摘要：

Dedicated to Timothy J. Lyons THE HISTORY OF INCEST LITERATURE, like most history, has been dominated by patriarchy. Freud's uncovering of the extent of incest and his subsequent recanting of his findings is well known. The shroud of secrecy, silence, and lies woven by patriarchy was ripped in the late 1970s by feminists, many of whom were psychologists, who revealed their and others' pain as survivors of incest.1 "Speak-outs" were organized that provided incest survivors with a forum to tell their stories as a means of educating the public about the dimensions of sexual violence in the home. They were meant to raise the consciousness of a society that was in denial about this issue. In the 1970s, even professionals in the mental health field felt incest was rare (Armstrong 24). Over the last twenty-five years, in literally hundreds of books, survivors, therapists, and scholars have testified to the prevalence of incest and the terrible cost this abuse wreaks on its victims (Edie 1997). Though there has been some change in terms of social action and legislation, there has also been a backlash against the movement, resulting in the medicalization of incest as a "syndrome" or "disorder" rather than a crime, and to its often being positioned in dominant discourse as a sensationalized and prurient topic. Given that "the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form," (Mulvey 412), the questions I aim to answer in this article are: How has the dominant discourse subsumed and distorted survivor discourse in feature films? Has survivor discourse been co-opted and exploited, represented in ways that undermine and even mock its subversive impact? How do both dominant and feminist incest discourse and media responses structure cinematic representations of the victims and perpetrators of parental incest?2 To quote Julia Lesage, "If we look closely at narrative films, with the intent of decolonizing our minds, we will find a similar 'story' about sexual relations running below the surface of film after film. Over and over again, male and female film characters are assigned certain familiar, recognizable sexual traits, which provide a ready way of expressing the culture's commonly held sexual fantasies" (235). Two films, Lolita (1997) and Murmur of the Heart (1972), provide patriarchal archetypes of male and female representation in terms of incest. In addition, three categories of incest films made since the 1970s will be analyzed in relation to feminist literature on incest: backlash films in which the protagonist is a female survivor, films that explore incest in relation to male survivors, and recent films in which survivors, both male and female, speak out.3 My thesis: the medicalization of incest, together with pervasive misogyny and a deep aversion to the topic as a socio-political issue, has resulted, in the female backlash films, in a view of the survivor as sex-obsessed, damaged, and dangerous. When the survivor is male, he is represented as highly sexed, and if he is viewed as damaged, his pain and anger are internalized. Both of these representations draw on traditional patriarchal stereotypes. Finally, when incest survivors speak out, in such films as A Thousand Acres (1997) and The Celebration (1998), the films resemble the feminist speak-outs and function as a counter discourse by giving the victims a voice. Thus, these two films breach the most powerful taboo of all, the cultural prohibition against representing incest for what it is: a horrific form of domestic violence. They stand in stark contrast to the majority of incest films that deflect attention from the crime and the perpetrator, onto the victim. Archetypes and Myths Female-The Construction of a Nymphet Freud discovered early in his career that female patients whom he labeled "hysterics" or "neurotics" had one startling thing in common-they had been or were being sexually abused, most often by their fathers. …

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