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

135
sexuality, for the Count had been dead not even a full day when the incest occurred. The
absence of the (male) ruler leads to disaster, and the rule of a woman, even over her own
home, quickly has devastating results. It is a clear indictment of female agency and an
implication that without the guiding hand of the patriarch, the family—and by logical
extension the existing social order—quickly falls apart.
The Countess, though genuinely pious and outwardly a paragon of virtue, is an
example of the monstrous female who consumes her own offspring. She is deceptively
dangerous because her role should be to produce and nurture new life, rather than destroy
it. Because of her incestuous consumption of her son’s body the new life she produces
stands outside of any socially acceptable variation of aristocratic lineage. And as she
begets children of incest, so might her daughters do the same. Her children will be
monstrous, as she is. Cohen notes that “the monster is dangerous, a form suspended
between two forms, that threatens to smash distinctions” (274), and the blurring of
boundaries is a thing feared for centuries. Many of Gower’s tales indicated concern
about the distinction between man and beast; Malory’s Questing Beast, also a product of
incest, is the product of “two things that were never intended by God to be mixed”
(Hanks 196). The idea appears in The Duchess of Malfi, as Ferdinand is horrified by the
thought of his sister marrying outside her social class, destroying the boundary between
nobility and serving class. This too threatens to create something new and fearful—
something monstrous. Nobility and commoner, in a hierarchy based on natural order,
were never intended to be mixed, either. Incestuous plot designs such as Manfred’s
pursuit of Isabella in The Castle of Otranto are frightening enough even if they are more