Book Review: Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire (review)

Book Review: Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire (review)

Complément du titre: By Janice Doane and Devon Hodges. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. 164 pp.

Trauma texts and studies of recent decades have engendered questions about the dilemmas of remembering and narrating a painful past. Telling Incest is a valuable contribution to these inquiries, employing feminist, rhetorical, and cultural analysis to delineate types of incest narratives. This study investigates contexts and controversies, wherein shifts in public attitudes affected by sociocultural movements, race and trauma, among others, in turn influence the creation and reception of women's incest stories.

Doane and Hodges establish the arguments and goals for their study by disputing some recent theoretical formulations of incest narratives. For example, Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul (1995) focuses not on victims' experiences, but on powerful public discourses that produce a "semantic contagion" of incest, which he suggests may perpetuate the act itself. In contrast to Hacking's approach, Doane and Hodges argue that these acts precede their narration and [End Page 878] that rather than silencing incest stories, they analyze the "social contexts for telling incest" to help readers ascertain texts' authenticity. For example, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (1925) reflects a context of shame through a narrative of oblique references, denials and silence, prefiguring future incest stories.