The Marriage With A Deceased Wife

The "Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill" Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense
of Family Purity in Victorian England

Author(s): Nancy F. Anderson
Source: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring, 1982), pp. 67-86
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of North American Conference on British
Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175534
Accessed: 22-02-2016 19:15 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
North American Conference on British Studies and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of British Studies.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 200.52.254.249 on Mon, 22 Feb 2016 19:15:16 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The "Marriage with a Deceased Wife's
Sister Bill" Controversy:
Incest Anxiety and the Defense of Family
Purity in Victorian England
NANCY F. ANDERSON
In 1835 the English Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst introduced into the

House of Lords a bill to correct an ambiguity in the law concerning
marriages within prohibited degrees. The existing law, based on the 1533
Henrican statute fixing the degrees of consanguinity and affinity, speci-
fied that marriages within prohibited degrees could be annulled at any
time within the lifetime of both spouses by the Ecclesiastical Court. Lord
Lyndhurst argued that the uncertain status of such "voidable marriages"
created an inconvenience and hardship for the married persons and espe-
cially for their children, who could during their parents' lifetime be
declared illegitimate. His specific motive was to guarantee the legitimacy
and inheritance of the son of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, who had
married his deceased wife's half-sister, a relationship within the prohib-
ited degrees. Lyndhurst proposed that parliament pass a bill to limit to two
years the time within which marriages could be annulled.
The consensus in parliament was that the ambiguity of "voidable mar-
riages" should be eliminated, and they readily passed a revised form of
Lord Lyndhurst's bill, declaring that all marriages within the prohibited
degrees of affinity contracted before August 31, 1835 were immediately
and absolutely valid. Yet, even as they eased restrictions on existing
marriages, they tightened the law for the future by adding a clause which
made marriages of both affinity and consanguinity contracted after that
date absolutely void.
In the parliamentary debate on the bill, there was some opposition from
those who argued that marriages within certain degrees of affinity, in
particular a man and his deceased wife's sister, should be permitted. They
supported Lord Lyndhurst's bill even with the new prohibition because
they believed that only in that form would the bill, with its validation of
previous marriages of affinity, pass parliament. In so doing, they voiced
the expectation that a new bill would soon be enacted, exempting a wife's
sister from the list of prohibited degrees.'
The expectation that marriage with a deceased wife's sister would be
13Hansard XXVIII:203-07 (1 June, 1835);XXX: 792-94 (20 Aug., 1835);XXX:948-51 (24

Aug., 1835). The StatutesRevised(3rded.;London,1950),III,743:5&6Will. 4, c.54. "Marriage
With a Deceased Wife'sSister,"WestminsterReview,CXIV(Amer.Ed.;1880),43-45.
68 JOURNALOF BRITISHSTUDIES
legalized was not realized until 1907. First introduced into parliament in
1842, the Wife's Sister Bill became a "hardy annual,"2 repeatedly debated
and then defeated in most of the parliamentary sessions in the last half of
the nineteenth century. The British colonies legalized such unions in the
1870s and 1880s, as did most of the United States, but the United Kingdom
(Scottish law also forbad this marriage) persisted in the prohibition.
A royal commission, appointed in 1847 to "inquire into the state and
operation of the law of marriage as related to the prohibited degrees of
affinity," reported that the prevalent feeling throughout the country was
against marriages with a wife's sister, that there was "very strong dislike
and disapprobation of them."3 A Marriage Law Reform Association was
established in 1851 to try to change public and parliamentary opinion,
but, despite its lobbying efforts throughout the century in collecting peti-
tions, publishing pamphlets, and holding public meetings, the law in
Victorian times was not changed.
Opposition to the Wife's Sister Bill came in part from conservative
Anglicans who saw the bill as another encroachment by the state, in that
age of increasing secularization, into the domain ofthe Established Church
of England. The Church had specified that a wife's sisters were within the
prohibited degrees. To replace what was considered divine law with state
law would not only subvert the will of God, but would challenge the
authority of the already beseiged religious establishment. The Wife's
Sister Bill would be, in the words of Beresford-Hope, an ardent champion
in parliament of the rights of the Church of England, "an installment... of
disestablishment." If the bill is passed, "a bit of the Church will be broken
off from the State and left with jagged edges."4
The opposition was spearheaded by defenders of the Anglican establish-
ment but the defense of church authority was not the major reason the
Wife's Sister Bill was delayed for so long. Many other pillars of the
Established Church were knocked down in the Victorian period. Nor was it
primarily a matter of conservative resistance to change. Opposing views
were not markedly differentiated along party lines. As Beresford-Hope
sarcastically pointed out, there were enough Liberals opposed to the bill to
prove that resistance did not indicate "a stupidity or a malevolence of
which only Tories can be guilty."5 The Liberal Party did not give the bill
official support until its final passage in 1907. The underlying issue at
stake was not whether the church or state should determine prohibited
degrees, but rather what degrees of relationship should be prohibited. In
24 Hansard CLXXXI: 355 (20 Aug., 1907).
3First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire Into the State and Operation of the
Law of Marriage as Related to Prohibited Degrees of Affinity, and to Marriages Solemnized
Abroad or in the British Colonies, in Parliamentary Papers, 1847-48, XXVIII, 238.
4A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, "The Lords and the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill," National Review, I
(1883), 763. For a fuller discussion of the Wife's Sister Bill controversy as an aspect of the
changing relationship of church and state, see Cynthia Behrman, "The Annual Blister: A Slight
on Victorian Social and Parliamentary History," Victorian Studies, XI (1968), 483-502.
5Beresford-Hope, "The Lords," National Review, I, 761.
"MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER BILL" 69
other words, the Wife's Sister Bill forced Victorians to confront the diffi-
cult matter of incest.
Until 1908 England had no criminal law penalizing incest, and the
matter was left to the ecclesiastical courts. Even when late Victorian
social investigators reported widespread incestuous sex in poor families
living in overcrowded rooms, parliament did not enact an incest law.
Anthony Wohl, in his essay on the parliamentary response to working
class incest, suggested that Victorian legislators failed to take up the
question in part because of reticence, that there was a "conspiracy of
silence on most sexual matters-on incest, the conspiracy reached
Watergate proportions."6 In the Wife's Sister Bill debates, however, the
conspiracy of silence was necessarily broken. In arguing whether a man
should be allowed to marry his deceased wife's sister, Victorians had to
discuss incest. They had to decide if incest involved relations of consan-
guinity only, or also affinity. They had to judge whether there was a
natural instinct against incest which would lessen the importance of legal
prohibitions, or if the incest taboo was merely created artificially by social
need, requiring therefore rigorous external enforcement. Was incest a
private individual matter, which the community should not try to control,
or did it so threaten the social order that it must be of public concern?
In the long drawn out controversy in Victorian England over the Wife's
Sister Bill, these general questions about incest were raised and publicly
discussed, often with euphemistic inhibition, sometimes with heated emo-
tion, and usually with intense anxiety. Members of parliament spoke of
the "delicacy and difficulty of the subject" and called the debate "painful"
and "strange," "a subject of a very peculiar character."7 When the Wife's
Sister Bill was first introduced into parliament, The Times condemned the
motion. "The immense majority of religious and thinking men throughout
the Nation looked upon the proceedings with disapprobation and disgust."
It later asserted that parliament was not quite the place "to explore the
mysteries of the domestic hearth." A letter to The Times urged that the bill
be dropped, because it "can hardly be discussed in public without in some
degree communicating a shock to purer minds and more acute sensibili-
ties, while coarser natures laugh and taunt." It was, according to the
Saturday Review, an "unsavoury question."8
Incest is a topic which probably arouses anxiety in most people-as the
Westminister Review said, there is perhaps "no point on which men are so
morbidly sensitive"9-but it was especially tension-laden in Victorian
England because of the particular emotional climate within the middle
and upper class family at that time. By the early nineteenth century the
'Anthony Wohl,"Sexand the Single Room:IncestAmongthe VictorianWorkingClasses,"in

