birth is abhorred 

and should be taken under vigilant 

control. Kristeva observes, “Fear of 

the archaic mother turns out to be 

essentially fear of her generative power.


It is this power, a dreaded one, that 

patrilineal filiation has the burden of 

subduing” (77). In the society where 

birth control is more in need, the more 

prohibitions are set against pollution and 

defilement. To the contrary, if a people 

live on abundant resources, one can 

hardly find any taboos or prohibitions 

against defilement (78). The fear 

toward the power of procreation turns 

into the obligation to strictly prevent 

pollution. In order to sustain the 

symbolic system, it is necessary to fend 

off everything related to the maternal, 

the natural, and the chaotic. 

In Quammen’s essay, the black 

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widow spider appalls man because it 

seems to possess a mighty power of 

procreation, so mighty that the fragile 

structure of human sphere are threatened 

to be devoured. They are the ones 

which “disturb identity, system and 

order, disrupting the social boundaries 

demanded by the symbolic. [They] 

respect no definite positions, or rules, 

boundaries, or socially imposed limits” 

(Grotz 90). In Tucson, the city where 

Quammen lived, “black widows breed 

like rabbits and prosper like 

cockroaches” (3). They occupied a 

space rapidly, turning the study into a 

spider hatchery: 

…[F]ifty or sixty of them had reached the lampshade and rappelled back 

down on dainty silk lines, leaving a net of gossamer rigging between the 

lamp and the Darwin book…that set on the desk. Some dozen others 

had already managed dispersal flights, letting out strands of buoyant silk 

and ballooning away on rising air, as spiderlings do—in this case 

dispersing as far as the bookshelves. (4-5) 

As abject, black spiders threaten to 

pollute the civilized world—epitomized 

here by the study filled up with books. 

The black widow spiders, with the 

prodigious power of reproduction, pose 

a threat to subvert the fragile system of 

human civilization. 

In Tucson, it is the black widow 

which assumes the position of abject, 

while every society, especially those 

highly civilized and populated ones, 

assignes certain non-human species as


its abject. As Huw Griffiths, Ingrid 

Poulter and David Sibley have argued, 

people’s attitudes toward the non-human 

species vary, depending on “their 

placing within a particular cosmology” 

(58). Those treated as pests are 

“animals which transgress the boundary 

between civilization and nature, or 

between public and private, which do 

not stay in their allotted space” (60). In 

other words, they are the abject. They 

stimulate the “feelings of discomfort or 

even nausea which we try to distance 

from the self, the group and associated 

spaces (but which we can never banish 

from the psyche)” (60). These 

animals/insects/plants are usually 

remarked by their vigorous fertility, such 

as rats, pigeons, stray dogs and feral cats, 

which, in the eyes of the city 

administrators, threaten to pollute the 

rationalized city space and subvert the 

structure of civilization which has to be 

maintained warily. The dirt they make 

might deteriorate city hygiene; the howls 

in the breeding season pierce through 

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tranquil orderly night; their 

uncontrollable movement transgresses 

the limits between the domestic and the 

public. In short, they disturb “system 

and order, disrupting the social 

boundaries demanded by the symbolic,” 

and showing no respect to “rules, 

boundaries, or socially imposed limits.” 

What abjection involves are not 

only the relationships between self and 

object, but also that between self and the 

Other, the Symbolic. The impulsion to 

reject the “part of me” which reminds us 

of the fact that we are part of nature is 

the way to establish civilization. 

“…[A]bject and abjection are my 

safeguards. The primers of my 

culture” (Kristeva 2). Although it 

cannot be denied that human beings are 

part of nature, we have to draw a line 

between us and nature in order to 

survive, that is to say, to occupy a niche 

within natural world. As Terry 

Eagleton argues, “[b]ecause we are all 

born prematurely…our nature contains a 

yawning abyss into which culture must


instantly move, otherwise we would 

quickly die” (my italics)(73). The 

paradox that culture which keeps us 

alive in natural world demands a violent 

and aggressive rejection toward nature is 

brilliantly illustrated in Kristeva’s theory 

of abjection. However, what is 

especially enlightening in her theory is 

that she does not justify violence and 

aggressivity in the name of abjection. 

She goes further to suggest that 

abjection needs to be sublimated. And 

the sublimation of abjection, the 

alternative to treat the impulsion of 

abjection in a non-violent way, is the 

creation of literature, that is, the 

employment of the symbolic to deal 

with the inassimilable and the 

unacceptable. “…[T]he subject of 

abjection is eminently productive of 

culture. Its symptom is the rejection 

and reconstruction of languages” 

(Kristeva 45). If what distinguishes 

human body from lifeless objects and 

animals is the capacity to make use of 

language to communicate with each 

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other in an extremely complicated way 

(Eagleton 72), the sublimation of 

abjection, the production of cultural 

works, marks the watershed between 

human beings and animals. The moral 

here lies in choosing consciously the 

non-violent way, i.e., writing, to deal 

with the abject. 

