pseudoincest

One of the most disturbing scenes in this narrative is surely the night he deflowers the still childlike girl whom he has been rearing as an adopted daughter, making her his wife. This act, striking the modern reader as no different from father-daughter rape or incestuous abuse, momentarily tears apart the haze of aesthetic/erotic illusion and makes one wonder about the reality of paternal domination behind the fiction of pseudoincest.