Cle'shea Crain

Publication Date

5-2008

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Jane Olmstead, Dale Rigby, Tom Hunley

Comments

Access granted to WKU students, faculty and staff only.

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Degree Program

Department of English

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

It’s a story about food. It’s about what goes in the mouth and what comes out the other end. It’s a story of love and hate and those emotions in between. It’s about truth and untruth and half-truth and pure fiction. It’s a story of many words and of few words. It’s about social acceptance and social ineptitude. It’s a story of closeness and distance. It’s about normal versus abnormal. It’s a coming-of-age story and growing-old story. It’s about opposites and attractions. And, in the midst, it’s just a story about a girl who loves a boy.

The following text is a work of fiction. The story is of a young woman Justine, who feels romantic love for her twin brother, Justin. The main subject of the text is consensual sibling incest and its influences on the psychological, sexual, and familial development of the female and male twins. Sibling abuse, twin relationships and family dynamics are among the sub-topics of the text. The text also implicitly explores, through fictional characters and events, the validity or fallacy of the opposing views on sexual development of Edvard Westermarck’s theory of sexual imprinting and Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal/Electra complex. The commonly reported and accepted definitions of sibling incest, sibling abuse, and sibling relations are implicitly and ditheringly challenged and accepted within the progression of the text.

Exploration of these subjects is important to understanding childhood sexual development, sibling sexual development, twin sibling sexual development, and the general development of healthy sexual beings. The text itself is an exploration into the sexual psyche of a young woman who seems to have had no explicit childhood trauma to warrant her dependency on her brother’s affection. As the story progresses, only more questions come about because no cause (most commonly, rape) for her sexual deviancy (that is, her disregard of the incest taboo) is readily accepted. Because no external cause can be pinpointed, the focus and search for the reason becomes internalized, signifying an innate characteristic, and thereby presenting a social abnormality as normal.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Creative Writing | Fiction

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