“it was bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, and she had killed it”: three versions of...
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“IT WAS BONE OF HER BONE,AND FLESH OF HER FLESH, ANDSHE HAD KILLED IT”: THREEVERSIONS OF DESTRUCTIVEMATERNITY IN VICTORIANFICTIONCatherine R. Hancock aa Aurora UniversityPublished online: 12 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Catherine R. Hancock (2004) “IT WAS BONE OF HER BONE, ANDFLESH OF HER FLESH, AND SHE HAD KILLED IT”: THREE VERSIONS OF DESTRUCTIVEMATERNITY IN VICTORIAN FICTION, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 15:3,299-320, DOI: 10.1080/10436920490489687
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‘‘IT WAS BONE OF HER BONE, AND FLESH OF HERFLESH, AND SHE HAD KILLED IT’’: THREE VERSIONSOF DESTRUCTIVE MATERNITY IN VICTORIAN FICTION
Catherine R. HancockCatherine R. Hancock teaches English at Aurora University. She is theauthor of ‘‘Teaching the Language of Domestic Violence in WutheringHeights,’’ included in the MLA’s forthcoming Approaches to TeachingBronte ’s Wuthering Heights.
The Victorians, increasingly aware of social injustices and zealous toremedy them, were disturbed by the existence of child abuse andinfanticide in their culture and were unusually sensitive to issues ofchild welfare. Because of their extraordinary esteem for the familyas a social institution, Victorians displayed an unprecedented concernfor the vulnerability of the nation’s young due to illegitimacy,unlicensed baby farms, intolerable conditions in workhouses andfactories, and alcoholism. The topic of infanticide was particularlyfascinating to Victorians, especially if the perpetrator of the crimewas the child’s mother, and this interest is clearly manifested in thefiction of the age. The most prominent Victorian literary represen-tation of infanticide is, of course, George Eliot’s masterpiece, AdamBede (1859), which drew considerable attention to the plight of unwedmothers in a society that cruelly stigmatized illegitimate births. Oftenoverlooked in contemporary critical studies, however, are two lateVictorian novels by women authors that feature infanticidal mothers,Margaret Harkness’s A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890) and LucyClifford’s Mrs. Keith’s Crime (1885).
These two neglected novels offer a radically different vision ofmurderous maternity than that depicted in Adam Bede. While theunmarried Hetty murders her child in Adam Bede to efface all tracesof her motherhood and thus avoid the censure of her family and com-munity, the young widows in A Manchester Shirtmaker and Mrs.Keith’s Crime—Mary Dillon and Maggie Keith, respectively—inter-pret their violence against their children as the fullest expression oftheir maternal devotion. Clifford’s Maggie Keith, a terminally illmother tending to her terminally ill daughter, and Harkness’s Mary
Literature Interpretation Theory, 15: 299�320, 2004
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1043-6928 print/1545-5866 online
DOI: 10.1080=10436920490489687
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Dillon, starving and unable to avoid the workhouse, truly believe thatmurder is the only way to alleviate their children’s suffering while atthe same time maintaining control over their children’s bodies andthus preserving maternal intimacy. Taken together, the three novelsreveal a startling range of maternal attitudes towards infanticide.The following examination of A Manchester Shirtmaker and Mrs.Keith’s Crime in conjunction with Adam Bede is an attempt to providea more comprehensive study of the theme of infanticide in Victorianfiction than has been previously attempted.1
