Sibling incest, madness, and the "Jews"

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Sander L. Gilman

small body.., of a well-trained child .... she looked

prepubescent--non-pubescent; I felt that if I ever slept with

her (these thoughts wriggle up) it would cause some

lingering and poignant hurt that would take me my whole life

to nurse. (Does she fuck? I wonder suddenly with a nauseous

lurch. Nah. She probably doesn't know about all that

yet...).

I didn't even want to fuck her....

Ursula-fuck, sister-fuck.., foster-fuck? No, I can't do it--I

can't even think about it (pp. 56, 59, 60).

Sibling incest for the parvenu Terry is impossible because, it seems, of the familiarity of the children, but of course it is also the awe that he holds the upper classes--so much better than he, at least in his own imagination.

Terry's rejection of the notion of sibling incest is precisely because of his sexual failures with women beyond the family, If he cannot "make it" with the women of his own class, with the secretaries and shop girls, how can he hope to possess some one who seems to be innately superior to him? He seems to be a sexual failure, while Gregory seems to be a sexual predator. And yet it is Gregory who, following Terry's rejection of the very thought of sibling incest, evokes "incest" in one of his monologues, in order to deconstruct it by historizing it. He is the incestuous brother.

Gregory quotes the dictionary definition of incest from the OED and points out that it was only "in 1908, however, [that] legislation was sneaked through (the Punishment of Incest Act) under which sexual intercourse of a male with his daughter, mother, sister or granddaughter (sic!) was made punishable by seven years' imprisonment" (p. 65). He provides an economic/biological rationale for the creation of incest as a punishable category: "Clearly, you wouldn't want your shiftless daughters compacting the familial bastion by marrying your own sons--when in the next hut or hovel there languished some strapping ploughboy who would be only too happy to move in and help you farm, hunt, chop wood" (p. 66). But, of course, such strictures could not apply to the upper classes with their economic certainty.

Gregory's elaborate rationale leads to his acknowledgment of his incest with Ursula on an island on the D-Pond, a lake on their estate, when they were pre-teenagers. It is this account of the idyllic moment of childhood incest that Gregory couples with Terry's appearance in the family--it is Terry's appearance that Gregory' credits with the disillusion of the perfection of his childhood rather than the seduction of his sister. The sexualized word success is now keyed to the incest between the siblings (p. 116), an incest that continued "before, during, and--if less regularly--after my pubescence and then, ultimately, through hers .... "(116) Amis' allows us to understand the literary import of the act by having Terry ironically evoke Gregory's "Byronic storm out into the night (marvelous stuff)" (p. 188).

Terry and Gregory live together in a flat, a flat initially designed for the oldest son to provide him with a pied-a-terre in London. It is in a section of London near Queensway which once was very posh but that had since decayed. Ursula appears in London to study to be a secretary. After the beginning of her descent into schizophrenia and her initial suicide attempt, she joins the brothers in their crowded flat. It marks the beginning of Gregory's mental and physical decay and Terry's rebirth as a moneyed member of the new unionized proletariat.