The Incest Plot: Marriage, Closure, and the Novel's Endogamy

This essay considers incest as the marriage plot's doppëlganger. Removing eligible partners from circulation in courtship, incest scandalizes the marriage plot's heteronormative logic. In lieu of sociable outcomes, incest offers enclosure and insularity, aspects of plot that the essay takes up in a formalist line of inquiry. Since incest privileges efficiency over teleology, it might be considered plot at its most "perfect," a designation Coleridge bestowed on Oedipus Rex and Tom Jones, whose narrative economy cast incest as a logical end of dramatic unity. Threatening narrative collapse in a scandal of sameness, incest in the novel is, as Peter Brooks has written, "a passion interdicted because its fulfillment would be too perfect." Picking up on the oft-noted ubiquity of incest in the eighteenth-century novel in works from Aphra Behn to Ann Radcliffe, the essay turns to examples of ersatz incest in Henry Fielding and Jane Austen to reveal how the incest plot replicates and exaggerates the closure offered by the marriage plot in order to expose its mechanics.