The Appearance of Incest in Gothic Fiction

The Law of the Father: The Appearance of Incest in Gothic Fiction

In her book Deadly Secrets Anne Williams says that "gothic escape fictions provide a virtual reality, and experimental world in which the repressed -- especially the female in all its guises -- might be realized" (96). Society in the eighteenth century operated under staunch patriarchal control which has been dubbed by critics like Lacan as "The Law of the Father". The Law of the father, according to Lacan, is founded on the distinction between male and female and involves the repression of all that is female. Many authors used the experimental world of gothic to explore life under and also life beyond the law of the father. What is woman's role in a world where the female is suppressed? Gothic novelists portrayed the terror women experienced at the hands of a male-dominated culture by creating fictions whereby the institutions of family and marriage are revealed in their most demented form. The family was the seat of sexuality in the eighteenth century. Girls were initiated into womanhood within its protection and received their legacy of powerlessness from their mothers. They learnt that their fathers, and all men, were the "Kings of the Castle" and that they had control of all aspects of their lives. A woman's sexuality was a man's to explore or exploit as he saw fit. The ultimate power that the father could exert over the women in his life resulted in a deep-seated fear of incest, a theme that we see often in gothic novels. In The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole the scene in which Manfred confesses his desire to marry Isabella and have sexual relations with her is very incest-like:

I desired you once before, said Manfred angrily, not to name that w...

... middle of paper ...

...on infused in all sexual relationships where the balance of power between male and female is so one-sided.

Under the repressive Law of the Father, eighteenth century women had few rights of their own. The Gothic genre, with its emphasis on nightmarish unrealities, provided a stage on which both the horrors of life as a woman could be demonstrated and the possibility of living beyond the Law of the Father could be explored.

Works Cited

Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets. London: Yale University Press, 1992.

Lewis, Matthew. The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1972.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness. Chicago: U of C Press, 1995.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.