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

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incestuous. When she vows to tell her story he cuts out her tongue whereupon she
weaves her story into a tapestry and sends it to her sister, Procne. In retaliation and rage
Procne kills Tereus’s son and feed the boy to him. In close proximity to this tale is the
story of Jason and his wife Medea, who slays their sons in front of his eyes when he
abandons her for Creusa. The murder of a child is metaphorically incestuous as the
parent devours his offspring, unkyndely murdering himself. Incest is figured as
symptomatic of an “unrestrained or monstrous appetite” (McAvoy and Walters 29). In
the incest tales in Confessio Amantis, incest represents monstrous appetite: the monstrous
mother, such as the Sultaness who murders rather than nurtures her son because she is
enraged over being replaced in her son’s life; the narcissistic self-love of Eolus who, in
his rage over losing control over his daughter’s body—and sexuality—consumed her
through death; and the unnatural (and fearsome) female sexual desire as seen through the
actions of Sultaness, Domilde, and Medea. Parent-child incest is a form of unnatural
consumption, and these tales are linked to the father-daughter incest in the Tale of
Apollonius in book eight, in which the riddle posed by Antiochus includes the phrase “I
ete / And have it noght forbore” the body of the mother. It also begins the trend of tales
notable for their overt incestuous content. Whereas earlier incest tales were those of
incest implied or averted, the later tales are usually of incest committed, and linked to
incest is violence and destruction.
The tales of avarice in the fifth book are followed in the sixth by tales of gluttony
as if to underscore the idea that unnatural desire and monstrous appetite are symptomatic
of improper behavior by man or king. Self-control and self-government are imperatives