UC Santa Cruz

My dissertation argues that the prohibition of incest is as much a prohibition of speech as it is a prohibition of behavior and that the suffering incest inflicts on survivors involves a crisis of representation that literary arts and literary criticism may help us understand. I consider figurations of incestuous abuse in the early 1970s United States, a historical moment when the Women’s Liberation Movement had broken the silence on various forms of violence against women, enabling a public discussion of incestuous abuse more far-reaching than ever before. Through close-readings of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (1970), Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown (1974), Anne Sexton’s poetry, her play Mercy Street (1969), and records of Sexton’s therapy sessions with psychiatrist Martin Orne, I conclude that the incest survivors in these works are doubly victimized by incest and the prohibition of incest – by a sexual assault and by a system of social relations that renders them blameworthy for undermining normative modes of kinship. I apply insights from anthropology, feminist studies, phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralist literary theory, and clinical research on family violence to argue that kinship – culturally prescribed relations within families and between families – loses its integrity in the face of incestuous violence and that this loss of integrity helps account for incest’s injurious unspeakability.