The VictorianFamily, ed. AnthonyWohl(New York, 1978),p. 200.
73Hansard CIV:1209 (3 May, 1849)and CCIV:1871 (13 Mar.,1873).
8TheTimes (London),March10, 1842,p. 5; June 21, 1849,p. 4; April 13, 1849,p.6. "Deceased
Wife's Sister,"SaturdayReview,LV (1883), 108.
'WestminsterReview, LXXX (Amer. Ed.; 1863), 41.
70 JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES
nuclear family group had become more cohesive and socially isolated, and
affective bonds among family members were stronger, than in the pre-
industrial period.10The emotional attachment within the Victorian family
was all the more intense, in contrast to earlier and also to the twentieth-
century family, because the rigid Victorian code of morality, restricting
extra-familial heterosexual relationships, dammed up libidinous feelings
within the home. For many young Vicorian men and women, the only
available people towards whom to direct erotic strivings were family
members. Freud pointed out that this was so for most young children, but
in the Victorian family this restricted field often continued throughout a
lifetime, with the most ardent love bestowed on parents, and even more
commonly, because more available and less hampered by hierarchical
distance, on brothers or sisters.
A prominent but not uncommon example of this type of relationship was
Thomas Macaulay's passionate love for his younger sisters, Margaret and
Hannah, on whom alone, in the words of Macaulay's biographer, John
Clive, "was focused the strongly developed emotional side of his nature."
Macaulay, who never married, became deeply depressed when Margaret
married. Margaret herself wrote that she could not bear to be separated
from Tom, who for years had been the object of her whole heart. She had
kept a diary of all Tom's sayings and doings, and read it to her new
husband with difficulty. "I felt almost as if I had broken faith, as if I was
reading my love letters to my first love." Macaulay counseled Hannah that
"husbands and wives are not so happy and cannot be so happy as brothers
and sisters." Hannah later said that her brother, after hearing the news of
her own engagement, became so mentally disturbed that the Governor
General of India was "frightened about him.l1 Fortunately for Macaulay,
he was able to continue living with his beloved sister even after her
marriage.
Henry Thornton, Macaulay's friend and fellow scion of the Clapham
Sect, was so attached to his sisters that he raged vehemently against their
marriages. He himself married on the same day and apparently in angry
reaction to the wedding of one sister. His most devoted sibling Marianne
never married, and lived with Henry even after his marriage. After
Henry's first wife died and until his remarriage, Marianne assumed the
mother's role, feeling that his children seemed like her very own.12
'?See ChristopherLasch, "TheFamily and History,"New YorkReviewof Books,November

13, November 27, and December11, 1975, for a survey of the recentscholarshipdocumenting
the new emotional intimacyof the Victorianfamily. See also LawrenceStone,TheFamily,Sex
and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977) and Stephen Kern, "ExplosiveInti-
macy: Psychodynamicsof the Victorian Family,"History of ChildhoodQuarterly,I (1974),
437-61.
"John Clive, Macaulay:The Shaping of theHistorian(New York, 1973),pp. 257-88.A. O.J.
Cockshut, in his essay on Trevelyan'sbiographyof Macaulay,also commentedon Macaulay's
"unnaturalbond"with his sister. TruthtoLife: TheArt ofBiographyin theNineteenthCentury
(New York, 1974),p. 126.
"E. M. Forster,MarianneThornton,1797-1887(London,1956),pp. 147, 177.
Such strong brother-sister attachments characterize many other Victor-
ian lives. Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and Charles and Mary Lamb
are familiar examples in the early period. In her biography of George
Eliot, Ruby Redinger emphasized the erotically tinged love of the young
Marian for her brother Isaac, as captured in her "Brother and Sister"
sonnets. Ellen Moers interpreted Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights as brother-sister sexual fantasies.
Charlotte Bronte's biographer also described the relationship of Charlotte
and Bramwell as incestuous-"not an incest of body but of mind: an incest
of imagination.'13
Robert Browning and his sister Sarianna were so close that she spoke of
"feeling through the experience of my brother who was part of myself."
Their lifelong intimacy was interrupted only in their middle years, when
Robert was married to Elizabeth, who herself had been so devoted to her
beloved "Bro,"her "first and chiefest affection," that the shock of his death
made her delirious for three months. Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli were
intimate companions throughout their lives. Sarah was so devoted to her
brother that a contemporary described her feelings as "a passion bordering
upon romance."14
The educator and novelist Elizabeth M. Sewell wrote in her autobiogra-
phy of her brother William that "I never loved anyone else in the same
intense way, and to him I owe (through the mercy of God) all that is most
precious for Time and Eternity. I was so engrossed in my feelings for my
brother that I had no thought to give to anyone else." As a young woman,
she did not want to go to parties but preferred to stay home alone. There
were many young men about, but she did not flirt. "I believe our brothers
were our safeguards: we cared more for them than we did for any of their
friends."'5 Elizabeth, like many of the others, remained true to her sibling
love and never married.
The sexual component of these sibling attachments was probably in
most cases unconscious. Clive did suggest that Macaulay may have been
aware that his love for his sisters was, as Macaulay himself said of the
attraction of two historical figures to their female relatives, an attachment
that was "not perfectly innocent."'6 Generally, however, passionate
"Ruby Redinger, GeorgeEliot: The EmergentSelf (New York, 1975), p. 45. Ellen Moers,
Literary Women (New York, 1977), pp. 151-63. Helene Moglen, CharlotteBronte: The Self
Conceived(New York, 1976),p. 39. DorothyWordsworthdidnotmarry,because"herpassionfor
her brotherwas so intense as to precludeher feeling forany man an emotionwhichwouldhave
satisified the physical as well as the spiritualside of her Nature."ErnestDeSelincourt,Dorothy
Wordsworth(Oxford,1933),p. 132.CharlesandMaryLamblivedso closelyboundtogetherthat
when she had a relapseof mental illness and went to an asylum,her lonelydevotedpoetbrother
wrote to her that "I am a widow'dthing, now thou are gone!"Anne Gilchrist,MaryLamb
(Boston, 1883),p.65.
'4JohnMaynard, Browning's Youth (Cambridge,Mass., 1977),p. 36. GardnerTaplin,The
Life of ElizabethBarrettBrowning(New York, 1970),p. 80. RobertBlake,Disraeli (NewYork,
1968), p. 67.
"The Autobiographyof ElizabethM.Sewell,, ed. EleanorL. Sewell (London,1907),p. 42.
"Clive, Macaulay, p. 273.
devoted love for a member of one's family was ostensibly considered pure,
safe, untainted by sexual lust.17
Under the surface, however, were currents of anxiety about the pos-
sibility that the love included sexual feelings. Elizabeth Sewell, for
example, revealed the source of her psychosomatic symptoms of anxiety
when she explained that she was not well during her youth because of
"nervousness, hysterics, and follies of that kind. . .and worries of the old
phantom of evil in the form of sceptical doubts, and increasing conscious-
ness that I teased William by being too fond of him." Redinger pointed out
George Eliot's discomfort when in 1869, in the same summer she wrote her
"Brother and Sister" sonnets, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in the Atlantic
Monthly an essay on "The True Story of Lord Byron's Life," exposing
publicly Lord Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister. George
Eliot wrote to Stowe disapproving of her discussing such subjects, that it
was "injurious socially.""' Anxiety about incest caused George Eliot to
want a veil of silence on the topic, and Wohl parenthetically suggested that
the "extremely close relationship that often existed in Victorian England
between siblings" may have been a factor in their failure to deal with
reports of working-class incest. It may indeed have provoked too much
anxiety for Victorians to face evidence of actual incestuous behavior,
whether by Lord Byron or slum dwellers. There was however a heightened
prophylactic concern to protect against incest. Shielding their eyes from
looking at the reality, they intensified their efforts to prevent the possi-
bility of its occurrence by protecting "family purity" from "the polluting
idea of unnatural passion."19This concern helps explain the strength of the
opposition to permitting even the semblance of incest by allowing a man to
marry his deceased wife's sister.
The Victorian anthropologist James Frazer, investigating the origin of
exogamy, argued that laws against incest are evidence of instinctive
incestuous desire. "The law only forbids men to do what their instincts
incline them to do.. .Accordingly we may safely assume that crimes for-
bidden by law are crimes which many men have a natural propensity to
commit." Freud, incorporating Frazer's views in his psychology, theorized
that societies "more subject to temptations of incest require more exten-
sive protection against it."20From this perspective, Lord Lyndhurst's Act,
"Even in our modernpsychologicallysophisticatedworld,there is concernto denythe erotic

