No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

In Horace Walpole's Gothic play The Mysterious Mother (1768), the widowed Countess of Narbonne slips into bed with her son – who thinks he is sleeping with yet another woman. Years later, he ends up marrying Adeliza, the child of his union with his mother. The author thought that this plot was so horrid that he limited the print run to just fifty copies and distributed it only to close friends: “I thought it [the subject matter] would shock, rather than give satisfaction, to an audience” (Walpole 2003: 251). The reader, however, can quickly discern that Walpole does not see incest as merely aesthetically unpleasant; the fact that he shared the play among a close/incestuous circle suggests that incest can also be a stand‐in for other activities – including, in the case of the play's cautious distribution, an inner circle that rejects widely accepted social norms. Indeed, as Karl Zender explains in his essay on Faulkner, incest can be linked not only to an oedipal anxiety – a son's love for his mother – but also to any number of antiauthoritarian acts (2002: 175). As a further example of oedipal anxiety, we may turn to Donatien Alphonse François' (the Marquis de Sade) “Eugénie de Franval: A Tragic Tale” (1800), in which a father raises his daughter as his spiritual and sexual partner but demands that she refer to him as “brother,” and “would not have his daughter call him by any other names” (Sade 2005: 246). Monsieur de Franval's demand suggests that sibling incest is somehow less egregious than parent‐sibling coupling. The opposite is true in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818): Victor's creation of life without sexual union can be read as an attempt to avoid incestuous contact with both his betrothed Elizabeth (his cousin in the 1818 edition; his adopted sister in the 1831 edition) and, symbolically, his mother – Victor's mother dies from the scarlet fever she contracts while nursing Elizabeth through the same; before she dies, she holds both Victor and Elizabeth by the hand and makes them swear they will marry each other: “Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place” (Shelley 1994: 26).