Domestic Intimacies by Connolly Brian;

Author:Connolly, Brian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yet, in a speech delivered before the Louisville Medical Club prior to publication of his report, Bemiss offered a more speculative analysis that tied incest to the contours of national development. The neutral language of scientific objectivity was replaced with passionate claims about the constitutional vigor of Americans. Westward expansion, incest, and immigration were tied together into one problematic, purifying national project. Early communities in “the West . . . were separated from each other and from the older States, by miles of dangerous wilderness. It was natural that each community should be composed in a great degree of blood relations. . . . When in their new homes, a scarcity of marriageable material would often render unions between relations expedient, and afterward, these covenants, arising at first from necessity, became a habit, often convenient in some respects, since it preserved estates within the family circle.”113 As it was for southern planters, incest—or at least endogamy—was important to westerners for the consolidation of property into tightly knit kin groups that could claim clearly marked racial boundaries.

The small populations and geographical seclusion that led to frequent incest would presumably have lead to higher rates of hereditary degeneration, and such might have been the case, Bemiss claimed, for isolated populations in “the valleys of the Alps” and “in this country, the Jews.” Bemiss, unlike either Samuel Wells or Julius Steinau, associated ethnic purity with a greater likelihood for degenerative incestuous reproduction. Yet miraculously, such was not the case in the West. There, “these pioneers were a hardy, robust people, living much in the open air, and undergoing vigorous exercise; having for their aliment wild game and the fresh products of a genial soil, and not addicted to any habits calculated to impair the integrity of their well-endowed constitutions. We would naturally expect conditions of life so favorable to the sound development of the bodily organism to overrule all counteracting influences.”114 And so, for Bemiss, they did. Despite his claims a year later, there was an antidote to incestuous reproduction—the sanguine environs of the West. The geographical blessings of the ever-expanding United States ameliorated the potentially degenerative effects of incest. If reproduction offered a new universalism for the incest prohibition, the United States, as a state of exception, could transcend the banality of the universal.115

If geography was one ameliorative, the constitution of the people was the other. Who were these intrepid, incestuous, robust pioneers of whom Bemiss spoke? They were Americans, of course, whose, “extraordinary activity and energy” were “due to the composite nature of their blood.”116 The absence of racial purity in the United States, that is, “the ingrafting of nations differing in constitution and temperament from each other,” produced “the most vigorous people.”117 Hybridity, that is, ethnic and national intermarriage and sex, produced a vigorous people, who flouted the hereditary rules of incest. This was, however, hybridity within limits. “I do not look upon mulattoes as hybrids,” Bemiss wrote, “but think they exhibit less of vigor and vital force than are found in crosses where there is less contrast.

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