Incestuous Father Research Articles

Narrative of Denial from Five Cases of the Incestuous Fathers

<p class="p1">Various data from the society show the tendency of increasing number of incest’s cases. This study aims to analyze the narratives of five cases of fathers who become perpetrators of incest. This study was conducted in 2016 to five fathers of incestuous perpetrators, who inhabited two Correctional Institutions in Bengkulu. This study was conducted using feminist narrative analysis and found that incestuous perpetrators rationalize their crimes based on their sexual identity and history to the victim. The history of the victims’ sexuality, which represents corrupted, dirty, wild, and naughty bodies, became a justification for incest. Persons with disabilities faced multiple vulnerabilities, not only being humiliated through the rape by their fathers, but they were also being blamed for their inability to participate in the investigation process and court hearings. The research has found linkages between incest and early marriage, troubled marriages, and early divorce. The construction of hypersexuality and the objectification of the perpetrators towards child sexuality had failed to guide the perpetrators towards a sane relationship.</p>

La “Chanson d’Yde et Olive” au carrefour des genres et des frontières: entre épopée, théâtre et “cantari” italiens

An epic cycle emerged at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, comprising a series of continuations to Huon de Bordeaux. What we call the Chanson d’Yde et Olive unites three different sequels, Yde et Olive I, Croissant and Yde et Olive II, which recount the adventures of the granddaughter and the great-grandson of the hero of Bordeaux. Sharing the same themes and motifs as tales, hagiographic legends and romances, these texts reflect the archetypal fluidity of the late epic, thus comprising representative samples of the genre. More specifically, the Miracle de la fille d’un roy, Tristan de Nanteuil and two Italian cantari, Antonio Pucci’s La Reina d’Oriente, and Pietro of Siena’s Cantare di Camilla, converge on the same narrative diptych depicting a homosexual marriage scene and a final metamorphosis. It is the most stable and undoubtedly the oldest dramatic core, that each work has tried to encase within its own narrative. Yde et Olive is the first text that introduces it by a widespread opening in contemporary literature, that of the incestuous father, which is found in the same configuration in the Miracle de la fille d’un roy and the Cantare di Camilla. Flourishing on both sides of the border, the tradition of the miracle plays, from which the cantari, characterized by a strong theatrical connotation, often draw their subjects, has undoubtedly contributed to the transmission of the matter of Yde et Olive in Italy.

Anais Nin: An Incest Between a Father and a Daughter

In 1933, Anais Nin thirty years old, meets again with her beloved father, the pianist and composer Joachin Nin. She did not see him since the age of eleven when he left his family for a mistress. She then started to write a diary. I want to show that you can make links and interpret the material and associations of her diary like the material of a psychoanalysis or a psychotherapy. When they meet again, he behaves like an incestual father telling her his love affairs and his sexual life with her mother. Then he relates to her an incestuous dream with her and acts like a lover until the consummate incest. She seems to consent but feels guilty, between fear and desire, and disgust. She will complain of intense heart beats, death anxiety and loss of joy. Through her Journal of Incest (1932-1934) and her Youth Journal (1914-1919), I will try to understand how such an incest can happen. The father is an incestuous father who has no taboo of the incest, does not recognize the difference between generations, does not respect the body intimacy of his daughter and treat her like a narcissistic object. He fluctuates between psychosis without symptoms and narcissistic perversion. Anais has a hysterical personality, with separation anxiety, psychosomatic and pervert symptoms. This patchwork evokes a borderline state. She acts sometimes like a narcissistic pervert.

