The festival of incest in Le Paysan perverti.(essay)(Critical essay)

Symposium, September, 2006 by Cheek, Pamela

HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND Retif de la Bretonne's preoccupation with weaving incestuous relations into his work? Does an author's obsessive return to a particular topos automatically qualify his work as something explicable entirely in terms of his own individual history and psychology? Or can the form taken by the obsessive return--here, the way incest is phrased--be followed as the warp of a larger cultural system?

Retif's own practice of incest with his two daughters as well as the pervasive preoccupation with incest in his writing have been carefully documented by Pierre Testud. Although all of Retif's writing is colored by a "pulsion incestueuse," the work before 1783 focuses openly on sibling and cousin incest and treats father-daughter incest only...

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