It is interesting to note that this fact is not scorned by anyone in the story, and that the incestuous relationship was officially sanctioned by Jacob's uncle Laban, who gave Jacob "his daughter Rachel as wife also" (Genesis 30: 28). Whereas incest functions as merely an aside in the story of Jacob, it is the primary plot function in Myrrha's tale. All of her woes descend from the fact that she finds her father desirable, sexually attractive, and eventually acts on this incestuous urge. However, it is portrayed as wrong and base from a number of different sources including Orpheus who is narrating it, Cinyras when he finds out he has been unwittingly duped into participating in, and most of all from Myrrha who is the one who seeks an incestuous relationship. Her anguish at dealing with this fact is discernible in the subsequent quotation in which she laments the...
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