componentof these intense Victoriansibling relationships.Forexample,in a letterto the Times
Literary Supplement,Aug. 9, 1974, p. 859, Elethea Hayter condemnedcritics who suggested
that the strong attachment of Dorothyand William Wordsworthand otherVictoriansiblings
included sexual feelings. Hayter sought to defendthe integrity of these Victorians,as though
unconsciousincestuousstrivings were blameworthyandtheir uncoveringdefamatory.
"AutobiographyofElizabethSewell, p. 47. Redinger,GeorgeEliot, p. 45.
"Wohl, "Sex,"VictorianFamily, p. 216, n. 66. Percy Greg, "WhyShouldWe Break Up the
Marriage Code?"National Review,VIII(1886),529.
"J. G. Frazer, Totemismand Exogamy(London,1910),IV, 97. SigmundFreud, Totemand
Taboo,trans. by A. A. Brill (New York, 1918),p. 14. HavelockEllis disagreedwith Frazerand
Freud about the strength of instinctive incestuousfeelings which need to be repressed.Ellis
believed that familiarity has a "dullingeffect ... on the developmentof sexual stimuli."He
acknowledgedhis own incestuouspassionforhis sister, but attributedit to their longseparation
during puberty.Phyllis Grosskurth,HavelockEllis (New York, 1980),p. 385.
"MARRIAGEWITHA DECEASEDWIFE'SSISTERBILL" 73
introduced initially merely to guarantee a nobleman's inheritance but

which became the occasion for strengthening the prohibition against
incestuous marriage, a prohibition vigorously defended throughout the
century, can be seen as evidence of Victorian society's need for more
safeguards against repressed but intensified incestuous feelings.
The particular relationship of a man and his deceased wife's sister
became the focus of controversy because the sociological conditions in
Victorian England made it especially sensitive. It was the common pattern
in Victorian families for unmarried "redundant" women, which the 1851
census revealed composed almost forty percent of the female population
ages 21-44,21 to live with a married sister, and to take care of the children if
the mother died, a not uncommon event in that age when the maternal
death rate was still quite high. The possibility of a widower wanting to
marry the sister was therefore real.
In addition to rational sociological factors, there could also be uncon-
scious psychological reasons for wanting marriage with a wife's sister.
Several Victorian critics of the bill argued that those who favored the
legalization of marriage with a wife's sister were motivated by their own
incestuous passions,22 an argument which modern psychoanalytic theory
would support and explain as the defensive displacement of feelings from
the blood relative to the in-law. Just as many defended against incestuous
feelings by condemning the marriage of affinity, so others acted out those
feelings in disguised form. Evidence for this view can be found in the case
of Henry Thornton, so jealously possessive of his sisters, who lived with his
sister Marianne after his first wife's death. He later went abroad to marry
his deceased wife's sister, and became a major financial contributor to the
Marriage Law Reform Association. Marianne, feeling rejected as surro-
gate wife-mother, and also disturbed by the affinal marriage with the
sister-in-law, wrote that even after the very painful initial feelings had
worn away, there were
other feelings that I fear nothing can eradicate for they seem like
an instinct planted in one's very nature ... I have never thought,
as alas all my family do, that it is very wrong-only that it is an
impossible sort of idea-in short it seems not a sin-but a
shame- if indeed those two can be unconnected.
Henry's friend Thomas Macaulay also opposed the marriage, which he

described to his beloved sister as a "miserable affair," which he said he
could not "with propriety" discuss with Henry.23
21J.F. C. Harrison, The Early Victorians, 1832-51 (London, 1971), p. 4.

