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Chapter 2. Theology
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Chapter Theology In the Dutch Reformed minister Philip Milledoler asked, ‘‘Is it lawful for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister?’’ Noting this was ‘‘a question which may appear at first sight to be of minor importance,’’ Milledoler argued that ‘‘the minor importance of this subject . . . is . . . not real; for if we view it in its bearing upon the happiness of individuals—upon the purity of the church and upon the best interests of the community at large, we shall see that it involves consequences of deep, if not of vital importance to mankind . . . for if such marriage be, as has been represented, INCEST, then they who enter into it, or in any way allow, encourage, or abet it, assume a position which no creature can assume without guilt and peril.’’ As Milledoler suggests, and as many other theologians in the early republic attested, such marriages indexed anxieties over desire, marriage, family, and kinship, all of which, when unregulated, tended toward incest—a symptom and signifier of apocalyptic moral decay.1 Milledoler’s text was published at the tail end of a seventy-year public theological discourse in the United States on marriage with a deceased wife’s sister that was generally referred to as ‘‘the marriage question.’’ The question was whether marriage with a deceased wife’s sister was incest; however, the marriage question taken as a whole was a broad inquiry into the force and function of the Levitical incest prohibitions. While Presbyterians dominated the debate, most of the older denominations in the United States—Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, and Episcopal—also contributed . The marriage question was not articulated along denominational lines, and it often manifested itself as an intradenominational quarrel. On the one hand, this was prompted by the growing disjunction between religious and civil incest laws. Once grounded in the Levitical prohibitions, state incest laws began to diverge from their biblical bases in the s. On Theology the other hand, the marriage question was an arcane exegesis on the force of Levitical law and the legitimacy of biblical interpretations. In this sense, the marriage question was often an abstract controversy over legal interpretation and acceptable translation of the Bible. Theologians and ministers like the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards, Jr., the Presbyterian James Finley, and John Henry Livingston of the Dutch Reformed Church spilled a great deal of ink in an effort to prove or disprove the existence of a transhistorical, universal, moral law of incest, applicable at all times and in all places and derived from the word of God. Stories like those of Sawney Beane, Richard Jennings, and Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart figured the incestuous subject of liberalism as operating outside the reaches of the law—Beane and Jennings, quite self-consciously, transgressed laws in following their own desires while Froissart’s accidental incest revealed the limits of nationally circumscribed laws of kinship and incest to regulate the transnational circulation of bodies. Yet, much of the discourse of incest in this period articulated some form of the incest prohibition with both universal and contemporary force. If the narratives of the previous chapter staged the incestuous subject of liberalism as both criminal and perversely normative, this and the following chapter explore intertwined but distinct attempts to articulate an incest prohibition—theological or legal—that could regulate liberalism’s incestuous subject. The marriage question, then, was never simply an arcane doctrinal debate as participants to the controversy worked through the problematic conjunctions of kinship and sexuality, foundational laws and history. The marriage question leads us into a world where the meaning of incest and its prohibition were never clear, forcing a reconceptualization of incest. Normally figured as a violent transgression of either domestic order or heredity, incest in this case was consensual, affective, and, in the case of its titular object—the deceased wife’s sister—affinal (between relations by marriage) rather than consanguine (between relations by blood). Indeed, as an exploration of the marriage question makes clear, an understanding of the social, cultural, and political functions of the incest prohibition, and the historical conditions of its construction, must exist independent of sociobiological claims that humans possess a natural instinct to avoid incest in order to perpetuate the species. Yet it also problematizes cultural explanations of the incest prohibition, which in their anthropological and psychoanalytic formations, tend to return to the fantasmatic origins of the taboo.2 The marriage question, operating outside the logic of consanguinity and [3.91.19.28] Project MUSE (2024-03-28...