Familial Love, Incest, and Female Desire in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Women's Novels - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Julie Shaffer

THROUGHOUT LATE EIGHTEENTH- and early nineteenth-century British fiction, sons are exhorted to see their parents' female wards as sisters; older men adopt paternal stances to young, unprotected women; and servants love their masters as children ideally love their parents. As good friends come to see each other as "like" family, sentimentalized familial bonds multiply This recurrent situation comprises what has been called the period's urge toward "familialization."(1) The broadening of supportive alliances by mining nonfamily into family, based in an Enlightenment belief that humankind's innate benevolence and sympathy lead to community building, appears so frequently in the era's novel of sensibility that it might be seen as the genre's defining motif; in the genre, constructing familialized support seems necessary, given that the world in which characters move is often presented as so immical to the sentimental protagonist that an ersatz family created of like-minded others is the best hope for support and community.(2)

Seeing others as like family is presented positively in such novels, the only moral response to a world in which supportive bonds are displaced by competition. The main objection to familialization might most obviously be that it is simply unrealistic to believe that supportive bonds can prevail in a world whose economic system depends on competition that then extends to other sorts of relationships. Yet familialization is made problematic in quite a different way at points, for it overlaps with the threat of incest, everywhere a possibility in Gothic novels, themselves closely related to the sentimental novel, the two linked through their reliance on suffering victims with whom the audience can sympathize as proof or practice of its own moral sensibility.(3) Threat or actuality of incest constitutes a Gothic moment in every genre, injecting horror into both Gothic and sentimental novels. It is thus a defining factor of the Gothic, as familialization is of sensibility. Its horror comes from its being the crime against nature (and culture) par excellence; this, and its frequent tie with tyrannical abuse of political power, suggests its obvious link with Walpole's, Radcliffe's, and Lewis's Gothic fiction.(4)

Familialization does not always turn to incest in the period's novels; characters seeing each other as (like) siblings or as (like) parents and offspring do not always become incestuous, as they would were the characters to marry, consummate, and discover themselves to be relatives in fact. An example will clarify what I mean: in Frances Burney's 1778 Evelina, the eponymous heroine sees her future husband Orville not only as like her guardian Reverend Villars--hence as a father-figure--but also as an adoptive brother before their relationship becomes more maritally directed than real parental-filial or sibling relationships may be. His taking these metaphoric family roles toward her helps them get to know each other and so forwards their love relationship without its then becoming incestuous; the lovers are not, after all, really relatives before marriage.

Evelina may seem a bad example of a novel that keeps familialization safely separate from incest, because it brings in incestuous overtones in Evelina's reunion with her father: Sir John sees the mother, the woman he loved, in the daughter who comes to him at about the age his wife was when he met and first loved her; we get such overtones as well in the tale of Evelina's illegitimate half-brother, Macartney.(5) I purposely use it as inaugural example, however, because it shows that the two impulses can feel separate yet verge on overlapping through proximity; it thereby demonstrates the complexity of the period's fascination with the fantasy-fulfilling and horrific sides of the issue and with the easily crossed line between the two. Familialization may be "the acme of Enlightenment thought" based in "an attempt to realize a dream of total harmony in which all the oppositional elements in human relationships ... have been eliminated" so that the entire world might provide a supportive web of relationships (Tanner 148), but when familialization turns to incest, sentimental dream becomes nightmare. Novels of sentiment and Gothic novels present us with the positive and negative outcome of everyone's being "like" family, the Enlightenment dream dangerously fulfilled.

Familialization comes closest to incest when parental-filial or sibling love shifts at least on one side to romantic or sexualized love. This occurs as insistently as familialization itself--not only in Evelina but in Austen's Emma and Mansfield Park and in Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, for instance.(6) In such works, familial feeling between two non-blood related or affinal characters is shown to be capable of gliding into sexual feeling unproblematically. I offer "familialized incest" as a provisional term for this, heeding the contradiction in its positive first word and negatively connotative second word. Loving someone as a sibling, parent, or child before loving him or her as a SPOUSe seems unproblematic within the world represented in these novels, but to late twentieth-century readers, such shifts may hint at danger, sounding like a reversible equation, sexualizing a relationship that should not, given most incest taboos, be sexualized at all. In fact, not all late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British novels are comfortable with the shift; some use it to demonstrate that the line between familialization and incest is dangerously thin and too easily breached.