Printing Families: Incest and the Rise of the Novel in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

This essay examines the presence of incest in the cultural imaginary of the early modern Spanish novel, taking as its inaugural case a piece by no other than Pérez de Montalbán and finishing with the little-known novelist Luis de Guevara. I read incest as a phenomenon that was conceived by Cervantes’s heirs as a self-reflexive trope to comment on both the state of the novel and on the readership who promoted its growth. I argue that this taboo manifested itself in these first decades of the century through two interconnected phenomena: on the one hand, as the radical condition from which to express a literary and social endogamy that was essential to the success of its agents; on the other hand, as one of the greatest reasons for the success of a new publishing formula, that of the short-story collection. In order to release all of its transformative potential, I take as case studies two significant elaborations of the topic—one at the early stages of the formation of the Baroque novel, the other near its swansong—that employ incest to reflect on processes that redefine acceptable choices in sexual partners, while simultaneously questioning class structures and means of promoting kinship.  Through a selection of novels by Juan Pérez de Montalbán and Luis de Guevara, I interrogate the family’s relationship to itself and to the state in the transition of a society highly stratified along feudal lines to one faced with different possibilities for social advancement. The narrative construction of incest, I conclude, should be examined as a fertile tactic through which the novel engaged with national history, societal expectations, civil and canon law, and the (ever increasing) institutional control over the genre