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IN THE FIFTH BOOK OF PLATO’S REPUBLIC, Socrates posits that in the imaginary city he and his interlocutors are inventing, marriage among the aristocratic (i.e., “the best”) guardians would be arranged by the state through lotteries, parents would not know their individual children, and men and women would consider everyone in their own generation bothers and sisters, regardless of blood relationship. “Those born during the time when their fathers and mothers were having children,” Socrates explains, “they will call them brothers and sisters so that, as I said, these groups will have no sexual relations with each other” (416d). This state-controlled human breeding aims to produce the best leaders for the polis, and to focus citizens on community rather than individual values.
Hardly a realistic blueprint for social reform, Plato’s imagined city serves instead to critique fifth-century Athenian self-interest and the political corruption that followed its defeat at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Why extend the meaning of “sibling” to a broader group than biologically related brothers and sisters? The incest prohibition here is not driven by a desire for genetic diversity; instead, it strengthens loyalty, avoids jealousy, and ensures a connection between people that does not depend upon eroticism. Ironically, a non-erotic sibling relationship provides greater opportunities for intimacy than many married couples would have had in Athens, when men and women’s lives in the citizen class were distinctly separated into public and private spheres. When they are past the age of child-bearing, Socrates suggests, couples may marry whomever they choose—including someone formerly designated a “brother” or “sister.”
While Jane Austen may not have been a reader of Plato, her language echoes the philosopher, and this framework of sibling and pseudo-sibling intimacy pervades her novels. Mrs. Norris cites the incest prohibition most directly when she assures her brother-in-law, Sir Thomas, that his sons would be safe from any predatory marriage pursuits by their cousin, Fanny Price: “‘[B] reed her up with them from this time, and suppose her even to have the beauty of an angel, and she will never be more to either than a sister’” ( MP 7). Pseudo-siblings abound in Austen’s fiction. Mr. Knightley’s romantic attachment to Emma evolves from a brotherly relationship necessitated until recent years...