LOVE & BLOOD: keeping it in the family
CONTENT WARNING FOR THE FOLLOWING TOPICS:
academic discussions of incest
emotional manipulation & abuse
deeply unhealthy family dynamics
code: veronica is, by any and all measures, a gothic horror story. it has all the major parts of a gothic classic: a castle, mad nobility, heroes and damsels in distress, monsters and romance. romance as a staple of the gothic genre is incredibly important, it is inherent to the gothic setting that is not seen in other horror / thriller subgenres. you don't need a romantic plot for a zombie game and in fact, throughout the re franchise, romance is hardly spoken of, at least until re7 ( which is also a gothic story, specifically a southern gothic story & yes, i will be going over that on my main account some day soon ) in which a husband searches for his missing, presumed dead, wife. there is some slight romantic undertones in re5 ( it is moreso obvious in the official re5 novel in which chris refers to jill as his soulmate & that losing her was like losing a part of himself. it could of course, be platonic. soulmates are not always romantic, but the writer stated that jill & chris were always meant to be a couple but that work got in the way of their happy ending ) and then re6 is a break up, the bitter, explosive end of a romance between carla radames & derek c. simmons.
the older games did not usually bother with romance as a plotline and focused on having the character be surrounded by friends or strangers that they had to help out. as much as the fandom loves to ship claire and leon, they barely interacted in the original game and more followed their own hero's journey through the city parallel to one another, then immediately moved on after they escaped with leon being detained and claire rushing off to find her brother.
it is undeniable that romance as a staple to code veronica is impossible to remove. if you took the flirting between ada and leon out in re 2 / 4 / 6, nothing would be lost, but if you removed the affection between claire and steve from code veronica, it would ruin the entire story-- the same must be said for alfred and alexia.
as stated by the title and the content warning, this essay will be on the theme of incest within the game and how it is handled by the creators, missed by the obtuse fans and integral to the identity of the game. i am not going to convince anyone ( nor do i mean to try!! it's bad!!! ) that incest is good or should morally be accepted but rather to talk about it through an academic lens when examining alfred as a character. i've spoken on the topic many times previously that despite his homosexual urges and his purposeful design to be a big, gay dandy, he is in love with his sister. he feels complete loyalty to her and only her which is mostly due to his inflated ego and belief that he must guard something precious but also in part, deep romantic love for his sister.
we should step back and examine the overall grander theme of sibling incest. while i do believe that alexander had some intention of forming alexia into his wife ( as is evident by his lifelong obsession with his great-great-great grandmother veronica, he used veronica's dna which is distantly related to him obviously, to create the twins but he and alexia are not fully father / daughter but more like very distant cousins genetically, however he still raised her as his daughter so emotionally, no mater how distant he was to her, she still knew him only as her father so it would be father / daughter emotionally if not physically ) and that it was very apparent to alfred that this was going to happen, i don't believe alexander ever got the chance to act on it. i believe the fact that he named her after himself ALEXander, ALEXia, is proof that he was claiming ownership of her. he could have chosen to name her veronica as she is an exact clone of veronica, but he chose not to for a very insidious reason. the twins were still very young when alfred found out that they were manufactured and that there " father " was not actually their biological father and began then, most likely, to put the pieces together that alexander was going to wait until alexia was mature enough to bare children then would marry her and restart the family tree with alexia as the new matriach.
this would put alfred out, obviously, because he was always the unwanted twin, a biproduct of the fertility treatment. he was kept around at first as an organ donor for alexia if need be ( as we saw later in darkside chronicles : operation javier, manuela needed constant organ replacements through surgery due to how tough the t-alexia virus was in her system ) and later at alexia's insistence. alexander did not want to risk upsetting alexia by getting rid of (read: killing ) alfred or she might do something drastic. giving alfred the title of seventh earl was to placate him by giving him a false sense of importance in the family and to assure alexia that she would not need to be married to him because her brother was already given the title for that generation-- but of course, upon his death, the title would be given to her, just as it was given to veronica, then alexander could marry her and the title would be passed on to their children.
