Vol. 15 No. 19 · 7 October 1993
pages 7-8 | 3104 words
The Virtue of Incest
Marina Warner
- Elizabeth’s Glass by Marc Shell
Nebraska, 365 pp, £30.95, July 1993, ISBN 0 8032 4216 6
The romance of Apollonius of Tyre opens with the classic fairy-tale couple: the king and his daughter. Antiochus is powerful, she is beautiful, and of marriageable age – there is no mother. The difference is that, in this variation, she will not leave home to marry a prince, for her father Antiochus ‘began to love her in a way unsuitable for a father ... Since he could not endure the wound in his breast, one day ... he rushed into his daughter’s room and ordered the servants to withdraw ... Spurred on by the frenzy of his lust, he took his daughter’s virginity by force, in spite of her lengthy resistance.’
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 21 · 4 November 1993
From Michael Cotsell
Once again one of your reviewers has made a woefully inept passing remark about the sexual abuse of children, this time Marina Warner, in a piece temptingly entitled ‘The Virtue of Incest’ (LRB, 7 October): ‘incest has become one of the dominant focuses of moral panic, flourishing virulently in fantasy as well as occurring, often tragically, in practice.’ Always tragically, I would assure her, but I suppose by saying that I become a fantasist who has lost his moral cool.
Michael Cotsell
University of Delaware
Vol. 15 No. 22 · 18 November 1993
From Marina Warner
When I wrote that incest occurs ‘often tragically’, I was using my words carefully, contrary to Michael Cotsell’s opinion (Letters, 4 November). There have been survivors of child abuse, and for the sake of the victims themselves, it seems to me important to remember that it is possible to survive, to keep in mind that their story isn’t ineluctably destined to end in tragedy. This isn’t to condone abuse or abusers, but to avoid stigmatising the abused as irrecuperable. The point of medieval romances like that of Apollonius, and of fairy tales like ‘Donkeyskin’ is that they unfold ways of escaping, recovering, making another life – that they offer hope that the incestuous parent may not be all-powerful and indeed fatal to the child.
Marina Warner
London NW5
