Incestuous Desire Research Articles

Selected Works of Eliza Haywood I: Vol. 1: Miscellaneous Writings, 1725–43, ed. by Alexander Pettit, and: Selected Works of Eliza Haywood II: Vol. 1: The Historiographer (A Companion to the Theatre, Volume 1) and The Parrot ed. by Christine Blouch, Alexander Pettit, and Rebecca Sayers Hanson

115 text’s excluded mother figures.’’ Sophia, in other words, may be a wise date, but she is also ‘‘an object of incestuous desire.’’ Far from feeling self-contradictory, these moments confirm what Ms. Pollak wants to tell us about incest being more a discursive event than a stable or reified plot point. Chapter Six includes a brief discussion of Tristram Shandy, David Simple and Evelina , as well as commentary on a 1751 pamphlet that rewrites one of Marguerite de Navarre’s sixteenth-century Heptameron tales. In this story a young man inadvertently sleeps first with his mother, then later with the daughter who is the product of their union. When he eventually learns the story from a letter left him by his deceasedmother he swallows the letter and kills himself. Ms. Pollak suggests that this ‘‘cannibalization’’ of the mother (the letter’s ‘‘incorporation into the order of cultural intelligibility’’) will nonetheless not succeed in silencing her, since we are what we eat. Or to put it another way (the author quotes Kaja Silverman quoting Lacan discussing Heidegger): eating ‘‘the book’’ means the ‘‘ecstatic rediscovery, at the site of the other, of one’s utmost ‘ownness.’’’ The book’s final and eminently digestible chapter is devoted to a tasty reading of Mansfield Park. Included are a Bibliography and a full Index. William Donaghue Emerson College Selected Works of Eliza Haywood I: Vol. 1: Miscellaneous Writings, 1725–43, ed. AlexanderPettit.BiographicalIntro.byChristineBlouch.Vol.2:EpistlesfortheLadies, ed. Alexander Pettit and Christine Blouch, introd. and annotated by Christine Blouch. Vol 3: The Wife, The Husband, and The Young Lady, ed. Alexander Pettit and Margo Collins. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000. Pp. lxxxii ⫹ 288, xi ⫹ 480, xi ⫹ 339. $395. Selected Works of Eliza Haywood II: Vol. 1: The Historiographer (A Companion to the Theatre, Volume 1) and The Parrot, ed. Christine Blouch, Alexander Pettit, and Rebecca Sayers Hanson. Vols. 2 and 3: The Female Spectator, Volumes 1 and 2 and The Female Spectator, Volumes 3 and 4, ed. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001. Pp. xviii ⫹ 366, xiv ⫹ 471, vi ⫹ 489. $395. This splendid edition is cause for celebration. To thehandfulof editedtexts(primarily fiction) now available, Pickering and Chatto have added ‘‘the first multi-volume edition ’’of Haywood’s works to appear in print since 1742; that is, the first since the fourvolume Secret Histories, Novels and Poems last appeared. The textual editor, Mr. Pettit, argues that editors have ‘‘[i]nadvertently . . . visited upon Haywood the fate that still distorts perceptions of her contemporaries, Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding: she has become a novelist rather than a writer.’’ This edition consequently avoids its predecessor ’s secret histories, novels, and poems for a judicious sampling that ‘‘attempts to restore something of the shape’’ of her career. Two miscellaneous collections, the two parts of The Tea-Table (1725) and Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), date from Haywood’s prolific first decade as an amatory novelist. For good measure, 116 the Tea-Table volume also includes Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730) and A Present for a Servant-Maid (1743), Haywood’s enormously popular manualofdomesticadvice. The Dramatic Historiographer (1735, later the first volume of A Companion to the Theatre), which discusses forty-five plays, most of them acted recently, dates from the period of Haywood’s most intense involvement in the theater; the editors also include the author’s Preface to the 1747 two-volume collection and The Parrot (1746), Haywood ’s most topical and overtly political periodical. A matched pair of conduct manuals , The Wife (‘‘By Mira, One of the Authors of the Female Spectator, and Epistles for [the] Ladies,’’ 1755 but dated 1756) and The Husband (‘‘In Answer to The Wife,’’ 1756), come from the very end of her career; the editors combine them in a volume with The Young Lady (1756), the weekly that Haywood abandoned because of illness shortly before she died. The three longest volumes contain the substantial and (judging from later editions and translations) highly successful works with which Mira, and hence Haywood, identifies herself: Epistles for the Ladies (1749–1750) and, long the greatest need in Haywood studies, the Female Spectator (1744–1746...

Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen (review)

132 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:1 to be definite and limited, but evidence from the South Seas brought back by Philibert Commerson and later by Darwin bore out the intuitions of Monboddo, who had foretold that the metamorphosis of species would be confirmed by austral discoveries. In a book with that very title, Restii de la Bretonne celebrated the community of humans and orangutans. It seems to be a fundamental point ofdifference between the giants ofthe Enlightenmentwhether humans and the human character could be changed by circumstances of climate, geography, transplantion, or solitude, and whether speciation was a perpetual process or the basic outlines of humans and all odier species were settled and immutable. Montesquieu, Monboddo, Raynal, and Diderot stand on one side; Hume, ThomasJefferson, de Sade, and Linnaeus on the other. Douthwaite is to be praised for setting this difference in such a broad spectrum ofcontexts, so well detailed and so full ofhints for further reading. The narrative she offers, however, is necessarily circular, from Gulliver's Yahoos to Frankenstein's monster. Once it became possible for enlightened human beings to consider their capacity for change, and the degree that change might be controlled by themselves, the myth of original innocence seems to mock, and be mocked by, the dream ofperfectible humanity. It is perhaps not surprising that the century should witness the rise of theriophily, now known as animal rights, a movement in favour of sympathy with animals that seems coincident with the most profound doubts about die humanity of humans. Jonathan Lamb Vanderbilt University Susan C. Greenfield. Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney toJane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. 227pp. US$34.95. ISBN 0-8143-2992-6. The essays that made up Susan Greenfield's (co-edited) InventingMaternity (1999) demonstrated die malleability of the sentimental, devoted maternal figure. Besides convincing us that one of our richest cultural symbols, the maternal body, is perpetually reinvented, this analysis influentially maintained that motherhood remains a contested site of political discourse. Addressing the representation of the mother-daughter bond in early novels, the volume under discussion here is a natural extension of this argument. Again Greenfield proceeds from the assumption—which has become codified, partially owing to her own earlier work—that the maternal body is culturally constructed for political purposes. Mothering Daughters REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS133 furthers her argument against a static, conservative model ofmaternity. This study is concerned with the flexible and ambiguous representation of maternity, with the emergence ofearly modern constructions ofmotherhood and the gendered body, and with the way in which the mother-daughter plot in women's novels affected modern motherhood. To this end, Greenfield considers the ideological implications ofwomen's representations ofmotherdaughter relationships in terms of a variety of issues such as gender, class, sexuality, pregnancy, homoerotic and incestuous desire, maternal breastfeeding , and legal, racial, and colonial discourse. Greenfield connects the development of the novel with die development of the nuclear family, focusing on the idealization of modierhood. She provides a historical, political and cultural context for the mother-daughter bond in the fiction oflate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women. From a feminist psychoanalytic approach that is heavily influenced by Freud, Kristeva, and Lacan, Greenfield analyses Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), Maria Edgewordi's Belinda (1801), AmeliaAlderson Opie's AdelineMowbray, or TheMotherandDaughter (1804), andJane Austen's Emma (1816). In these works, which feature missing mothers and suffering daughters, maternal absence emphasizes the importance ofmotherhood and the mother-daughter bond: "In novel after novel, the mother's absence highlights her indispensability, the daughter's pain bears witness to her love" (13) . Besides documenting the contribution of the mother-daughter plot to the development ofthe novel and to the construction ofmodern maternal ideals, Greenfield makes claims for its contribution to psychoanalytic theory. Although Marianne Hirsch earlier took on psychoanalytic theory directly in The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989), she deals with Austen and later novelists, while Toni Bowers's novelists in ThePolitics ofMotherhood (1996) predate Greenfield's, as do those of Felicity Nussbaum, whose Torrid Zones (1995) also emphasizes other cultural texts. Greenfield both incorporates...

Egos and Ogres: Aspects of Psychosexual Development and Cannibalistic Demons in Central Australia

ABSTRACTThe paper explores from a psychoanalytic point of view some of the many ethnographic references to cannibalistic figures in Aboriginal societies of the Central and Western parts of Australia. The purpose is to show how dynamics of splitting originating in early infancy (love‐aggression, incorporation‐expulsion, inside‐outside, self‐other) continue to exist in culture‐specific expressions of cannibalistic fantasies and incestuous desires.

