The Disgust that Fascinates: Sibling Incest as a Bad Romance

This article compares the discourse of sibling incest evident in a corpus of fiction with the discourse found in clinical, sociological and criminal literature. Whereas the former primarily regards the coupling as a bad romance, the latter presents the idea that it is unequivocally harmful. This discrepancy between the two discourses surrounding sexual relationships between brothers and sisters speaks to literary fiction’s need for thwarted romances for the purposes of the literary market. A more detailed look into three novels from the corpus, Tabitha Suzuma’s Forbidden (2010), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) shows how this logic of sibling incest as a bad romance works in practice.