Incestuous Relationships: Mansfield Park Revisited

Incestuous Relationships: Mansfield Park Revisited Glenda A. Hudson Anumber of Jane Austen's novels end widi marriages that have incestuous overtones. In Emma the heroine marries her brodier-in-law, Mr Knightley, who throughout much of the novel shares a fraternal relationship with her. In Sense and Sensibility Elinor, like Emma, marries her brother-in-law, Edward Ferrars, and Colonel Brandon tells Elinor of his desire to marry Eliza Williams, a sister-in-law brought up as his sister. But the most prominent incestuous relationship of Austen's fiction appears in Mansfield Park, where the first cousins, Fanny and Edmund, have been brought up as brother and sister. Jane Austen's sister Cassandra attempted to persuade her to change die outcome of Mansfield Park. According to Cassandra, Austen's failure to allow Henry Crawford to marry Fanny, and Fanny's cousin Edmund to marry Mary Crawford, constituted a major flaw in the work.1 But clearly Cassandra Austen's assessment, like that of many critics, overlooks or fails to appreciate the significance of the incestuous marriage of the cousins, Fanny and Edmund. In order to define the nature of incest in these novels, it is necessary to consider not only the powerful fraternal relationships between these characters but also society's conception of the relationships. In Totem and Taboo Freud comments on the prohibition of incest in ancient tribes: Exogamy linked wim me totem effects more (and therefore aims at more) than the prevention of incest with a man's momer and sisters. It makes sexual in1 See Elizabeth Jenkins, Address to the General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society (Reportfor the Year 1980), p. 26. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 1, October 1991 54 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION tercourse impossible for a man with all me women of his own clan (that is to say with a number of women who are not his blood-relatives) by treating mem all as though mey were his blood-relatives. It is difficult at first sight to see me psychological justification for mis very extensive restriction, which goes far beyond anything comparable among civilised peoples. It may be gathered from mis, however, mat the part played by the totem as common ancestor is taken very seriously. All those who are descended from the totem are bloodrelations . They form a single family, and within that family even the most distant degree of kinship is regarded as an absolute hindrance to sexual intercourse.2 Freud stresses the great sensitivity of the tribe to incest, and the way in which it replaces blood relationships with "totem kinship." He goes on to suggest that the linguistic usage in totemic communities is also relevant to a consideration of incest, since the terms used by members of me tribe to refer to each otiier do not suggest a relation between two individuals so much as a relation between an individual and a group. Thus, a man might use the word "sister" not only for his blood sister but also for all the other women who may be considered his sisters according to tribal law. In this way, the kinship terms used by tribal members do not necessarily betoken any consanguinity but instead designate social rather than blood relationships.3 Although such extensive taboos do not exist in civilized society, it is nonedieless clear that in Austen's time some of these prohibitions, whether conscious or unconscious, existed in an attenuated form. In eighteentii-century England marriage between first cousins, though permitted , was often discouraged. At least to some extent, middle-class and aristocratic families were aware of die taboo. In Austen's novels the lingering and attenuated taboo surfaces, for example, when near the beginning oíMansfield Park Mrs Norris says that it is "morally impossible" for Fanny to marry Edmund.4 And marriage between close affines, such as in-laws and step-siblings, was also discouraged and even disapproved of by Austen's society, since die individuals involved had previously 2 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950), pp. 5-e. 3 Freud, pp. 5-7. See also J.G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London: Macmillan, 1910) on the universality...