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

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Castle of Otranto displays the tensions and contradictions traversing eighteenth century
society’s representations of itself” (53). The theories of George Haggerty in his 1989
Gothic Fiction, Gothic Form and 2006 Queer Gothic focus the scholarly view on the
ways that the Gothic uses sexual matters to both uphold and subvert patriarchy. In her
study of Gothic elements, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick concludes that the Gothic novel (almost) always includes the possibility of
incest, a subject taken up by Ruth Perry in her essay “Incest as Meaning in the Gothic
Novel” (1998) in which she argues that as the family unit became more “nuclear” sexual
danger increased, with incest disruptive of family building and by extension, of societal
growth
This is but a short survey of the work of critics of Gothic literature. They agree
on the use of incest as symptomatic of larger social problems of the age in which the
work was produced. I suggest that reading incest in Walpole’s Gothic novel and play is
best done with an understanding of its long history of usage. The ways incest is used in
literature, like its definition, is adaptive. If incest in medieval texts serves to question
morality and in the early modern time questions the nature of kingship as well as
addressing the problem of enlarging and upwardly mobile non-aristocratic classes, then
incest in Walpole’s works is a family affair, and anxieties over the stability of the family
are evident. Incest in Confessio Amantis and Morte d’Arthur works to demonstrate the
destructive effects of a tyrannical king on his people. The king, as leader of the family of
his kingdom, can be analogized to the patriarch of the nuclear family. Just as tyranny in
the king is disastrous to his people, tyranny in the patriarch is calamitous to his wife and