Incest as a private/social conundrum: A brief analysis of Atlıkarınca movie and the mother’s reaction to the incestuous husband within the context of Ethics of Care

Incest, which is also the main theme of the movie Atlıkarınca (2011) (Merry-Go-Round), has been observed both in ancient and modern societies. As a lathomenon, despite mostly being kept as a secret, it has been one of the most brutal realities and practices of families and societies for centuries. Even though many countries have their own prohibitive laws regarding the issue, in Turkey it is still considered a taboo, and in Turkish Penal Code there is no article openly discussing incest. For this respect, Atlıkarınca can be thought as a brave step for bringing up the topic into the scene as a private and social dead-end and a conundrum. The movie reveals the physical and psychological demolition that incest brings to a family, and leaves questions in the viewers’ minds about whether the mother’s way of handling the situation is righteous or not. Also, since the movie is about a social reality, it serves as a documentary both by reflecting a social reality and symbolic narration. In the light of these, this study aims to analyze the movie in terms of social and legal deficiencies and problems in law and society and seeks to explain the mother’s reaction to the incestuous father within the context of Ethics of Care as developed by the American Feminist writers Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings.

Sprookjes in/en initiatierituelen

All over the world stories are told in which girls become women. Young heroines survive outside and inside, lightning and thunder, earthquakes and floods … In spite of bodily harms, jealous mothers, incestuous fathers, animal suitors … changing women emerge, bleeding instead of sleeping, alive and kicking, rooted in firm female flesh after their second birth. The author collected oral stories about growing up from girl to woman among the Sepedi and Griqua in South Africa. In this article she deals with questions about writing these stories for young readers from other cultural contexts. She attempts to answer the question: How much is lost in translation?

Incest in the Schizophrenic patient: Case report

IntroductionIncest may be defined as sexual relations between close blood relatives. Legally, incest and sexual aggression toward minors are classified as a criminal behaviour. Tunisia is among the countries from which incest cases are rarely reported.Objectives and methodThe aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the psychotic structure and incest, and to describe the individual, clinical, and criminal traits of the incestuous father through clinical observation.Case reportMr T.G is 46 years old. He is married and has six daughters. His wife appears to be passive, and largely dependent on her husband. Mr T.G has had incestuous relationships, initially, with his two eldest daughters. The acts were followed by the mother's complicit silence and the non-denunciation of the daughters. Two years later, he starts an incestuous behavior with his third daughter. Incest took place in the context of delusion. The patient was convinced that he is responsible of his daughters’ sexuality education. He develops an incoherent theory of purification with a tendency towards morbid rationalism. It is only after four years of insufferable paternal incestuous relationships that the third daughter filed a complaint to the police. A psychiatric expertise concluded that the accused is exempt from criminal responsibility.ConclusionIncest is a multi-faceted phenomenon, which makes its approach, comprehension, and treatment quite complex. For a psychotic patient incest is a means to deny alterity by crushing other. It also allows him to find, in this complete power, control over his annihilation anxiety.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

The Psychology Of The Female Body In The Incestuous Father Daughter Relationship: Clinical Study Realized In Algeria

The Psychology Of The Female Body In The Incestuous Father Daughter Relationship: Clinical Study Realized In Algeria

Monstrous Mother, Incestuous Father, and Terrorized Teen: Reading Precious as a Horror Film

