Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 "Sometimes I call my lady mama, just to feel at home for a while".  A song
by Jude

   Incest in Fiction

   Incest is supposed to be the ultimate inhibition, universally recognized
and unconsciously observed.  The quantity of incest fiction in archives
like ASSTR is staggering.  Incest is a significant kink element in
pornography but serious literature also covers the subject frequently.  It
has been a powerful stimulus to our individual and collective imagination.
It has made us shiver and wonder.  After centuries of restraint, incest is
finally a hit.  Many novels insinuate relationships between siblings, and
between parent-child.

   It is implied sometimes that lying with a near relative ends in tragedy
but according to Dr.  Paul Gebhardm director of the Institute for Sex
Research in Bloomington, Ind.  "I'm having a hard time recalling any
traumatic effects at all.  I certainly can't recall any form among the
brother-sister participants, and I can't put my finger on any among the
parent-child participants."

   Some of the literature focus on the incest between father and daughter
but problem with this type of relation is that it is often in the category
of non-consensual.  On the contrary the incest between mother and son is
mostly consensual.  Indeed, the taboo on sexual relations between mother
and son is so deep, so all-pervasive, that many people, if asked where it
had originated, would reply that it was simply "natural".

   Incest is a major element of the Sophocles play Oedipus the King, based
on the story from Greek mythology, in which the title character unknowingly
kills his father and marries his mother.  This act came to great prominence
in the 20th century with Freud's analysis of the Oedipus complex as lying
beneath the psychology of all men.

   In many instances the relation occurs because the son becomes a
substitute for the non-existent father.  Many novels deal with the theme of
mom-son incest.  Given below are names and plot summaries of the some.



   [PENDENNIS by William Makepeace Thackeray]

   In the classic 19th century novel, PENDENNIS, the theme of incest is
strongly evident.  Helen Pendennis, mother of the main character Arthur,
seems to lust after her own son.  Helen Pendennis, a lonely but sexually
alluring widow, is very much aware that the object of her lust is her own
son.  She broods over her son's affairs, even throwing one young lady into
the street because of her interest in the son.  "I have no doubt there is a
sexual jealousy on the mother's part, and a secret pang," Thackeray writes
in PENDENNIS.

   Helen Pendennis is several times described as being in her son's bed. 
She is nursing him through an illness, "with her Bible in her lap." In the
introduction to the book, John Sutherland insists that while the "holy book
is significant" in this scene, "so is the part of the body it is covering."
He also points out that "Helen posts herself by Arthur's bed, less a nurse
than a virtuous dragon."



   [FLESH AND BLOOD by Pete Hamill.]

   Flesh & Blood describes the developing career of a talented heavyweight
- Bobby Fallon, who begins training as a boxer in prison, where he's doing
a two-year stint for assaulting a cop.  While in the prison boxing program,
he's discovered by Gus Caputo, a trainer at a gym on the outside, who sees
the makings of a champion in Fallon.  Outwardly tough and unmovable, Bobby
is tortured with memories of his miserable childhood, which included an
incestuous episode with his mother.

   Boxing and his Mom are really all that Bobby's got, his father, Jack,
having abandoned the family when Bobby was just five years old.  But Kate
never divorced Jack, never entirely let him go, and seeks him out
sporadically, a fact Bobby didn't learn until he was 11.  Bobby is obsessed
with both Jack and Kate.  He loves Kate to the point of wanting to takes
Jack's place in her life, but at some level hungers to know Jack, too, or
at least the part of Jack that is also part of him.  Kate, who sees her
husband in her son, is torn between her own compulsions to substitute her
son for the usually-absent Jack and the knowledge that fulfilling her
desires will ultimately devastate her son.  He has never had an intensely
loving relationship with any woman other than his mother.  According to the
catalogue copy, theirs is "a love affair that readers will never forget."



   [THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE by Richard Condon]

   The novel portrays incest between Eleanor Iselin and her son Raymond and
refers to earlier incest between Eleanor and her own father.  The central
concept of the novel is that (Raymond Shaw) the son of a prominent,
right-wing political family has been brainwashed as an unwitting assassin
for an international Communist conspiracy.  Shaw's mother, Mrs.  Eleanor
Iselin, is the driving force behind her husband, Shaw's step-father,
Senator John Yerkes Iselin, a bombastic demagogue in the style of Joseph
McCarthy, who is dismissed by most people as a fool.  However, unknown to
everyone including Raymond, the Iselins are actually Communist agents with
a plan intended to take them all the way to the White House.  His mother is
actually the American "operative" for whom Raymond is to affect the
operation's final step.  In the novel, Mrs.  Iselin uses her son's
brainwashing to have sex with him before the climax.