22"Deceased Wife's Sister," Saturday Review, LV, 815. Letter to The Times, April 13, 1849, p.
6.
23Forster, Marianne Thornton, pp. 175, 184. Just as Marianne Thornton and Macaulay were
probably expressing unconscious defensive as well as rational practical reasons for opposing the
marriage, so did Christina Rossetti when she refused to greet Holman Hunt's second wife
because she was his deceased wife's sister. Rossetti in her moral indignation was acting as a
loyal daughter of the church, but she may also have been defending against her own conflicted
sexual feelings for her brothers. Stanley Weintraub, FourRosettis: A Victorian Biography (New
York, 1977), p. 210.
74 JOURNALOF BRITISHSTUDIES
Support for the argument that incestuous feelings stimulated desire for
marriage with an affine could also be found in the case of a third genera-
tion Claphamite offspring, Vanessa Stephen (Bell), who was frustrated by
the law which prevented her marrying Jack Hills, the husband of her
deceased half-sister Stella. As children Vanessa and her sister Virginia
(Woolf) had developed a strong enduring attachment to their brother
Thorby, with whom they slept in a night nursery. Both girls also were
subjected to repeated sexual molestation by their older half-brother
George. This incestuous sexual experience made Virginia frigid.24 In
Vanessa, beneath the sense of disgust and horror, it may have so excited
her that she wanted to resume through marriage the sexual relationship
with a brother in the displaced form of in-law. The molesting brother
George was most adamant against Vanessa going abroad to marry her
brother-in-law Jack, because George felt it would be too scandalous.
Ironically the closely consanguineous marriage of first cousins, a relic of
an earlier age of landed aristocracy, was legal and common in Victorian
England, yet was not seriously challenged until the late Victorian era, and
then by eugenists rather than moralists. Cousin marriage was not
strongly opposed because cousins were usually not raised with the same
isolated emotional intimacy as siblings, nor in the same household, so
their sexual relationship would not taint the purity of the family. Cousin-
hood, though a blood relation, did not evoke incestuous associations as
strongly as did the relationship of a brother and sister-in-law. Cousin
marriage was not tabooed, therefore, because it did not arouse the same
unconscious desire and attendant guilt and anxiety as did the idea of
marriage with a sister, even in surrogate dejure form.
The following analysis of the debate in parliament and the press over the
Wife's Sister Bill provides unique insights into the dark hidden layers of
the Victorian psyche, and reveals the extent of the incest anxiety in that
time of intense family relationships. This paper does not suggest any
increase of consummated incest in middle or upper class Victorian fami-
lies. It rather uncovers the increased incestuous strivings, unconscious
wishes which then, if Freud is right, must be defended against by stronger
protection against incest.
The first line of attack against the Wife's Sister Bill was the argument
that such marriages were in fact incestuous because the relationship was
one of consanguinity as well as affinity. This argument was based on a
literal interpretation of Genesis 2 that husband and wife "became one
flesh," and that therefore marriage meant physiological as well as spiri-
tual and legal union. If of "one flesh" with his wife, a man was related by
blood to his wife's relations. This consanguineous relationship was not
24QuentinBell, Virginia Woolf(NewYork, 1972),pp. 26, 45-56, 75.
dissolved by the death of the wife, so remarriage with an affine would be

incestuous.25
Another common scriptual argument used by those who considered
marriage with a deceased wife's sister to be incestuous was that it was
included by inference in the Levitical list of prohibited degrees. Leviticus
18:16 forbids a man "to uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife," and
so it was argued by analogous reasoning that neither should he uncover
the nakedness of his wife's sister. Leviticus 18:18 specifically forbad the
marriage during the wife's lifetime.
The meaning of these texts, and the extent to which they would guide
Victorian marriage, was hotly debated in the mid-nineteenth century.
Critics of the argument claimed that Biblical references were used to
justify rather than prove the contention that marriage with a wife's sister
was incestuous. Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, one of few bishops
who supported the bill, said that his impression was that Biblical argu-
ments "indicated a very strong desire to accommodate the construction of
Scripture to a preconceived opinion, and that if such preconceived opinion
had not existed, such a construction would never have been adopted."26
By the 1870s, the Bible was not as often cited as evidence against the
bill. The new higher criticism had shown the interpretations to be invalid
(Biblical scholars suggested that other passages in Leviticus actually
required marriage with a deceased wife's sister), and the increasing
rationalism of late Victorian England made the arguments seem irrele-
vant. Matthew Arnold, who passionately opposed the bill, discounted the
claims of Old Testament law on Victorian marriage law. "Who can believe
that, as to love and marriage, our reason and the necessities of our
humanity have their true sufficient and divine law expressed for them by
the voice of any oriental and polygamous Nation like the Hebrews."27
In place of Jehovah, the new Victorian God of Science was called on to
prove that it was incestuous to marry a wife's sister. The "one flesh"
argument from Genesis, for example, was transmuted into biological
theory, with the contention that sexual intercourse causes an actual phy-
siological change in the marriage partners that makes them blood rela-
tions. The Saturday Review, defending this theory, suggested that "we do
not need to prove absolutely that a true case of blood relationship is
established. The probability is enough if we would be on the safe side and
act consistently on the supposition of degeneration resulting from inter-
breeding." Therefore, the journal concluded, "the taboo against the
deceased wife's sister is perfectly rational and there is better reason for
25Forexamples of this argument, see letter to The Times, April 13, 1849, p. 6. Earl Beau-
champ, "MarriageWith a Deceased Wife's Sister,"ChurchReview, XLVII(1886), 400-02. 3
Hansard CCXIV:1891 (13 Mar., 1873).
26Quoted in [Henry Rogers],"MarriageWith a DeceasedWife'sSister,"EdinburghReview,
XCVII(1853), 332.
27MatthewArnold,Cultureand Anarchy(New York, 1969),p. 184.
continuing it rather than abolishing it."28

