Mary and Colin Didn't Get Married

[steepholm]

In a recent post I asked about attitudes to first-cousin divorce marriage, and said that my impression was that it seemed to be more of a taboo with young British people today than it had been for my own generation.

I considered asking my students what they thought, but refrained for a while, as it seemed a slightly disconcerting thing to bring up out of the blue. However, today I was handed the perfect opportunity, when a student remarked that there was no hint of an incipient romantic relationship between Mary and Colin in The Secret Garden, adding, "But of course they're cousins anyway."

I leapt in then, you may be sure, and asked for a show of hands. Did they consider first-cousin marriage (medical issues aside) to be taboo? I can report that every hand shot up: 18 out of 18. The group were 20 and 21 year-olds mostly, predominantly from southern England and Wales. All were white.

As a postscript to the postscript, I can add for interest that when Hallmark made a film version of the book in 1987, they framed it with a story in which the adult Mary (now a WWI nurse) returns to Misselthwaite and meets the adult Colin, played by a pre-Darcy Colin Firth. Romance is certainly in the air in that film, but Hallmark changed the back-story to make Mary no blood relation of the Cravens at all. So that was all right...

Comments

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Can you find the Freudian slip in your post? Its a big one.

Do you consider that widespread knowledge of the scientific issues involved have changed the intensity of the taboo? For example, when Darwin married his first cousin, he had no qualms at all, but, through his researches, eventually came to realize that recessive genes (as we would call them today) were responsible for the early death of his daughter and bitterly regretted it. Isn't that a miniature of the historical process on this issue?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Oops! Don't know what was going on there...

I don't know what's caused it. Yours is a rational explanation, but I think it's just as likely that it's an attitude that's been imported from the States, where the taboo seems to be of longer standing.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

What recessive genes? I thought Anne Darwin died of the after-effects of scarlet fever, like many another Victorian child.

According to Gwen Darwin Raverat's portrayal of her family in Period Piece, the Darwins tended to worry a great deal about their health anyway; consanguineous marriage may have provided yet another thing for them to obsess about, but I don't think Raverat mentions that.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Darwin was a notorious valetudinarian. I don't know how far his fears took a genetic form, but it can't have helped that another of his cousins was Francis Galton. (And, to close the circle even more incestuously, Galton's wife was my own first cousin - four times removed, admittedly.)