The Nature of Domestic Intimacy and Sibling Incest inDiderot's Fils Naturel

Abstract

The Nature of Domestic Intimacy and Sibling Incest in Diderot’s Fils Naturel Suzanne R. Pucci (bio) Les mouvements de sang sont-ils donc si semblables à ceux de l’amour qu’on puisse s’y méprendre? Marie-Anne Robert, La Voix de la nature, 1770). 1 (The impulses of blood are they so similar to those of love that one could make a mistake about them?) What kind of “mistake” is the one candidly alluded to in the above citation, which confuses “the impulses of blood with those of love”? Such “mistakes” were certainly not an anomaly, not at least in the texts of the French eighteenth century; instead, they constitute rather familiar aspects of the plots, thematics and language of Enlightenment fiction and theater. 2 This is the case in plays, such as in Diderot’s Le Fils naturel or Beaumarchais’ La Mère coupable, not to mention the fiction of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie or, for instance, the novel cited above, Marie-Anne Robert’s La Voix de la nature. Why did such confusions in the eighteenth century seem not to provoke the same kind of repulsion, dread, secrecy, or grave consequences that this taboo generated a century later and that later still, Freud would refer to as “the horror of incest?” 3 [End Page 271] We seem to have lost the thread which would allow us to trace the filiations leading from one representation and from one discourse of incest to another. The trajectory of the incest taboo in its formulations and representations composes a story of its own—one that needs to be understood in relation to the construction of the social and psychic history of Western culture. What, for instance, does the apparently conspicuous flirtation between blood relations and romantic love have to do with the emergence of modern society that in the eighteenth century seems to be conceived in large part around a newly valorized social unit of the bourgeois family? The investment in viewing incest as sacrosanct interdiction that from its place of exclusion institutes social criteria such as the basic principle of exogamy has obscured certain other functions that “incest” performs, in this instance within the thematics, motifs, and language of eighteenth-century texts. Though common wisdom typically situates “incest” from Oedipus on down through the ages in the same excluded, untouchable, place of prohibition, outside the Western polis, this taboo, this crime, in effect serves also in other capacities—capacities which, like the mere “mistake” referred to above, transgress incest’s sacred liminality. Diderot’s Le fils naturel provides a striking example of how literature participates in constructing norms of social reality and how in this instance the text itself fashions new family ties in part through these very “mistakes” of incest. In my view, Diderot’s preoccupation with domestic intimacy informs the entire conceptual and textual bias of the drama; but for these new sentiments to acquire strength and authenticity, the near “mistake” in question becomes in effect a necessary dramatic and textual strategy. For though this play as ideological tool attempts to celebrate kinship in a new sense of the intimate family as a structure already in place, as an established, accomplished reality of which this particular story is just one example of a general proven principle, this drame bourgeois proves to be rather a testing ground, itself the construction site of domestic intimacy. My essay will reconstruct the rather elaborate scaffolding supporting the complex interrelated levels of such new family cohesion and sentiment. Furthermore, it will demonstrate how the criteria of domestic intimacy are so positioned as to appear already there, subtending the cultural edifice that Diderot’s drama is inversely first attempting to erect and to stabilize. Published at mid-century in 1757, Le Fils naturel established the family subject in both title and in the name of this new genre coined by the philosophe as tragédie domestique or alternately, drame or tragédie bourgeois. 4 This play does not focus in the same way on supposedly pathological examples of literary, sociological, or historical family lack and difference that Roddey Reid demonstrates to be so prevalent and crucial to determining the...