Many opponents of the bill conceded that the relationship was not
physically consanguineous, but claimed that it was so psychologically.
They argued that there was a natural instinctive revulsion against the
idea of a man marrying his wife's sister, just as presumably there was
against other incestuous relationships. This instinct was nature's pro-
nouncement of prohibition. Man-made law was necessary however to
support natural law, because natural instinct, the Bishop of London
warned, "is a weak and precarious barrier against human passion." Glad-
stone's Lord Chancellor Selborne advised that "the brutal passion of some
of the lowest order are capable of overleaping even the natural barriers
which exist between parent and child-between brother and sister. But as
a general rule, the repugnance to such unnatural connections may be so
great that they would be rare even if no prohibitory laws existed." Beyond
these close relations, however, he believed that legal prohibitions were
necessary. "The more remote the connection, if it is still within the line of
unrestrained domestic intimacy-the more important it is to fence it."29
The bill's supporters denied there was any instinctive revulsion against
it. The Christian apologist Henry Rogers, who himself had married his
deceased wife's sister in 1834, the year before Lord Lyndhurst's Act,
claimed that "the 'horror naturalis,' which so many metaphysical jurists
have asserted against many species of union where consanguinity is
involved-a horror, which whether natural or not, is certainly most
rational...cannot be supposed to exist or operate here." As evidence
Rogers, writing anonymously in the Edinburgh Review, cited not his own
experience but the fact that so many other modern societies allow mar-
riage with a wife's sister.30
Advocates also argued that affinity was not really considered inces-
tuous, otherwise parliament in 1835 would not have validated the pre-
vious marriages. Opponents insisted that Lord Lyndhurst's Act did not
declare any existing incestuous marriages to be good, but merely pre-
vented any suit in the ecclesiastical courts invalidating such existing
marriages. They acknowledged that the act was logically inconsistent, but
that it was necessarily so because parliament could not introduce ex post
facto penal legislation. As William Hale Hale, the Archdeacon of London,
stated to the 1847 Royal Commission, Lord Lyndhurst's Act was enacted
"to strengthen not alter the old law." Percy Greg later argued the same
point, that the act "placed marriage with a deceased wife's sister on
exactly the same footing both for the future and the past, with the most
hideous forms of consanguineous incest."31
An underlying assumption in these arguments against the Wife's Sister
2""Science and the Deceased Wife's Sister," Saturday Review, XCIX (1905), 443-44.
293Hansard CCIV: 1902 (13 Mar., 1873).
30[Rogers], "Marriage," Edinburgh Review, XCVII, 326-27.
31"First Report of the Commissioners," P.P., XXVIII, 388. Greg, "The Marriage Code,"
National Review, VIII, 529.
Bill was that, just as the relationship between brother and sister is pure, so
should be the relationship between brother-in-law and sister-in-law,
"without taint of passion or irregular desire."32The heated insistence on
maintaining sexless purity between in-laws suggests however transferred
anxiety about emotional intimacy between siblings. One opponent of the
Wife's Sister's Bill in a letter to The Times acknowledged this "special
intimacy" when he pointed out that in-laws should not quite relate as
brother and sister. "No man possessed of any knowledge of human
nature-of any experience in the world, would ever wish to see the inter-
course of a husband with his wife's sister assume the full familiarity which
is pleasing as between children of the same parents, but for many reasons
unadvisable under other conditions."33
The Wife's Sister Bill was opposed not only because it was seen as
legalizing incest, but also because it was feared that it would introduce
into the family circle the unwelcome element of sexuality, whether inces-
tuous or not. The prohibition was a cordon sanitaire which maintained
"the dignity and purity of family life."34It protected the home, which had to
be "hedged round the nature's vow of chastity, the moral instincts of
mankind, and the prohibitions of the law," else the "flaming torch of
sensual and inordinate desire would fill the sanctuary with smoke," and
"you would transform a consecrated Church into a menagerie of wild
beasts."35 Control of sexuality outside the family had been a key factor in
containing erotic feelings within the family. Moral guardians now were
concerned to maintain their vigilance against dangerous sexual impulses
in the domestic sphere itself.
Opponents of the bill took for granted that a man would lust for his wife's
sister if their relationship were not tabooed. The royal commission
reported that the argument most strongly insisted upon against marriage
with a wife's sister, was that if there were the possibility of marriage
between a man and his sister-in-law, "cause would be given for the excite-
ment of those feelings which might destroy the peace of the wife and even
lead to criminal intercourse."36 It was often argued that if the law were
323 Hansard CCXIV: 1891 (13 Mar., 1873). See also J. F. Oxon [Bishop of Oxford], "Sisters-in-
Law," Nineteenth Century, XX (1886), 674. The Bishop of Oxford (John MacKarness) was
remarkably independent and supported church disestablishment on many issues, but he was
strongly against the Wife's Sister Bill.
33Letter to The Times, May 8, 1849, p. 7.
343Hansard CCXIV: 1891 (13 Mar., 1873).
35Quoted in W. G. Todd, "The Roman Catholic Marriage Laws," Contemporary Review, XXVI
(1875), p. 423. The irony in the argument that there should be no sexuality within the family
was noted by Lord Bramwell. He praised the eloquence of the idea that the family circle was a
"sacred precinct, the purity of whose air is to resemble that of heaven," yet said it was
unintelligible, because the center of that circle was the marriage relationship of a man and his
wife. Lord Bramwell, "Marriage With a Deceased Wife's Sister," Nineteenth Century, XX
(1886), 413.
36"First Report of the Commissioners," P.P., XXVIII, 242.
changed, an unmarried sister could not live with her married sister, or
even take care of her when sick, because, in the dire words of Irish Catholic
peer Lord O'Hagan, one could not be sure "that the husband will remain
free from evil thoughts and wrongful aspirations, which he never before
indulged." The maiden sister herself, who came as a ministering angel,
would also fear "lest she should sometimes be distracted by the bewilder-
ing and corrupting thought, that it might be her lot, by the license of the
law, to mount as a nuptial couch the bed on which her sister, in her agony,
had waited dissolution." Thomas Richey, writing in the Church Review,
suggested the oedipal parallel to a daughter's incestuous wish to replace
the mother.
If it was a thing from which nature herself revolted, that a

