“Silenced But for the Word”: The Discourse of Incest in Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon

Abstract

“SILENCED BUT FOR THE WORD” : THE DISCOURSE OF INCEST IN GREENE’S PANDOSTO AND MENAPHON BRENDA CANTAR University of Waterloo T o w a r d the end of his life, Robert Greene renounced his “love pam­ phlets” as “so many parricides ... for now they kill their father, and everie lewd line in them written, is a deep piercing wound to my heart” (12: 139),1 an extraordinary confession that vividly exemplifies the anxieties of au­ thorship among the group of writers Helgerson has called the Elizabethan prodigals. But, while these exaggerations may be viewed as nothing more than a histrionic gesture of remorse for former transgressions, imagined or real, and generally characteristic of his “repentance” pamphlets, the correla­ tion Greene makes in this passage between love, sexuality, and parricide has a striking resonance. It is a conjunction of terms powerfully dramatized in two of his most successful “love pamphlets,” Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589), tales in which the emotions of amazement and wonder evoked by the happy endings are momentarily jarred by scenes in which tyrannical fathers manifest what Crupi euphemistically terms the “darker human impulses” (59): that is, incestuous desire for their daughters, a transgression for which they are killed, either literally or metaphorically, and their daughters si­ lenced— except for the words that reverberate beyond the text. As Boose and Flowers, the editors of Daughters and Fathers, remark, the cultural territory of father-daughter relationships is a “discourse that stands relatively unmapped,” and one that is “written all over by tacit injunc­ tions that have forbidden its charting” (1). Similarly, Benjamin notes that, compared to discussions of boys and their fathers, the “psychoanalytic dis­ cussion of the father-daughter relationship has been notably thin” (107).2 Indeed, the critical discussion of incest motifs in the genre of romance, a genre that Northrop Frye asserts is the “structural core of all fiction” (15), is equally thin — even though the incest motif is identified as the genre’s “one recurring theme” (44). In Frye’s view, the recurrence of the incest motif in romance shows merely “that some conventions of story-telling are more obsessive than others” and “tells us nothing of the relation of fiction to reality” (44). Perhaps. But romances are not just entertaining fantasies; like the fairy tales they resemble, romances have endured across time as English Studies in Canada, 23, 1, March 1997 popular reading for a predominantly female audience, and, according to Rowe, are powerful transmitters of myths that “encourage women to inter­ nalize only aspirations deemed appropriate to [their] real sexual functions within patriarchal society” (239). Unlike “high” culture, which has always communicated its ambiguous messages to a privileged audience, a popular cultural genre such as prose romance, in all its formulaic simplicity, “depends on audience unawareness that judgements are being made, shared, and en­ forced” (Twitchell 128). As Hamilton notes, at the “end of any romance, there is no desire to reflect on what one has read but instead a desire to read another romance” (298), testimony of the genre’s efficacy in silencing or lulling its readers (and critics?) into a passive pliance with its all-toofamiliar codes. So commonplace are its formulas and conventions, romances have virtually attained the status of social and cultural myths, which often aim at what Frye identifies as the “consent of silence” (16), an observation that has an acutely ironic significance for the women readers of romance in the sixteenth century, who evidently defied the stern warnings against reading romances lest their senses be inflamed.3 Along with obedience and chastity, silence was, of course, the most impor­ tant virtue of an Elizabethan woman, a virtue prescribed and reinforced in all aspects of early modern culture: simply put, a woman’s “loose” tongue implied sexual looseness, hence the need for vigilant paternal control. In Pandosto and Menaphon, this vigilance is sensationally underscored by the motif of incest. If a “work of fiction is not just a distorted reflection of reality, but a structure that permits reflection upon it” (Stevens 5), Greene’s twicetold tale offers us multiple reflections of the kind of historical and cultural “reality” of a period in which the transition from the...