WHEN A mother HER THROWS A TELEVISION down a stairwell in pursuit of her daughter holding her newly born son; a father rapes his daughter while mother voyeuristically gazes from afar; and a grandmother refers to her own granddaughter, who has Down syndrome, as an animal, we are introduced to Precious, a 2009 film based on 1996 novel Push by Sapphire and directed by Lee Daniels that provides some of most provocative representations of black family life witnessed on screen. These scenes, among others, are so scandalous and disturbing that they invite reading film as an extension of horror genre. Because film takes on taboo subjects such as failed black motherhood, incest, pedophilia, and homosexuality, turning to horror as one way by which to read these racialized representations seems called for. My intent in this article is not to avoid critical engagement with sociopolitical issues addressed on screen or to disregard a class analysis of obstacles faced by protagonist, but rather to suggest that based on way story unfolds, filmmakers (writer, director, cinematographer, etc.) either consciously or unconsciously drew on horror genre in order to portray protagonist's struggle as synonymous with a living nightmare.Exploring film as an extension of horror is certainly rendered plausible given that a number of reviewers and critics have associated film with horrific, inhuman, gothic, and animalistic.1 film's indisputable association with horror is all more convincing when we examine its depiction of perverse social relations [that] breed monstrosity (Lindsey 280); its challenge to traditional notions of family where the eruption of violence and sexuality [enter] into domestic sphere (Lindsey 279); and its representation of a matriarch who wreaks havoc on her daughter because of her own sexual repression-all of which are consistent with horror.This investigation is structured around examining following subject areas: mothers, phallic mothers, collusive mothers, failed mothers/motherhood, and monstrous mothers; parallels to horror films-Psycho (1960) and Carrie (1976); incestuous fathers, sexual taboo, and rape; horror and horrific; body as grotesque; and dreams, fantasies, and voyeurism. To introduce each section, since film pays tribute to literary figure Zora Neale Hurston, this article extracts subtitles from Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to connect novel and film and to demonstrate how Hurston's text provides an urtext to protagonist Precious's (played by Gabourey Sidibe) search for subjectivity, a subjectivity that she shares with Hurston's protagonist (Janie Crawford).Bad Mothers, Phallic Mothers, Collusive Mothers, Failed Mothers/Motherhood, and Monstrous MothersIt was like seeing your sister turn into a 'gator... You keep seeing your sister in 'gator and 'gator in your sister, and you'd rather not.-Zora Neale Hurston (48)Bad MothersIn order to examine phallic, collusive, failed, and monstrous mothers as well as black motherhood, it is necessary to address phenomenon of bad mothers. Characterization of black mother as bad has to be contextualized within larger discussion of what constitutes a mother and historical and political discourse surrounding bad mother. In past few decades, 'bad' mothers have moved noticeably toward center stage in American culture, declares Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky (2). The are familiar: welfare mother, teen mother ... But mother-blaming goes far beyond these stereotypes (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 2). Any mothers who do not fit kind of mother associated with 'traditional' nuclear family, according to Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, constitute bad mothers and are under assault (3). This examination, however, is an attempt not to defend bad mother or to further demonize mother but to suggest that filmmaker either consciously or unconsciously deployed strategies to create mother image, an image that circulates in contemporary discourse. …

Éclairages historiques, épidémiologiques et psychopathologiques concernant l’inceste : entre crime et pathologie ?

There are many different specifications about incest and they do not refer to the same concept: each society gives it borders which are valid for a community in a specific time. Regulation about incest is constantly evolving as shown by the last act of February 8, 2010 that brings the term of “incest” in the penal French Code. Nowadays, about 2 millions French people are victims of incest. In France, incest cases constitute 20% of Assisi trials, they represent 75% of sexual assaults of minor cases and more than 57% of rape of minors. On the forensic accounting in 2007, sexual violence authors are the second largest contingent of subjects incarcerated, behind assault and battery authors. Senon and Manzanera estimate that only 1 to 5% of sexual offenders suffer from a mental disease. By a literature review, we found there is a significant variability in prevalence estimation about psychiatric comorbidities in sexual offenders’ population. In international classifications categories such as pedophilia are identified by the term of “sexual preference disorder” in ICD-10, or by the term of “paraphilia” in DSM-IV-TR. In both these classifications, the notion of incest is not clearly stated as a separate entity but finds itself inserted into the concept of pedophilia. Psychiatric classifications are not intended to study sexual offenses but they are useful, during forensic psychiatric assessment, to identify a mental illness causing transgressive sexual behavior or to identify a psychiatric comorbidity. However, statistically, very few sex offenders are recognized criminally irresponsible because of their mental illness, according to Article 122-1 paragraph 1 of the French Criminal Code. Psychiatric experts are “technicians” in the service of justice: they have to carry out the missions entrusted to them by the judges, based on their skills and knowledge in the subject concerned. The psychiatrist expert may be questioned before the judgment on the issue of criminal responsibility, and, if convicted, on the appropriateness of an injunction care. In a current context of media dramatization, we choose to question about links between crime and pathology in a population of incestuous fathers. Nowadays, irrespective of the chosen theorical frameworks, there is a consensus to denounce the shortcut by which a subject can be defined by its act. Despite the clinical polymorphism of deviant behavior, the infinite variety of psychopathological configurations in which these behaviors may appear, one point seems to have the experts agreement: the fact that these sexual behavior disorders are much less sexual disorders themselves than “defense solution” attempts versus major anxieties about feeling identity. Authors’ ethiopathogenic hypotheses that refer to psychodynamic theories are the following: in most cases, there is at the forefront a serious disturbance of narcissism, a fragile sense of continuity of identity, and the threat of collapse depression, linked to major anxiety about alteration or disappearance of self-representation. Incest, by its transgressive dimension, asks each of us. Major health problem, it cannot be answered only by punishment but requires a diverse precautionary approach where societal debate (and its educational decisions), and psychiatric theorizing are decisive.

