Sibling Incest
The Pervasive Horror Trope I Can't Unsee
Crimson Peak (2015)
As someone who has recently hopped on the “seasonal reading” bandwagon, I have been tailoring my media consumption this October for spooky season. And to my genuine surprise, my selection has strangely circled around the theme of sibling incest. Since I’m currently teaching John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the preponderance of this trope in other places has been striking — whether that be the film Crimson Peak (2015), which my partner and I recently watched in the run up to Halloween, or Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Speaking to a student in office hours about Ford’s play, without any prompting from me, she noted that this play felt very much like a contemporary horror film. Which, of course, begs the following question: why is sibling incest so scary?
I have made the case in my book that the sibling incest trope highlights the problematic logics of endogamy (marrying within one’s class/station or social group). And, of course, incest is the logical conclusion for this practice. As one of my students queried just the other day: weren’t the royals committing incest all the time? The answer, at least using our own definition of what constitutes incest, is yes. The preoccupation with maintaining royal bloodlines meant that there was a limit to how much exogamy (marrying out) that one could do. Thus “kissing cousins” was somewhat common practice. The sibling incest trope, I maintain, merely underlines the troubling consequences of maintaining power and privilege within the hands of a select few.
While I still believe this to be true, especially in an early modern context, I’ve been playing around with how this trope might intersect with the discourses of romantic love. As my partner/co-author and I have started to outline here, romantic love is myopic, entirely fixated on the beloved and distracting the lover from other relationships or pursuits. And at first glance, this seems to resemble an incestuous impulse. Yet for romance this myopic gaze nevertheless views the beloved as the key to transcendence of some sort: either an escape from our mundane, quotidian existence or some experience of the world better than anything else one could hope for. It thus points outward, towards some escape from our present reality.
So maybe the terror of sibling incest pertains to its retreat inward, reflecting a constitutional aversion to searching beyond the known and familiar. It’s not a coincidence that these narratives of sibling incest tend to feature claustrophobic atmospheres. In both Poe’s “Usher” and del Toro’s Crimson Peak, the protagonists are unable to leave the premisis. Thus romance, which usually thrives in contexts that are either taboo or forbidden, are largely absent from these stories. This erotic/sexual energy turned towards an overly familiar beloved does not inspire, but rather repels and disgusts. For true romance, it seems, we at least need the promise of something more, something beyond or outside.