Love, Sodomy, and Scandal: Controlling the Sexual Reputation of Henry III

In 1589 III, king of France, was addressed by an outraged subject as Henry of Valois, buggerer, son ofa whore, tyrant.1 The audacity of calling a king by his family name and then attacking him in sexu? ally pejorative terms indicates not just the intensity ofthe anger directed at but the inclusion in popular fiiry of markers of sexual deviance. Indeed, the legacy of III, who reigned from 1574 to 1589, has been fraught with sexual innuendo. Assumptions of deviance, formulated in his lifetime, have been used ever since to explain the problems of his reign, which ended with his assassination in the midst of a bloody civil war. Among the recent iterations of that negative image is Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film Elizabeth^ which represents Henry, then duke of Anjou, as a silly, cross-dressing fop, more interested in the men ofhis entourage than in courting the queen of England. In this instance, as in others, the film is inaccurate: it conflates Henry, who never visited England, with his younger brother, Francis, duke of Alencon, who did court Elizabeth in person but was not renowned for flamboyant behavior. Kapur's film presents sexual deviance not merely as fact but as explanatory fact: he was a bad king because he was deviant. sexuality is depicted similarly in Patrice Chereau's 1994 film La Reine Margot, based upon Alexandre Dumas pere's 1845 novel ofthe same name. The film presents as having both an incestuous desire for his sister, Marguerite, and a preference for male com? pany. French history textbooks also include III's alleged sexual misdeeds in discussions ofhis reign. James B. Collins describes him as cross-dressing and asserts that Henry's contemporaries believed him to

Femme/Butch Family Romances

SUMMARY My essay theorizes femme/butch family romances against the grain of dominant feminist and lesbian thought that desexualizes the space of mother/daughter desire. I do so through a reading/recoding of the infringing incestuous mommie-boy desires that surface in an archetypal lesbian novel, Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart.

Rethinking Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind

Incest?or rather, the avoidance of incest?has struck a number of influential thinkers as providing the key to understanding human culture. Frazer made the universality of the incest prohibition central to his demonstration of deep similarities among so-called primitive and modern cultures alike in his 1910 study, Totemism and Exogamy. Freud went further and made the repression sublimation of incestuous desires crucial both for the development of individual psychic life and for the rise of human society in works like Totem and Taboo. Levi-Strauss, in Elementary Structures of Kinship, made the incest prohibition the step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture is accom plished/'1 Over the past decade, the ubiquity of incest avoidance has proved no less significant for those seeking to establish the biological foundations of culture, to call the distinction between nature and culture radically into question. In Human Universals, Donald E. Brown presents the Darwinian approach to the universality, or near-universal ity, of the incest taboo as an exemplary case of how biological anthropology should best be theorized and empirically tested.2 Steven Pinker, distilling the new field of evolutionary psychology for popular consumption in How the Mind Works, includes an anti-Freudian account of incest avoidance that covers much of the same ground as Brown.3 Illustrating his theory of gene-culture co-evolution, E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, presents still another, updated version of the evolutionary theory of incest avoidance in his recent book Consilience.4 Creative artists too have long recognized the universality of the incest prohibition and its role in defining the difference?or congruence? between humans and other animals. The incestuous brother in Beau mont and Fletcher's A King and No King (1611) claims that to cure his lovesickness, one must first Orethrow Divinity, all morall Lawes, / And leave mankinde as unconfinde as beasts.5 Literary violations of the incest taboo?at least outside of pornography?are anything but casual: they broach the fundamental laws of human society and raise the

The Cadaverous Bodies Of Vampiric Mothers And The Genealogy Of Pathology In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tales

In Hoffmann’s works vampiric mothers with cadaverous bodies traumatise their progeny. The mother’s body and her melancholy demeanour propel her children into states of despondency and other psychopathologies. The structure of doubled depression to which Hoffmann returns throughout his stories crushes the mother’s male offpring within the contradictory injunction simultaneously to express the most intense, exclusive, incestuous desire for his mother and to participate in a mother‐son dyad which effaces all desire. The mother’s status as a melancholic and her forbidding, pregnant, and corpse‐like body are shown to be linked in several of Hoffmann’s narratives to both a physiology of reproduction and a psychosomatic generation of pathologies. The babies born to cadaverous mothers are psychic monsters. Vampirism, cannibalism, murder, and incest are but some of the perversions and criminal tendencies passed from mothers to children in a relentless genealogy of maternal monstrosity.

