This book demonstrates that incest was representative of a range of interests crucial to writers of the Gothic, often women or homosexual men who adopted a critical stance in relation to the heteronormative patriarchal world. In repositioning the Gothic, representations of incest are revealed as synonymous with the Gothic as a whole. The book argues that extending the traditional endpoint of the Gothic makes it possible to understand the full range of familial, legal, marital, sexual and class implications associated with the genre's deployment of incest. Gothic authors deploy the generic convention of incest to reveal as inadequate heteronormative ideologies of sexuality and desire in the patriarchal social structure that render its laws and requirements arbitrary. The book examines the various familial ties and incestuous relationships in the Gothic to show how they depict and disrupt contemporary definitions of gender, family and desire. Many of the methodologies adopted in Gothic scholarship and analyses of incest reveal ongoing continuities between their assumptions and those of the very ideologies Gothic authors strove to disrupt through their use of the incest trope. Methodologies such as Freudian psychoanalysis, as Botting argues, can be positioned as a product of Gothic monster-making, showing the effect of Gothic conventions on psychoanalytic theories that are still in wide use today.
acclaim, her works were routinely subject to critical censure linked to concerns over the growth of the literary marketplace, its perceived pandering to a growing middle-class readership, its disconcerting dominance by female readers and writers, and its effect on both the worth and accessibility of literature. The principal publisher of popular novels in Romantic-era Britain, 10 Lane was understood by critics to drive the period's troubling ‘bibliographic surplus’ and the associated ‘ “quantitative” rather than qualitative rise’ of the novel. 11 ‘Minerva’ thus became
substitutions for incestuous sibling desires. Osbert and Mary’s bond acts as an idealised model for male–female partnerships and marriages, grounded in a basis of equality and similarity of age, class, education and resources and based in respect, mutual love and reason. Each of these factors is demonstrated within the text to be fundamental to happiness, yet Radcliffe indicates that such egalitarian unions are
English culture and the shedding of wider kin ties grew out of another economic imperative related to, but distinct from, issues of lineal inheritance or romantic love’. 11 Perry argues that the need for increased personal wealth in the changing economic structure contributed to making cousin marriage desirable, particularly among the members of the upper classes. 12 Cousin marriage became a viable
as Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams. Gramsci understood hegemony as the consent of society to be dominated by force; a consent that is engendered partially through the use of ideology as ‘an instrument of domination and social hegemony’. 16 Gramsci clarifies that ideologies operate as weapons wielded by the dominant social or political class in order to create a consensually subordinate society. He argues that
disadvantages of mother–son inbreeding. 4 Shepher’s attempt to account for the rarity of mother–son incest through its corresponding low genetic gains moves from the biological to the social. Shepher argues that the incest inhibition proscribed by the maternal act of nurturance does not exist in mothers such as ‘queens who did not have time for such everyday activities, upper middle-class mothers who were too
positioned outside the family line, but within it, not from the serving class but a member of the aristocracy who threatens the women of his own bloodline. Here it is not the heroine who transgress the incest taboo, often viewed as fundamental in maintaining the kinship system of exchange that reinforces the patriarchal power structure, but the uncle. 7 In order to understand how the uncle is capable of
editions of Otranto , the tale's overt supernaturalism presented a simultaneous flirtation with and condemnation of atavistic superstition, a movement that is intrinsically linked throughout to competing notions of historical progression. In this sense, Otranto 's debt to preceding historical fiction is clear. Prévost's fiction, for example, has been understood as ‘pre-Gothic’ in its charting of a widespread contemporary ‘fear of violent change and its effects on what had been a stable class system’. 33 In other words, it anticipates the anxieties about social
heiress , More ghosts! , The heroine , and other such titles, are much more than straightforward burlesques of existing prose fiction, whether identified as ‘romance’ or not. As Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik point out, The heroine uses parody ‘rather cleverly [to have] it both ways: it inscribes the values of the aspiring middle-class … but simultaneously exposes the constraints they impose on the imaginative young woman’. 40 Indicatively, Cherry's ideological recuperation from addled romance reader to rational and decorous young woman ends not with her chastisement
, did not hinder you”’ (p. 40). Bianca’s class enables her to voice the presence of ‘masculine’ passions, freeing her from the silence that Hippolita, Matilda and Isabella must maintain regarding sexual desire. 57 When Hippolita is anxious to see her husband, ‘Matilda made signs to Isabella to prevent Hippolita’s rising; and both these lovely young women were using their gentle violence to stop and