but all that is background information that should already be obvious, what we've got to look at today is the unfortunate topic of incest. as i stated, i don't think alexander had yet acted on his desires before his " mysterious disappearance " but it was intended. much of the gothic setting centers around incest but usually it is step-parent / step-child in which often a much older father takes a young wife to raise his children, the father dies while the heir apparent is in his teens, so the title goes to him and with it, goes the young wife. in this case it is emotional incest, the step-mother usually comes to live with the family after the biological mother's death due to such high mortality rates among women giving birth. the son would grow up knowing only his step-mother but there is no blood relation to the woman he would go on to marry and have children with, however there is no getting over the fact that this woman raised him and the imbalance of power is there. often times these characters, these men that were raised by these woman they would after go on to marry would continue to treat them as mother, sometimes continuing to call her "mother" in private settings such as diary entries.
even after finding out that alexander is not their biological father but more their distant cousin / great-great-great-great grandson, alfred still calls him father in his journal entries.
there is a lot of literature out there on father / daughter incest in gothic horror that could be spoken about but i don't write alexia or alexander so i'm not going to go off on that topic any more than this, but it is out there, being spoken on by many philosophers and literature majors.
(IM)MORATLY OF INCESETOUS RELATIONSHIPS
once again, i cannot state strongly enough that i am NOT arguing for acceptance of incest!! it is very gross to me on a deeply personal level and i am only speaking of it here in the realm of fiction. these are made up characters that fit inside a mold that i am speaking of. in real life any and all incest is grotesque to me, not on a religious basis, not on a moral basis but on a gut-instinct i'd rather let the human species die out than fuck someone i'm related to way. most of society agrees that when growing up within a remotely normal family, one does not see those they are living with in a romantic light. there is believed by many people, a biological repulsion to the idea of mating with someone that has the same dna as them, but actually that is not entirely true. there is no scientific evidence to back up the claim that we are hard wired to find those we are related to as gross.
in fact, there is something called genetic sexual attraction, which is a term used to understand this almost obsessive attraction to a blood relation that one has just been reunited with. the statistics of long-lost siblings and parent / children notes that as many as 50% of these reunited people fall in love with the sibling or parent / child they have just relocated.
The term GSA was first coined in the US in the late 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, the founder of Truth Seekers In Adoption, a Chicago-based support group for adoptees and their new-found relatives. The emergence of GSA both in the US and the UK coincided with the relaxation of adoption laws in the mid-1970s, which gave adopted children easier access to their records and led to an increase in the number of reunions between adoptees and their blood relatives.
The unexpectedly high number of reported cases of men and women struggling with sudden and terrifying emotions after a reunion has surprised and perplexed most post-adoption agencies. So far, because of the taboos surrounding GSA and its variable and complex nature, the frequency of these cases is almost impossible to quantify, although some agencies estimate that elements of GSA occur in 50% of reunions. Growing awareness of its potentially devastating implications, especially in cases where relatives embark on a sexual relationship, has prompted some organisations to warn all clients attempting to trace a relative about the phenomenon, while also training counsellors to recognise the warning signs and to help adoptees and their families cope with the damage.
ย In the view of Sue Cowling, deputy director of the Post-Adoption Centre, "Genetic sexual attraction associated with IVF births is a time bomb waiting to go off." Cowling, like many professionals, suspects that the subject has remained a no-go area, even for psychologists, because even in a society wide awake to the spectre of paedophilia and sexual abuse in families, GSA - which falls into neither category - threatens to explode too many cosy assumptions about "normal" and aberrant sexual instincts.
Gonyo, the non-academic who originally "outed" GSA in the 1980s, has written the only book on the subject. In it, she suggests that romantic love and erotic arousal may be the delayed by-product of "missed bonding" that would have normally taken place between a mother and her newborn infant, or between siblings had they not been separated by adoption. "Many such people, as adults, need to go through that early missed closeness. It may become sexual, or it may not."
