Abstract
Incest is a form of replacement when one family member supplants another to create ‘a strange confusion of kinship’ (Morgan). In Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Âne (1970), for instance, the only female that can possibly replace the dead wife for the grieving king is their daughter, who is a replica of her mother. The Genesis account of Lot and his daughters and the Graeco-Roman myth of Myrrha also consider incest between daughters of marriageable age and their fathers when each replaces her mother via that staple of sexual deception, the bedtrick. This chapter is a comparative study of these daughters, as each comes to represent what Mary Douglas calls ‘matter out of place’ when traditional patterns of filial and paternal relations are transgressed.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact, Mary Douglas does not claim to have originated this phrase. In Purity and Danger, she refers to ‘the old idea of dirt as matter out of place’ (44). I am grateful to Naomi Segal for informing me of Freud’s earlier mention of this idea; in ‘Character and anal erotism’ (1908) he cites in English: ‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place ’ (Freud 2001: 172–173).
- 2.
Marian Roalfe Cox endeavours to classify the folktale Cinderella by comparing the narrative across a range of cultures and categorising similarities to end up with three groups, as the title of the book emphasises. Peau d’Âne [Donkeyskin] belongs to the ‘Catskin’ category.
- 3.
I have borrowed the first situation from Fox 1983: 3. The other scenarios (2 and 3) are my own.
- 4.
Doniger (2000) posits two scenarios for the bedtrick: impersonation, in which someone pretends to be another in order to copulate, which is Myrrha’s situation; and substitution , in which a replacement takes the place of the expected bedfellow, as in the biblical story of sisters Leah and Rachel, the daughters of Laban and wives of Jacob.
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Owen, J. (2018). Replacement mothers, bedtricks and daughters out of place. In: Owen, J., Segal, N. (eds) On Replacement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76011-7_3
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