DOMESTIC PASSION: SISTER-BROTHER INCEST IN FOUR NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELS (AUSTEN, ELIOT, BRONTE, MELVILLE)

In this study I examine a concept of sister-brother incest in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Herman Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. I discuss incest in these novels as an intense domestic affection that prevents the successful formation of emotional ties outside the family. The intense domesticity of these relationships reveals the dark side of the nineteenth-century exaltation of the family. As the notions of home as a refuge from the mercantile and sexual conflicts of the larger sphere and woman as a desexualized angel in the house developed into ideologies, I argue, the family became a center of these ideologies: a shelter from the complexities of adult experience and the locus of non-sexual domestic affection. The consequent privileging of sister-brother love as the ideal affection between women and men tended to trap sister and brother within the home. In these novels I examine this constriction of incestuous sister-brother relationships as an inward- and backward-turning movement demonstrating the inescapability of the family.;As I examine the constrictions of incestuous domestic passion, I discuss a second constraint: the demands of narrative form. I explore this constriction in these novels as the requirement that a plot have a single ending toward which it can be seen to develop, either a happy ending in marriage or a conclusion that reconciles divergent developments of plot. The nature of incestuous love exacerbates the difficulties of meeting this requirement of narrative form. The inward- and backward-turning movement of incestuous sister-brother love blocks the outward-turning movement toward a happy ending in marriage with an outsider. This circularity means that the end of incestuous relationships is present in their beginning; a conclusion that gives full value to the emotional intensity of these relationships yet moves beyond their beginnings is the problem posed by the requirement that an ending assign a single meaning to multiple plot developments. As they demonstrate familial inescapability, incestuous constrictions in these novels both attest to and challenge the constraints of narrative form.