Gonyo's reputation as the world's leading GSA "expert" came about largely as a result of her own experience of strong sexual attraction, when, in 1979 and aged 42, she was reunited with her adult son 26 years after she had given him up for adoption.ย
source: genetic sexual attraction || thegaurdian.com
the theory that gsa could be the brain confusing the strong familial bond with that of romantic and even erotic, is very interesting to note and could explain why alexander had such an obsessions with veronica. as is stated in the article, it seems that gsa can strike at any time, whether the two parties know they are related or not, and seemingly no amount of sensible talk can assuage their feelings.
so this idea that one will " just know " it is wrong and will not act on it is false. more likely, social and religious doctrines keep people from acting on it. the idea that we as a species has always known it was bad to interbreed is silly especially when looking to the two sources we have built out society on: ancient peoples and holy text.
in earlier times, we needed as many able bodies as we could get. small tribes went to war with one another all the time and it didn't really matter if inbred men were holding clubs to defend the women and children, just as long as they were. what most likely happened was that the bartering system in its infancy planted the idea that trading animals, food, supplies and people was a good way to build up relationships with other tribes in the area. giving away a daughter to the leader of another tribe was a good way to assure that you could gain favor because there was always a need for another female body to produce offspring ( & of course i'm speaking in generalizations here ). the rule of fathers not mating with their daughters probably came about around the same time that the made up importance of virginity came along. giving a young girl that had not been " broken in " was deemed a better gift than an older woman that has had many children already and would be more likely to die in childbirth as every pregnancy added on the possibility of fatality.
when we look to holy texts ( & i'm going to use the christian bible here because it is the one i know ), incest is all over the place, right under the banner that it is a mortal sin to sleep with your children or siblings. humanity, within the context of the bible, started with adam and eve, either siblings ( as they are referred to as the children of eden ) or father / daughter ( as adam makes eve of himself ) so we began with incest and following the family trees of the bible show that many siblings were married to one another, and their children carry that on.
on noah's arc, it is stated that noah brings only his family, so therefore, all other humans were cleansed from the earth and the human family tree is again whittled down to only one breeding pair and their children.
BROTHER-SISTER / HUSBAND-WIFE / KNIGHT-QUEEN
it must be noted that sibling incest is also very big in both gothic horror as well as in actual real live nobility. as i've spoken on before, there is this erroneous idea that royal blood is better than anything else and that nobility must keep it pure by not " watering it down ", so they tend to intermarry despite all the physical and emotional turmoil it brings about.
in her essay on sibling incest, jenny diplacidi speaks on its importance within the gothic setting:
The relationships between female characters and their
brothers or brother-substitutes are often fraught with underlying incestuous desires that are expressed as hidden subtext or explicit incestuous love. In contrast to the potential for abuses of power with which father-daughter relationships are endowed by the nature of the familial bond, the relationships between siblings are grounded in a more even distribution of power.
source: my more than sister: re-examining paradigms of sibling incest || jstor.org
in falling in love with her brother, a daughter is often times reclaiming some power from her father who usually, claims he owns her i.e. " daddy's girl " and by-proxy, who she will be married to. in the gothic setting, women did not have a choice or voice in who they were going to marry, it was often up to their fathers to decide so by secretly harboring this relationship with a brother, she reclaims some sliver of power over her life, deciding to follow her heart, a thing her father cannot control no matter how he tries. i think we see this in how alexia treats alfred versus her father. most likely due to his distance, alexia rarely spoke to her father and when she did, she probably spoke to him like a colleague rather than her father meanwhile, she spoke much more warmly to alfred. she chose to spend her time playing pretend with him, making plans for their future. alexander no doubt noticed this but did not ever think that alfred was any real competition. that when the time came for him to take alexia as his wife, alfred would be out of the way ( again, read: dead ) and alexia would naturally fall to his side, looking at him to fill that void.
