Incest in contemporary literature

Miles Leeson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526148100
  9781526122162
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526122186
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first edited collection of essays which focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day. It considers a number of key authors and artists, rather than a single author from this period. The collection exposes the wide use of incest and sexual trauma, and the frequency this appears within contemporary literature and related arts. Incest in contemporary literature discusses the impact of this change in attitudes on literature and literary adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth century, and early years of the twenty-first century. Although primarily concerned with fiction, the collection includes work on television and film. Authors discussed include Iain Banks, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Newman and Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath.

Part I

Behind closed doors

1

Text, image, audience: Adaptation and reception of Andrea Newman’s A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969)

Frances Pheasant-Kelly

Although Andrea Newman’s novel, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969),¹ received largely positive reviews on its initial publication, it garnered immediate notoriety on its dramatisation as a television series in 1976. This first adaptation was, nevertheless, highly successful, attracting 26 million viewers, while a more recent television version in 2010 achieved 13 million viewers over its three episodes.² The furore surrounding London Weekend Television’s (LWT) 1976 production centred on Peter Manson’s (played by Frank Finlay) apparently incestuous desire for his nineteen-year-old daughter, Prue (played by Susan Penhaligon), with whom he seems obsessed. Aside from Manson’s displays of jealousy towards Prue’s husband, the drama’s portrayal of sadomasochism and infidelity both attracted and scandalised audiences and reviewers alike – for instance, Penny Perrick of the Sun commented ‘Let’s hope that plastic people with horrible habits like the Mansons are banished from the screen forever’,³ whereas Times reviewer, Michael Church, assigned the series ‘a curious magic’.⁴ Also telling of the drama’s 1970s’ contexts was Times reviewer, Michael Ratcliffe’s comment that, ‘bright spots included … two sharp blows across the face for Prue, from the sorely provoked Gavin’.⁵ Whereas the first adaptation followed the novel closely, the second differed both narratively and visually, with its less oppressive aesthetics seeming to reflect changed attitudes towards incest since the 1970s. In respect of the latter, Joan Lynch observes how, ‘[t]‌he shroud of secrecy, silence, and lies woven by patriarchy was ripped in the late 1970s by feminists, many of whom were psychologists, who revealed their and others’ pain as survivors of incest’.⁶ In a related vein, Euan Ferguson of the Observer suggests that the unmentionable nature of incest was one of the reasons that made the 1976 version so popular, leading him to ask, ‘why remake this? I know incest, even the thought of it, is still taboo, but in the mid-70s it was seriously taboo and thus entrancing viewing’.⁷

The novel’s narrative, however, does not entail actual incest, but rather problematises a father–daughter relationship without directly depicting the taboo, since Prue actively invites the attention of her father, and takes delight in provoking him emotionally. In many ways, the novel and its adaptations explore the boundary between paternal affection and incestuous desire. Indeed, in interview, both the novel’s author, Andrea Newman,⁸ and director of the second adaptation, Ashley Pearce,⁹ contend that Peter Manson would have been shocked by any suggestion of incest. Nonetheless, the implication of mutual attraction between father and daughter is an undeniable central feature. More contentiously, the mode of its signification in both novel and first adaptation (through fantasised scenarios and imaginary dialogues), together with Prue’s provocative behaviour, recalls Freud’s notion of childhood phantasy and its inference of child desire.

The latter superseded his earlier Seduction Theory, in which he attributed symptoms of hysteria in adult women to previous abuse, and instead suggested that children had imagined or fantasised such mistreatment. As Judith Herman reports, a number of surveys from the 1950s to the present day, including the 1953 Kinsey report, which was based on 4,000 interviews,¹⁰ discredit this suggestion and indicate that incest is, and has long been, a real and widespread phenomenon. Yet, the information from these reports was not prioritised at the time because, according to Herman, ‘The public, in the judgement of these men, was not ready to hear about incest.¹¹ In the 1970s, however, feminist social science scholars and psychologists again uncovered evidence of extensive child abuse, their work illustrating the contentious historical tensions of the incest debate. For, at one end of its spectrum lie the patriarchal sensibilities promoted by Freud and, at the other, these feminist responses, which disclosed the on-going suppression of child abuse reports. The recent media attention given to paedophilia concerning a number of such cases that occurred during the 1970s – notably regarding Jimmy Savile – typifies the suppression of child abuse, with a significant lapse in time occurring between suspicions of crime, and subsequent police investigation.¹²

The way in which the father–daughter relationship in Bouquet of Barbed Wire is represented, principally through claustrophobic settings, close framing, and editing, also lends itself to analysis using Raymond Williams’s concept of a ‘structure of feeling’¹³. Williams suggests that the dominant ideas at any given time manifest pervasively across visual culture though may only be recognised retrospectively. He explains this phenomenon as ‘the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period’.¹⁴ Even though it is not possible to directly correlate a single drama’s aesthetics with either generalised attitudes towards incest, or broader cultural emotions at any given time, there is nonetheless a line of travel between the oppressive scenarios of the novel and 1976 versions of Bouquet of Barbed Wire and the censorship of similar concurrent contentious (but more explicit) material (Brimstone and Treacle¹⁵ and Scum¹⁶ for instance) in a reflection of society’s ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time’.¹⁷ The unstable political landscape during the 1970s is telling in this respect – as Lez Cooke observes, ‘The cultural shift from the 1960s to the 1970s, from liberalism to conservatism and from consent to coercion, was reflected in the television drama produced during the decade’.¹⁸ While Cooke goes on to explain how television programmes such as the period drama enabled viewers a means to ‘escape’¹⁹ such political tensions, one might also correlate such conservatism with the visual strategies evident at the time. Indeed, Williams himself specifies a correspondence between the enclosed aesthetics of the post-war televised play with both the technological limitations of the period and the contemporaneous ‘structure of feeling’²⁰ and suggests Bergman’s The Lie²¹ as a late example of this.

Accordingly, this essay argues that the varying representations of father–daughter desire in the novel and its dramatisations correspond with their respective zeitgeists, these reflecting differences in attitudes towards incest. In sum, the 1976 version conveys the child figure as seductive and manipulative in line with Freudian concepts of phantasy, as if cohering with concurrent patriarchal perceptions of incest. Here, incest remains implicit, its suppression being signalled through technical aspects such as framing, cinematography and mise-en-scène, and conveying a ‘feeling’ of repression in relation to father–daughter desire. In contrast, the open aesthetics of the second drama correlate with the changed socio-cultural climate, which is reflected across visual culture and broader regimes more generally and ranges from tendencies towards exposing physical and psychological interiority in art to the dismantling of entrenched institutional practices. This is in line with claims by Anna Meigs and Kathleen Barlow who note the emergence

in the 1970s and [which] continues to this day an important American literature on the surprising frequency and traumatic consequences of “incestuous abuse” … Overall, this new literature signals a paradigm shift in American public consciousness: It is less acceptable to view incest as an infrequent and obscure act more or less effectively controlled by its taboo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Behind closed doors
• Part II Incest and the child protagonist
• Part III Incest as a political conceit
• Part IV The rhetoric of narrating incest
• Index