Parental Incest / Literature

• The father threatening marriage is found in many medieval Chivalric Romances. These include Vitae Duorum Offarum, Emare, Mai and Beaflor, and La Belle Helene de Constantinople. These are close to the fairy tale The Maiden Without Hands — so close, in fact, that the Grimm Brothers are often suspected of bowdlerising the tale with a Deal with the Devil.
• Filmmaker Bertrand Blier wrote a Lolita-like novel, Beau-père. A 29-year-old sadsack failed musician, Remy, lives with his 35-year-old girlfriend, Martine, and her 14-year-old daughter, Marion. Remy has been raising Marion since she was 6, so when Martine is killed in a car crash, she wants to stay with him instead of going to live with her real father. She soon reveals that she's attracted to him and sets out to seduce him. He resists at first, but eventually gives in. Blier subsequently made a film of his novel.
• Pedro Castera's Carmen deals with the relationship between a father and his daughter. Through the second half of the book, the question arises whether she is his biological daughter or not although never confirmed in the story nor by the author (given that it was written in the 1860s), it becomes clear once you analyse it that he is indeed her biological father.
• Classic Singapore Horror Stories have one of the stories, "Skin Deep", which revolves around the protagonist, Dr. Raymond Quek (a Singaporean-Chinese), falling for his half-English daughter, Emma, since his wife Sybil (a white Brit) died while giving birth. As Emma grows up into an adult, she increasingly reminds Raymond of his deceased wife, leading to his eventual infatuation with his own child which leads to a horrible ending for both father and daughter.
• One Chicken Soup for the Soul story has a girl's friend committing suicide to escape her (the friend's) father repeatedly sexually abusing her, as detailed in her suicide note. Months after he's arrested, he finally confesses.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Subverted slightly in that Elena, who is the product of rape between Thomas Covenant and her mother Lena, actively pursues a sexual relationship with her father, without his knowing for most of The Illearth Stone that she's his daughter.
• In The Cider House Rules, Mister Rose is the father of Rose Rose's baby. This is the first case where Homer is actually compelled to perform an abortion, having been trained to do so but morally opposed to it.
• Dean Koontz uses non-consensual incestuous relationships fairly frequently in character backstories. In addition to the Brother–Sister Incest that figures into The Bad Place, in both Whispers and Life Expectancy, a major character is the product of a father raping his daughter. Additionally, in What the Night Knows, a major character is the product of three generations of line-breeding in his family, starting with a brother-sister pairing, then the father/uncle impregnating his daughter/niece, then impregnating his twin daughters/granddaughters/grandnieces, one of whom is the mother of the character in question. The other twin and her daughter (also fathered by the family patriarch) state in their last documented conversation with their relative that they're both about a month pregnant.
• Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, is based directly on the original "Donkeyskin" fairytale - except unlike in the various folk stories, the princess's father actually does rape her, and impregnate her, and she winds up miscarrying his incestuous baby in the snow on top of a mountain. While largely an amnesiac. It's not a happy story. It is, however, a beautiful story, in its way.
• A Discovery of Witches: Ysabeau reveals that her sire and his other male children raped and abused her to try to break her.
• Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? has a parody of this as the main setting of the plot, practically depicting the main heroine and mother of the protagonist as an adult analogue of the Little Sister Heroine.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Lord Raith in Blood Rites is an incubus who binds all his daughters to him in sexual slavery (and kills all his sons; it's a theme). Lara Raith engages in a similar behavior at the end of the novel, turning the tables on her father, and binding him to be her slave instead. By way of explanation, it's not pure sexual slavery, it's complete mental control, achieved through the use of their supernatural mojo.
  • Nicodemus also enjoys "indulging his daughter"...
• A character in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern short story "Rescue Run" rapes his three daughters to produce grandchildren. Then he rapes his daughters/granddaughters, as do his sons/grandsons.
• Duncton Wood: Mandrake is disturbingly obsessed with the Action Girl lead Rebecca, ultimately culminating with him raping her literally just after he killed her mate in cold blood.
  • In its Darker and Edgier sequel Duncton Quest Rune has a just as nauseating obsession with his daughter Henbane, the novel's Big Bad. What a twisted monster...