Quammen’s question of “[h]ow 

should a human behave toward the 

members of other living species” can be 

paraphrased as follows: how should a 

speaking subject behave toward the 

species which are treated as abject? If 

abjection of nature is fundamental for 

civilization, how do we find a less 

aggressive way to co-exist, or, at least 

tolerate the natural other? If the violent 

banishment of everything related to 

nature is necessary for the formation of a 

cultural subject, how do we sublimate 

the violence? Quammen’s advice is to 

resort to both the symbolic and the 

imaginary. Before making eye contact 

with the spider, one must first be warned 

(through words) of its extreme


difference and then offered an image. 

During the eye contact, he suggests to 

repeat the mantra: “This is some 

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mother’s darling, this is some mother’s 

child” (7). After the preparations, he 

looks into a spider’s face: 

I only know that, when I make eye contact with on, I feel a deep physical 

shudder of revulsion, and of fear, and of fascination; and I reminded that 

the human style of face is only one accidental pattern among many, some 

of the others being quite drastically different. I remember that we aren’t 

alone. I remember that we are the norm of goodness and comeliness 

only to ourselves. I wonder about how ugly I look to the spider. (8) 

The feeling of revulsion, fear and 

fascination—sense of abjection—is 

followed by the realization that human 

being is the arbitrator only of the human 

world, which is located in a larger 

matrix. 

Even so, he honestly admits that the 

final decision he made with the hundred 

baby spiders was to exterminate them all. 

His massacre of a hundred spiders seems 

to be a “glaring contradiction” (5) to his 

promotion of “eye contact” with 

non-human species. The ethics related 

to killing other species is too large an 

issue to be dealt with in this paper. 

Here I would like to put aside the moral 

debates on killing and suggest a 

psychoanalytic reading of Quammen’s 

solution. The extermination of the 

spiders is performed not without the 

subject knowing of what he is doing. 

The movement of abjection here is not 

an unreflective violent attack but a 

conscious act with the knowledge of 

how subject is related to the Other. 

The aggressivity and violence 

accompanied the constitution of the 

subject are laid down into words. The 

application of Kristeva’s theory of 

abjection to “The Face of a Spider” may 

not answer Quammen’s question of how 

man should behave toward other species. 

Nevertheless, it may at least point out a 

direction for us to meditate on how the 

internal impulses determine the 

relationships between self and other, 

humans and nature.


Works Cited 

Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of 

Postmodernism. Oxford: 

Blackwell, 1996. 

Griffiths, Huw, Ingrid Poulter, and 

David Sibley. “Feral Cats in the 

City.” Animal Spaces, Beastly 

Places: New Geographies of 

Human-animal Relations. Ed. 

Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert. 

London: Routledge, 2000. 56-70. 

Grosz, Elizabeth. “The Body of 

Signification.” Abjection, 

Melancholia and Love: The Work of 

Julia Kristeva. Ed. John Fletcher 

and Andrew Benjamin. London: 

Routledge, 1990. 80-103. 

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An 

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Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon 

S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia 

UP, 1982. 

Quammen, David. “The Face of a 

Spider: Eyeball to Eyeball with the 

Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” 

The Flight of the Iguana: A 

Sidelong View of Science and 

Nature. New York: Touchstone 

Book, 1988. 3-9. 

Smith, Anna. Julia Kristeva: Readings 

of Exile and Estrangement. 

Houndmills: MacMillan, 1996.


由賤斥理論討論大衛.奎曼的〈蜘蛛的臉〉 

蘇秋華 

中文摘要: 

本文試圖以克莉絲蒂娃的賤斥理論來討論大衛.奎曼的〈蜘蛛的臉〉,希望能藉 

此將賤斥理論的運用範圍從人類世界擴大到自然界。奎曼的散文巧妙地從自然界 

的生物談到其文化意涵,作者提出了一個最根本的問題:「人類在面對其他物種 

時究竟該展現何種行動?」這個問題呼應了當代文學研究最重要的關懷:我們要 

如何面對他者?針對這個問題,克莉絲蒂娃的賤斥理論所說明的便是,產出他者 

的過程乃是形構主體和維繫文化的必要條件。如果精神分析的基本前提是使我們 

體認到自我和他者的親密性,賤斥理論則進一步提昇他者的地位,成為值得被敬 

重並珍惜的對象。 

關鍵字:克莉絲蒂娃、賤斥、奎曼、恐懼症、人與自然的關係 

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On David Quammen's “The Face of a Spider”

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