Daddy's Girl: Incest in Life and Literature

Incest is all right as long as

you keep it in the family.

Incest is portrayed in the Bible and in Greek tragedies. In Genesis 19:32-36, Lot's daughters, alone with him in a remote mountain cave and with no other available men, got him drunk and had sex with him “to preserve the seed of our father.” The aged Lot had an extraordinary erection while drunk and asleep, and never realized what was happening to him. Both daughters became pregnant, gave birth to sons, and created new dynasties. Though incest was explicitly forbidden in Leviticus 20:17, the daughters were not punished for the self-sacrificial act that preserved their race. The Greeks, by contrast, considered incest an unforgivable sin. In Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Oedipus fulfills the oracle's fatal prophecy by unintentionally killing his royal father and sleeping with his mother, Jocasta. When they discover the truth, she hangs herself and he gouges out his own eyes—terrible punishments for violating the taboo and polluting not only the guilty man but also his entire city.

In the 20th century, though some of the evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive, four artists and writers seem to have had incestuous relations. The English sculptor Eric Gill, the most depraved and shameless example, kept detailed records of serial rape with his sisters and daughters. The American photographer Diane Arbus had sex with her brother throughout her life. The American novelist Djuna Barnes engaged in a rare form of incest with her grandmother, and was raped by her father or his surrogate. The English novelist Lawrence Durrell raped his daughter. In their literary work, the Jacobean

dramatist John Ford, Thomas Mann, Jean Cocteau, and Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Barnes and Durrell, either described incest or suggested it with dark hints and allusions. All these works portray the conflict between incestuous desires and moral law.

Some of the novels justify the artist's Nietzschean right to find inspiration by defying s