THE FLIGHT FROM INCEST AS A LATIN PLAY: THE "COMOEDIA SINE NOMINE", PETRARCH, AND THE AVIGNON PAPACY

The Comoedia sine nomine (sometimes cited as Columpnarium) is a seven-act play in Latin by an unknown author which survives in a single manuscript, Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Lat. 8163.1 It is a most unusual classicizing adaptation of a plot which was very popular in the later Middle Ages, a combination of two widely used narrative motifs, the Flight from the Incestuous Father and the Falsely Accused Queen.2 Emile Roy in his 1902 edition assumed that the manuscript dated from the fifteenth century and was written in Italy, but in the view of Francois Avril of the Bibliotheque nationale, it was produced in the mid-fourteenth century at Avignon under Italian influence.3 I shall return later in this essay to the question of dating and provenance to argue that the text - or at least this particular manuscript of it - can be linked to Petrarch's circle in Avignon. It could of course have been composed considerably earlier than the surviving exemplar, but I believe that there are strong grounds for positing an Avignon provenance, and for speculating that although the plot is a well-known one, this particular version may be intended to allude to the papal schism.Plot and styleFirst I will consider the many ways in which the Comoedia is an unusual version of a popular, if disturbing, medieval narrative. The writer - or his source - has gone to a lot of trouble to rework the plot elaborately in classical terms, with a mish-mash of classical names.(I) The dying queen of the Carilli makes her husband King Emolphus swear only to marry a woman who looks exactly like her. He sends the court painters to travel the world and record possible candidates. (II) The people urge Emolphus to remarry; Princess Hermionides' nurse rashly remarks that her charge is the image of her dead mother. The king falls passionately in love with his daughter and decides to marry her. (Ill) Hermionides is horrified and wants to die. The nurse plots to save her: she persuades the king to delay the wedding until the gods have been placated, and escapes with the princess to Phocis. (IV) There they are taken in by Sophia, an old friend of the nurse and expert needlewoman. Hermionides is seen by the local king, Orestes, who falls madly in love with her. He sends Aphrodissa, a bawd, to negotiate for him, and they are secretly married.(V) Orestes' mother, Queen Olicomesta, is furious, as her son had foreseen. Orestes leaves for a tournament at Athens to pursue glory at Hermionides' urging, even though she is pregnant. (VI) When she bears a fine son, the messenger Epiphanius stays with Olicomesta en route to Athens, and while he is drunk the clever maid Pharia substitutes a letter announcing that the baby is an Ethiopian monster. This news makes Orestes sad, but he orders mother and child to be well looked after until his return. Again Epiphanius stops che'.i Olicomesta, and the letter is changed to order the killing of mother and baby. The faithful seneschal Coelius exposes the baby in a watertight cradle, and sends Hermionides into exile.(VII) The baby in its richly equipped cradle is found by Achironeus, a poor fisherman. He wants to adopt the child, but first consults the oracle of Apollo on Parnassus, after discussing the matter with his friend Amyclas. Their conversation is overheard by Orestes and his counsellor Regulus, who are on their way back from Athens, suspicious of recent events. Coelius too is suspicious and discovers the forged letter trick, which he reveals to Orestes and Regulus. Meanwhile Hermionides, wandering on Parnassus, meets a shepherd who urges her to consult the oracle. All the main characters then make for the oracle; Hermionides meets Achironeus the fisherman, hears his story, recognizes the baby as hers, and manages to recover him. The nurse, Orestes, and Coelius all overhear their conversation; Hermionides and Orestes are reunited. News arrives that Olicomesta and her maid are dead. The nurse announces that Emolphus is dead and that Hermionides has inherited the kingdom. …

