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MARY CHAPMAN The Masochistic Pleasures of the Gothic Paternal Incest in Alcott's "A Marble Woman" Women are encouraged to commit incest as a way of life.... As opposed to marrying our fathers, we marry men like our fathers . . . men who are older than us, have more money than us, more power than us, are taller than us ... our fathers. PHYLLIS CHESLER, "Rape and Psychotherapy" Locating the emergence ofthe gothic in the period ofthe American and French Revolutions, many scholars have remarked on the ways in which the gothic asserts equality in the face of domination, most noticeably in its attention to marginalized or dominated groups such as women, colonials, and homosexuals.1 Gothic fiction has been described as "fundamental[ly] subversiv [e]," as "a movement toward freedom and away from the control ofdiscipline," as "a liberated and liberating alternative to the conventional novel," and as a mode that allows the "shattering of sexual [and] social roles."2 Contradictory to this gothic desire for subversion, however, is the desire for domination: according to theorists of the gothic, protagonists and readers of gothic texts both crave "the delights of terror" (Heller I) and the "pain [that] gives rise to delight" (Burke 147), which Brendan Hennessy has claimed are "as much part ofhuman nature as the need to laugh" (7). This pleasure in being dominated, whether by supernatural or earthly powers, complicates the subversive potential of the gothic. r84 GOTH ICC UR RENT S IN W 0 M EN'S WRI TIN G This tension, rendered politically as a tension between subversion and domination, is rendered erotically as a tension between a woman's desire for romantic equality and her longing for masochistic subordination to another, especially in the subgenre known as "female gothic." Claims for the subversiveness of female gothic have been common among feminist critics like Kate Ellis, who argues that the female gothic asserts the "validity of female rebellion against an aristocratic father" (57). Casting off paternal authority, most often by marrying someone other than the father's choice, is symptomatic ofwomen's desire for subversion in the gothic novel. However, like the gothic reader who craves the "delights of terror," the gothic heroine often also locates pleasure precisely in the unwanted, the "terror-inflected Richardsonian courtship," and the painful initiation into patriarchal culture (Masse I I, I). The subversiveness of the female gothic, then, is often compromised by the heroine's masochistic desire for a lover who dominates her, whether this man is the woman's father or a lover who merges with this figure. In many ways, the struggle between a young woman's desire for autonomy and her desire for her tyrannical father, as repre""sented in the paternal incest tale, is paradigmatic of the tension between the desires for subversion and domination I have outlined as symptomatic of the gothic. Incest, both sibling and paternal , has been a stock theme of American gothic literature from the fiction of the early republic to contemporary fiction.3 Leslie Fiedler claims the "secret sin" of the gothic is the "incest of brother and sister-daughter bred out of an original incest of mother-son" (129); Louis Gross similarly claims incest in American gothic fiction is "primarily brother-sister pairings" (53). Although there are far fewer scenes of paternal incest, American gothic texts are often structured by titillating plots which threaten it, such as the standard plot ofthe early American novel in which the "lascivious career ofan older man is halted when he seduces a poor young woman who proves to be his cast off daughter" (Dalke 189), or they gesture toward this taboo without being able to represent it openly. For example, Bill Christophersen reads Brockden Brown's Ormond (1799) as a veiled 18.188.20.56] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 00:29 GMT) INCEST IN ALCOTT'S "A MARBLE WOMAN" 185 "fable of incest" (57), and in slave narratives, a form influenced by the gothic, the most common abuse recounted is women's rape by their masters/fathers. That readers experience pleasure reading about paternal incest and that gothic heroines often desire the father while simultaneously fearing him are two linked manifestations of the masochism of the gothic: just as the reader 's desire for the freedom of the protagonist with whom she identifies is compromised by her love of terror, the female protagonist 's own emergent autonomy is threatened by her erotic ties to her father. This essay will explore the masochistic pleasures ofthe gothic...

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