in aligning herself with her brother, they essentially cut out alexander for their plans of world domination. they chose each other, as equals rather than one sat on top of the other ( even though alexia harbors higher intelligence and loftier goals, as well has has stronger sway over him that alfred does of her, i speak mostly as when they were children. pre-infection, alexia and alfred were two, neglectic children isolated completely from the outside world. they chose each other over everyone else. if all alexia wanted was attention, she could have gotten it from the many men working in the facility, just as alfred could have chosen not to come back after he left for schooling, but they made a promise to one another that it was them against the world and this deep brother / sister bond is seen as a threat to not only the outside world ( alexia never betrayals alfred and alfred dies to protect her, there is very few other siblings in the entire series that either share any screen time or actually care for one another ) but against their father specially. in a gothic setting, this was about the most dangerous thing that could happen, the greatest threat to a controlling father's rule was a pair of siblings swearing an oath to one another, as diplacidi states:
However, in the Gothic novel the brother rarely presents a threat to the heroine, instead functioning more commonly as an equal sufferer under patriarchal power. It is, I argue, the potential for equality โ akin to what Caroline Rooney calls โa feeling of universal sympathy associated with the sisterโ โ that underpins the relationships between brothers and sisters and makes the bonds between siblings so dangerous and potentially destructive to patriarchal society. This potential for unravelling society (in a way that renders father figures both obsolete and unnecessary) causes sibling desire to be treated as, perhaps, the most dangerous and complicated of all the incestuous relationships represented in the Gothic. The destruction of patriarchal society is effected through the dissolution of social growth into a condition of familial stasis that, unlike fatherโdaughter incest, excludes any paternal or head of family position.
source: my more than sister: re-examining paradigms of sibling incest || jstor.org
alfred is chosen by alexia, the vaunted savior of the entire family, to be taken in as her most trusted and closest companion. in their childish games, he is her protector, her knight and in the new world they are going to build together, he will be a king appointed by god. meanwhile all alexander gave him was the family title that has degraded with every change in the numeral and a position overlooking two facilities no one wants. there is little reason for him not to choose alexia, filling his head with fairytales of valor.
ROMANTIC NARCISSISM IN SIBLING LOVE
it has already been spoken on by the love of my life @titanomyrma, but alexia is undoubtedly a narcissist. she is self-appointed and her megalomaniacal outlook on her own importance cannot be overstated. from the moment she was born, she was smarter than everyone around her and was told she was the promise, the salvation. she was treated like a christ figure, there is no way that wasn't going to go to her head. her own self-actualized importance grew exponentially until she was so far above everyone else, she was never going to be able to relate to her peers anywhere she went in the world.
the background nazi philosophies of believing that by virtue of her birth, being born white and of germanic heritage, of having blonde hair and blue eyes and being thin and very pretty, she was the very picture of perfection meant that she was never going to believe anyone was going to be good enough for her-- except perhaps, for alfred, who looked so much like her, he could pass for her.
it is another staple of the gothic, this idea of identities. of " alike to
the point of being interchangeable in looks, name and nature ". alfred and alexia surely were indistinguishable when they were very young, before puberty hit and hormones began to change their physiology. they were mirror images of each other and the practice of swapping places probably started when they were very young. alexia most likely started it as her inflated ego must have feasted on the idea of their being two of herself, and for alfred's part, he was treated so differently as alexia. he was treated well by their father, given compliments and probably spoken to in a loving way-- maybe even a little timidly. alexander knew that alexia was quickly growing smarter than him and therefore as she grew older, probably tried his best to suck up to her.
with alfred he was always spoken down to, seen as a failure in every way beside alexia. he was not as smart, he was not as beautiful, he was not wanted. he was a failure as a boy, too delicate, too soft, too sensitive. alexander knew from the beginning that there was something off about alfred, beyond his temper. he could sense that alfred was first and foremost, gay, a dead end to their family line, but secondly, he was sadistic and that kind of base desire would be an embarrassment for the family if it got out. so he spent as little time with alfred as possible and when they were together, it was all business. alfred's fracturing sanity made everything worse-- but when he wore alexia's dress, suddenly he was treated well, catered to.
it is easy to understand why alfred would be happy to keep playing into this but alexia's motives are more mysterious. this narcissism could have, at some point, crossed wires and became romantic narcissism.