Gower and the Incestuous Father: The Intimate Author in Pericles

Gower and the Incestuous Father: The Intimate Author in Pericles

Hidden victim of incestuous father: Case report

Due to the societal attitude against incestuous relationship, its prohibition became universal throughout the world. It is related to the cultural obstacles for it implies violation of moral and moral comprehension about interfamilial relations. However, the incest is mostly unreported, hardly detected and recognized because the child - hidden victim of incest, shame and fear is suffering in silence. Therefore, probability of prevention, support and treatment of the victim is decreased while severe psychological consequences are increased. It is known that, in certain cases, when the mother get to know about incestuous relationship between her daughter and the father, due to various interests and dependence-related reasons, the child is forced not to report on it. As those crimes mostly occur in private circle of the family, with no witnesses, even if reported, the perpetrator is usually released due to a lack of evidence, which will be illustrated in this case report. Sexual taboos, especially present in undeveloped countries, contribute to the expansion of societal moral crisis and sexual delinquency, as well as to the alienation and isolation of its victims. Our future should be marked with more efforts invested in raising public awareness about the presence of this problem in our country and a comprehensive care for children where multidisciplinary approach is required.

Moments of Silence, Acts of Speech: Uncovering the Incest Motif in the Man of Law's Tale

The persistent silence of the heroine regarding her history has tradi tionally been seen as an uncomfortable feature in the Man of Law's Tale and its closest analogues, an unfortunate necessity of the plot inexpertly dealt with by the authors.1 It has long been noted that the tale-type to which Chaucer's tale belongs begins with the Constance character flee ing an incestuous father,2 and many critics locate the source of Custance's unexplained refusal to divulge her identity or her history in the traces of this incest motif that remain in the tale.3 This same odd

A Prayer for Mourning: Seduction and Trauma in Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie

A Prayer for Mourning:Seduction and Trauma in Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie Jessica Forbes Roberts (bio) Let there be veils. Let there be protections and escapes from the knowledge we are condemned to work so hard at discovering. Carolivia Herron, Thereafter Johnnie The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming" The 1991 publication of Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie found praise in both academic and nonacademic circles. The New York Times Book Review asserts that her "fascinating and highly original first novel belongs in the distinguished company of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gloria Naylor's wickedly satirical Linden Hills" (Bierhorst 16). The critic for the New Statesman writes that Herron's "incandescent and visionary prose-poetry is capable, like a divinely wrought gospel song, of raising the hairs on the back of your neck or moving you to tears" (Stuart 41). Henry Louis Gates calls the novel a "remarkable achievement" and Herron "the fourth Fury" (dust jacket). Barbara Christian opens her review for the Women's Review of Books with the pronouncement, "I am dazzled, literally, by the intense light of Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie" (Christian, "Epic" 6).1 And yet in the thirteen years since its publication, Thereafter Johnnie has received surprisingly little critical attention.2 But perhaps the lack of critical attention should not be so surprising. In addition to praising Herron's novel in her review, Christian also anticipates that feminists, an audience to which the novel could be expected to appeal, might find it disturbing, not because of "the theme of incest per se" but because of her method of presentation: [Herron] does not present father/daughter incest, as Alice Walker does in The Color Purple, as a powerful father figure's brutal assault upon a helpless girl-child, or as Toni Morrison does in The Bluest Eye, as a powerless father's sense that sexual love is all he can give his wounded daughter. In Thereafter Johnnie both father [End Page 1060] and daughter seduce each other, so that it is difficult to distinguish between "who was the possessor, and who was the possessed." And Herron writes of their sexual intercourse in a language so erotic it approaches the divine. (6) Herron's erotic descriptions of incest are, indeed, disturbing not only because both father and daughter draw pleasure and pain from the incestuous acts but also because the language of these passages threatens to inflict both pleasure and pain on the reader as well. But whether the novel has disturbed feminists or other audiences, for that matter, is unclear because so few scholars have responded to it in writing. Christian's comment seems to imply that feminists are more likely than others to be disturbed because Herron chooses to make the seduction mutual and, therefore, to represent Patricia as actively seducing her father. In doing so, Herron risks casting Patricia as the Seductive Daughter, "one of the two major culprits in the incest romance" (Herman 36), thereby enabling readings that relieve the incestuous father of both responsibility and blame. I would argue, however, that while the characters seem to accept both this explanation for incest and the myths that support it, the novel does not. By having her characters (almost compulsively) interpret Patricia and John Christopher's relationship, Herron anticipates the various discourses readers invoke in order to deal with narratives of incest—those of victimization, morality, and psychology—and reveals them to be inadequate. Rather than champion a version of Freud's feminine Oedipus complex or what Jung called the Electra complex, Thereafter Johnnie reveals how Freud's revised ideas about infant abuse have offered its readers a way out of the complexities of the novel. In this essay, I will use theories of narrative and traumatic memory to explore Herron's feminist critique of the Seductive Daughter and of the Western mythologies and twentieth-century interpretive frameworks that have been used to protect the "Poor Father." The...