• In Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, this is used to account for the youth of the supposed relative of the Emperor by a doubting Akbar.
• From the Gemma Doyle trilogy. This is Felicity's backstory. When she got "too old," Daddy dumped her, later taking in another young relative as a "ward"...
• Gregorius or The Good Sinner, a 12th-century German epic poem by Hartmann von Aue. The orphaned son and daughter of the ruler of Aquitaine have an illicit love affair, resulting in the birth of a baby son, who is put into a box and cast adrift. He lands on an island in the Channel, where he is christened Gregorius. After growing up he becomes a knight and comes to the aid of the queen of a besieged city, whom he marries. It is then discovered that she is his mother. She becomes a nun, he a penitent hermit who has himself chained to a rock for seventeen years, after which he is elected pope. Thomas Mann retold the story in his novel Der Erwählte (The Chosen One, 1951). Here Gregorius and his mother/wife Sibylla have two daughters.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series, this theme gets used several times. In Magic's Promise, a minor character was sexually molested by his mother; the trauma from this triggered his latent Psychic Powers. Further, in the Mage Winds trilogy, Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter Nyara is raised by her father, Big Bad Mornelithe Falconsbane, as a sex toy and guinea pig for his sadistic magical experimentation.
  • In another Valdemar book, Talia uses her powers to punish a man who raped both his daughters and murdered one by forcing him to relive his younger daughter's experiences.
  • Also in Lackey's book with Holly Lisle, When the Bough Breaks, a young girl is being molested by her father and develops psychic powers and split personalities. You later find out the dad used to be mentally tortured by his own father, and his eventual comeuppance is very fitting.
  • Another of Lackey's books, Unnatural Issue, is based on the fairy tale "The King Who Wished To Marry His Daughter," and had a more disturbing version. He wishes to use his daughter's body as a vessel for her dead mother's spirit, and marry her all over again, even making plans to dismiss all the servants who knew about the girl and return with his new 'young bride'. In a particularly creepy scene, the heroine overhears her father ruminating on the things he's going to do to her (well, her body anyway) and is as horrified as you might expect.
  • Another Lackey book, Blood Red,involves having to take out a werewolf clan that was preying on humans in Romania. When the main character confronts the leader of the clan, he tells her, "You have murdered my sons and my wives." As he has said nothing about daughters, she puts two and two together to realize that his "wives" are his daughters. Even worse, as the leader has been around for so many years, at that point his "wives" are also his granddaughters.
• In Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, Jones sleeps with a woman who, it is later revealed, is thought to be his mother. (Turns out she isn't.)
• In the novel Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, the 15-year-old main character gets involved in a relationship with a woman who is heavily implied to be his estranged mother. It's also heavily implied that she knows this but doesn't care.
• In Lolita, Humbert is the eponymous character's stepfather, and says at one point that he, "with an incestuous thrill," had started thinking of her as his daughter, and had planned on impregnating her so that when she's too old, he'd have the next one ready. Lolita actually brings up the subject first, coyly suggesting that if they became lovers, that would be incest as Humbert is now married to her mother. This, along with other comments she makes, allows Humbert to portray himself as being seduced by her instead of the other way round.
• In 1980, Judith Rossner, the author of Looking For Mr Goodbar, published Emmeline, loosely based on the tragic life of Emeline (one m) Bachelder Gurney. Emeline was also the subject of an early American Experience episode, "Sins of Our Mothers." However, the story is mostly folklore and bears little resemblance to the truth. Author/artist Juli Kearns did more research and reveals the true story of Emeline on her blog.
• Zillah and Nothing in Lost Souls (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite are a rare father/son pair. It seems incest runs in Nothing's family, as his mother Jessie seduced her father.
• Lucy Stone Mysteries: In Tippy Toe Murder, a particular repugnant example happens in the book's main plot. The main story involves the disappearance of a retired dance instructor, with a few chapters revealing she's seemingly kidnapped a small child. It turns out the instructor's trying to help one of her former students by hiding her daughter from her father, who's been accused of sexually abusing the girl. Halfway through the book it's confirmed the father has indeed been molesting his child, and he even reminisces on the first time he did it. When she was a baby. Main character Lucy takes it upon herself to hide the girl with her family after the father brutalizes the instructor when he can't find his daughter.