   [PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN DROWNING, the only novel published by Charles
Perry]

   The novel takes place in the slums of Brooklyn during the Great
Depression, and follows the narrator, Harry Odum, from his early childhood
to his death.  His father, Hap, abandons the family, leaving Harold to be
raised by his mother, Kate.  Harold falls in with his friends from the
neighborhoods, who take him along to participate in petty crime.  He soon
joins up with "Bug", the neighborhood kingpin, and moves his way up through
the local crime syndicate.  He eventually becomes the neighborhood mob's
killer for hire.  Meanwhile, Kate spirals deeper into alcoholism and mental
illness, and grows ever more possessive of her son.  Through it all, the
only person Harold feels any love for is his mother; he develops an Oedipal
complex and an inability to sexually relate to anyone without resorting to
his alter-ego, Madden.  In the guise of this other self, he rapes a local
girl, Iris, with whom he later falls in love.

   Harold attempts a relationship with Iris, but Kate threatens her away
during a family dinner.  The next day, Harold flies into a psychotic rage
and rapes his own mother, who commits suicide.  A dazed, traumatized Harold
then goes for a ride with some of his partners-in-crime who, fearing his
testimony to a police investigation, shoot him dead.



   [SAVAG GRACE by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson.]

   A fascinating book told in a long series of interviews with various
people who knew the mother and son at differing points.  It's a page-turner
that could make a reader from the most dysfunctional family think, "Oh,
mine was normal." The story is based on the true story of the
dysfunctional, incestuous relationship between heiress and socialite
Barbara Daly Baekeland and her son, Antony.

   Savage Grace is the saga of Brooks Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite
plastics fortune.  As the family fortune begins to decrease after years of
wealth, Brooks marries Barbara, who desires to mingle in the highest social
circles.  They have a child, Tony, who is homosexual.  Tony grows up to
kill Barbara, in part because Barbara takes a personal interest in "curing"
her son of his orientation.



   [JOSEY ROSE: A Novel Jane Wood]

   The 11-year-old eponymous hero lives with his father, Willie, whose
out-of-control alcoholic rages lead him to mistreat everything he lays eyes
on.  In addition to his father's anger, Josey's childhood is filled with
mysteries.  Is his long-absent mother dead or alive?  Who is the beautiful
Lily, whom Josey comes to love, who lives in a stone chapel in the woods
and must, like Josey, bear Willie's physical and emotional abuse?  As Josey
gradually realizes his mysterious connection to Lily is that of Mom-son, he
still wants to be with her in a "lovers" way.



   ["The Crime of Olga Arbyelina" by Andrei Makine.]

   Olga Arbyelina is a princess who fled Russia during the revolution; now
she lives in a town near Paris tending to her hemophiliac son, keeping
ghosts at bay--an existence hollowed out by history.  The town gossips
obsess over her, making her into the prime character in their "game of a
thousand voices." They "had a fleeting dream of figuring in a poignant
melodrama called The Exiled Princess." When she is found lying next to a
dead man on the local riverbank, her fame only increases.

   Olga's husband, a swashbuckling poet, left her in 1939, when their
hemophiliac son was seven.  Since then Olga has lived with her frail son
among the other Russian exiles in Villiers-la-For?t.  In 1946, Olga
discovers she's pregnant, and travels to Paris for an abortion.  Though she
has a lover, the pregnancy puzzles her, since its timing doesn't match his
visits.  One day she spots her teenage son shaking something into the
flower infusion she drinks before bedtime, and understanding floods her: he
has been drugging her in order to enter her bed.  Tormented by her fears
for his future (he is sure to die young), and by dread of her own old age,
she decides to let him continue his incestuous practice, pretending
continued ignorance during the day, and feigning unconsciousness at night
during his lovemaking.





   [GARDEN OF SAND by Earl Thompson.]

   "A Garden of Sand" is an epic novel of one boy's journey through the
depression as well as coping within the ultimate dysfunctional family. 
Jack, the protagonist of A Garden of Sand, is raised by his maternal
grandparents in Wichita after his father's death.  His grandfather is a
proud, populist farmer on the outskirts of Wichita who loses his farm in
the depression of the 1930's and moves into the city.  Jack's mother
becomes a prostitute, and Jack becomes the receiver of fisticuffs from his
mother's thug boyfriend Bill, and the cynosure of store detectives' eyes.