What renders GSA particularly relevant to examining brotherโsister attraction in the Gothic novel is its core premise that the familiar and the similar cause an intense desire. Catherineโs declaration โ โHeathcliff is me!โ โ in Emily Brontรซโs Wuthering Heights (1847) is in essence true: if Heathcliff is indeed her bastard half-brother, he is her; her blood, her genes, her double.21 Desire, attraction, love, here, stem from the premise of sameness and are equally sought by the brother or the sister. The foundation of equality is consanguineally rather than socially formed; the siblings are born with a biologically based parity of genetics that causes similarities which effect desire, although society ultimately refuses the potential for equality to exist between male/female siblings. In addition, the location of the brother as the other half โ the sibling as a double of the self โ contributes to an understanding of the brother as a self-reflexive equal. The brother as other is the most dangerously seductive figure within the Gothic, presenting at once a mirror image and an escape from the patriarchal exchange of women,
source: my more than sister: re-examining paradigms of sibling incest || jstor.org
this aspect of alfred looking exactly like alexia is crucial to their relationship, not only in that later alfred will be able to cope by being subconsciously driven to dress up like alexia during the events of code: veronica, but in that it is one of the things that alexia may love about him the most. he is her, he is her blood, he is her face, her eyes, all the best physical traits of herself. it is like loving a reflection, the very source from which the term is coined. narcissus loved himself and himself only and thus fell into mourning over never being able to touch his reflection. alexia and alfred can, they can reach out and grab ahold of skin that looks and feels just like their own.
it again redoubles from alfred's point of view--he does not love women. he has never met a woman before in fact. he has spent his entire life surrounded by adult men, hard workers that perform manual labor or stuffy scientists that have no interest in him. he has no one to grow affectionate towards other than himself and his reflection. his affection towards alexia is not because she is the only girl around, but because she looks just like him.
each experiences longing for an other, distinct being, but desires in that being primarily the reflection of its own. Like the related theme of the doppelganger,4 incestuous narcissism is particularly prevalent in Romantic and neo-Romantic literature, where it appears as an image of isolation. But the isolating circumstances and, correspondingly, the nature of the incestuous bond vary in their depiction from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, reflecting shifts in the intellectual atmosphere of the time
source: self-reflexive siblings: incest as narcissism || jstor.org
in traditional settings, it is two lonely noble siblings set apart by class, intelligence and often times, a malignant sickness. i spoke about it on my literary analysis on the fall of the house of usher. in that novel, the siblings roderick and madeline are stricken devastatingly ill by some unknown affliction. the unnamed narrator states that he believes it is the house itself, sitting in the middle of a bog and slowly sinking into the swamp. most likely, a surface reading would lead one to conclude that it is swamp gases coalescing in the house and wrecking havoc on the minds and bodies of those that dwell in the house day in and day out, but when reading into it more, there is a subtle undercurrent of inherited madness. roderick states over and over again that he fears they have gained the madness of their parents before them, this taking on of sin of the father by the children.
it is that practice i mentioned in my last headcanon, of " keeping the bloodline pure " and intermarrying that often passes on bloodborne illnesses. roderick and madeline may have inherited something like schizophrenia from their parents and are losing their sanity due to hitting that age. there is also the twist ending that madeline has catatonia, that she often falls into catatonic states and ends up being buried alive during one and roderick is so upset over it, he ends his own life. as i stated in that post, alexia too goes into the grave while sleeping. she is buried alive, as far as alfred is concerned. he is the only one that knows it and it drives his already fragile mental state to pieces because of it, the guilt of leaving her alone, the desperate loneliness of having the only person he ever loved taken from him, his only purpose in life put on suspense.
in both the fall of the house of usher and in code: veronica, there is something that sets the siblings apart. right away, people can tell they are strange and distant. they are villains, obviously, and that does go a great length to keep them from being seen with any sympathy, but even through letters and alfred's diary from when he was younger, from the playroom with two, sad carousel horses and some painted clouds on blue walls. they were never given a chance to make any kind of normal connections with kids their age. alexia was never going to be able to, due to her high intelligence, she was always going to have trouble but alfred may have stood a chance if he had been sent away to school-- which he was eventually but by then, the damage was done.
this palpable and literal distance between themselves and everyone around them leads to what finney speaks about here, this longing for another mingles with the image of isolation. because they are so alone, they hold on to each other tighter. they are the only thing that they have control over, that they have to call their own and as they grew older, their minds naturally extended that on to dating and marriage. who else was there to be with? for alfred, there was no one. there were no other women on the staff, there were none in the labs, there was no one he could possibly marry even for the convince of social graces. they had been cut off from all the other lesser nobility of english society. he couldn't take a wife from another, richer family to help bring some shine back to the ashford name-- besides, he was groomed from infancy to believe that alexia was going to do that. she was going to single-handedly pull them out of perdition. he needed only believe in her and only her and this extended on towards romantic attraction.
romantic attraction can be divorced from sexual attraction. alfred is not sexually attracted to alexia, he's gay ( she is too but i leave that discussion to ty ) but his duty to his family and his connection to her is so strong that they are the only things that matter to him. he and alexia have built up their own world together, just the two of them and they are not the first to do it. we must also look at the literature and philosophies they were being exposed to at a young age. as much of their childhood that was filled with eugenics and nazi-toted super race, there was also the theme of german romanticism.
