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Domestic Intimacies - Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Hardcover)
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Domestic Intimacies - Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Hardcover)
Series: Early American Studies
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Although it is commonly thought that incest has been taboo
throughout history, nineteenth-century Americans evinced a great
cultural anxiety that the prohibition was failing. Theologians
debated the meaning and limits of biblical proscription, while
jurists abandoned such injunctions and invented a new prohibition
organized around the nuclear family. Novelists crafted fictional
tales of accidental incest resulting from the severed ties between
public and private life, while antislavery writers lamented the
ramifications of breaking apart enslaved families. Phrenologists
and physiologists established reproduction as the primary
motivation of the incest prohibition while naturalizing the
incestuous eroticism of sentimental family affection. Ethnographers
imagined incest as the norm in so-called primitive societies in
contrast to modern civilization. In the absence of clear biological
or religious limitations, the young republic developed numerous,
varied, and contradictory incest prohibitions. Domestic Intimacies
offers a wide-ranging, critical history of incest and its various
prohibitions as they were defined throughout the nineteenth
century. Historian Brian Connolly argues that at the center of
these convergent anxieties and debates lay the idea of the liberal
subject: an autonomous individual who acted on his own desires yet
was tempered by reason, who enjoyed a life in public yet was
expected to find his greatest satisfaction in family and home.
Always lurking was the need to exercise personal freedom with
restraint; indeed, the valorization of the affectionate family was
rooted in its capacity to act as a bulwark against licentiousness.
However it was defined, incest was thus not only perceived as a
threat to social stability; it also functioned to regulate social
relations-within families and between classes as well as among
women and men, slaves and free citizens, strangers and friends.
Domestic Intimacies overturns conventional histories of American
liberalism by placing the fear of incest at the heart of
nineteenth-century conflicts over public life and privacy, kinship
and individualism, social contracts and personal freedom.
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