   The sexually precocious Jack is horny even as an infant and, once he
gets a peek at his gorgeous mother who comes to reclaim him when he is
eight ("Blood pounded in his head...the tip of his rigid little thing,
sticking straight out, hurting in its hardness..."), his entire existence
focuses on seducing her--which he does, several times before puberty,
gradually casting Wilma whose "long legs seemed to grow right out of her
high-heels" in the dual roles of mother and mistress.  Thompson manages to
make this incestuous relationship--the novel's dramatic core--credible,
strangely inoffensive, somehow even touching, and fueled by an ambivalent
mixture of sin and defiance.

   "Are you mad at me?" Jacky asked afterwards.

   She shook her head no.  "Let me get up," she said, trying to rise.  She
opened her eyes and for the first time looked at the face near hers.  She
had borne him, this strange, hard, skinny boy with a look in his eyes she
had known since he was only a few months old.  She brushed back the damp
hair that stuck to his brow.  "This is crazy.  You know that?"



   [Little Oscar by Carmen Anthony Fiore]

   Although incest has been masterfully confronted in fiction, from Iris
Murdoch's `A Severed Head' to Earl Thompson's `A Garden of Sand', such is
hardly the case here.  Writing in graphic and frequently illiterate detail,
Fiore has produced a sordid account of a mother and son bound together in
squalor.  She's white; his black father died before he was born.  She's a
whore with a drug and alcohol problem, and he's growing up a tough street
kid.  Her boyfriends get too rough?  Hey, no problem: the kid kills them
off one by one so he can have Mom all to himself.  Little Oscar is a boy
with a man's perspective.  He will protect his mother at all costs; from
her loser man friends to the rough pimp seeking control of her in order to
keep her safe and well--for himself.  Even her bigoted, tight-ass farmer
parents, who have hurt her and rejected her and him from the very
beginning, end up a target of his youthful determination and wrath.  The
author, a former social worker (and, believe it or not, elementary school
teacher), offers a veneer of social commentary throughout so we'll
understand that Little Oscar is a product of his environment.



   [Ma Mere (My Mother) by Georges Bataille.]

   The story revolves around pious, young Pierre (Louis Garrel) who has
just left a Catholic boarding school to live with his wealthy parents at
their villa on the island of Gran Canaria.  Pierre's father dies, leaving
his mother, Hélène to care for him.  Pierre soon learns, however, of the
depraved nature of his parents.

   While in a restaurant, his mother reveals to him that she has been
unfaithful to her husband many times with his knowledge and feels no shame
about it.  She then insists that her son accept her promiscuous ways.  Soon
after this, Pierre finds a closet full of his father's pornography.  His
reaction is to furiously masturbate and then to urinate on the magazine
pages.

   Hélène encourages her uninhibited sex buddy, Réa, to take her son's
virginity.  She does so but in public and on a concrete floor at Gran
Canaria's Yumbo Centrum, a popular shopping and nightlife complex.  Hélène
looks on longingly as the partially clothed couple copulates with passersby
raising no objections.  Afterward, Hélène includes her son in an orgy with
her friends, including Hansi, a sweet-faced young woman who later becomes
Pierre's girlfriend.  After the orgy, Hélène decides that she must leave
her son to travel.  While saying goodbye to Pierre, she implies that
something taboo has happened between them and that she must leave to
prevent it from happening again.

   Upon Hélène's departure, Hansi enters Pierre's life as a friend.  She
admits befriending Pierre at Hélène's encouragement but denies receiving a
fee from her.  Their friendship blossoms into a tender romance and they
both fall in love.  After an extended absence, Hélène returns home with Réa
in tow because Hélène has finally tired of her sexual adventures.  Upon
arriving, she finds her son and Hansi socializing at a bar near the villa.
Hélène and Pierre greet each other by chatting and gazing into each other's
eyes like lovers while Hansi looks on jealously.  Finally, Hélène invites
her son to sleep with her and he agrees.

   "Wrong is not what we're about to do.  Wrong is wanting to survive it,"

   "You're my mother and my love," Pierre insists as he gazes lovingly at
her.

   Finally Hélène commits suicide in apparent guilt over her relationship
with her son.