mother...might have her last days embittered by the thought
that her end was desired in order that her own daughter take her
place as a wife, it is surely not less a thing to be abhorred that a
sister ... should be compelled during her lifetime to witness the
growth of an affection which only waits for her own death to reach
its consummation.37
Critics of this argument complained that it "implied a very low and false
estimate of the morality of the females in this country," and that it was
"simply a libel upon the women of England." The Bishop of Ripon, another
of the few bishops supporting the bill, pointed out the projection of sexual
feelings by opponents: those who opposed the bill, because of"the resulting
'social evils,' drew entirely upon their own imaginations."38
Proponents of the bill questioned whether, if even the possibility of
marriage with a wife's sister could so taint family purity, a mere law
labeling that relationship as incestuous was sufficient. Could a law, "by
merely calling these marriages by odious names ... fill the public mind
with the feelings and associations with which the whole community
regards as incest?" The Earl of Kimberly felt that the opposition had failed
to prove that the prohibition "did fence round the family circle. The fact
was that the sister-in-law could never be regarded in the same light as the
blood sister."39
Opponents argued that the prohibitionary law did have the effect of a
true incest taboo in preventing sexual desire, that it could, as William
Hale Hale testified to the royal commission, create "feelings of repug-
nance" to marriages of affinity. A letter writer to The Times insisted that
the prohibition served as "an unseen indestructibly well-acknowledged
"33Hansard CCXIV: 1891-92 (13 Mar., 1873). Thomas Richey, "The Theory of Marriage and
Its Consequences," Church Review, XLVII (1886), 289.
383 Hansard CIV: 1191 (3 May, 1849). CCIV: 283 (15 Feb., 1871). CCXIV: 1896 (13 Mar.,
1873).
39[Rogers], "Marriage," Edinburgh Review, XCVII, 337. 3 Hansard CCIV: 1907 (13 Mar.,
1873).
bar to any other feeling but that of the purest friendship." For Percy Greg,
"to all wholesome natures, the impossibility of marriage is the exclusion of
passion. It matters not exactly where the line is drawn ... there the sacred
protection of natural feeling and domestic love follows it."40
Defendants of the prohibition against marriage with a wife's sister as a
means of controlling sexuality argued that the restraint of sexual passion
was a mark of higher civilization. Matthew Arnold's biographer said that
Arnold's repugnance to the Wife's Sister Bill was due to "his strong
sense. .that the sacredness of marriage, and the customs that regulate it,
were triumphs of culture which had been won, painfully and with effort,
from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive life." Theodora Chapman, an
anti-feminist moral guardian, argued that the "general note of Christ's
teachings is one of restraint of natural impulses-especially in regard to
the strongest of human passions," and that human progress is a record of
slow steps upward from the brute level. "To annul the prohibition of
marriages of affinity is distinctly a retrograde step for us English people to
make from the position which we have reached among mankind. It is
surrendering a bit of the field of life to the domination of passion which, in
the interest of the family, the greatest of human institutions, had been
fenced off from that domination."41
Eliza Lynn Linton, another prominent anti-feminist, supported the
Wife's Sister Bill, and characterized the 1835 law as an example of the
sexually repressive "feminine element of restriction, of prohibition." In
the same spirit Mary Elizabeth Braddon, in her 1888 sensationalist novel
The Fatal Three, portrayed an opponent of marriage with a deceased wife's
sister as an anti-sexual ascetic, a man who denounced such marriages as
"unholy, immoral, accursed," but who unconsciously was against any
marriage at all.42
The Wife's Sister Bill was part of the larger debate over the right of
society to exercise moral control over individual action. Even if the prohi-
bition against marriage with a deceased wife's sister were effective in
keeping sexual passion out of the home, liberal supporters of the bill
questioned whether society had the right to interfere in a private matter of
conscience. Lord Houghton, himself a notorious hedonist with a well
known interest in pornography, denied this authority. Did parliament, he
asked his peers, have the legislative power "to pronounce whether other
men acting on their own free judgement should do, or abstain from doing,
any act socially wise or unwise, prudent or imprudent, convenient or
40"FirstReport of the Commissioners,"P.P., XVIII, 386. Letter to The Times, May 8, 1849, p. 7.
Greg, "Marriage Code," National Review, VIII, 530. Beresford-Hope, the bill's chief parliamen-
tary opponent, may have especially felt the need for a strong incest law in that, after his father's
death, his mother married the illegitimate son of her uncle.
41G.W. S. Russell, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1904), p. 203. Theodora Chapman, "Marriage
With a Deceased Wife's Sister," Nineteenth Century and After, LIII (1903), 985.
42E. Lynn Linton, "The Philosophy of Marriage," Universal Review, II (1888), p. 32. Robert
Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York,
1979), p. 345.
inconvenient, in the domestic circle in which each lives? Are they mem-
bers of a tribunal of social policy inquisitors of the manners of other
men?"43
The argument for freedom of choice convinced William Gladstone to
change his position in 1869, as he did on other principles of the Established
Church, from opposition to ambivalent personal support for the Wife's
Sister Bill. He would not however adopt the bill as a government measure
because he claimed public opinion was too divided on the issue,44but in this
case it was probably his moralistic feelings that inhibited his commitment
to liberalism.
Conservative opponents of the bill argued predictably that the needs of
society were more important than individual liberty. The happiness of the
community and the purity of social life were more important than indi-
vidual grievances. The Wife's Sister Bill would, the Bishop of Oxford
insisted, only promote "the principle of laxity and licentiousness under the
specious name of liberty." Even if one generally favored greater individual
freedom, according to the Saturday Review, "there are some liberties
against which Nature herself protests. In the case of marriage it is
apparent that the prima facie argument is not in favour of liberty but in
favour of restriction." Lord O'Hagan reaffirmed that parliament did have
the right and responsibility to exercise moral guardianship for the good of
the individual as much as for social welfare. "The Legislature must have
the power to regulate, more or less, the conduct of people for their own
moral good."45
The basic argument, with its many variations, against the Wife's Sister
Bill was that it would destroy the purity of the family. Towards the end of
the nineteenth century, supporters of the bill reversed that argument in
reference to the working classes, and said that it was the prohibition of
marriage which created sin among these classes. Poor families, it was
argued, often lived in one room. If the mother died, the husband could not,
as did the more affluent classes, hire a housekeeper. He had to call on a
relative, usually the wife's sister. As Lord Bramwell warned, "we cannot
shut our eyes to what must and does follow. It cannot be denied it would be
well if the man and woman could marry."46
A propertied Englishman could go abroad to marry his deceased wife's
sister, but not so a poor man, so the existing law, it was argued, operated

44John Morley, Life of Gladstone (New York, 1903), I, 569. 3 Hansard CCXII: 432 (1 July,
1872).
45Oxon, "Sisters-in-Law," Nineteenth Century, XX, 674. "Science," Saturday Review, XCIX,
443.3 Hansard CCXIV:1892(13 Mar.,1873).Therewas also an argumentagainstthe bill based
on freedom of choice, that the bill would morally compel an unwilling widower to marry his
wife's sister. One young lord even thought it would legally require a man to do so. The lord went
to great effort, unusual for him, to journey to parliament to oppose the bill. He explained that "I
do think it'll be an infernal shame if they oblige a chap to marry his deceased wife's sister-if he
don't want to." Frances M. Brookfield, The Cambridge "Apostles" (London, 1906), p. 242.
46Bramwell, "Marriage," Nineteenth Century, XX, 405.
unfairly between classes. The objection that the bill would prevent an
unmarried sister from living with her married sister was also claimed to
be a class argument, representing only the bias of those for whom home
was "of a conventional and overstrained character, and founded on the
feelings of classes of society that were much more sensitive on such points
than the working population generally."47
The opponents of the bill scoffed at this defense of the Wife's Sister Bill
based on the needs of the working class. Beresford-Hope insisted that it
was a bogus issue, "the stalking horse for the apostles of conjugal free
love." The Bishop of Oxford argued that it was a few corrupt men from the
upper class, not the workers, who wanted the bill passed. "The notion that
a working-man's family has its store of sisters living unemployed at home
in readiness to help a brother-in-law in his bereavement is a fancy picture,
which is exhibited in order to divert attention from the fact that it is quite a
different class from which the promoters of the Bill are drawn."48
The opponents acknowledged that the single-room family dwelling did
present an awkward situation, which led to many forbidden unions, the
least common of which was that of a man and his wife's sister. Therefore,
Percy Greg concluded, the single room argument in favor of the bill should
be set aside, "unless we are prepared on the same grounds, to legalize all
the forms of incest to which the 'single room' gives rise." A last ditch
compromise solution was offered, in the final debate before the passage of
the Wife's Sister Bill in 1907, that parliament should not change the
marriage law, "which had caused this country to be more pure and moral
than any other," but rather it should improve the housing of the poor.49
The final major argument against the Wife's Sister Bill was that its
passage would lead to further removal of restrictions on prohibited
degrees. The prohibition of marriage with a deceased wife's sister was seen
as a bulwark, a line of defense against the threatening onslaught of
unrestrained incest. Without this fortification, family purity would be
corrupted by even more blatant incestuous demands than that of marriage
with a wife's sister.
Fear of opening the floodgates, and letting damned-up, incestuous
desires flow uncontrolled, permeates much of the debate. This fantasy of
unrestrained incest, a fear perhaps masking unconscious wishes, suggests
473 Hansard CCIV:292 (15 Feb., 1871).

48Beresford-Hope, "TheLords,"National Review,I, 758. Oxon,"Sisters-in-Law,"Nineteenth
Century, XX, 671. The fact that the pre-Raphaelitepainter W. HolmanHunt, who had gone
abroadto marryhis deceasedwife's sister, was chairmanof the MarriageLawReformAssocia-
tion must have strengthened the idea that supportersof the bill were self-interestedand
somewhat disreputable.The notoriousMoncktonMilnes,elevatedto LordHoughton,a longtime
supporterof the bill in the Commonsand then the Lords,couldbe cited as anotherexample.
49Greg,"MarriageCode,"National Review, VIII, 528. 4 Hansard CLXXX:1437 (14 Aug.,
1907).
the need felt for rigid control of incestuous impulses. Repeatedly it was
argued that this bill would lead to another, and then another, "with a
velocity that could not be stopped,"50and then finally all the prohibited
degrees would be abolished. Earl Beauchamp insisted that the Wife's
Sister Bill would be held to justify "marriages about the incestuous char-
acter of which there would be no doubt." If the bill were passed, there
would be no law to prevent "marriages of the most shocking description-
even the marriage of a father and a daughter." The Archbishop of Canter-
bury likened a change in the law to wrenching a stone from a building,
which would then collapse.51
To rebut this argument, defenders of the bill cited the fact that marriage
with a deceased wife's sister was legal in almost every other country, with
none of the disastrous consequences forecast by the opposition. Lord
Houghton pointed out that these marriages in fact were often regarded as
praiseworthy as a means of binding the family closer together, and he
lamented that Englishmen in England could not contract marriages that
were legal in almost every other state in the world.52
Opponents answered that point easily. They asserted national and
imperial superiority. England leads, not follows. England, the mother
country, should set the standard, for according to the Bishop of Oxford, "it
would indeed be an evil day for England when we began to take the pattern
of our laws from the medley of crude legislation which a score of inexperi-
ence communities had chanced to enact." The bill's opponents claimed that
the example of other countries supported their view that the bill led to
moral corruption. The marriage law and practice in other countries, Percy
Greg insisted, "are not examples, but hideous warnings. A cankerous
license, a social rottenness simply indescribable, has followed step by step
the first relaxation of Christian tradition." Greg claimed that in countries
where marriage with a deceased wife's sister is allowed, "incestuous mar-
riages, conjugal unfaithfulness, and facility of divorce are now rife, and
are producing consequences which we may well shrink from describing or
even contemplating." The Saturday Review cited evidence from America
to prove that the legalization of marriage with a deceased wife's sister had
created "a perceptible and painful constraint ... a consciousness of evil
tendency which itself is the nature of sin."53
Arguing that the marriage with a deceased wife's sister was not and
would not lead to incest, its supporters were challenged to say where the
line should be drawn. What marriages should in fact be forbidden? There
was general consensus that marriages of close consanguinity should be
prohibited, but there was less agreement on why. The popular view, held
by those concerned ostensibly not with family purity but with racial
5?3Hansard CIV: 1153 (3 May, 1849).
513 Hansard CCXIV: 1879-83 (13 Mar., 1873). 4 Hansard CLXXXII: 364 (20 Aug., 1907).
53Oxon, "Sister-in-Law," Nineteenth Century, XX, 672. Greg, "Marriage Code," National
Review, VIII, 531. "Deceased Wife's Sister," Saturday Review, LV, 116.
strength, was that inbreeding led to physical and mental degeneration.

Charles Darwin offered scientific evidence for this view in his 1862 Fertili-
zation of Orchids. "Nature tells us in the most emphatic way that she
abhors perpetual self-fertilization ... May we not further infer as probable
... that marriage between near relatives is likewise in some way injurious
-that some unknown great good is derived from the union of individuals
which have been kept distant for many generations."54
Darwin's conclusion on the harm of inbreeding was challenged by other
scientists, including Darwin's own son George, himself the product of a
cousin marriage, who concluded that his own investigation, "so far as it is
worth anything, tends to invalidate this opinion." The Westminster
Review, surveying the recent studies, pointed out that scientific theories
are shaped by preconceived ideas. It said that because there is a general
"feeling" against consanguinity, scientists have produced studies that
prove it causes harm. Nevertheless, the "feeling" is "founded on a kind of
superstition than on any really scientific considerations."55
William Adam, whip of the Liberal Party in Gladstone's first ministry,
accepted the argument that consanguinity was not biologically harmful to
the species, but he insisted that it was to society. Consanguineous mar-
riages "confuse the reciprocal duties of domestic life, and thereby retard
the formation of moral character and prevent real moral progress." If, for
example, a son married his mother, there could not be "pure filial rever-
ence and pure maternal affection." To the offspring, the father would also
be the brother, and "the authority of the father and the equality of the
brother are lost and annulled."56
Despite scientific studies to the contrary, Darwin's view that marriages
of blood relatives led to degeneration in offspring was the dominant theory
in the late nineteenth century, and led to increased concern to prevent
such marriages. This concern worked in favor of the Wife's Sister Bill,
because it shifted the focus from a relationship of affinity to one of con-
sanguinity: the marriage of first cousins. Supporters of the Wife's Sister
Bill argued that it was strange for opponents of the bill to say that
marriage with a deceased wife's sister would be incest. As Lord Gage
pointed out, "it is a curious idea of incest to call it incest to marry an alien
in blood when it is not incest to marry with a first cousin." Walter Lisle
mocked the law which allowed a man to marry his first cousin "who is but
one degree removed from the relationship of a sister-a genuine sister,
mind you, not a fictitiously legal one-and yet forbids marriage with a
woman who is a complete stranger to his blood."57
To gather information on the effects of human inbreeding, Sir John
54CharlesDarwin,Fertilizationof Orchids(1862),quotedin WilliamAdam,"Consanguinity
in Marriage,Part I,"FortnightlyReview,II (1865),723.
55GeorgeH. Darwin, "MarriageBetween First Cousins in England and Their Effects,"
FortnightlyReview,XXIV(1875),p. 41. WestminsterReview, CXXX(Amer.Ed.;1863),48.
56WilliamAdam, "Consanguinityin Marriage,Part II,"FortnightlyReview,III (1865),87.
573 Hansard CCXIV:1876 (13 Mar., 1873).Walter Lisle, "MarriageWith a DeceasedWife's
Sister", WestminsterReview,CLX(1903), 158-59.
Lubbock proposed that the 1871 census include a question about the
marriage of cousins and the health of their offspring. Parliament rejected
the idea as being too sensitive and awkward because it would "stigmatize"
the many cousin marriages. Nevertheless, most who spoke on the question
in the House of Commons expressed opinions against cousin marriages.58
A supporter of the Wife's Sister Bill writing in the Westminster Review
defended cousin marriages, on the grounds that it was natural to want to
marry someone similar to oneself. After all, "nature permits breeding only
within very narrow limits ... the connection between resemblance and
love in striking." If there is, he said, an "innate horror of intermarriage
with relations," there is "an equally universal and much better founded
dislike of marriage with foreigners . . . 'God made white men, and God
made black men, but the Devil made half-castes."'59 The tone of this
argument suggests that, at least for this author, anxiety about miscege-
nation, surely a common occurrence in the nineteenth-century British
colonial empire, was greater than incest anxiety.
In 1906 parliament passed a Colonial Marriages Act, which granted full

inheritance rights in England to children of marriages with deceased
wives's sisters contracted in the colonies. This bill prepared the way, as its
opponents feared, for the passage finally in the next year of the Wife's
Sister Bill, with the Liberal government for the first time giving its official
support. When opponents complained that the bill was being rushed
through on short notice, sarcastic reference was made to the long repeti-
tious debates through the previous decades. Recognizing that the bill was
going to pass, the opposition made desperate efforts to restrict its scope.
The proposal was made unsuccessfully to include in the preamble the
specific disclaimer that the bill was to be confined only to marriage with a
deceased wife's sister, and that it was not to be "'a jumping off' ground for
the alteration of the marriage law generally." An amendment to confine
the operation of the bill to non-Anglicans was rejected. Opponents also
failed in the attempt to eliminate the retroactive clause, which they
claimed would encourage lawlessness by white-washing people who had
broken the existing law. The bill passed both houses of parliament, and
received royal assent on August 29, 1907.60
The Wife's Sister Bill became law at that time because of government
endorsement, and its passage reflects the increased rational and secular
spirit of Edwardian England. More importantly, however, it passed
because changing social conditions of the early twentieth century made
the idea of marriage with a deceased wife's sister no longer so disturbing.
583Hansard CCII:817 (25 July, 1870)and CCII:1006-09(26 July, 1870).

59"Kin,The Marriageof the Near,"WestminsterReview,CIV(Amer.Ed.;1875),147-55.
6?4Hansard CLXXX:1425-1512(14 Aug., 1907) and CLXXX:348-411 (20 Aug., 1907).The
Statutes Revised (3rd.ed.;London,1950),XIV,287-88:7 Edw.7, c.47.
The change was in part created by expanded employment opportunities for

women, which meant that single women, no longer necessarily redundant,
did not have to find shelter with their married sisters. Also, improved
obstetrical methods and birth control had lessened the possibility of young
deceased wives.
The most significant change was that the Edwardian family was not as
much a hothouse of repressed incestuous feelings as was, to a greater or
lesser extent, the Victorian family, whose purity had to be so vigorously
defended. The greater social freedom of women, a relaxation of the strict
Victorian moral code, and the increased opportunity for extra-familial
heterosexual interaction, lessened the emotional intensity within the
family. In the Freudian sense, instinctive incestuous wishes could now be
rechanneled and gratified by less anxiety-provoking objects outside the
family. Or, in the view of Havelock Ellis, the infantile incestuous feelings
would just die out naturally "when stronger stimuli from outside are
applied."61 In the 1940 report for the Archbishop of Canterbury on prohib-
ited degrees, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski suggested that less
stringent rules were needed for affines, because "the greater freedom of
women in modern social conditions had broadened the range of social
intercourse and lessened the significance of household and kin relation-
ships in erotic temptation."62 The state had already acknowledged the
need for "less stringent rules" with the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill in 1907,
which was extended in 1921 to include deceased brother's widows, and in
1931 to nieces or nephews by marriage.
In 1908, the year after the Wife's Sister Bill became law, parliament
passed a Punishment of Incest Act, establishing for the first time criminal
rather than merely ecclesiastical penalties for incest. The law covered
"any male person who has carnal knowledge of a person who is to his
knowledge his granddaughter, daughter, sister or mother ... whether or
not it was with her consent," and "any female person of or above the age of
sixteen years who with consent permits such carnal knowledge." This act
was briefly debated in 1903, and then passed with very little opposition in
1908.63
The Punishment of Incest Act is a sharp contrast to Lord Lyndhurst's
Act of 1835 and to the nineteenth-century arguments against the Wife's
Sister Bill. The 1908 Act, pushed by the National Vigilance Association
and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,64dealt
with actual consanguineous incest, not with fantasized threatening rivers
of incestuous desires that had to be tightly contained. The suggestion was
made that sex with a stepdaughter as well as daughter be included, but the
61Havelock Ellis, Studies in thePsychologyof Sex (Philadelphia,1906),II, 505.

62Quotedin Raymond Firth, Jane Herbert, Anthony Forge, Families and the Relatives:
Kinship in a MiddleClass SectorofLondon(New York, 1970),p. 191.
63TheStatutesRevised(3rd.ed.;London,1950),XIV,444-46:8 Edw.7,c.45.
64EdwardJ. Bristow, Viceand Vigilance(Totowa,N. J., 1977),p. 191.Wohl,"Sex,"Victorian
Family, p. 209.
consensus was that the number of relations should be limited, and should
include no person related by affinity.65 To enforce the act, parliament
established criminal penalties rather than relying on the prohibition of
marriage as sufficient deterrent.
The 1908 Incest Act does not suggest a new incest taboo, or an intensi-
fied need for repression. It, like the passage of the Wife's Sister Bill, is
evidence that the sexual tension within the English family had eased. One
could now more comfortably look beyond the shadow of incest in the form of
marriage with a deceased wife's sister and face directly the light of reality,
without the guilty fear of Oedipal blindness.
UNIVERSITYOF NEW ORLEANS
654 Hansard CXXIV:697 (24 Feb., 1903)and CXXV:820 (16 July, 1903).

The Marriage With A Deceased Wife

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The Marriage With A Deceased Wife

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The "Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill" Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense

of Family Purity in Victorian England

In 1835 the English Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst introduced into the

13Hansard XXVIII:203-07 (1 June, 1835);XXX: 792-94 (20 Aug., 1835);XXX:948-51 (24

'Anthony Wohl,"Sexand the Single Room:IncestAmongthe VictorianWorkingClasses,"in

'?See ChristopherLasch, "TheFamily and History,"New YorkReviewof Books,November

"Even in our modernpsychologicallysophisticatedworld,there is concernto denythe erotic

introduced initially merely to guarantee a nobleman's inheritance but

Henry's friend Thomas Macaulay also opposed the marriage, which he

21J.F. C. Harrison, The Early Victorians, 1832-51 (London, 1971), p. 4.

24QuentinBell, Virginia Woolf(NewYork, 1972),pp. 26, 45-56, 75.

dissolved by the death of the wife, so remarriage with an affine would be

continuing it rather than abolishing it."28

If it was a thing from which nature herself revolted, that a

433Hansard CCXIV: 1872 (13 Mar., 1873).

473 Hansard CCIV:292 (15 Feb., 1871).

strength, was that inbreeding led to physical and mental degeneration.

In 1906 parliament passed a Colonial Marriages Act, which granted full

583Hansard CCII:817 (25 July, 1870)and CCII:1006-09(26 July, 1870).

The change was in part created by expanded employment opportunities for

61Havelock Ellis, Studies in thePsychologyof Sex (Philadelphia,1906),II, 505.

S-ar putea să vă placă și