Abstract
Three of Austen’s novels end with marriages that have incestuous overtones. In Mansfield Park, Fanny and Edmund are first cousins; moreover, they have been brought up as brother and sister in the same household. In Emma, the heroine marries her brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley, who throughout much of the novel shares a fraternal relationship with her. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor, like Emma, marries her brother-in-law, Edward Ferrars. And in the same novel, Colonel Brandon tells Elinor the story of his desire to marry Eliza Williams, a sister-in-law brought up as his sister.
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Notes
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), pp. 5–6.
Freud, Totem and Taboo, pp. 6–7. See also J. G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910) on the universality of the incest prohibition and the importance that primitive societies, as well as civilized, attached to it, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. edn, trans. James Bell et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)
This book does not incorporate the analyses of anthropologists Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, whose book, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990)
See Jean-Louis Flandrin on consanguinity, matrimonial alliance, and spiritual kinship in Families in Former Times (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 19–23.
Sybil Wolfram, In-Laws and Outlaws: Kinship and Marriage in England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), pp. 16–7
See Trumbach’s discussion of prohibited degrees of marriage in The Rise of the Egalitarian Family, pp. 18–33 and Wolfram’s commentary on incest, pp. 21–51. It is also worth noting here that Jane Austen’s brother Charles remarried Harriet Palmer, the sister of his deceased wife Frances Fitzwilliam Palmer, in 1820. Critics speculate that biographers J. H. and E. B. Hubback may have stinted in their treatment of Charles in Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (London: Bodley Head, 1906)
J. David Grey, ‘Our Little Brother’ in Persuasions, 3 (1981) 9–11.
See Paula Marantz Cohen, ‘Stabilizing the Family System at Mansfield Park’, English Literary History, 54 (Fall 1987) 671.
For a list of eighteenth-century novels dealing with the subject of incest, see J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 66.
Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London: Fortune Press, 1938), pp. 391–2
Interest in incest reached towering heights in the eighteenth century, but it was no means a new subject in literature. The issue of incest and its prohibition is an important subject in three of the seventeenth-century plays of Dryden, Don Sebastian (1689), Oedipus (1679), and Love Triumphant (1694). For more information on the preromantic treatment of incest in literature, especially in Milton, Ford, Dryden, and Otway’s The Orphan (1680), see Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 41–5
See Nancy Fix Anderson, ‘Cousin Marriage in Victorian England’, Journal of Family History, 11 (1986) 286–7.
This was particularly so in the case of the Romantic poets and their sisters, for example, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. See James B. Twitchell, Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 98.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), Vol. 2, p. 154.
Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Mrs. Sidney Bidulph (New York: Pandora Press, 1987), p. 114.
Margaret Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 161.
Frances Burney, Evelina (London: J.M. Dent, 1967), p. 337.
Frances Burney, The Wanderer (London: Pandora, 1988), p. 107.
On this subject, see for example, Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)
Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
In his deconstructionist reading of Mansfield Park, David Musselwhite argues that the hard-headed Austen was obsessed with making money from her fiction, and that this novel was written to appeal to a much broader audience, that of the ‘urban and industrious’ middle class, by using the sensationalist formula of Lovers’ Vows. See David Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 16–42.
See Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 115.
See William Patrick Day’s commentary on siblings in American gothic novels in In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 125–9.
N. I. White, Shelley, II (1940; New York: Octagon, 1972), pp. 422–3.
Susan Morgan, Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteeth-Century British Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 39.
See Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 33.
Orthodox Church, see The Pedalion of St. Nicodemus (Athens, Greece: Astir, 1957), p. 741.
Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved, New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 160.
See, for example, Robert Gittings, The Young Thomas Hardy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), pp. 111–25
John Fowles, ‘Hardy and the Hag’ in Lance St. John Butler (ed.) Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 34
See J. Hillis Miller on Hardy’s debt to Shelley in his essay on The Well-Beloved in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 147–8.
On Darwin’s influence on Hardy, see George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 22
Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 1–40.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978), p. 137.
Richard Steele in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 496 (1712), Vol. IV, p. 260
Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, Vol. 2 (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1968), p. 172.
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© 1992 Glenda A. Hudson
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Hudson, G.A. (1992). Antecedents and Successors. In: Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21866-0_2
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