I believe you've touched a bit on the way muir deconstructs/explores the idea of "family" and "found family", and I was wondering if you have any takes on how the like ... quasi incestuous dynamic between ianthe and corona plays into that? I'm not sure what to say about it other than "families can sure be gross huh", but I'm sure there's something deeper there abt the way fucked up things in the adept/cavalier dynamic and in the family/sibling dynamic play off each other
content warning for discussion of incest, rape, and pedophilia throughout this answer.
this is really really good and i’m glad someone brought it up, lol. it’s very interesting. (to get the elephant in the room out of the way: i think you’d have difficulty arguing that that particular scene where corona and ianthe are reunited isn’t supposed to be read as incestuous. the obvious jealousy around judith, the pet names, the intimacy and the language of possession eg. ‘my pretty golden girl’—like, the undercurrent is barely even an undercurrent, tbh.)
i think the presence of incest in the text can be pretty clearly reckoned with on two fronts: firstly that one of tamsyn muir’s major intertexts is lolita, and secondly that she consistently draws on the genre conventions of gothic horror, of which incest is often a major player. in lolita, humbert humbert’s pedophilic rape of dolores haze is made possible through his inculcation into the haze family structure, when he marries her mother and becomes her stepfather and leverages the social power that this affords him in order to isolate her such that his abuse becomes possible. whilst not “incest” in the literal sense—they are not related—nabokov teases out the relationship between familial bonds and abusive, pedophilic ones, and establish ‘the family’ (white, middle class) as a site where abuse is both made possible and invisibilised. humbert humbert’s predation towards dolores haze is figured as quasi-incestuous inasmuch as nabokov raises questions around what the socially sanctioned dynamic between a father and his daughter makes possible. i would argue that similar such discursive moves are in play in tlt. gideon, harrow, and alecto are all at some point figured as john’s children; gideon is literally his daughter, he expresses a wish that harrow had been his daughter, and his ‘creation’ of alecto + ‘for john so loved her that he had made her she, for john had loved the world’ being a riff off of john 3:16 similarly positions her as his daughter. the treatment of gideon/kiriona as an extension of himself which draws upon discourses of the child as private property is mirrored with his treatment of alecto, which, imo, is a pretty transparent metaphor for sexual abuse; we might even add to this the fact that his treatment of harrow in htn skirts incredibly close to grooming when considered alongside muir’s short story in which a very similar relationship was written as a grooming metaphor. as i’ve argued before, what seems to be taking shape here is an interrogation of the notion of god as ‘the father’ if we refigure ‘the father’ not as a site of paternalism but as one of abuse. what does that do to our understanding of what both christianity and the family exist to fortify? this is long-winded, so, to bring it back to ianthe and coronabeth: in short, it doesn’t surprise me that incest would be present in a text where the violence of cavalierhood as one of consumption figured as similar to what humbert humbert does to dolores haze is being linked up to the sites of sexual violence that nabokov takes up—pedophilia, rape, incest.
as for gothic horror—typically, incest in the gothic form is rendered as a perversion of reproductive heterosexuality, in keeping with the broader genre conventions in which the gothic house stands to tease out the horror made possible in the domestic social arena. if we abstract muir’s socially gendered logics onto her rendition of the gothic horror form (sorry to repeatedly cite myself but i explained this argument properly in the first section of this), then the site of horror through perversion of sexual formations comes from a perversion of the necromancer/cavalier dynamic; which is exactly what we see take place here, both through the fact that ianthe and coronabeth are evolved, dissonant versions of what once were one another’s necromancer and cavalier now turned lyctor and defector and through the fact that ianthe can only ‘access’ this social form through possessing (and doing impressions of) babs, thus recreating the false dynamic that existed between babs and corona. much of the tension in this scene is created less through the implicit incest itself and more through how badly we feel what ianthe wants to do, but can only carry out through babs—“I can’t even hug you with my own arms, touch you with my own body. Only Babs’s ... there’s a metaphor in there.”—babs as a conduit for ianthe’s desires feels very in keeping with the position he ultimately took up between the two, as both maintainer of a secret (corona must be a necromancer if babs is her cavalier; it’s not incest if it’s corona and babs) and pacified receptor of their desires (from the chewing and biting to the part where he gets eaten properly). so, in keeping with the gothic horror form, it’s a bit that locates its horror through both the corruption and the full, mask-off realisation of the social dynamics that it reckons with.
i’m also interested in how much that scene reads like a seduction on ianthe’s part towards corona, and also might be read as something of an inculcation of corona back into the imperial system that she was trying to escape—seduction and inculcation all in one go to me feels reminiscent of gideon/cytherea, which is of course the seminal tlt setup for use of the sexually deviant and sexually violent to identify a broader violence.on a similar note—i’m caught by ‘“White makes Babs look peaky.” / “Wait ‘til you see me in it.” / “I’ll bet.”,’ just in terms of what whiteness and specifically lyctoral whiteness is doing in the text. the shadow-presence of white as imperial, white as death, death as imperial, serves to suggest that these themes should be held in the background when assessing this scene—it’s part of the broader moves being made around socially sanctioned interpersonal violence under imperialism.