The coalescence in German Romanticism of these two streams of
thought, the deification of subjectivity and the affirmation of what we term the unconscious, led to a new conception of reality: not only the conscious mind but the whole self "creates" the world, and the products of dream and fantasy are as valid as the objects of empirical perception.
This view accounts for the element of the fantastic in so much of German Romantic literature. Inherent within the solipsistic attribution of creative omnipotence to all levels of the mind, however, is the danger of selfimprisonment, or the incapacity to distinguish between the self's own projections and the empirical world, between dreaming and waking
source: self-reflexive siblings: incest as narcissism || jstor.org
on top of being physically isolated at the antarctic base, they were also being culturally and socially isolated because they were seen as the first " pure " children to be born to the ashford family since the time of veronica herself. they were being kept away from outside influences so that they would not be ' spoiled ' by a world that did not deserve them. this again reinforces their belief that they are the only ones that are good enough for each other or themselves. this theme in german romanticism reinforced that through what they were reading. alexia was made very aware that she was going to be the mother of a new, better race of people and alfred was taught that it was hid duty to protect her honor and keep the filth of the outside away from her lest it sully her virtue.
this compounding of metaphorical and literal senses, on both keeping the children ignorant of other races and cultures, etc. and the literal preservation of alexia's body, her womb and ability to bear children that would carry hers and veronica's incredible genes, co-mingled and became something so real to these children that even their father wasn't fully aware of. he treated them like adults because they were intelligent but just because a child is intelligent doesn't mean they do not still have a child's brain, a child's rationale. this world they built in their heads was going to come true. for alexia, she went to sleep and dreamed for fifteen years ( the novel makes note that she had begun to wake up a few months before alfred woke her up but still.... call it fourteen and a half years of sleeping ) while alfred was awake. day in and day out, living in the real world. he was sent to school, he attended meetings with umbrella staff ( not many due to how unstable he was becoming ), he oversaw the running of both the rockfort island and the antarctic facilities-- and all the while, he continues to keep the dream alive. he continued to toil in mundanity with the promise that once alexia woke up, they would pick back up where they left off and that they would be able to bring their dream into reality.
this desperate need to see his reflection alive and moving and speaking is what leads to him unconsciously splitting his mind in twain so that alexia can live again. it is a common misconception that started in the game and continued on into the fandom that alfred is " dressing up " like alexia. he has no idea that it is his body doing that, he believes that she's there, right up until the moment that he is confronted with the sight of himself wearing make up, then he suddenly remembers and triggers the self-destruction of the island. at that point, he cannot stand the idea of being without her for one more minute and unlike narcissus, he can retrieve his reflection.
From this point on the attraction between the two intensifies rapidly. Its narcissistic overtones echo and re-echo. For what joins them is their common isolation, their shared suffering as members of a strange breed-neither mortal nor immortal-which all others shun.
source: self-reflexive siblings: incest as narcissism || jstor.org
it culminates in a naked alexia holding her brother's face to her chest and rocking him to sleep as he dies in her arms-- and for the canon of this blog, infecting him through the many, many built wounds before placing him in her cryogenic pod so that he may dream of her until it is time to wake him from his slumber in her new world.
Their physical identity externalizes the bond between their souls.
[...]
In works like these, as in Wagner's opera, the siblings or quasisiblings (children raised as if brother and sister) are typically Romantic heroes, outsiders by virtue of their inherent social position or because of an exceptional sensibility which leads them to cast in doubt or completely reject their society's values.