It is important to include the Harkness and Clifford novels in anyinvestigation of Victorian literary representations of infanticidebecause these novels’ depictions of mothers who kill their sickly andstarving children provide powerful evidence of Victorian concernsabout cultural degeneration. Mrs. Keith’s Crime and A ManchesterShirtmaker were written at the fin de siecle, a time when England,like many Western European nations such as France and Germany,was overwhelmed by fears of moral and physical decline. The senseof unbridled optimism that defined the Victorian era as the Age ofImprovement dimmed as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Thisloss of confidence in the prospects of English civilization was the resultof contemporary medical, psychological, and social theories of thinkerssuch as Morel, Nordau, and Lombroso, theories which emphasized thedecay of human health and moral values. In the light of the wide-spread belief that society was in the process of decline, motherhoodheld an even more prominent role at the end of the Victorian era thanever before; English women were encouraged to give birth to and raisestrong, healthy children to ensure the propagation of the English race.As William Greenslade notes, ‘‘‘Motherhood’ was . . . gaining momen-tum as a test of solicitude for the future of the nation and the nation’sstock’’ (146). Victorians at the fin de siecle hoped that a renewed focuson capable mothering would ensure that England could stay and evenreverse the course of cultural degeneration.2
Mrs. Keith’s Crime and A Manchester Shirtmaker clearly reflectVictorian anxieties about the decay of the English race. Mary Dillonand Maggie Keith are mothers who are devoid of healthy progeny,and while they destroy malnourished and diseased children forhumane purposes—to spare them suffering—their violence callsattention to fundamental inadequacies of nineteenth-century Englishsociety, such as poverty, unemployment, and the medical establish-ment’s inability to treat deadly communicable diseases such astuberculosis. Even Adam Bede, published long before the fin de siecle,participates in this spirit of cultural degeneration; although it reachedits zenith in the final decade of the nineteenth century, degeneration
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theory had its roots in the middle of the century (Greenslade 16).Hetty’s infanticide represents the decay of morals and a degenerationof the ideal of motherhood. Whether it is through a mother’s murder ofa legitimate, loved child or her destruction of an illegitimate, unlovednewborn, all three versions of destructive maternity invoke images ofnational decline.
I. ‘‘I SEEMED TO HATE IT’’: INFANTICIDE ASSELF-PRESERVATION IN ADAM BEDE
Adam Bede is a groundbreaking novel precisely because it gives thetheme of unwed pregnancy and infanticide center stage; RosemaryGould emphasizes Eliot’s unique contribution when she asserts that‘‘Hetty gives birth and abandons the child in order that it will die.She is the first major heroine to do so in a novel. In both The Heartof Midlothian and Jessie Phillips the heroines are finally shown notto have really tried to commit infanticide. The desire that the childshould die is displaced onto some other, more easily villainous charac-ter’’ (271).3 Eliot’s novel engages issues at once fascinating and terrify-ing to the English readers of her day: premarital sex, illegitimatebirths, and women’s temptation to destroy their newborns. The Victor-ians were disturbed and embarrassed, to say the least, by the veryexistence of infanticide in their ostensibly advanced culture and gavethe subject unparalleled attention in popular journalism. Almostinevitably, the cases publicized in the press involved unmarriedwomen who committed neonaticide—the act of killing their childrenwithin twenty-four hours of their birth.
