SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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and, as Kenneth Graham notes, is “an inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which
all of Europe was feeling in the late eighteenth century. [The Marquis de] Sade reminds
us that the Gothic novel is a product of a revolutionary age” (260). Readers found that
the Gothic novel “voiced a protest against the excess of rationalism and realism in the
early eighteenth century” (Scarborough 6), reacting to the cultural transformations of the
previous centuries in light of even more changes. The popularity of the Gothic form may
have been because its response to the pervading cultural anxieties of the period was easily
recognizable by such a wide range of readers. Ironically, too, the rising readership of
novels “exacerbated the neoclassical fear that all romances and novels could produce
antisocial effects and lead to social disintegration” (Botting 46). In the preface to the
second edition Walpole defines his work as “an attempt to blend the two kinds of
romance, the ancient and the modern” (xxx), a union of two seemingly unmixable
things. 1
Hogle notes that
the Gothic has frequently displayed generic instability, a visible and unresolved
conflict between retrograde and progressive discourses, from aristocratic and
middle-class ideologies to alchemy and modern science . . . that prevents its
monsters and ghosts from reconciling their tensions between death-seeking and
life-affirming tendencies. (29-30)
Often, incest is used to do the same things; in literary works it can represent confusion,
ambiguity, and transgression, in much the same way that the Gothic conventions do. The
1 Compare this to the description of tragicomedy as a “mungrell mixture” of two competing and seemingly
incompatible varieties of drama a monster wholly unknown to antiquity. . . .to join these two Copies of
Nature together [is] monstrous and shocking” (Maguire 1). The idea of monstrosity and the unnatural, of
the mingling of things which ought to be kept separate, belongs also to the definition of incest.