• In The Manchurian Candidate, part of Ellie Iselin's Freudian Excuse is that she was repeatedly raped by her father as a child. Late in the story, she has sex with Raymond while he's brainwashed. This is only heavily implied in the film adaptations; in the 1962 film's case, the Hays Code wouldn't let them say it outright. Strangely, the version with the Hays Code in full force is actually more explicit with this than the later remake — that is not a motherly kiss.
• Dealing with the Borgia family (who were historically defamed as a bunch of incestuous murderers), Gregory Maguire's Mirror, Mirror (2003), a retelling of Snow White, has Lucrezia Borgia not only sleep with her father and brother, she also seduces her product-of-incest son.
• Phantastes: Referenced, with a Older Than They Look grandmother and her apparent grandson:
  Overcome with the presence of a beauty which I could now perceive, and drawn towards her by an attraction irresistible as incomprehensible, I suppose I stretched out my arms towards her, for she drew back a step or two, and said—
  
  "Foolish boy, if you could touch me, I should hurt you. Besides, I was two hundred and thirty-seven years old, last Midsummer eve; and a man must not fall in love with his grandmother, you know."
  "But you are not my grandmother," said I.
  "How do you know that?” she retorted. "I dare say you know something of your great-grandfathers a good deal further back than that; but you know very little about your great-grandmothers on either side. Now, to the point."
• Invoked in Red Dragon, when the FBI agents claim that the eponymous Serial Killer "may have had sexual relations with his mother" as part of the highly sensational smokescreen that they feed to the press, because they specifically want to offend him into doing something stupid. In actuality, the killer's Freudian Excuse is significantly less Freudian, though still fairly messed up.
• Robert A. Heinlein is notable for the Free-Love Future portrayed in many of his novels, in which familial relationships are sexually taboo only by tradition, which most sensible people discard as long as the matter is consensual and there's no genetic risk.
  • His protagonist Lazarus Long sexes up his mom towards the end of Time Enough for Love. He goes back in time to when he was 5 or so. At first he's disgusted by the thought, but then realizes they're not procreating so it's OK. After all, he has sex with his female half-clones, and most other people he has sex with are his descendants at some level already. (Not to mention that genetic testing indicates that he has absolutely no harmful genes whatsoever — so even if he did get his mom pregnant, the baby would be perfectly healthy.) Later, in The Number of the Beast, he rescues her from death and brings her to his present (her future) so the relationship can be formalized.
  • And let's not get started on Heinlein's —All You Zombies—. The protagonist is a hermaphrodite, who travels through time, has sex with him/herself and becomes both his/her own father and mother. And son and daughter, logically. And is also the same person who took himself back in time to meet herself. Yeah. This short story is weird.
  • Lazarus came by it honestly. In To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Maureen tries to have sex with her father. (By the end of the book, it's strongly implied that she finally manages it.) In the same book, there's a consensual sexual encounter between Maureen's first husband (Lazarus/Woodrow's father) and their oldest daughter, who is an adult, pregnant, and soon to marry her child's father.
  • In Farnham's Freehold, Farnham's daughter mentions to him that, of the three men she's been stranded with, he's the one she'd prefer to father her child (if she weren't already pregnant just now). Her dad is completely undisturbed and in fact flattered by this.
  • In The Number of the Beast, Lazarus Long's free-spirited ways inspire protagonists Deety and Jacob (her father) to do the deed.
• Heavily implied in Son. Einar's father was abusive due to Einar causing his mother to die in childbirth. When explaining his situation to Claire, Einar mentions that he was made to cook and clean and "be a wife in ways too horrible to mention."
• A Song of Ice and Fire
  • Craster has an arseload of wives, married all his daughters (and sacrificed all his sons to the Others). At least one of the daughters is shown to be pregnant, and though it's never made explicit how many generations it goes back, he's not young and girls in Westeros are considered marriageable as soon as they hit puberty, so it could be a few.
  • A variation: The Chessmaster Littlefinger is simultaneously trying to pass off his childhood friend and unrequited love Catelyn's daughter Sansa (who looks strikingly like her) as his natural-born child and trying to seduce her, apparently seeing Sansa as a Replacement Goldfish for her mother. Fatal Flaw, anyone? Eh? Eh?
  • Speculated to have happened with Aegon IV "the Unworthy". One of his nine mistresses, Jeyne Lothson, was the daughter of his first mistress Falena Stokeworth. Many believe he was her real father and was said "he enjoyed mother and daughter together in one bed". While he wouldn't have known, he probably wouldn't have cared.
  • The prostitute Shae was sexually abused by her father who also treated her like a kitchen wench.
  • You would expect this to be the case with House Targaryen, but according to supplementary material, there has never been any recorded marriages or relationships between parent and child or grandparent and grandchild. It appears that they drew the line there.
• The main male character in the Spellkey Trilogy is the product of father/daughter incest and is an outcast as a result.
• Multiple instances by Stephen King:
  • The title character of Dolores Claiborne had an asshole husband who, among other things, was trying to get into the pants of his own teenage daughter. This was one of several factors that eventually led to Dolores killing him.
  • The long flashback that makes up the second act of Gerald's Game depicts main character Jessie being sexually molested by her father during a solar eclipse.
  • One of the few things Snakebite Andi does in Doctor Sleep that a reasonably sane person could sympathize with is killing her father for repeatedly raping her. She kills him via knitting needle, after employing it on the offending portions of his anatomy.
  • An offscreen character in The Tommyknockers kills his father via Hunting "Accident" because of this. The killer thinks he's simply committing an Inheritance Murder to escape a nasty financial bind, but narration discusses how thoroughly he's repressed the memories of his father's rapes of him and his brother when the sons were children.
• Due to their obsession with blood purity, the God Emperors in The Stone Dance of the Chameleon have been known to engage in this, as well as in Brother–Sister Incest. We see this happen in the story when Molochite (who is himself already a product of Brother–Sister Incest) weds his mother Ykoriana after he ascends the throne. He is 13 at the time, while she's in her early 40s. The two eventually have a child together.
• In Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song, Chris's (the female protagonist) father tries to talk her into sleeping with him, although she refuses.
• Tender Is the Night: When she was twelve, Nicole Diver was raped by her father shortly after her mother passed away.
• Heavily implied in To Kill a Mockingbird — when Mayella is testifying against Tom Robinson, she says that she'd never kissed a grown man before, because what Papa did to her "don't count".
  • This line was cut from the film for obvious reasons, but Mayella's actress Colin Wilcox-Paxton said that she communicated the incestuous relationship through her body language and facial expressions. She revealed in the documentary, which comes with the deluxe DVD set, that she was acutely aware that Mayella's experience was real. "I saw these girls on the streets of violence, these very underprivileged girls. These girls from awful, awful backgrounds. I mean, most of them took it for granted they'd be molested by the time they were... certainly 12, by a father, an uncle, a brother — or someone down the road."
• Paradise Lost: In one of the more allegorical bits, Satan's rebellion against God causes a beautiful woman named Sin to spring from his head (in a sort of parody of Athena with Zeus). He then has sex with her, impregnating her with Death, who was likewise Born as an Adult and raped her, resulting in a pack of dogs that run in and out of her body. Certainly a Big, Screwed-Up Family.
• Peyton Place: There are undertones of this with Norman Page and his overbearing mother, who punishes him (for talking to girls) with enemas and naked whippings.
• In The History Of Danish Dreams, as a child, Carsten often spies on his mother Amalie while she's undressing or having sex; when he's a teenager, they start a sexual relationship. Eventually, Amalie comes to her senses and sends him off to a boarding school so they won't be tempted to do it anymore.
• In Isaac Asimov's The Robots of Dawn, there is a planet with such loose morals that one of the characters received a lifelong trauma when her father refused to become her first man (to the extent that she was apparently still a virgin at the age of 300). And he could never figure out why he refused.
  • To explain, Aurora, the planet mentioned, has done away with the concept of family. A centralized system tests the genetics of people who want to produce offspring together and gives the go-ahead. Once a child is born, the centralized system takes the child into custody and s/he is brought up in a communal nursery with no further interaction with her birth parents. Aurora is also a perfect example of Free-Love Future, where sex is a casual pastime for everyone and no commitment is considered necessary. As such, as long as two closely related people do not procreate, sexual relations between them are perfectly normal and acceptable - and until procreation is intended, they are unlikely to know of the relationship in the first place. The example refers to an anomaly within this system, where a roboticist interested in social dynamics decides to personally rear his daughter in his own home (he had to call in a lot of favors to be allowed that). The girl grows up with her father, an unusual circumstance, and falls in love with him. He rebuffs her advances, but is unable to explain why, beyond the fact that he considers it 'an emotional response'. The protagonist, an Earthman with recognizable morals, is very disturbed by all this.
• Rant has possibly the most horrific example of this, and also one of the more unusual in that it's the son who rapes the mother... and the grandmother... and the great-grandmother, and... obviously, there's a bit of time travel involved.
• In Octavia Butler's Imago, part of the Lilith's Brood series, almost all of the human race has been rendered sterile. At least one woman and at least one man are still fertile, though—we know because she gets pregnant. He runs away immediately after the conception and is never seen again, so the only way to perpetuate the species is in fact mother/son incest.
• The "novelization" of Flash Gordon (1980) included a small scene of Emperor Ming and Princess Aura pleasurably reminiscing about the most recent time they had (BDSM-heavy) sex together.
  • The conversation begins with Aura complaining about 'missing their closeness'. Seems Daddy's been too busy oppressing to have time for her lately.
• In the short story "Clean Slate," the protagonist kills her parents and becomes a serial killer when her father breaks off their long-term affair after she turns 18.
• In the Chinese Cinderella story Bound by Donna Jo Napoli, Xing Xing's Wicked Stepmother suggests this to Xing Xing to mock her, though there was no denying that Xing Xing's father was much closer to her than to his stepdaughter Wei Ping.
• In Book Girl and the Famished Spirit, one character is implied to have been sexually abused by her uncle/guardian, who is eventually revealed to be her real father — which she knew, but he didn't.
• In one of his columns, Dave Barry called for readers to send in candidates for what should be the national insect. In his next column, he mentions that someone wrote in saying, "My vote for the national incest is mother-son. Thank you for asking."
• Invisible Man contains a scene where the narrator finds a man with two pregnant women in his yard. It turns out one is his wife and the other his daughter whom he accidentally entered (they shared a bed) while dreaming. She enjoyed it so much that she begged him to continue, resulting in both his wife and daughter being pregnant by him at once. It is strongly implied that the rich white man the narrator is escorting envies this relationship.
• This is actually the motive behind the major case in the novel Case Histories and its subsequent TV adaptation. The little girl at the center of case was murdered by her oldest sister because the sister realized that their father had the intention of sexually abusing her like he had been doing with the sister. In order to spare her little sister from the same fate, she murdered and buried the little girl in their neighbor's yard and subsequently entered a convent.
• In Death: Eve Dallas was subjected to this by her own father. She had to kill him to get out of it. Born In Death reveals that Madeline Bullock and her son Winfield Chase had been in a sexual relationship for years.
• Millennium Series: The book (and the subsequent Swedish and American film versions) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has the character Harriet Vanger being raped from a young age by her father, Gottfried, and after his death by her brother Martin, which is why she leaves Sweden.
• In The Thirteenth Tale, it's implied that George Angelfield at least had a sexual interest in his daughter. Certainly when she ran off, his reaction was more like a spurned lover than a father.
• In Sara Douglass' The Wayfarer Redemption sextet, this and Sibling Incest are the only forms of incest not permitted to the Icarii. Everything else, including grandparent/grandchild, is fair game (so long as it's consensual). When WolfStar kisses Azhure passionately, he admits that what he did was "unclean"... and thereby admits his parentage.
• In the Old Norse Saga of Hrolf Kraki, King Helgi of Denmark kidnaps (he thinks) a servant girl, falls in love with her, and marries her. Then it turns out she is his own daughter he begot by rape.
• Most marriages in A Brother's Price consist of a number of women, some of them full sisters, some half-sisters born from different mothers and all considered sisters, and one or more unrelated men. One family, the Brindles, is suspected thanks to the age of the husband and a twelve-year gap in new children to be having their single son servicing his mothers. While most characters think this is a disgusting possibility, a contrary Whistler who's interested in that son retorts that at least it's proof that he's fertile.
• In the Dreamblood Duology, Tiaanet is repeatedly molested by her father and at one point gives birth to a daughter.
• Emperor Nero with his mother Agrippina, both (rumoured) in Real Life, and in I, Claudius.
  • If such a thing did happen in real life, then Nero was a victim of sexual abuse; he actively hated his overbearing, controlling mother who had essentially forced him into emperorhood in the first place, taking the benefits and leaving him the problems (judging from the few reasonably accurate records, he was a tyrant out of indifference rather than malice). And then he had her killed.
• In John C. Wright's The Hermetic Millennia, in Nymph culture, it was expected that a man's first sexual intercourse would be with his mother.
• Various early Christian writers, discussing pagan charges that their secret rites were sexual, countered that actually Christians are obviously more scrupulous than pagans in sexual matters, since they do not expose their children, knowing they will be taken up and raised as whores, and they do not frequent brothels — and the pagans do both, and must often commit this.
• In the short story Florville et Courval by the Marquis de Sade, Florville marries her father and becomes pregnant with his child. Florville's mother kept the pregnancy secret and gave Florville away without the father knowing of her existence.
• In Odd John by Olaf Stapledon, the superhuman protagonist — partly out of a desire to declare his independence from normal human morality — sleeps with his mother.
• Imperatot Kurj of Catherine Asaro's Skolian Saga lusts after his mother, Roca, but never acts on it. However it does create considerable tension between him and the rest of his family. She is unaware but his father suspects and the tension escalates after his father dies and she remarries.
• Lirah the Serker, in The Lumatere Chronicles, was born from her father and his eldest daughter.
• The plot of James M. Cain's novel The Butterfly is driven by a man's lust for his daughter.
• Central to the plot of Daniel Gonzalez's Un grito en las tinieblas (A Scream in the Dark) horror novel is Zárate Arkham's history of incestuous abuse from her father.
• In Shovel Ready Persephone claims that her father is also the father of her child. He's not, although he did rape her.
• In Doctrine of Labyrinths, Diokletian lusts after Felix because Felix reminds him of the woman he loved, who happens to have been Felix's mother. This means there's a definite chance of Diokletian being Felix's father. Oddly, this bothers Diokletian a lot more than it bothers Felix, who doesn't seem to have an issue with incest.
  • Also, Kolkhis and Mildmay. They aren't blood related but Kolkhis essentially acted as a mother towards Mildmay, raising him like a son from the age of three and then began sleeping with him when he was fourteen.
• William Johnstone's horror novel The Toy Cemetery has a few disturbing depictions of this. The town of Victory, South Carolina is controlled by a cult that has been making its citizens propagate by making them sleep with their children via magical control. The first opening chapters actually has the main character almost sleep with his daughter, who was willing to go along with it before they both snapped out of it. Sadly, the book ends with said daughter, now thoroughly brainwashed, secretly planning to one day seduce or rape her father.
• Ice Forged by Gail Z. Martin starts with Lord Blaine McFadden running his father Ian through with a broadsword after Ian rapes Blaine's sister Mari. It's this that convinces King Merrill to commute what should be a beheading offense to exile to a Penal Colony, which naturally proves fortuitous later.
• In Bent Road a little girl goes missing. We find out through her mother that her father accidentally killed her and had sexually abused her as well, because as she put it, "Some men don't know the difference between a daughter and a wife."
• One of the two main characters of Matilda's Last Waltz is raped by her alcoholic father after her mother's death until he himself dies, leaving her pregnant and responsible for their farm while she's still in her teens. However, there was no biological incest between them, as the girl was actually the offspring of her mother's affair.
  • Then it's played horrifically straight. When Matilda gives birth to her son, the midwife decides to keep the baby for herself and tells Matilda she had a stillbirth, before taking the baby and her husband to New Zealand. The baby is happily raised under the name Finn MacKaulay, and decides to go back to Australia following his parents' deaths. There, he seeks to buy a farm, which leads him to meet Matilda, falling in love and marrying her. Matilda is pregnant with their child and about to give birth when she discovers a box of photographs and letters Finn kept from his parents. The shock and shame are so strong she suffers Death by Childbirth, and poor Finn is so broken he decides to leave his daughter in an orphanage and commits suicide.
• There are implications in The Catcher in the Rye that Jane's alcoholic stepfather has at a minimum sexually harassed her.
• The short story "Goat" by James McBride has this as the Twist Ending: the narrator sees the birth certificates of his friend Goat and Goat's two brothers, which have "Irving Evans" listed as the father, and then sees the birth certificate of Irving Evans, who apparently has the same mother that Goat and his brothers do.
• In Push by Sapphire, the protagonist Precious is raped by her father and mother, resulting in two children and HIV. The first child has Down's Syndrome. Precious's mother also forces her to "take care of her" (i.e., perform oral sex on her) because she feels that her daughter drove her boyfriend off and, as she says, "Who was gonna love me?"
• The protagonist of The Color Purple, Celie, has been abused by her father and has three kids by him. It's later revealed that he's her stepfather.
• The heroine of the Danielle Steel novel Malice is a victim of this, having been forced to be her father's lover because her cancer-stricken mother can't be. Even more horrifying, she reveals that her mother held her down for him. She finally snaps and kills him when he rapes her yet again the night of her mother's funeral.
  • The heroine of the novel Accident reveals that she's a victim of this also during an argument with her mother and sister (who was a victim too), blasting them for their denial and insistence that it didn't happen. Paired with Gratuitous Rape, as there were no hints of this before the supposed Wham Line, and it had no relevance or impact on the story before or after.
• Judge Dee: While it doesn't actually happen, there are several characters who seem a bit too close to their own daughters:
  • One man, whose daughter was kidnapped before she could reach her husband's home, bursts into the tribunal to accuse the husband's father of kidnapping her for his own sick ends in what certainly looks like a case of Psychological Projection.
  • In one story, a young man is having an affair with one of his father's concubines (who's his own age), even conspiring to murder his father so they can elope in peace. An unbelievably pissed-off Dee tells him in barely-disguised terms to kill himself (note that the man's father was very much an Asshole Victim, being the general whose betrayal caused Tsiao Tai to desert and turn to banditry in the first place), which he does and is joined by the concubine. Their devotion to their filial and marital duties are widely celebrated.
  • In "Necklace and Calabash", one court lady claims the reason the Third Princess has remained unmarried for so long is that the Emperor has an unnatural fixation on her. Dee shakes it off as rumors spread by eunuchs.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events: In the first book, Count Olaf is not actually the Baudelaire's father, but he is their legal guardian, and as such has the right to consent to Violet's forced underage marriage— to him.
• In Jenna Rhodes's Elven Ways series, House Andreion is the ruling house of the Vaelinar elves. They were not the original ruling house. The previous ruling house had its king die in battle without issue, and his second in command took over. This new king had a daughter that he married off, but displeased that his grandson lacked the scrying powers typical of House Andreion, the king got his daughter pregnant himself. The resulting daughter/granddaughter had the scrying ability and was declared the true heir over her older half-brother.
• In Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg, one of the Couriers, who has some major father issues, has a goal to sleep with every female ancestor he has, as a gesture of contempt toward their mates. (Although he does skip his actual mother: "I draw the line at abominations.")
• V. C. Andrews is famous for incest plotlines. Each of her three works—Dollanganger Series, Casteel Series, and My Sweet Audrina—contain heavy, certainly intentional Incest Subtext in the central parent-child relationships, but no actual canon parent-child incestuous relationships.
• In Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler, there's an incest epidemic amongst the Glass family. Cynthia Glass sleeps with her father. Her mother sleeps with her son. Cyn and her brother sleep together. And then there's a golem.
• In The Witcher, The Emperor Emhyr var Emreis learned of a prophecy in which his The Chosen One daughter Ciri's son would rule the world, and wanted to sire that child himself. However, his conscience eventually kicked in and he let Ciri stay with Geralt instead (before marrying his daughter's Body Double).
• William Carlos Williams's poem 'Youth and Beauty' is about the narrator's seeing a dishmop as a substitute daughter, "naked, as a girl should seem to her father".

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