dc.description.abstract | This thesis mainly uses Sigmund Freud’s uncanny and Julia Kristeva’s abject to scrutinize the story plots, the characters, and the speaking lines of Tomie in order to deconstruct and analyze its interlocking horror essence. A master of horror genre manga, Junji Ito(伊藤潤二), creates one of his most famous works named Tomie(富江). Tomie is not only a manga character but also an iconic representation of the horror prototype in popular culture nowadays. By the juxtaposition of the uncanny and the abject, the result is to see how Tomie makes readers and characters generate the feeling of being attracted and disgust towards her at the same time. In the process of analyzing, we can also find that Ito is good at creating an uncanny atmosphere in surreal storylines yet realistic. Then this thesis reflects upon the gender issue of Tomie, thereby demonstrating the phenomenon nowadays. Therefore, Tomie’s image will be discussed by the subjects of identity boundaries and the monsterization, especially shedding light on her monstrous traits by abjection of femininity. Tomie seems to be in limbo of prey and predator, at first she is an object of the male gaze, but the extremely seductive quality she has, which makes most men hard to resist but get caught in her beauty trap. Tomie’s beauty is the only thing that makes her powerful and valuable, despite her loathing personality and attitude. Under this situation, it questions us that is the power of beauty just a story or in fact it is a campaign of innuendo and reflection of nowadays society. With the help of gender discourse, reviews of feminine abjection and elaboration of Tomie are a manifestation of the question above. Even though Tomie has a large amount of similarity technique which has been used in the horror genre; however, the struggles of feminine monstrosity in Tomie set it apart from other Japanese horror manga. Lastly, by inference, the hidden yet explicit message in Tomie is misogyny which is everywhere in our daily life. Misogyny is not only an uncanny existence, but also a strong embodiment of abjection, and it is like Tomie that they both will not be eliminated from the patriarchal society. | en_US |