The twins' shared isolation is assured by the contemptuous sarcasm they direct at everyone but each other. Their disdain usually stems from purely aesthetic or sensory repulsion. When their scorn does transcend the aesthetic level, it succeeds only in pointing up their hypocrisy.
source: self-reflexive siblings: incest as narcissism || jstor.org
this bit comes from a musical piece, Die Walkaret by richard wagner in a woman is home alone when a stranger rushes into her house needing help. her husband is off at war and she looks after the man who instantly, she feels a connection with. they both feel like they know each other and over the series of events, it is revealed that they are twins, separated when young but feel they must be together to the point of the woman helping her brother kill her husband so that they can live with one another. while siegmund and sieglinde had to deal with her husband and later gods and goddesses fighting about who had the right in the fight, alfred and alexia have only their father to deal with. on top of alexia not wanting to constantly listen to her father, she instructs alfred to help her kill ( not really ) their father for the good of both of them.
in die walkarat, sieglinde gives her husband a sleeping potion so that he will be too tired to put up a real fight, alexia injects her father with her pride and joy, the viral strain she's spent years working. infecting him may have been just the advantage alfred needed to overcome him for the good of her love for him.
this theme of fighting for love, even be it incestuous love, gained popularity in the gothic romantic setting but has its roots in literature that the twins may have been reading as children. in fact the characters of siegmund and sieglinde reappear in a novella written by a german novelist in 1905( A WARNING!!! if you do read this be FULLY AWARE that the topic is HIGHLY ANTI-SEMITIC!! the narration often speaks of the characters mixed jewish background as ' tainting ' their pure blood and the characters try to go out of their way to hide their jewish ancestry. it is very overt and spelled right out in the open so be aware if reading ). they are twins here as well and live in decaying wealth under their parents ignorance. in this novella, called Wรคlsungenblut or The Blood of the Walsungs, the twins are very close and are described in a way very similar to alfred and alexia.
Siegmund and Sieglinde came last, hand in hand, from the second floor. They were twins, graceful as young fawns, and with immature figures despite their nineteen years. She wore a Florentine cinquecento frock of claret-coloured velvet, too heavy for her slight body. Siegmund had on a green jacket suit with a tie of raspberry shantung, patent-leather shoes on his narrow feet, and cuff-buttons set with small diamonds.
They were very like each other, with the same
slightly drooping nose, the same full lips lying softly together, the same prominent cheekbones and black, bright eyes. Likest of all were their long slim hands, his no more masculine than hers, save that they were slightly redder. And they went always hand in
hand, heedless that the hands of both inclined to moisture.
source: the blood of the walsungs by thomas mann || literaturesaves2wordpress.com
they are obviously older than the ashford twins but of note, siegmund and sieglinde are said to be very immature while alfred and especially alexia are extremely mature for their age.
the family is buzzing because soon sieglinde is to be married. unlike the opera in which she already is married, in the novella, she is not yet married and hasn't even met her fiancรฉe yet-- everyone except siegmund. he has been distant and moody and when her betrothed appeared, sieglinde joined her brother in verbally berating him.
The brother and sister had spoken glibly and with point. They may have attacked out of a habitual inward posture of selfdefence; perhaps they deliberately meant to wound-perhaps again their words were due to the sheer pleasure of turning a phrase. It
would have been unreasonable to feel annoyed. They let his feeble answer pass, as though they found it in character; as though cleverness in him would have been out of place.
source: the blood of the walsungs by thomas mann || literaturesaves2wordpress.com
we can see again this theme of romantic narcissism and how it leads to a feedback loop of them loving themselves above all others.
The children laughed. At that moment they did not look down on him. They sat there at table, in their low, luxuriously cushioned chairs, with their spoilt, dissatisfied faces. They sat in splendour and security, but their words rang as sharp as though
sharpness, hardness, alertness, and pitiless clarity were demanded of them as survival values. Their highest praise was a grudging acceptance, their criticism deft and ruthless;
it snatched the weapons from one's hand, it paralysed enthusiasm, made it a laughingstock.
source: the blood of the walsungs by thomas mann || literaturesaves2wordpress.com
one day go to the opera to watch die walkarat. afterwards, they return home and siegmund is so overcome with a feeling that what was in the opera was to be their fate, that he sends the servants away so that he and his sister can dine alone. this culminates in the climax of their romantic narcissism, in siegmund deciding that he will just have to take things into his own hands and deliberately goes to a mirror.