   [CHARLOTTE: the final journey of Jane Eyre by D M Thomas]

   Prequels and sequels inspired by the classics are popular with readers
who want to know what happened to their heroes and heroines before, or
after, the existing confines of the narration.  In Charlotte, D M Thomas
entirely re-writes the ending of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

   As every Reader knows, the prim passionate governess married her man. 
By the time, Jane Eyre sat down to pen her story; she has already enjoyed
10 years of married bliss.  The blinded Rochester has regained his sight
sufficiently.  Jane's cousins, Diana and Mary Rivers, have both married
happily and respectably and St John - who took the news of Jane's marriage
to Rochester stoically - has devoted his life to spreading the gospel among
the heathen in India.  Everyone is happy and, after all the emotional
turmoil, most readers are content that they should be so.

   Instead of 10 years of married bliss, Thomas's Jane only enjoyed two. 
When she had written to her cousins Mary and Diana Rivers telling them of
her marriage and inviting them to stay, Edward Rochester surreptitiously
read his wife's letter (with a magnifying glass) and then demanded to know
why she lied to her friends - suggesting he concurred in her invitation
when he would prefer not to have them near.

   Jane is so painfully pure that, even though she relishes the delights of
the marriage bed, she is shocked to discover later that her marriage is, in
fact, unconsummated.  Men doing things with their hands do not produce
babies.  "I was still a virgin...  It was unbearable, to have been so
stupid.  Unbearable, above all, not to have been able to stir the least
desire in my husband." When she tries to discuss his impotence with
Rochester, he rides over the moors to seek consolation with Grace Pool, and
breaks his neck in a riding accident.  Mr.  Rochester later dies, leaving
Jane still a virgin!  Jane goes to Martinique also and fulfills her
fantasies with Mr.  Rochester's black son.





   [Dreams of a Weeping Woman by Leon Whiteson.]

   The novel is told as a fictional memoir, written by Joel Bajamonde
when he is an adult.  It chronicles Joel's total surrender to his Mother,
Leila, and her extraordinary erotic energies and unfulfilled
emotional needs.  Joel's father, Max, is a paraplegic, injured in an
automobile accident when Joel is ten and when Max, an architect is offered
a job up north, the bizarre relationship between Mother and son begins.  As
the sensuality and highly charged sexuality of the Mother came through for
her son, the reader was left realizing that she was not only uncontrollable
but uncontainable in her sexual appetite for her son.  Her husband also
talks about trying to 'dumb down' her sexuality early on in their marriage.
The sexuality was always there, simmering below the surface.  It got
transferred to her son.  Joel's life becomes more complex when he takes up
with a Rory, a fellow student and, quite abruptly, Leila moves off to
France where she was born.  After graduating from college, Joel travels to
Granada to study Spanish, Rory follows him, and then urges him to seek out
and confront his mother in Paris.  He does so...and again becomes entangled
in his mother's mysterious and incestuous powers!!!

   Over the years, the incest became love, the victims became lovers.  We
were left with 2 people who didn't know their roles anymore.  The Mother
ruined them both for other lovers.  The story of incest became a love
story. Leon Whiteson pulled it off by digging deep into the psyche of the
Mother thereby taking the reader on a mesmerizing journey from illicit love
to eternal love.



   [THEATER OF INCEST by Alain Arias-Misson.]

   The story is told by an unnamed protagonist who is seduced by his
mother, which begins a life of incest with various female relatives.  The
three parts are "My Mother My Lover," "My Daughter My Other," and "My
Sister My Sweet Witch." After his tender rape by a housemaid at age four or
five, an incident he suspects inspires his incestuous yearnings, the
narrator revels in the feel of his mother's silk underwear, seeks sex with
older women at age 13, and by 16 is his mother's lover.  Their feverish
relationship lasts for more than two decades, until he beds his daughter
(her mother is absent from the narrative) when she turns 16; he later
leaves his daughter's boudoir for his sister's, and the reunited siblings
settle into sensual middle-age cohabitation in Paris.

   While his perception is that he's identifying with his mother, then his
daughter, then his sister---becoming them by merging his body with
theirs---identity in this world is just another word for alterity, even as
the lines between male and female, and gay and straight, fade into
obscurity.  But in the end the storytelling has far more to do with the
self-obsession that can result from representations of reflexivity,
especially when familial roles become performative ones.  In the end, his
passionate desire is so earnest that the reader is left to wonder if he is
truly a monster or an innocent: who is directing whom?