‘Father wants to tear out my tongue’: Daughters Confront Incestuous Fathers in Postwar German Literature

Since the 1970s, empowered by the women’s movement, daughters sexually abused by fathers have told their stories in memoirs, case histories, and fiction. In this article I apply the results of current research on incest to analyse incest narratives by German and Austrian women authors: Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, Alissa Walser’s ‘Geschenkt’, and Elisabeth Reichart’s ‘La Valse’. Each of these texts depicts daughter‐narrators who are coping with after‐effects of sexual abuse, in particular, split identity and gender ambivalence. In Malina and ‘Geschenkt’, the I‐narrators try to resolve the split by opting for a masculinised ego ideal, a façade self that protects the vulnerable female self from painful memories. On the other hand, ‘La Valse’ is based on an inclusive, not a dualistic, model of identity. The daughter begins her tentative journey toward autonomy when she acknowledges her ambivalent attachment to her father and reintegrates memories and emotions. By shaping and giving meaning to the experience of sexual trauma, incest narratives reveal competing – dualistic and inclusive – notions of the self.

Shelley Laughs: Comic Possibilities in ‘The Cenci’

Whilst Percy Shelley's childhood pranks at Field Place, Syon House, and Eton may occasionally lead commentators to accredit him with some lightness of spirit, analysis of his texts has yet to provoke critics into highlighting any literary evidence of a penchant for comedy. However, enactment of the poet's dramatic writing indicates that on at least one occasion, not only did Shelley's pen take a humourous turn, but that it did so seemingly in order to provide some light relief in one of his darkest works, The Cenci. A dry reading of the text of this rarely-staged play provides little indication of any comic intentions. But put to its intended use as a script for theatrical production, the process of rehearsal with actors reveals the author's unmistakable pursuit of burlesque in two scenes with the result readily acknowledged by the subsequent laughter of audiences during public performance.1 In Scenes IV. ii and IV. iii, we are introduced to the characters Marzio and Olimpio, the two assassins hired by Beatrice Cenci to rid her of her debauched. and incestuous father. From their very entrance for a midnight rendezvous with Beatrice and Lucretia beneath the castle ramparts of Petrella, the murderers are revealed by their dialogue and behaviour as a pair of inept, squabbling, and cowardly buffoons. Their obvious reluctance and lack of boldness towards their task forms a comically stark contrast to the fortitude of the young heroine who employs them. 'Your cheeks are pale', notes Marzio of his companion, to which he receives the withering riposte, 'It is the white reflection of your own which you call pale.' (IV. ii.20-22) Unsure of their mettle for such murderous work, Beatrice asks; 'Are you resolved?' The hapless pair can only reply by asking: OLIMPIO: MARZIO: Is he asleep? Is all quiet? (29)

Quality of Life in Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse Who Have Undergone Therapy

ABSTRACT This study examined perceptions of past sexual abuse experiences and quality of life among adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Fifty-two adult survivors (15 men, 37 women) of childhood paternal sexual abuse who had completed therapy were interviewed about their past and current life. A qualitative analysis of the interviews revealed three types of explanations for the offenders' abusive behavior (fathers and/or mothers in terms of compliance): characteristics of the offender-parent (incestuous father), the victim's characteristics, and circumstantial conditions. The results indicated that a higher percentage of survivors who attributed the abuse to the offender's characteristics managed to keep their self-esteem fairly intact and had a higher quality of life, in contrast to survivors who took full blame on themselves or blamed situational factors. The results further revealed that male survivors judged their quality of life as less satisfactory than did female survivors.

Issy's Footnote: Disruptive Narrative and the Discursive Structure of Incest in Finnegans Wake

Within Finnegans Wake, Joyce grants special narrative powers to Issy, the young girl character in the book. A victim of incest at the hands of her father and brothers, Issy speaks with subversive intent that is particularly helpful to Joyce as he simultaneously articulates and undermines notions of control and mastery in narrative. Joyce bestows on Issy authorial knowledge that is not available to other characters. In fact, Issy knows what she cannot know as a character within a text: she knows the sigla Joyce used in his Finnegans Wake notebooks. When designing the novel, a process he described to patron Harriet Shaw Weaver as a mathematical problem akin to squaring the circle, Joyce used these emblems to represent characters and concepts.1 Writing in a footnote, Issy comments on The Doodles family, giving the sigla for her father, her mother, herself, the four old men, the book, and her two brothers.2 She should not know this information: talking about herself as if she had read her author's preparatory material, Issy disrupts readers' expectations of what comprises proper knowledge for a character. Improper knowledge, in fact, defines Issy. Her wealth of sexual information reveals both how her sexuality is regulated by the social norms of patriarchy and how she subverts those norms, for while her knowledge may appear to cast her as essentially erotic, it also becomes the ground from which she speaks a disruptive story that threatens the gendered economy of power in Finnegans Wake. Joyce configures Issy according to a revision of the psychological models historically available to him, models that combine disruptive speech with hysteria and thus with unbridled sexuality. Within the novel, Joyce uses incest as a metaphor through which he articulates both his desire for this subversion and his opposition to it. That is, like an incestuous father, Joyce seeks to control and to possess the desired daughter who never can be fully controlled, for she always possesses the dangerous potential to betray the father and overthrow his authority by speaking his secrets. Incest within the novel thus names not only a

"Looking at the Back of Your Head": Mirroring Scenes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy

Although Alice Walker insists that Possessing the Secret of Joy is not a sequel to The Color Purple, she has chosen to recast various characters in the later novel. The novels are also alike in that their protagonists, Celie in Purple and Tashi in Joy, are women who experience epiphany-like moments that lead to a fuller, more coherent sense of self. In these moments the presence of a literal or metaphoric mirror enables the protagonists to move from an experience of fragmentation to a vision of a more unified state of self-possession. As Daniel Ross notes, this transformation resembles Jacques Lacan's mirror stage theory.' According to Ross, in The Color Purple there are several mirror scenes that are crucial to Celie's development of selfhood. Before these scenes, Celie endures a barrage of rapes and brutality that causes her to experience her body as fragmented and as being possessed by others, namely her victimizers. At age fourteen, Celie already questions her self-image as a result of her abusive father's repeated rapes. She begins a letter to tell God that she is a good girl and immediately strikes out the word am, and revises her sentence to say, have always been a good girl, demonstrating that she no longer feels certain of her goodness or her identity (1). Celie's violent, loveless marriage to a man she calls is no less damaging than her relationship with her incestuous father. In her best moments with her husband, Celie imagines herself as the beautiful, grinning Shug Avery and puts her arm around him as she supposes Shug might. Of more dangerous times, particularly when Mr. is beating her, Celie says It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree (23). Celie detaches herself from her identity because of her intolerable circumstances. Shug's arrival marks Celie's