Closing his eyes he surrendered to this atmosphere, as a man will console himself with some delicate pleasure of the senses for the extraordinary harshness of his lot.
Then suddenly he started up again, tossed away his cigarette and stood in front of the white wardrobe, which had long mirrors let into each of its three divisions. He moved very close to the middle one and eye to eye he studied himself, conned every feature of
his face. Then he opened the two side wings and studied both profiles as well. Long he looked at each mark of his race: the slightly drooping nose, the full lips that rested so softly on each other; the high cheek-bones,
source: the blood of the walsungs by thomas mann || literaturesaves2wordpress.com
eventually his sister comes to check on him because he had left dinner without eating or really even talking to her. she comes dressed in a thin nightgown and sits on the ground beside him, noting that he is warm and looks almost ill. he remarks only on how so alike they are.
"I was waiting for you," said he.
She was still standing bent over, and made a little moue which brought out markedly the facial characteristics of her race. Then, in her ordinary tone: "Which does not prevent my present position from giving me a crick in the back."
He shook her off.
"Don't, don't-we must not talk like that-not that way, Sieglinde." His voice was strange, he himself noticed it. He felt parched with fever, his hands and feet were cold and clammy. She knelt beside him on the skin, her hand in his hair. He lifted himself a little to fling one arm round her neck and so looked at her, looked as he had just been looking at himself-at eyes and temples, brow and cheeks.
"You are just like me," said he, haltingly, and swallowed to moisten his dry throat. "Everything about you is just like me..."
source: the blood of the walsungs by thomas mann || literaturesaves2wordpress.com
it ends in a passion that takes over them in which they note only how much they like the way the other smells, how similar their bodies are. it is the ultimate example of romantic narcissism. we have siegmund standing in front of a mirror, thinking about how much he deserves the best, how he is a hero and deserves to have the princess to himself, not lose her to someone else just at the same time as his sister is getting ready to get married off to a stranger and then his sister walks in and replaces that reflection from the mirror-- which the narrator notes he can still see himself in while laying on the ground with his sister.
we see this so clearly in code: veronica. alfred believes he is the only one that deserves alexia, he builds an entire house to her, he kills everyone that knew about it, he hides her away and then smashes all the mirrors in the private residence so that there is no reflection of him that is not alexia. of course the real alexia is not there so he puts on the wig and dress, he puts on make up and lifts his voice so he may sound like her. he doesn't put on the outfit because he gets off on dressing like a woman ( not that there is anything wrong with that! i support it, you do you! but that's not the case here ) he does it because there is a half of him that is missing, he cannot experience joy of pleasure as half a person. he needs alexia there to be happy and that spills over into his romantic and sexual happiness.
as spoken about previously, he is a sadist that enjoys torturing the men under his command for his own sexual pleasure despite how bad it makes him look. no one will respect him if they find out he's gay so he punishes them, beats them to the very edge of and sometimes beyond, death, so that he can when alone, remember feeling their bodies under his touch and can masturbate to his own fantasies-- but he cannot be happy or complete without his other half being there and alexia would not approve of him having these base attractions to 1. men in general, she is just as homophobic as he is and, 2. the general population. these are not men of a similar station to them, they are black and brown natives or criminals brought in from around the world. these are not the kind of people that alfred should be looking at to satisfy his desires. they are beneath them, so he cannot gain any reprieve while she is around either.
it is a constant state of not being able to be happy without her around but when she is around, they fall back into old habits of believing that no one else is good enough to be around them. that they alone are above the fray and can only be with each other, can only be understood by each other.
so their relationship is not just that they want to fuck one another, it is far more complicated than that. it is gross negligence on the part of their father, romantic narcissism, extreme isolation and racist philosophies culminating in them not being able to or wanting to be with anyone other than each other. if they were normal people in a normal setting, they would have probably been fine. alexia may have had problems relating to others ( i think the show queen's gambit does a great job showing how difficult it is to relate to others when so highly focused on a specific special interest ) but alfred probably, with therapy, medication and patience, could have had some relationships that may not have been healthy or picture perfect but at the very least, wasn't him marrying his sister.