"Reading Encrypted But Persistent": The Gothic of Reading and Poe's "The Fall Of The House Of Usher"

"READING ENCRYPTED BUT PERSISTENT": THE GOTHIC OF READING AND POE'S "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER" Harriet Hustis The College of New Jersey Trickery, hoaxes, hieroglyphs, and ciphers: few writers have foregrounded such mechanisms ofduplicity in their fiction as did Edgar Allan Poe. This is perhaps why the status of Poe's texts within the American literary canon has been so fiercely contested and debated. As many critics have noted, it is precisely the prevalence of such motifs of ambiguity and linguistic, hermeneutic, and ontological uncertainty that have led to the resurrection and revaluation of texts such as "The Purloined Letter" and "The Raven." And yet Poe's status was never in question within the framework of the French tradition, for example; Poe was always more famous and his works better appreciated in Europe than in the United States. Debates about the place of Poe's texts within the canon are always "American" debates, since elsewhere the point is strangely moot. Interestingly, whereas French theorists such as Lacan and Derrida readily take to Poe's texts, American critics often assume a more cautionary stance and warily reflect on the fact that Poe's writings have a tendency to take their readers in. Shoshana Felman highlights this "insidious " influence with respect to Poe's poetry: The case ofPoe in literary history could in fact be accounted for as one of the most extreme and complex cases of "the anxiety of influence," of the anxiety unwittingly provoked by the "influence" irresistibly emanating from this poetry. What is unique, however, about Poe's influence, as about the "magic" of his verse, is the extent to which its action is unaccountably insidious, exceeding the control, the will, and the awareness of those who are subjected to it.1 Felman' s statement echoes early criticism of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," which often focuses on the reliability of the narrator —in particular, whether he contracts Roderick Usher's hysterical phobophobia and whether he, like the critic, perceives Usher's submerged incestuous desire for Madeline. Felman's description of the 4 Harriet Hustis "action" of Poe' s text is curiously similar to the "action" that occurs within Poe's text: the influence to which the narrator and Roderick Usher are subjected is also "unaccountably insidious, exceeding [their] control, [their] will, and [their] influence." More recent criticism has moved away from an exclusive focus on close readings of Poe's life and work in order to explore Poe's discursive position within American culture ofhis time. Nevertheless, analyses that explore Poe's situation with respect to emerging "lowbrow" culture (such as Jonathan Elmer's Reading at the Social Limit) and/or the "seriousness" of his literary endeavors (i.e., his desire to earn a place as a creator of "highbrow" literature despite his use of "lowbrow" literary strategies and motifs) demonstrate a similar preoccupation with whether or not the reader should be taken in by Poe' s stories—the shift has merely been to questions of how, exactly. In the introduction to their collection The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman thus identify a need "to recognize that Poe's most extravagant literary maneuvers were usually based in the specific cultural and political climate of antebellum America."2 This desire to reconnect Poe with the American literary tradition (or simply to reassert the existence of that connection, since according to Rosenheim and Rachman, it was always there but disavowed by both parties3) exists alongside recognition that for so long Poe's texts were read as highlighting the insufficiencies ofany attempt to fix a subject's location in time or space.4 Previously, Poe was seen as decidedly "unAmerican " because his stories did not seem to reflect "Americanness" à la Hawthorne or Melville; now he is regarded as decidedly American precisely because he presumably chose not to reflect the "American " literary flavor of a Melville or a Hawthorne. The very qualities that previously disqualified Poe from a place within the American literary canon now assure him of that place, and previously anxious detraction has become determined reclamation. And yet the parameters ofthis new trend toward (albeit lukewarm) critical...

