Abstract
Various patterns of the representation of incest in the turn-of-the-19thcentury
British Gothic novels will be analyzed from a Foucauldian perspective
in this paper. The Foucauldian model emphasizes the tension between two
modes of familial organization—“alliance” and “sexuality”—and this tension
often occurs in representations of the modern nuclear family. In the 18th
century, the period when this clash between familial alliance and sexuality
began, there was an acute anxiety about incest, which was represented in the
Gothic novel with its wide range of scenarios. Some Gothic writers wavered
between the modes of alliance and sexuality while others preferred to look
back nostalgically at the traditional alliance-based model of the family. Some
were so concerned about the potential confusion between domestic affection
and erotic attachment in the newly-emergent nuclear family that they looked
suspiciously at the sexual “connections” of couples who were not blood kin
but acted as if they were—the so-called “familialized incest.” Domestic
space—and how it is compartmentalized, controlled, and infiltrated—plays an
important role in the way incest is imagined as haunting horror or unconscious
wish. It will be argued that the incest of Early British Gothic fiction is above
all a symptom or expression of the problem of meeting the contradictory
demands of familial alliance and sexuality.