Gothic incest

Gender, sexuality and transgression

Jenny DiPlacidi

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526107565
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The first full-length study of incest in the Gothic genre, this book argues that Gothic writers resisted the power structures of their society through incestuous desires. It provides interdisciplinary readings of incest within father-daughter, sibling, mother-son, cousin and uncle-niece relationships in texts by authors including Emily Brontë, Eliza Parsons, Ann Radcliffe and Eleanor Sleath. The analyses, underpinned by historical, literary and cultural contexts, reveal that the incest thematic allowed writers to explore a range of related sexual, social and legal concerns. Through representations of incest, Gothic writers modelled alternative agencies, sexualities and family structures that remain relevant today.

1

‘Unimaginable sensations’: father–daughter incest and the economics of exchange

Let a veil be drawn over the unimaginable sensations of a guilty father.

Mary Shelley, Matilda (1959)¹

There are several problems that usually emerge in scholarship examining representations of father–daughter incest in the Gothic, even in works by scholars whose goal is to lay bare the feminist themes that are central to the genre. Principal among these is that representations of father–daughter incest often cause works to be placed in the gendered subgenre of Female Gothic and to be viewed through a lens predicated on this generic division. What frequently stems from this homogenising gesture is a misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the ambition of the Gothic as displaying what E. J. Clery refers to as an ‘intrinsic “femaleness”’.² This leads to texts being viewed as part of a Male or Female Gothic form and their representations of father–daughter incest to be understood through these gendered divisions. As I suggested in the Introduction, the application of Freudian theory, sociological approaches to incest and structural anthropological discussions of the incest taboo contribute to reading father–daughter incest within a gendered framework that tends to view this incestuous relationship as alternately imagined or abusive. Freudian approaches are often applied in conjunction with anthropological understandings of incest such as those advanced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who theorised that: ‘the prohibition of incest is … the fundamental step … in which the transition from nature to culture is accomplished’.³ The Freudian psychoanalytic preoccupations that underpin much scholarship on the Gothic similarly identify the prohibition of incest as fundamental to the formation of culture, as incest allows adolescents to move from the family into exogamic relationships that complete the transition into culture. Sociological approaches that are informed by the equation of father–daughter incest with abuses of power contribute to readings of these relationships as reflective of the abuses inherent in the emerging nuclear family and domestic spaces.⁴ These understandings have focused scholarly readings of father–daughter incest in the Gothic on locating the perceived or real threats against the heroine within the home or castle. I argue that in moving away from these approaches to rely instead upon feminist theories on the traffic in women, representations of father–daughter incest can be understood as engaging with and troubling notions of the exchange of women deemed necessary to culture.

The Freudian mode of viewing incest is, inconveniently for those who use it to lend credence to their arguments regarding incest in the Female Gothic, predicated on the notion of children desiring the opposite-sex parent who raises them and seeing the same-sex parent as a rival. Sigmund Freud argued that ‘the simplest course for the child would be to choose as his sexual objects the same person whom, since his childhood, he has loved with what may be described as a damped-down libido’.⁵ Freud believed that incestuous desires rearoused at puberty must be fought against in order for adolescents to distance themselves from their parents and therefore the incest barrier is ‘a cultural demand made by society’.⁶ In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud’s statement that ‘boys regarded their fathers and girls their mothers as rivals in love, whose elimination could not fail but to be to their advantage’, was founded on his belief that the first sexual desire of children is towards their mothers, an argument explored further in Totem and Taboo (1912).⁷ This theory, which stipulates that female desire and sexuality are developed in response to the father figure, allows first for a pre-Oedipal stage in which the daughter loves and bonds with the mother before turning to her desire and love for the father, a stage that engenders rivalry with the mother. The incestuous desire is resolved later when the daughter is able to transfer her incestuous desires to another male. The Oedipal phase has two periods, between ages three to five, after which there is a waning consequent upon repression, and then it is reactivated in puberty, when puberty makes possible the transference of incestuous desires.⁸

Freudian theories of incest have become increasingly discredited in the psychological community, in part due to the work of modern psychologists who argue that Freud discounted the actual experiences of his female patients’ sexual abuse and that his theories have limited applicability to female sexuality and desire.⁹ Psychologist Anne Cossins describes Freud’s work on incest as ‘discredited due to the circumstances surrounding his initial revelations of incest in patients he was treating and his subsequent repudiations of those claims [as fantasies]’.¹⁰ Similarly, psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer calls Freud modern history’s ‘most debunked doctor’, whose work ‘doesn’t hold up very well at all … every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality’.¹¹ In an article that describes the displacement of Freud’s incest theories, Bruce Bower states: ‘one current school of psychoanalytic thought rejects Freud’s assertion that the Oedipus complex occurs universally, arguing instead that psychologically disturbed parents sometimes stir up incestuous and intensely competitive feelings in their children’.¹² Though this theory fails to account for incestuous feelings and desires exhibited by parents or children not raised by the relations they desire, it is more closely linked to the types of incest uncovered in the Gothic than a purely Freudian interpretation. The sexism underlying Freudian theory is pointed out by feminist scholar Gayle Rubin, who finds it challenging to use Freud and Lévi-Strauss to account for the incest taboo as ‘[they] write within an intellectual tradition produced by a culture in which women are oppressed … the sexism in the tradition of which they are a part tends to be dragged in with each borrowing’.¹³ In spite of what Rubin describes as the misogynistic tradition underlying these modes of analysis that has led to a feminist re-evaluation of Freudian psychoanalysis and Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, these are still privileged approaches in analyses of female sexuality and incest that find their way into literary scholarship on the Gothic.¹⁴