How often did child-murder occur? What kind of women perpe-trated it and why? Was the incidence of infanticide increasing ordecreasing? How did England’s infanticide and infant mortality ratescompare with its European counterparts?4 These questions hauntedthe Victorians as never before, particularly at mid-century. The ques-tion of the true extent of infanticide was hotly debated by Victorianjournalists and social activists and is still a bone of contention for scho-lars today. George Behlmer writes that ‘‘[f]rom the late 1830s to the1860s, official statistics document a sharp rise in the incidence ofinfanticide’’ (423). At the same time, however, he qualifies this claimby asking, ‘‘Are these mid-Victorian figures reliable, or are we dealingwith statistical mirages?’’ (423). In The Massacre of the Innocents:Infanticide in Britain 1800�1939, Lionel Rose speculates thatimproved policing methods may partly explain the higher reportedrates of infanticides (37). And Rosemary Gould contends that ‘‘[i]nthe nation as a whole, there is no proof that women were committing
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infanticide at a high or even at a growing rate. The perception thatthey were may have been generated by the need to explain the realhorror of the period: the high infant mortality rate among childrenof the poor, especially illegitimate children born in workhouses’’ (266).5
Ann Higginbotham further suggests that coroners, who increasinglywere medical doctors, may have exaggerated the extent of infanticidein order to emphasize the need for men with medical training to per-form accurate autopsies (324). Some coroners, particularly EdwinLankester and Thomas Wakley, were crusaders against infanticideand took every opportunity to publicize statistics—some based onprojections rather than actual findings—that supported their claimthat child-murder was rampant. A contributor to the Pall MallGazette in 1866 expressed his displeasure with what he saw as theMiddlesex coroner’s excessive zeal to uncover parental violence in Eng-land: ‘‘It is . . . exceedingly unpleasant to find ourselves stigmatized inforeign newspapers, on Dr. Lankester’s authority, as ‘a nation of infan-ticides . . .’ ’’ (9). Whether or not infanticide actually increased duringthe Victorian era is impossible to determine with any degree ofcertainty and perhaps even irrelevant: what is irrefutable is thatmany Victorians believed that infanticide was ‘‘an epidemic thatshamed the nation’’ (Gould 263) and lavished unprecedented attentionon the topic.
Victorians condemned infanticide but demonstrated enormous sym-pathy for the unwed mothers who, driven by (well-grounded) fears oflosing social caste as well as their employment, destroyed theirchildren. Few foundling hospitals existed to take care of abandonedbabies because, as one writer in The Nation remarked in 1865,‘‘[O]ur public cannot tolerate the idea of encouraging the status of il-legitimacy’’ (270). In addition to discouraging outdoor relief for able-bodied, unsupported women, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834instituted fundamental changes to the existing bastardy laws thatmade it significantly more difficult for unwed mothers to receivechild-support from fathers; many Victorians believed that this actencouraged financially destitute women who had been abandoned bytheir lovers to commit infanticide. Although Hetty Sorrel does notask for money from Arthur Donnithorne and cannot even locate himto inform him of her pregnancy before she decides to do away withher child, the fact that Arthur is an aristocrat who seduces and aban-dons a vulnerable working-class woman would be certain to remindVictorian readers of present-day concerns about fathers desertingyoung pregnant women who, if they overcame the temptation to killtheir babies, would have to be cared for in workhouses at government(and ratepayers’) expense.
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Hetty’s punishment—a guilty verdict, a death sentence, and areprieve that substitutes transportation for execution—also echoesthe criminal justice system in place in 1859. Infanticide was a capitaloffense, a fact that reformers tried unsuccessfully to change through-out the century. The mandatory sentencing laws that required thedeath penalty were enforced in name only; typically, a woman wouldbe condemned to death and would later be granted a pardon fromthe Home Secretary. As one contemporary critic of Victorian infanti-cide laws wrote in 1877, ‘‘The sentence is a fiction which serves nopurpose but the infliction of horror and despair’’ (Fyffe 584). Manyjuries also refused to render a guilty verdict even in the face of thestrongest evidence because they did not want to be responsible forinflicting emotional anguish by handing down a death sentence.Critics claimed that women were murdering their children withimpunity because they knew the chances of being convicted for murderwere minimal. More often than not, infanticide cases never made it totrial, as the doctrine of ‘‘separate existence’’—which required evidencethat the baby was completely out of the birth canal at the time that themurder occurred—was almost impossible to prove (Behlmer 411). Amore common punishment meted out was a short period of imprison-ment on a ‘‘concealment of birth’’ charge, ‘‘the crime of bearing a childsecretly, without providing for its safe birth’’ (Gould 271).
