ABSTRACT
By the time this text becomes fully "Shakespearean" in 3.1, the initial act of incest has been spectacularly punished (2.4.1-12) and apparently forgotten, and Pericles's identity and the familial relations upon which it is based have apparently stabilized: he has discovered his father's armor, magically plucked out of the sea, and has found a new father in Simonides ("Yon king's to me like to my father's picture" [2.3.37]; he has been furnished with a loving wife and is about to become a father himself. But the Shakespearean portion of the play nonetheless responds profoundly to that initial act, working and reworking the threat it represents;4 though the incest is ostensibly forgotten, acts 3 through 5 are structured counter-phobic ally, as though all sexuality were tantamount to that initial act of incest and all families based in the sexual body were similarly contaminated. If the point of origin for the disasters of the first part of the play is the sexualized body of Antiochus's daughter, the point of origin for the disasters of the second is Thaisa's sexualized body, as the sailors half-intuit when they insist that she be thrown overboard; in effect returned to that first body by his wife, Pericles has to begin his wandering all over again. The repetition makes this new round of wandering seem a recapitulation of the first, a response to the original source of danger; and the resolution that allows Pericles's resumption of identity and return to his family entails so thorough a rooting out of sexuality that it confirms this point of origin: if the cure is the excision of the sexual female body, then the disease must have been that body in the first place. In the end Shakespeare will reestablish Pericles's masculine identity only by first detoxifying the contaminating female body and the family relations based on it, in effect undoing the initial trauma of the play and freeing the family from its sexual origin.
