ABSTRACT
The orphan’s guardian/ward relationship provides a unique opportunity for the reformulation of the exchange signified by marriage: the father-figure can marry his daughter-figure without having that union labeled incestuous. In the eighteenth century, desire between a guardian and orphan may have been considered illicit but it was not considered incestuous. 1 Such a relationship would have been incestuous only if it was already biologically determined to be such by falling within the Levitical degrees. 2 As a result, the marriage between a guardian and orphan is not illegal, and thus leaves little trace in the legal record. A chasm separates the legal record from the literary record on this issue: although the legal record does not contain cases declaring the guardian/ward marriage incestuous, the literary record is filled with plots warning that such marriages are incestuous. Incestuous orphan relationships follow a pattern elucidated by critics such as Ellen Pollak and Ruth Perry: although the law neglects incest, literature is obsessed with it. 3 As seen in Chapter 4, the female orphan plot features desire that can take incestuous or near-incestuous forms. A turn to literature allows the recovery of eighteenth-century constructions of orphan marriage, and its specific interest in the female orphan’s need to locate a family and ability to use marriage to incorporate herself into her guardian’s family. If not legally or biologically incestuous, the desire of a replacement parent for the orphan is certainly socially and economically incestuous and often coded by the novel as such. The novel implicitly recognizes that guardian/ward desire supports Levi-Strauss’ formulation of incest; if incest’s threat comes not from its “biological danger” but from its potential to disrupt structures of reciprocal exchange between families, guardian/ward desire proves incestuous because it threatens to replace exogamous exchange with endogamous conservation. 4 The surrogate father/daughter relationship created by orphaning allows the family to enact a strategy of conservation rather than exchange. The orphan plot that features a guardian who seeks to maintain his orphan ward within the family boundaries by either seducing or marrying her, is born out of this impulse toward conservation.