Many Victorians believed that much of the blame for child-murdershould be placed not so much on the individual woman who committedthe crime but on environmental conditions that gave little support tounwed mothers; as a consequence, these women were treated withconsiderable clemency within the criminal justice system. The Victor-ians displayed a fundamental ambivalence towards the crime of infan-ticide: they were loath to reduce the rate of child-murder by buildingmore foundling hospitals to care for these unwanted, stigmatizedchildren because they believed this would encourage or sanctionillegitimacy, yet they were moved to pity by the plight of these desper-ate, often exploited, women. The end result of this ambivalence wasthat the majority of Victorians were satisfied with a largely symbolicpunishment for infanticidal women: a few years in jail, with a chanceto start a new life once released.
Despite the fact that Eliot’s novel is set in 1799, her portrayal ofHetty reflects many of the fears and concerns about infanticide thatpreoccupied Victorians at mid-century. As Christine L. Krueger notes,novels like Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian and Adam Bede‘‘make use of retrospective settings to reflect on the contemporarypolitics of infanticide’’ (279). Eliot deliberately chooses to distanceher readers from the uncomfortable topic of child-murder by not
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setting her story in the heart of London or another industrialized,overcrowded city; instead, the action transpires in a small rural com-munity at the turn of the century. The Arcadian beauty of the HallFarm is sullied by Arthur Donnithorne’s seduction of the beautiful,ignorant, and childlike dairymaid and her subsequent infanticide.Hayslope, with its fecund fields and overflowing dairies, is an Edenof sorts; by participating in illicit lovemaking with a member of thelandowning aristocracy personified by Arthur, Hetty tastes fruit fromthe forbidden tree and becomes an exile from this land of plenty. Ironi-cally, Hetty believes that the only way she can win readmission intoparadise is to commit the grave sin of infanticide. But Eliot does notmerely place blame on the archetypal fallen woman; Hetty’s violencefunctions as a microscope which magnifies the shortcomings ofthe values of the Hayslope community and, by extension, Victoriansociety.
From the beginning, Hetty’s character challenges the stereotypeof Victorian femininity not only by her illicit premarital sex withArthur but also by her attitude towards children. Hetty is constantlydescribed by the narrator as childlike, but she is decidedly anti-maternal long before she even becomes pregnant. The Poyser childrenare ‘‘the very nuisance of her life—as bad as buzzing insects. . . : Hettywould have been glad to hear that she should never see a child again;they were worse than the nasty little lambs . . . for the lambs were gotrid of sooner or later’’ (200). It is not that Hetty literally desires physi-cal harm to come to young Totty; rather, she dislikes the responsibilityof being a caregiver for children and animals or, for that matter, anyliving being at all. Hetty’s impending crime against her newborn iseerily foreshadowed when Totty slaps her and refuses to let Hettycarry her to bed (192); even a young toddler perceives that Hetty’smothering skills are woefully inadequate.
Despite her inherent selfishness, Arthur and Adam fall prey tothe assumption that Hetty’s remarkable good looks reflect an innerbeauty and perfection of womanliness; behind the soft curls and long,dewy eyelashes, however, lurks Hetty’s true nature: her narcissism,insensitivity to the needs of others, and, above all else, what Eliot calls‘‘hardness.’’ Hetty’s physical beauty blinds Adam in particular to herinner defects; he truly believes that she will someday become an excel-lent wife and mother. This discrepancy between appearances andreality is apparent in the narrator’s ironic observation that Hetty issure to be a natural mother: ‘‘How she will dote on her children! . . .the little pink round things will hang about her like florets roundthe central flower’’ (198). Eliot powerfully inverts this image duringHetty’s confession to Dinah, where Hetty describes her newborn baby
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not as a flower but as ‘‘a heavy weight hanging round my neck’’ (499).Hetty’s open acknowledgment of her hostility towards the baby whothreatens her freedom, so evident when she declares, ‘‘I seemed to hateit,’’ stands as a startling rejection of the role of motherhood which wasso sanctified during the Victorian era.
Hetty’s primary motive for murder is to preserve her personal repu-tation as well as the Poyser family honor; thus her quest is to regainher sense of virtue by eliminating the child that compromises it.Hetty’s behavior, however selfish and irresponsible, does not springfrom an inherently evil nature but is, to a certain degree, learned.Mason Harris asserts that Hetty’s ‘‘dark journey . . . [is] a blind,regressive drive to reassert the respectability she possessed whenshe lived with the Poysers. In this state of mind she acts out a grimparody of their values’’ (183). For the Poysers, family pride is to bemaintained at all costs. When Hetty thinks about her options aftershe learns of her pregnancy, her pride prevents her from going ‘‘onthe parish,’’ which ‘‘was next to the prison in obloquy’’ (424), for assist-ance because she ‘‘had the pride not only of a proud nature but aproud class—the class that pays the most poor-rates, and most shud-ders at the idea of profiting by a poor-rate’’ (418). Abandoning her new-born is infinitely preferable to returning to Hayslope not as thesought-after town beauty she once was but as a needy and disgracedunwed mother. Hetty reveals her fear of the judgmental citizens ofHayslope when she declares to Dinah, ‘‘I daredn’t go back homeagain—I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t have bore to look at anybody, forthey’d have scorned me’’ (497). The narrow-mindedness and unforgiv-ing nature of Hayslope are incentives to Hetty’s crime; her unwilling-ness to rely on her family and community for help in raising her childas a single mother is a stark reminder that, in 1859 as well as 1799,England offered few viable options for unmarried pregnant women.
With the murder of her child, Hetty has also, in a sense, murderedher identity within the Poyser family. The Poysers, like England as anation, fear that infanticide has irrevocably ruined their reputation.Harris contends that Hetty is not the only bad parent in the novel:Martin Poyser’s rejection of Hetty constitutes an abdication of par-ental responsibility (179). Because Martin and Rachel Poyser haveraised Hetty since she was a child, they are her surrogate parents;as such, their abandonment of her is all the more devastating. WhenMr. Poyser discovers that Hetty has run away from her commitmentto marry Adam, he displays a willingness to forgive her foibles andwelcome her back into the Poyser fold: ‘‘She’s acted bad by you, andby all on us. But I’ll not turn my back on her: she’s but a young un,and it’s the first harm I’n knowed on her’’ (448). But when he learns
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about Hetty’s arrest for infanticide, Mr. Poyser undergoes a stunningabout-face: ‘‘I’m willing to pay any money as is wonted toward tryingto bring her off. . . : [B]ut I’ll not go nigh her, nor ever see her again,by my own will. She’s made our bread bitter to us for all our lives tocome, an we shall ne’er hold up our heads i’ this parish nor i’ any other. . .’’ (459). Apparently Hetty’s uncle and surrogate father can accepther as a jilt, but not a murderess, no matter how trying her circum-stances. Mr. Poyser’s lack of forgiveness is an example of the ‘‘strangedeadness to the Word’’ (137) that Dinah feels characterizes Hayslope.Eliot makes it abundantly clear that the Poysers’ primary concernupon hearing the news of Hetty’s crime is their reputation, and nottheir niece’s well-being: ‘‘The home at the Hall Farm was a house ofmourning for a misfortune thought to be worse than death. The senseof family dishonour was too keen . . . to leave room for any compassiontowards Hetty’’ (459). The inability of either Martin the younger or hisfather to feel genuine sympathy for Hetty demonstrates their limita-tions as characters, for Eliot’s most valued emotion is sympathy,‘‘[T]he one poor word which includes all our best insight and our bestlove’’ (531). Even the hard-edged Rachel Poyser, so quick to chastiseHetty throughout the novel, is surprised by the vehemence of herhusband’s repudiation of Hetty.
