taiey

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taiey
replied to your post “Call the Midwife is still the only show I’ve ever seen do an incest…”

How’d thy do it?

Basically Jenny (the main character) is assigned to nurse a elderly man dying of cancer and notes how close he and his sister are, and then realises that the siblings share a bed as well. (Whether or not they did anything more than just sleep in the bed is never said.) Jenny tells the head nun this, in horror, but the nun tells her that both siblings grew up in the workhouses, which were segregated by gender, and by the time they got out they had both been separately abused so horribly that “family meant nothing to them anymore” (paraphrased). Plus, well, they’re old and don’t have children from each other or anyone else, so no-one’s really being hurt. The old man dies of cancer and when Jenny comes back the next day she finds his sister has killed herself too, because due to the circumstances of her childhood she simply had no way of supporting herself once her only support was gone.

It’s sort-of based on a true story which Jenny Worth wrote about in her book Shadows of the Workhouse, but I’ve never been able to work out how she could have possibly known for certain the exact nature of these people’s relationship (there’s a passage detailing the brother’s sexual feelings towards his sister, which… like, Worth couldn’t have known their thoughts) so take that with a pinch of salt I guess.

Call the Midwife goes very hard on how appallingly bad the workhouses were.

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