Metafiction, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita

Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/1999) PHILIPP SCHWEIGHAUSER (Basel) Metafiction, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita Alfred Appel's "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody" (1967) and his introduction to The Annotated Lolita (first published in 1970) have set the tone for many aspiring critics of the novel. Appel highlights Lolita's metafictional elements and labels it an "involuted work":1 An involuted work turns in upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and "allégorique de lui-même"— allegorical of itself, to use Mallarmé's description of one of his poems. An ideally involuted sentence would simply read, "I am a sentence" [...] (The Annotated Lolita, xxiiif.) Both John Ray Jr.'s fictional foreword and Nabokov's afterword "On a book entitled Lolita" strongly discourage a referential reading and lend support to Appel's proposals. While John Ray mocks the "old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story" (4), Nabokov declares that "Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss" (134). Later critics who wished to stress the novel's referential aspects (e.g. Lolita's suffering as a human being) often had to define themselves explicitly against Appel's readings.2 Feminist critic Linda Kauffman (1989) attempts to steer a middle course: I should like to propose a dialogic reading, one that is both feminist and intertextual; one that releases the female body both from its anesthesia and from Humbert's solipsism while simultaneously highlighting textual artifice. (137f.) Kauffman then makes an interesting assertion concerning the relationship between the novel's intertextual references and the violence done to Lolita: "That the novel is an exercise in intertextuality [...] does not mitigate the 1. "Involution" is also the term used by John Fletcher in his chapter on metafiction in Novel and Reader (1980: 33-50). 2. Cf. Merrill 1979, Alexandrov 1991. 100 Nabokov Studies honor of Lolita's treatment. Instead, it reinforces it" (138). Unfortunately, though, Kauffman abandons this line of inquiry after a few references to Poe, Dickens and James in favour of a straightforwardly referential reading: "In Lolita, the incestuous father's jealousy, tyranny, voracity, and possessiveness are both verisimilar and clinically verifiable" (149). I would indeed argue that there is an intimate relationship between Lolita's suffering, and the novel's status as metafiction. Now this is a paradoxical statement. If Lolita is a metafictional novel that severs all links with reality and comments on the process of fiction-making instead,3 then it seems highly irrelevant and maybe even somewhat naive to inquire into the suffering one of its characters inflicts on another. In metafiction, "death" may be "but a question of style" (Bend Sinister, 220), as the nanator of Nabokov's Bend Sinister suggests in the face of the main protagonist's demise.4 In the case oÃ- Lolita, however, I would argue with Alfred Appel that the novel is "a parody of death with real suffering in it" (The Annotated Lolita, 378 n. 119/1). In one sense, Lolita's parodie, intertextual, self-reflexive, anti-realist and anti-representational stance diverts from and to a certain extent even negates the ethical dimension a reading of the novel as realist fiction might focus on. On the other hand, my discussion will suggest, it is precisely these metafictional elements which contribute to and reinforce the sinister implications of Humbert's discourse. Take Humbert's solipsism for instance. The self-reflexiveness and selfconsciousness of the text reproduces the fictional character Humbert's almost exclusive concern with himself on the extradiegetic level of nanation.5 At first 3. For Raymond Federman (1975), the primary purpose of metafiction (his term is surfiction) is "to unmask its own fictionality, to expose the metaphor of its own fraudulence, and not to pretend any longer to pass for reality, for truth, or for beauty" (8). Rüdiger Imhof (1986) argues in a similar vein that "[a] metafiction is a kind of self-reflexive nanative that nanates about nanating" (9) and that "metafiction thematises only its own mechanisms and does not aspire...