Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy

SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy. (2011) Directed by Dr. Denise N. Baker. 176pp. British literature is rich in stories crafted around the problem of incest. Incest has long been seen as a universal, or near-universal, taboo, yet dynasties have been founded upon it—and have fallen because of it. This dissertation explores usage of the incest theme in the medieval and early modern literary periods, and into the mid-eighteenth century, a time which saw the emergence of a new form of literature named by one of its creators as Gothic. While incest remains firmly taboo across this long period of time, writers and storytellers appropriate it to reflect some of the anxieties attendant upon their times. To understand the usefulness of incest in mirroring societal disarray across centuries, it is necessary to first understand the historical background of consanguineous relationships, a history which is full of ambiguities and contradictions. Thus incest seems a natural choice for John Gower, who relies on incest in his Confessio Amantis, and in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, where it is used to allegorize the misdeeds of tyrannical kings who fail to rule wisely, and lead themselves and their people to misery. Given the popularity of drama in the early modern period, it is through this genre that the usage of incest best reveals the anxieties of this age, anxieties which include not only tyrannical kings but also the risks of increasing female autonomy. Incest in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King, and No King and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi works to showcase the dangers of uncertainty when it comes to matters of inheritance, especially when the inheritance involves the throne. Added to this is the fear that rising female agency might eventually succeed in completely undermining the patriarchal and monarchical social structures that were still believed by many to be divinely ordained. By the mid-eighteenth century, changes in economic and political systems appeared to threaten the institution of the family, and incest proved to be a useful metaphor for expressing these anxieties. I conclude that reading incest across four centuries of literary works reveals that while societal threats change over time, a common desire to preserve, uphold, and defend patriarchy remains. READING INCEST: TYRANNY, SUBVERSION, AND THE PRESERVATION OF PATRIARCHY by Karen Crady Summers A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2011 Approved by _______________________ Committee Chair to my family ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at the University at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair __________________________________ Denise N. Baker Committee Member _________________________________ Michelle Dowd Committee Member _________________________________ Jennifer Keith ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members—Dr. Denise N. Baker, Dr. Michelle M. Dowd and Dr. Jennifer Keith—for their patience, their insight, and their support throughout this process. They have shown me what it really means to profess literature: diligence and professionalism, hard work and collegiality, and the joy of discovery. I will forever be inspired. Thanks especially to Dr. Baker for holding up the lantern at the end of the tunnel and illuminating the path at times when I needed it most. I am very grateful. Thank you to Kim Reigle, Temeka Carter, and Tamara Benson, my classmates and friends, for their inspiration and belief in me; parts of this work were formulated during our lunch meetings. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. READING INCEST: BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION……………...…..…...….…...…1 II. ‘SWICHE UNKYNDE ABHOMINACIOUNS’: MEDIEVAL INCEST………………………………….……………...…....14 III. ‘INCEST IS IN ME’: INCEST AND EARLY MODERN DRAMA …………………………….82 IV. ‘THEIR DARKEST AND MOST THREATENING FORM’: INCEST AND THE GOTHIC……………….………....…...……..…….. 119 V. CONCLUSION.……………..…………………….…………………..........148 BIBLIOGRAPHY...………………………………………………….…………………153 v 1 CHAPTER I READING INCEST: BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION Literary representations of incest reveal an astonishing variety of plotlines, characters, and morals. From comic to terrifying, the incest topos appears at the very instant of human (Western) consciousness, vanishing and reemerging as it travels across centuries, carrying with it the anxieties and complexities of the times. As Elizabeth Archibald writes, “Every society has taboos about incest, but they differ considerably, and so do literary representations of incest” (1). Because literature is not written in a vacuum, but is rather a product of its time, it is evident that usage of the incest theme shaped, and was shaped by, contemporaneous culture. Incest is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary simply as “unchaste”; however, volumes of clarifications, explanations, justifications, and especially legislations evolved over time in an attempt to proscribe precisely just what it did mean. Such efforts to make the definition absolute, however, only led to gaps through which incestuous behavior did enter societies. Sensing this weakness, kings, clerics, and simple folk skirted the laws, whether for power plays or true love, and communities found themselves in uneasy negotiations with sin and salvation, for such was the double message of incest narratives. Because of the great attention given to defining, codifying, and prohibiting incest, it is clear that there was tremendous anxiety over it, rather than unquestioning acceptance 2 of it, despite its familiarity to virtually all western societies. Incest narratives both uphold and subvert; they instruct and deconstruct, entertain and warn. There has been much invaluable critical work done on incest in general and incest in narratives of specific literary periods, from ancient to modern. Otto Rank’s 1912 The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend: Fundamentals of a Psychology of Literary Creation is encyclopedic in its survey of the different formulations that incestuous relationships can take, specifically father-daughter, mother-son, and sibling incest, in addition to relationships between step-relatives and affines. Elizabeth Archibald is perhaps the name best known for her several works on medieval incest. Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval & Renaissance Themes & Variations examines the transmission and reception of the Historia Apollonii, one of the most widely read tales of ancient Greece, medieval England, and early modern Europe. Her Incest and the Medieval Imagination notes and examines the prevalence and popularity of the incest motif in medieval tales. Karen Cherewatuk, in Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur posits that adultery and incest on the part of the Pendrake men are symbolic of Arthur’s failings and the consequent fall of his kingdom. For the early modern era, Richard McCabe’s Incest, Drama, and Nature’s Law 1550-1700 surveys incest as a metaphor for the ambiguity and confusion that accompanies attempts at absolutely fixed meanings of authority, politics, and natural law. Maureen Quilligan’s work, Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England, is a study of how women, a minority in the ranks of early modern authors, used incest in their works as a form of empowerment. The theories of George Haggerty in his 1989 Gothic Fiction, Gothic Form and 2006 Queer Gothic focus the 3 scholarly view on the ways that the Gothic uses sexual matters to both uphold and subvert patriarchy. In her study of Gothic elements, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick concludes that the Gothic novel (almost) always includes the possibility of incest, a subject taken up by Ruth Perry in her essay “Incest as Meaning in the Gothic Novel” (1998) in which she argues that as the family unit became more “nuclear” in form sexual danger increased, with incest disruptive of family building and by extension, of societal growth. These scholarly works do much to elucidate theories on the enduring popularity of incest in literary works of different eras. But I argue that reading incest is best done through a comprehenisve approach; that is, by acknowledging the impact that the accumulation of earlier readings has on later ones. Reading incest in texts of any one era, along with their specific social and cultural contexts, impacts subsequent readings in part because of the malleability of the definition of the term. In comparing the six selected texts, it will quickly become apparent that incest is a useful literary tool for writers and dramatists to exploit the many different social tensions, problems, and anxieties of their ages. I trace these anxieties and their literary manifestations through the medieval and early modern eras, culminating with Gothic literature, with its conventions of reviving medieval institutions and appropriating medieval symbols and themes. The anxieties and contradictions of any one era often remain unresolved and are compounded as newly arising tensions emerge. Before turning to the texts themselves, it is necessary to trace the development of the problem of incest. Incest tales, in some form, exist

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