Catching the clerics, again

Feminists, rightly, attack the nymphet/Lolita treatment of incest, in which middle-aged father figures are victimized by precociously sexualized teens or pre-teens, as well as by their bitchy, frigid wives. This is the initial setup for the film American Beauty , though in the end the father figure refuses to consummate his desire and reverts to a father-figure when he discovers the object of his lust is a virgin. But the film invests so much style into making the nymphet captivating and the father-figure sympathetic that his final enlightenment seems cheaply won. He has his fantasies and his fatherhood too, and doesn’t really have to sacrifice either. He gets to be both of the things his daughter calls him at the beginning, both a “horny geek” and a “role model.”

In attacking this account of father-daughter incest, feminists are simply catching up with the medieval clerics. According to Elizabeth Archibald’s book on incest in medieval imagination, the clerical writers of the middle ages consistently blame men as a initiators and perpetrators of incestuous relations with daughters and daughter-substitutes. Medieval literature had plenty of room for seductresses, but not for nymphets.