   ....  'The first true erotic opportunity did come a little later.  I
liked to think it happened when I was thirteen and she thirty-four........
I sneaked out of the cabin which I shared with my sister (my parents so
ignored my burgeoning sexuality that they still put us in the same cabin!)
with my shoes in my hands, and putting my jacket on again but not the bow
tie, hurried back to her cabin, and waited for minutes outside the door,
not daring to breathe, listening for any evidence of her presence inside.
Finally I tapped very lightly, shocked at my own boldness, and heard her
voice call out.  I couldn't move until the door opened a crack and she
stood there, looking surprisingly small without her heels on, wearing a
nightgown that revealed the deep cleavage of her breasts.  She opened the
door wider and pulled me in; I was shaken by the brusqueness of her
gesture, and inside the cabin I just stared down at her as she stood
revealingly, her body outlined in the filmy gown.  Then she took both my
hands and placed them on her breasts.'





   [TABOO by Tom Hathaway]

   The author and his mother set out in 1968 to become "the Che Guevaras of
sex." As he reports in TABOO: A MEMOIR, it began in the psychedelic
aftermath of a Rolling Stones concert when he was 18 and she was 36.  Back
home after the concert, stoned on mescaline, they started dancing to the
Stones' records, and one thing led to another.

   The next day they both felt guilty, but guilt was unhip.  Stopping the
guilt was easier than stopping the sex.  When the world didn't fall in on
them as they had expected, they kept doing it.

   Perhaps to justify their incest, they saw themselves as sexual
subversives working to overthrow patriarchy.  Rather than a crime against
nature, their affair was cultural anarchism in action.

   The mother was a radical from the Beat Generation days, so a rebellious
lifestyle was appealing to her.  She had raised the son alone and was now a
career woman, a left-wing lawyer.

   The father was a deadbeat beatnik poet who had become a drug dealer and
gone to prison.  But when dad was paroled, their troubles began.  He wanted
back in the family, and when they rebuffed him, he suspected what they were
up to, then caught them at it and tried to blackmail them.  They managed to
outsmart him, though, and send him back to prison.

   Tom and Diana eventually got married in a private ceremony and stayed
together until her death from cancer.  "I still miss her terribly," he
writes.  "My life feels incomplete.  I seek her in my dreams.]

   In The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things by JT LeRoy, five-year-old
Jeremiah is physically and sexually abused by his prostitute mother.

   In Ken Park, a 2002 drama based on Larry Clark's journals and stories,
an incestuous relationship develops between the protagonist and his
biological mother.  As a result of this and other socially sensitive
material depicted in the film, an uncensored version of the movie has been
made unavailable in many countries.

   <><>

   Next in line and perhaps most popular is brother-sister incest.  This
type of incest is mostly consensual.  Given below is only the name of
novels that deals with this type of incest.

   Pierre, or the Ambiguities - H Melville

   The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

   René is novella by François-René de Chateaubriand

   Eustace and Hilda - L.P.  Hartley

   Ada or Ardor - V.  Nabakov

   The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan

   The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

   Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving

   Man without Qualities - Musil

   Flowers in the Attic - V.  C.  Andrews

   All of It - by Jeannette Haien

   "Mercy of a Rude Stream" BY Henry Roth

   "A Song of Stone." BY Iain Banks'

   Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively

   Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland

   Beautiful Kate by Newton Thornburg

   Fade by Robert Cormier

   Invisible by Paul Auster

   The Kindly Ones written in French by Jonathan Littell

   Outer Dark by U.S.  writer Cormac McCarthy

   "Picture Palace" - Paul Theroux

   Family Outing, by Alison Habens

   A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

   The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K.  Le Guin

   The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory

   Wideacre by Philippa Gregory.

   A Little Demonstration of Affection by Elizabeth Winthrop

   The Shadow of the Wind features - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

   "The Happy Hunting Grounds" by Nana Tepper

   A Severed Head 1961 novel by Iris Murdoch

   Sleeping Dogs by Australian Sonya Hartnett.

   The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair

   Unto the Soul: A novel by Aharon Appelfeld

   Shadowing Hannah by Sara Berkeley

   The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

   Josie and Jack: by Kelly Braffet

   The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

   Aztec by Gary Jennings

   The Ventriloquist's Tale by Pauline Melville

   "Relations" by Caroline Slaughter

   The Family - Mario Puzo

   Queen Ehlana - David Eddings

   White Horses, BY Alice Hoffman

   Damage - Josephine Hart

   The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón