Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression

Gothic incest provides the first book-length study of incest in the genre. It challenges dominant critical accounts about gender and sexuality in Gothic literature of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period by revealing the complexities of the pervasive, yet largely neglected, incest thematic. DiPlacidi argues that Gothic writers negotiated, resisted and reimagined the power structures of their contemporary society through permutations of desire between kin.

Interdisciplinary analyses of texts from 1764 to 1847 by authors including Emily Brontë, Eliza Parsons, Ann Radcliffe and Eleanor Sleath are underpinned by explorations of their cultural, historical, literary and social contexts. Breaking with the scholarly tendency to focus most intently on violent incest within a Female Gothic or its Male Gothic counterpart, Gothic incest is structured around readings of incest within father-daughter, sibling, mother-son, cousin and uncle-niece bonds, and the sexual, social and legal anxieties articulated therein. It shows that writers of the Gothic took up the theme of incest to explore the consequences of the laws of coverture and primogeniture; abuses of institutionalised power; the elasticity of definitions of the family; and women’s cultural and legal subjugation to male authority. DiPlacidi reveals that through representations of incestuous desires, Gothic writers modelled alternative agencies, sexualities and family structures that are as important today as they were to the writers of the Gothic.

Jenny DiPlacidi is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Romanticism at the University of Kent