Subjects-in-Process: A Kristevan Reading of Semiotic, Symbolic, and Abject Identities in The Lollipop Shoes and The Strawberry Thief

Abstract

This study performs a Kristevan reading of Joanne Harris’s The Lollipop Shoes (2007) and The Strawberry Thief (2019) to demonstrate that identity is precarious, processual, and continually reconstructed. Using qualitative close reading, the analysis applies Kristeva’s key concepts, namely, the semiotic, the symbolic, abjection, and the subject-in-process, to show how rhythm, affect, and memory traverse and rework social forms. The first part of the discussion maps the semiotic/symbolic dynamics: respectability suppresses semiotic impulses, yet they return through expressions, nonverbal rhythms, gestures, and images. In Harris’s food poetics, cadence and texture re-materialize signification. The second section examines abjection across registers: the double’s mimetic intrusion collapses the self/other; the corpse stages death-as-contamination, which disrupts communal order; and the revenant memory corrodes symbolic promises. The third and final part synthesizes these pressures as a subject-in-process: Vianne’s iterative selves, Rosette’s creative semiotic, and the maternal negotiation of attachment and separation keep identity open, provisional, and continually remade. The findings position Harris within debates on fluid identity, gendered space, and the materiality of signification and contribute a reproducible heuristic: semiotic/symbolic mapping, abjection across registers, and integration as a subject-in-process for applying Kristeva to contemporary fiction. This study shows how affective rhythms and abject shocks repeatedly reconfigure symbolic forms, making identity a practice of ongoing becoming rather than a fixed, settled state.