steepholm | Fanny and Edmund Got Married

I'm curious about attitudes to first-cousin marriage.

First, to get the medical side out of the way, I can see good genetic reasons for not marrying one's first cousin, reasons which may indeed be powerful enough to justify measures banning or restricting the practice. I don't feel qualified to judge that, and for the present purpose I'm not interested in it either. It's clearly less than optimal, like having parents over fifty, but whether it's a sufficiently bad idea to pass laws about it I just don't know.

What I'm interested in here is the visceral ickiness some people clearly feel at the idea of first-cousin marriage - the feeling that it breaks some powerful incest taboo, perhaps just a notch down from marrying one's sibling, child or parent.

I wasn't brought up to feel like that at all, and I'm curious as to why not - or, conversely, why other people do. Since these things are cultural, where are the cultural dividing lines, in terms of geography, generation, or belief systems? My impression is that the taboo feeling is stronger in the States, but I also think that in the UK it's stronger with the younger generation than with my own or older. There are also ethnic groups within the UK where first-cousin marriage is common, notably within the Pakistani community where I believe it runs at over 50%, and of course that has meant that the subject has inevitably become embroiled in rows about race, religion, etc. Has that altered the broader terms of the debate?

In short - as I see it, when I was growing up first-cousin marriage was considered unusual but in no way taboo, at least in my little bit of the world. I think it was even seen as romantic. Now, the feeling that it's taboo is much more widespread.

How does this tally with your experience of your own and other people's opinions? Have things changed?

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Westermarck effect

Thank you!

Then of course there are situations like those of my mother and her cousin, who share all four grandparents but no parents, their fathers being brothers and their mothers sisters. For them to have married would have been illegal, but only because they are both female - which would, ironically, have rendered the medical objection moot.

But they're double cousins -- that's surely a special case. I cannot believe that if they were different genders that they would legally be allowed to marry.

Whereas I would be astonished to discover the existence of a law prohibiting their marriage! Cousins have never featured in the Church of England's Table of Kindred and Affinity. Perhaps if the church authorities had had a better understanding of genetics they might have done, but it never happened. I suspect the frequency of dynastic marriages between cousins meant that no one ever thought of it as something to ban; informing the royals that they were sinning against God wouldn't be a smart career move.

I stand corrected. It seems that even in the US most states that allow first-cousin marriages have no exception for double first cousins (North Carolina is an exception). That makes my blood run a little cold, as double first cousins are at least as closely related as half-siblings. Presumably there's no exception for cases where one or both of the sibling pairs were identical twins, either, which would further up the consanguinity.

The problem is that most of these laws derive (if indirectly) from Biblical laws rather than medical science, which tends to be retrofitted onto existing prohibitions where it's taken into account at all.

If we were starting from scratch, and trying to frame laws to minimize inherited and congenital health conditions, we'd probably be thinking about restricting (for example) older parents, as well as closely related ones.

I don't think restrictions on older parents could possibly fly, either in terms of practicality or social acceptability. It would be too much of an assault on personal freedoms.

In a way that legislating against cousin-marriage would not be?

Sure. For one thing, there's no precedent at all in the matter, whereas with marriages between related people there is. It's not the kind of thing that strikes most people as being anyone else's business, and it's not as if older parents had any specific risks that no one else incurs. Moreover, given that it's perfectly possible for people who are marrying "late" (however you define that) to not want children, or indeed to already be infertile, how on earth would you enforce the matter if they said they didn't want children in order to get married, and then welcomed an accidental or accidental-on-purpose pregnancy? And what about people who marry early and have children late? Short of having a full-on license to procreate (which would take a huge upheaval in societal values), you couldn't do anything about them, and I don't honestly see why you should.

But as mentioned earlier, there is no precedent in my society for banning first-cousin marriage, nor would it occur to me that it was my "business"; if one were to interfere, cousins could offer the same "not planning to breed" defence that you suggest, and then do so accidentally; and in any case, even if one were to ban such a marriage, there would be nothing to stop them having sex and children outside marriage. One could offer medical advice to all of these categories of people, whatever their marital status; I don't perceive a right to do more, in either case. (I speak as the daughter of an elderly father; in my family, large age-gaps between partners have been very common.)

My mother and her brother would also have had such double cousins had the two older children not died in the flu epidemic after the First World War, before my mother and brother were born. I believe that under the Orthodox Church rules my grandparents would not have been allowed to marry, on the grounds that they had siblings married to each other. (Doesn't this come up in War and Peace - Nikolai and Maria could not have married had the marriage between Natasha and Andrei gone ahead?) Presumably the argument is that once husband and wife have become one flesh their sibling pools combine as well. But the Orthodox Church does seem more paranoid about the whole kindred and affinity idea, as they appear to ban everything up to second cousins. I think Catholicism allows second cousins, but you need a special dispensation to marry a first cousin. Again, I imagine that's down to dynastic politics.

That's very interesting about the Orthodox Church - an institution of which I'm horribly ignorant. In fact, tell it not in Gath, I've not read War and Peace either. Now I have a reason to put that right!

Oh dear, I've given away the ending!

Other literary examples: in Silas Marner, Nancy refuses her cousin Gilbert Osgood "on the ground solely that he was her cousin", though she might just be being kind; she loves Godfrey. In the Forsyte novels, cousins Val and Holly marry but decide to remain childless.

Re catholicism, I don't think my in-laws, who were Catholic, needed a dispensation, but I could be wrong.

Whereas I seem to remember Hugh Walpole puts at least one first-cousin marriage (with child) into his Herries Chronicles, and to the best of my recollection (I'm away from home so can't check the text or the useful family tree) I think all the objections relate to the family feud rather than the degree of kinship. Oh, and isn't Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice trying to marry her daughter to first-cousin Darcy? Not that Austen presents this as a Good Idea, but Lady Catherine appears to regard it as right and proper.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I grew up in a culture that doesn't see anything odd about first cousin relationships. I remember when I was a child expressing the idea that I might marry one of mine, and my mother's response was that she thought he'd once said that too, leaving me with the idea that it was normal, rather than "don't be silly". (Neither of us showed any interest in the idea once we grew up!)

There's also the Austen example of Mansfield Park, which I alluded to in the post title, where the hero and heroine are first cousins.

Yes, I remembered that was your starting point after I'd logged out, but have only just got back to admit it!

Fanny and Edmund Got Married

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