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

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And when he knelt, weeping, to ask his mother’s forgiveness, he took her hand, but she
“snatch’d it back with horror” (II.2.47) in a repudiation of the physical attraction she had
felt for her son. The medieval idea of kynde, of human action, freed from the constraints
of reason, based upon what is normal and natural to do, survives into the eighteenth
century, but adapts to the time. Cox finds that in the play, religion acts to regulate
sexuality. Morality is imposed on natural desires that may be “true to nature but frowned
on by society” (144). Kynde had been used by Gower and other earlier writers to try to
explain incestuous attraction as one of “like calls to like.” In other words, it is not
shocking to discover that a father is attracted to his daughter, or a brother to his sister. Of
course, when the attraction is physically acted upon, that is a cause for shock and moral
outrage. The Countess gave in to a ‘kynde’ attraction to her son, who looked so much
like his father, and who lived after his father died. It is a gender reversal of the many
medieval tales in which the father became attracted to his daughter only after the mother
died. By this definition it is easy to see why Edmund was immediately attracted to his
sister-daughter. She is familiar and indeed, she reminds him of his mother, who
withdrew her love from him years ago.
As the play opens, Edmund has returned home to claim his inheritance and
ownership of the castle, continuing the patriarchal line of succession. However, incest
has trumped the line. Incest blocks the ability of Edmund to continue the family line, as
his wife is in fact his sister and daughter. By the end of the play the castle and its
associated wealth is subsumed by the church and the family is no more. In contrast, in
The Castle of Otranto, Manfred’s incestuous intent blocks the inheritance of the castle by