Why Is Incest So Common

Once again my blog post of the week is going to be about "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison.  This time we are going to be tackling the matter of incest.  For those who don't know, incest is defined as sexual relations between people classed as being too closely related to marry each other.  In many places, incest is seen as a crime as well.  In "Song of Solomon" incest is shown between many characters, but the main example of incest in the novel is the relationship between Milkman and Hagar.  Even when they first met, "Milkman had no need to see her face; he had already fallen in love with her behind," they were already in love with each other.  The two of the started having sexual relations starting when Milkman was in his teens and ending in his thirties.  This novel also not the only novel or story that shows the idea of incest between characters.  In the story of "Oedipus Rex," the main character ends up killing his father and marrying his mother.  If incest is seen as so bad in society, why does incest show up so much in this novel that we are reading and other literature in general?  The difference is that many of the novels that involve incest are set in a time where it is not seen as so bad.  Many father and family figures wanted to keep their bloodline inclusive and so they would not let their children marry outside of the family.  In this way, incest became a staple of older literature, but now incest is seen as taboo.  There are also scientific reasons as to why incest is seen as bad.  Intermarrying between a family destroys the genetic diversity of a population which makes that population more susceptible to being wiped out by foreign pathogens.