Faulkner: the return of the repressed

Doreen Fowler. Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xxi + 215 pp. $36.00 cloth; $14.50 paper. Doreen Fowler's Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed belongs to a tradition of Faulkner scholarship that includes John Irwin's classic study Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge, Eric Sundquist's Faulkner: The House Divided, and Andre Bleikasten's The Ink of Melancholy. Fowler, drawing from the theories of Jacques Lacan, provides feminist psychoanalytic readings of Faulkner's five canonical novels: The Sound and the Fury, As Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. These readings share a central premise: that Faulkner's novels are sites of a conflict between oedipal accommodations to the symbolic and narcissistic desires for a return to the other of the imaginary plane (xv). Fowler is interested in revealing the repressed tensions between the imaginary (the pre-oedipal realm of identification with the maternal body) and the symbolic (the post-oedipal realm of language and paternal alienation) in Faulkner's characters. Yet Fowler's primary concern is with the texts, not the theories. She states, I use Lacan only as a tool to help me uncover disguised or residual meanings in Faulkner's texts (xix). She locates these meanings in the black and female characters of the novels, who are marginalized doubles for the white male protagonists of Faulkner's fictions. This approach yields valuable insights for Faulkner scholars. Fowler's introduction provides clear definitions of basic Lacanian concepts and applies them to Faulkner's psychobiography. Her definitions are clear and precise, the applications brief and concise. She argues that Lacan's theory of the split subject can be used to read Faulkner's biography as emblematic of the conflict between the Desire of the Mother and the Law of the Father. She locates this conflict in Faulkner's ambivalence toward his mother, then traces the resultant tensions through the other relationships in his life. Fowler reads Faulkner's early failures as paternal resistance, and then argues that Faulkner's relationship with Sherwood Anderson reenacted that resistance. She also interprets Faulkner's binge drinking as embodying the tension between a desire for death and a desire to deny death. Though such readings are often problematic, Fowler is able to assert her claims without becoming deterministic or stretching credulity. Having demonstrated her thesis in Faulkner's life, Fowler turns her attention to his major novels. Fowler starts with The Sound and the Fury, reading Faulkner's first major novel (and his self-avowed favorite) as a story about male inadequacy. Benjy, Jason, and Quentin are characters psychologically or, in Benjy's case, physically castrated. For Fowler, Benjy is an example of a pre-oedipal person, a helpless, inchoate, inarticulate bundle of sensations (34) who desires to transgress the imposed boundaries of repression and merge with Caddy. Yet this desire, Fowler notes, violates what Lacan terms the Law of the Father. Thus, Benjy suffers the father's punishment-castration (35). Jason and Quentin, on the other hand, seek to maintain divisions that, by exclusion, establish difference and define the self (35). Fowler argues that Jason is overtly anxious about his masculinity, a tension he imposes on Caddy. Unable to drive his own car or get a job, Jason projects his inadequacies onto Caddy and her daughter, thus denying his own lack. Quentin, however, is much more conflicted about his lack, Fowler suggests. She argues that Quentin is torn between his incestuous desire to merge with Caddy and his masculine desire to separate from Caddy, enforcing her otherness. This conflict, Fowler notes, surfaces when Quentin associates sex and death with Caddy. Quentin wants to connect with Caddy, his double and mother-surrogate, but must repress that desire in order to enter the social world. …

Edith Wharton and the "New Gomorrahs" of Paris: Homosexuality, Flirtation, and Incestuous Desire in The Reef

Edith Wharton and the "New Gomorrahs" of Paris: Homosexuality, Flirtation, and Incestuous Desire in The Reef

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

“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...

Oedipal themes in latency. Analysis of the "farmer's daughter" joke.

A sample of "farmer's daughter" jokes, gathered from archives, personal informants, and published collections, is examined in relation to the developmental progress of the latency-age boys who most often tell them. The joke texts are divided into three categories-oedipal triumph, castration, and feminization-each of which represents a different regressive fantasy. Through these fantasied scenarios, the joke teller can safely work through some of the anxieties he experiences as a result of the recent repression of the oedipal conflict. Common themes of latency fantasies such as separation from the family, confusion of gender identity, and incestuous desires are all present in the texts. Repetition of the farmer's daughter joke not only motivates the child's individual psychological progress but also reinforces his or her awareness of taboos and socially appropriate behavior. Because the parental injunctions are internalized to help consolidate superego formation at the onset of latency and the child must now displace incestuous urges with manifestations of conscience, the retesting of values through joke telling is important during this developmental period.

Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis by Georgiana Donavin

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER -Eager to show that Arveragus in The Franklin's Tale is guilty of the kind of "tyranny and deceit" (p. 53) representative of his knightly estate, Dillon tells us that all is well in the tale until Arveragus goes off to England: "Military activity, the active seeking ofwar simply for the sake of 'worship and honour,' becomes his only desire and he leaves Dorigen, his wife, for two years" (p. 52). It is problematical enough to state as fact that Arveragus goes "simply" to bolster his own reputation rather than, say, because knightly duty calls him to help his lord. But when Dillon glosses the first two words of Chaucer's "Shoop hym to gon and dwelle a yeer or tweyne / In Engelond" (FranT 809-10) as "decided" rather than as "ar­ ranged" or "prepared," she misleads readers into believing that Arveragus made an arbitrary and selfish decision to abandon his wife. I do not mean to close on so negative a note. Janette Dillon's Geoffrey Chaucer will be a useful book, particularly for the undergraduates for whom it was intended. It is particularly sound in its treatment of the developing status of English as the language of England, for its statements about the production and reproduction of early fiction, and for its discussion of England's wide connections with continental Europe in Chaucer's lifetime. Although Dillon's central contribution is in her discussion of the historical contexts that inform Chaucer's work, she is also capable of helpful discus­ sions of literature. To the continuing debate, for example, about whether Alison of Bath is Chaucer's negative stereotype of a wife or a Chaucerian critique of that stereotype, Dillon has this to say: "A character who con­ sciously enacts the stereotype of the wicked wife cannot at the same time be accused of being no more than the stereotype" (p. 69). Good point. PETER G. BEIDLER Lehigh University GEORGIANA DoNAVIN. Incest Narratives and the Structure ofGower's Con­ fessio Amantis. English Literary Studies, vol. 56. Victoria, B.C.: Univer­ sity of Victoria, 1993. Pp. 103. $9.50 paper. In recent decades readers of the Confessio Amantis have attended increas­ ingly toJohn Gower's treatment of incest in that poem and particularly in two of its tales, "Canace and Machaire" and "Apollonius of Tyre." In this 198 REVIEWS new study Georgiana Donavin reexamines those tales and also discusses others where she sees incestuous desire as an implied subject; she looks at references to incest in Genius's other statements and finds, in all of these assorted materials, a significance for the work as a whole. For Donavin, Genius's description of the incest of Venus and Cupid in book 5 sets the framework for understanding the love that Amans pursues and eventually rejects. The principal characters in the frame--not only Venus and Cupid but, by association with their court, Genius and Amans--appear at some time or other to condone incest. Eventually, how­ ever, and especially through the poem's incest narratives, Amans learns to replace his amorous passion with a love of God. That Donavin should find the theme of incest so central to the work is problematic, for Gower does not literally represent it in a narrative until book 3, describe it in reference to Venus and Cupid until book 5, or introduce it as a confessional topic until book 8. Amans there asserts that he is innocent of the sin, and the rest of his confession supports his asser­ tion. That he writes ballads for his lady, dreams of kissing her, or gossips about other lovers might suggest that he is libidinous, but this evidence does not establish that he "imitates incestuousness," as Donavin claims (p. 6). In her effort to show the structural importance of incest (in its special meaning, not its general meaning of "unchaste"), she excludes from consideration the poem's many other representations of love; in the end, the hypothesis does not adequately address the work's complexity. That is not to say, however, that Donavin avoids complexity entirely: she recognizes Genius's inconsistencies, for example, as well as other problem­ atic features of...

Between culture and fantasy: a New Guinea highlands mythology

The myths of the Gimi, a people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, attribute the origin of death and misery to the incestuous desires of the first woman or man, as if one sex or the other were guilty of the very first misdeed. Working for years among the Gimi, speaking their language, anthropologist Gillian Gillison gained rare insight into these myths and their pervasive influence in the organization of social life. Hers is a fascinating account of relations between the sexes and the role of myth in the transition between unconscious fantasy and cultural forms. Gillison shows how the themes expressed in Gimi myths-especially sexual hostility and an obsession with menstrual blood-are dramatized in the elaborate public rituals that accompany marriage, death, and other life crises. The separate myths of Gimi women and men seem to speak to one another, to protest, alter, and enlarge upon myths of the other sex. The sexes cast blame in the veiled imagery of myth and then play out their debate in joint rituals, cooperating in shows of conflict and resolution that leave men undefeated and accord women the greater blame for misfortune.