Even scholars who seek to displace Freudian models of sexual desire sometimes return to the Freudian paradigms that are so entrenched in literary analyses of incest and sexuality more generally.¹⁵ Julie Shaffer, for example, argues first that ‘by situating explicit incestuous lust in the father’s desire, such desire need not be projected onto the daughter in the way Freud does’.¹⁶ However, Shaffer subsequently gives credence to Freudian theory when she argues: ‘Arraigning patriarchal power in the form of the father figure … situates that power in the home, site of the construction of the female character’s sexuality where it develops ostensibly in response to the father.’¹⁷ In a similar way, Tania Modleski argues that Ann Radcliffe’s plot ‘became popular at a time when the nuclear family was being consolidated. … It spoke powerfully to the young girl struggling to achieve psychological autonomy in a home where the remote, but all-powerful, father ruled over an utterly dependent wife.’¹⁸ These readings rely on both the psychological and sociological models of incest and although they provide important insights into viewing incestuous threats as linked to the domestic structure they focus exclusively on the father as a threat within the nuclear family.¹⁹ Part of the problem in deploying this Freudian model to explain incest and female sexuality in the Gothic is that it requires father–daughter incest to be read as a product of a familial dynamic seldom present within the texts.²⁰ Freudian theory that claims girls develop incestuous desires for the fathers who raise them is not applicable to the many Gothic novels in which girls are not raised by their fathers. Its application can thus lead to misreadings that diminish the importance of incest to the narrative and position heroines as victims of fantasies rather than threats. For incest to be a result of children desiring the opposite-sex parent who raises them in infancy and toddler-hood, there clearly needs to be an opposite-sex parent present during these developmental periods, which is not the case in many Gothic works. In addition to the lack of the appropriate family structure, authors did not often depict daughters who desire their fathers, but when/if they do, it rarely correlates to a synonymous hatred of the mother figure, who in these instances is most often absent.²¹ The Freudian paradigm is therefore irrelevant to analyses of novels where the narrative and/or familial structure prohibit conformity to it.

Applying Freudian theory to analyses of heroines can trivialise incestuous threats by framing them as fantasies. Hoeveler, for example, asserts that Gothic heroines seek or fear incest because they have ‘an infantile desire to remain in the paternal and protective domicile of childhood’.²² Recognising that she must leave home to marry, the heroine attempts to make her father appear evil as she

does not want to leave her father and marry another … Therefore, she fancies that her father has attempted to rape her (The Romance of the Forest) or her father is an adulterer (Mysteries of Udolpho) or her father has tried to kill her (The Italian). Only if she can convince herself that she exists in such a super-charged moral universe … can she agree to separate from the paternal abode.²³

Uniting incest with the Gothic tropes of murder, adultery and hidden secrets seems to corroborate Freudian theory on incest as fantasy or seduction, but when the novels used to support this point are closely examined some disturbing discrepancies emerge. If the heroine of Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Ellena di Rosalba, encounters an internal struggle between remaining within the protective paternal home or marrying an interloper, she would necessarily have experienced such a patriarchal home. However, Ellena, raised by her aunt since the age of two in an exclusively female society, has no memory of a patriarchal house. As such, a Freudian analysis of Ellena’s desires and motivations becomes impossible to reconcile with her upbringing. The second point, that because of Ellena’s desire to remain in the paternal abode she imagines an attempted murder by her father, misidentifies both the violent encounter and the familial relationship between Schedoni and his brother’s daughter, Ellena. Schedoni enters his niece’s room, intent on killing her as she sleeps, but is stopped by the sight of a miniature she wears that he believes is his likeness. The attempted murder is real and, therefore, the use of the term ‘fancies’ with its implicit denotation of belief without fact or foundation is inaccurate. Aligning Ellena’s murder fantasy with other Radcliffean heroines’ imagined fears seeks to legitimise the use of Freudian theories yet also conflates the Gothic tropes of terror, incest and hidden secrets. This diminishes the relevance of individual conventions – particularly incest and its various configurations – to the subversive agenda of the Gothic.

Rather than apply a Freudian methodology that is often combined with structural anthropological and feminist sociological approaches, I argue that feminist theory on the exchange of women and recent advances in scientific and anthropological theory better serve analyses of representations of incest in the Gothic. Opponents of Freud’s incest ideas include psychiatrist Mark T. Erickson, anthropologists Arthur P. Wolf and William Durham and feminist theorist Florence Rush, all of whom argue that rather than desiring those by whom one is surrounded in infancy and adolescence, humans tend sexually to reject those by and with whom they are raised.²⁴ This theory, put forth by sociologist Edward Westermarck and known as the Westermarck effect, can be summarised as ‘an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth’.²⁵ An intriguing aspect of the Westermarck effect is the notion that although brothers and sisters (and indeed, any non-related children) who are raised together will tend to be sexually averse to one another, if there is a separation at birth and siblings are not raised together they are likely to be highly sexually attracted to one another in adulthood.²⁶ Foreshadowing recent anthropological and scientific research, there are many instances in Gothic texts of fathers and daughters and other blood relations who sexually desire or who are highly attracted to one ...