Science, Natural Law, and Unwitting Sibling Incest in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Science, N atural Law, andonmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA U nw itting Sibling Incest in Eighteenth-C entury Literature W . D A N IE L W IL S O N Two y oung pe ople fall in love , pe rhaps ge t marrie d ,pe rhaps have a child— and at some point along the way ,the yd iscove r that the yare b rothe r and siste rwho had b e e n b roughtup se parate ly . Aficionad osof e ighte e nthce nturylite raturewill prob ab ly b efamiliar with variations of this motif, since it se e msto have intrigue dsome of the b e stmind sof the age .It occurs in almost thirty works from D. C. von Lohenstein's A rm inius (1689) to Schillers Bride of M essina (1803), works as celebrated as Drydens D on Sebastian and Defoe's M oll Flanders, Lessing's N athan the W ise and Goe­ the's W ilhelm M eisters Apprenticeship, Diderot's Le Fils naturel and Vol­ taire's M ahom et, not to mention many lesser lights and parodistic varia­ tions in works like Fielding's Joseph A ndrew s and Matthew Lewis' The M onk.11 can deal with most of these works and with the various aspects of the motif — philosophical, theological, psychological, etc.— only in a fulllength study; in the following pages I shall restrict myself to the fascina­ tion of a few literary and philosophical writers with the scientific and philosophical-scientific facet of the problem of incest. The analysis is thus not meant to provide a global interpretation of the works under considera­ tion, but to elucidate sometimes fruitful, sometimes disadvantageous cross­ currents between literary production and scientific-philosophical inquiry. First, however, we must take a look at modern findings on the origins 249 250 / WILSON of incest avoidance in order to appreciate more fully the problems faced by the eighteenth century. Perhaps surprisingly, the issue has only recently begun to approach a definitive solution, probably because the taboo plays such a central role in competing interpretations of man — psychoanalytic, anthropological, and sociobiological. At the end of the nineteenth century biological theories sought to explain the incest taboo on the basis of presumed deleterious effects of close inbreeding, but in the wake of a widespread dissatisfaction with “reductionist" explanations for human behavior, the biological the­ ory was soon dismissed in favor of models from the social sciences? At this stage, biologists could not call on the infant field of genetics to bolster their model. Of the various other explanations which then arose, only two are still viable today for social scientists. The first is Bronislaw Malin­ owski's suggestion that "incest would mean the upsetting of age distinc­ tions, the mixing up of generations, the disorganization of sentiments, and a violent exchange of roles at a time when the family is the most important educational medium."3 The other approach, dubbed the "alli­ ance theory," has attained the status of "the anthropological party line"4 under the influence of Claude Levi-Strauss.5 It states that the rule of ex­ ogamy strengthens the cultural and economic status of the family through the exchange of wives. Both these theories, however, have begun to be viewed more as descriptions of later justifications or secondary benefits of incest avoidance rather than of its original cause, because the biological theory has been reasserted with new cogency since the 1960s. It now ap­ pears indisputable that inbreeding leads to a wide range of defects in off­ spring through the manifestation of traits carried by recessive gene pairs; but equally decisive in terms of the strictly understood origin of incest avoidance is the fact that outbreeding increases the genetic variety essen­ tial to evolutionary survival.6 Most recently, strong evidence has suggested a plausible mechanism through which this biologically advantageous in­ cest avoidance is made probable in siblings:7 human beings apparently have an innate "disinclination to be erotically aroused" by others (whether siblings or not) with whom they have been brought up in intimate physical contact until about the sixth year.8 Edward Westermarck first presented this idea to the scientific community in 1891,9 although, as...