The Law of Man and Its “Abhomynacions”

The ‘abhomynacions’ of Dinshaw’s title are the themes of incest which the Man of Law announces in his Prologue that he is not going to deal with, but which return at several points in the Tale he tells. In the first section of Dinshaw’s chapter (omitted here), the Man of Law is established as a spokesman upholding patriarchy, property and propriety, ‘professionally engaged in maintaining society as it is’. Constance’s being exported to marry the Sultan is seen as a telling instance of that trade in women — putting women into circulation like goods or currency — that maintains (patriarchal) social order, and the incest prohibition (that disallows keeping women at home, so to speak) is a vital part of such trade, and hence supported by the Man of Law (and indeed, Dinshaw argues, by Levi-Strauss in his classic analyses of it). Patriarchy’s ideal of woman as a ‘blank’ to be imprinted solely with male desire is, however, ruptured in the Tale by women who have their own desires, including incestuous desires for sons or fathers. At these points of rupture, Dinshaw notes how the Tale strives to efface such threats by, among other things, demonizing these women and excluding them from the realm of ‘femynynytee’ altogether. Dinshaw in fact sees the Man of Law’s Tale generally as an exemplary instance (following on the analyses of Pierre Macherey) of the ways in which a dominant ideology works for a resolution of contradictions, presenting itself as a seamlessly coherent, ‘natural’ and self-evidently legitimate state of things in the face of the opposition that besets it. For further discussion of Dinshaw’s work, see my Introduction, pp. 6–9.

"Unkynde abhomynaciouns" in Chaucer and Gower

In expressing his distaste for unkynde abhomynaciouns in his introduction, ML distinguishes his tale from stories like of Tyre. The distinction results in a peculiar distortion of the story, in which the brief episode of incest at the beginning is overshadowed by the lengthy account of the power of kynde in the adventures of the hero. It also draws attention to a feature of the traditional story that ML suppresses, the father's incestuous desire for his daughter which both motivates the ensuing action and gives sense to the many variations of parent-child relations throughout the tale. MLT is marked by this attempt to suppress that which ML finds repugnant but also by the repeated reassertion of the incest theme in subtle but ironic ways. Gower's version exhibits no such preoccupation. Unlike ML, Gower directly links his Constance to his Apollonius: in addition to the remarkable similarities in plot, he emphasizes in both the power of kinde love that draws father to daughter at the end, and he uses almost the same words to describe the two reunions (CA 2.1381-82; 8.1707-8). Like Chaucer, Gower was probably aware of the incest motive in the traditional story, but he kept Trivet's version of the opening since incest was to be a central theme in both Apollonius and Book 8 of CA. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1]

The Trickster-Father Feigns Death and Commits Incest: Some Methodological Contributions to the Study of Myth

When studying myth, psychoanalytic investigators have generally started with a single text of the myth that is being analyzed and developed an interpretation of that single text. Such an approach, while useful, ignores the fact that a given myth usually "exists" in the form of several different versions. Structuralists, while professing a concern with the multiple versions of individual myths, rarely incorporate that concern into their work. This article demonstrates that interpretations of the same myth can be evaluated by paying attention to how the versions of that myth differ from society to society. The particular myth considered is a North American Indian myth, in which a Trickster-Father feigns death and then reappears as someone else in order to have intercourse with his own daughter. Three interpretations (two psychoanalytic, one structuralist) of this myth are offered. Thefirst suggests that the myth reflects a projection, onto the father himself, of a daughter's incestuous desires for her father. The second suggests that the myth reflects afather's unconscious desirefor his daughter. The third suggests that the myth is really concerned with making some statement about exogamy. Hypotheses derived from each interpretation are operationalized and tested, using information from the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967). The data suggest that only the second interpretation cannot be rejected. Thefinal section of the article discusses some of the more general questions about mythic thought that might be investigated by using the methodological procedure described here.

Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays by Constance Brown Kuriyama

materials out of which a cohesive picture of Medwall as dramatist can yet emerge. DAVID BEVINGTON University of Chicago 178 Comparative Drama Constance Brown Kuriyama. Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980. Pp. xvi + 240. $21.00. Professor Kuriyama summarizes and discusses fully and perceptively the current criticism of Marlowe’s plays and finds it confusing, contra­ dictory, and inconclusive. Her purpose seems to be to clear up this confusion and critical perplexity by presenting a psychoanalytical in­ terpretation of the chief characters of the dramas. For example, she believes that Tamburlaine’s “confused and vacillating relationship” to the gods “seems ultimately related to a basic preoccupation with sexual identity.” Uneasiness about one’s relationship with women is as much an uncertainty as one’s relationship with the gods. She concludes therefore that the author of Tamburlaine was “probably” suffering from “an intense conflict of a marked homosexual character.” She finds just such confusion and vacillation common to the chief characters in all the plays. Tamburlaine, for instance, under her examination turns out to be a son unconsciously in rebellion against his father, then as a father unnaturally destroying his son. She also finds Tamburlaine busy with such kind of concerns as “Intense rivalry with father figures, strained efforts to cope with women and sexual objects, pronounced castration anxiety.” Moreover, we shall see that Tamburlaine is central to these concerns, “that he embodies and activates them, and yet remains the play’s primary means of dealing with them.” She then proceeds to analyse such leading characters in the rest of the plays according to the criteria set forth by Irving Bieber and others in Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytical Study of Male Homosexuals. Now, Professor Kuriyama accounts for such characters as these by the character of their creator as she finds it within the plays and in certain evidence she deduces from his biography. Thus the unconscious mind of this vacillating, unstable, brilliant young dramatist driven by primitive sexual urges is responsible for the same states in his leading characters—Tamburlaine, Aeneas, Dido, the Queen Mother Catherine, the Duke of Guise, Barabas, Faustus, and Edward II. In her final chapter (it had been better placed had it been the first chapter) the author takes up the biographical evidence for homosexu­ ality in Marlowe’s character. She maintains that Marlowe’s mother was an aggressive, domineering woman and that Christopher was her favorite, with suppressed incestuous desires; that his father was a braggart, and an indolent failure, derided and despised by Christopher’s mother. Thus the father was resentful of the poet, hostile, and very jealous of him. As a result, the poet must have hated his father and feared him. Out Reviews 179 of this condition one may recognize the Oedipal complex rising, and Christopher was haunted and perplexed and driven by this condition unconsciously. It made him unstable, violent, given to extremes, and ambivalent. It accounts for these same conditions in the characters of his plays. Thus when one looks at Faustus or Tamburlaine or Edward, one will hear varied changes rung on the character of Christopher. Indeed the poet’s violent death provides a summary of the various complexes one finds in his characters and deduces from what we know of his life. Threatened, he responds “with a violent attempt to assert his dominance, manifesting itself as a sudden attack from behind involving provocative seizure and use of the prospective victim’s own weapon (castrating before one is castrated).” But this attack is followed by Marlowe’s inability to do more than inflict a few minor wounds on Frizer “(evidence of his ambivalence toward violence, augmented by guilt).” This gives way to weakness; so Frizer turns the dagger into Marlowe’s brain “with lethal force.” This last indicates “suicidal sub­ mission, talion punishment.” Marlowe’s character, then, according to Professor Kuriyama, follows the very same frustrating and ambivalent scheme in his works “with various permutations” from “Tamburlaine at one extreme (identification with the aggressor) to Edward at the other (identification with the victim.)” His life is the very paradigm of his works. This is ingenious but just too pat. The evidence...

Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit

Little Dorrit is both a narrative about authority and an examination of the authority of narrative. The novel links vocation with sonhood and storytelling with fatherhood and self-generation. Little Dorrit, however, tells a double story, of a daughter as well as of a son. If the son’s story relates the search to replace the father and to discover paternal authority, the daughter’s story details the horrors and consolations of incestuous desire and generational collapse. Storytelling that seeks the father as origin reveals paternal deception and inauthenticity; incestuous structures of desire attempt to collapse genealogy on the hero and heroine, making paternal origin unknowable and creating an overdetermined narrative ending. Dickens’ double story, then, identifies yet questions genealogy and the patriarchal family as metaphors for narrative structure.

An Experimental Study of Parental Castration Phantasies

A fundamental anxiety, if not the fundamental anxiety, in males, according to classical Freudian psychoanalysis, is the fear of castration. According to Freud (1953, pp. 120–121; 1933a, p. 267) this is the fear of being castrated by the father as a reprisal for incestuous desires toward the mother. Nonetheless, the concept of the castrating mother also plays a prominent role in psychoanalytic literature, e.g. De Monchy (1952), Blos (1950), Fairbairn (1952), Klein (1948), and Bergler (1949).