Adam Bede is usually remembered as a novel that is primarilyabout a mother’s eradication of her connection to her own child;however, an alternative interpretation of Hetty’s character revealsthat she does not simply desire to obliterate family ties. Hetty’s actis destructive, but its motivation largely stems from her urge topreserve her place within the Poyser family and the Hayslopecommunity as a whole. Eliot creates in Hetty a character whoseagony enables her to appreciate as never before her surrogate parentsand to experience a sense of family feeling and communal belonging.The narrator describes this metamorphosis: ‘‘Now for the first time,as she lay down to-night in the strange hard bed, she felt that herhome had been a happy one, that her uncle had been very good toher . . .’’ (417); she aches for ‘‘[t]he bright hearth and the warmthand the voices of home—the secure uprising and lying down—thefamiliar fields, the familiar people, the Sundays and holidays withtheir simple joys of dress and feasting—all the sweets of her younglife rushed before her now, and she seemed to be stretching her armstowards them across a great gulf’’ (432). Hetty, who had previouslytaken her home for granted and even desired to go into service sothat she could leave the Hall Farm which was the site of her disgracewith Arthur, now longs to return to the only home she has everknown.
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Before she embarked on her flight from Hayslope, Hetty had waitedand prayed for a miscarriage ‘‘to set her free from her terror’’ (411);when nature does not accommodate this desire, Hetty believes thatmurder is the only thing that will truly set her free and enableher to resume her old life at the Hall Farm. Mason Harris recognizesHetty’s dual drive both to destroy and protect family ties when hewrites that ‘‘Hetty devastates the traditional family life of the Poysersby killing her child. . . : In her blind respectability she rejects all possi-bility of rescue, hiding her child in a forest in a compulsive attempt torecover her position as the Poysers’ child’’ (179). Hetty tells Dinah that‘‘the thought came into my mind that I might get rid of it, and go homeagain. . . : [A]nd never let ‘em know why I ran away’’ (498). But Hettynever follows through with this plan; her sense of guilt, if not remorse,compels her to return to the scene of the crime and she is arrested.Hetty’s elimination of her illegitimate child has precipitated the verydisintegration of the Poyser clan that she thought it would prevent.While Eliot does attempt to humanize Hetty to a certain degree byhaving her state several times during her confession to Dinah thatshe hoped someone would find and rescue the newborn, the baby—whose sex is never mentioned—is never a flesh-and-blood characterbut an abstract symbol of the social evil of infanticide and the Victor-ians’ inability to cope with the reality of it.
The crucial difference between the ending of Eliot’s novel and theworkings of Victorian infanticide legislation is that Arthur personallysecures Hetty’s freedom from the gallows. The significance of the factthat Hetty’s pardon is obtained through private rather than publicintervention is that it gives Arthur the opportunity to demonstrate hisrepentance and also acknowledge his own responsibility for Hetty’sdownfall. Although the fact that she is not executed reflects contempor-ary Victorians’ sympathy for the lot of the infanticidal woman, many seeEliot’s punishment of Hetty to be unduly harsh. George Creeger ironi-cally states that ‘‘George Eliot might just as well have had her hangedto begin with’’ (231), and Deborah Anna Logan goes so far as to claimthat ‘‘Eliot is guilty of the narrative neglect, abandonment, and meta-phorical infanticide of her literary ‘child’ [Hetty]’’ (124). Eliot does notallow Hetty to make atonement for her crime within her community,since Hetty’s expulsion from Hayslope turns out to be permanent: ‘‘thepoor wanderer’’ (582) dies of unspecified causes on her way back toEngland seven years after her conviction, while Arthur is allowed toreturn as the prodigal son who has redeemed himself through suffering.Because she is a woman, Hetty’s sin is judged more harshly thanArthur’s; the Victorians’ gender bias becomes evident when Arthur iseventually allowed to reclaim his life while Hetty withers away.
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Even though Eliot attempts to inspire compassion in her readers forHetty’s plight, she does not allow Hetty to be reincorporated into herfamily, her community, or even her country. Despite her confessionto Dinah and repentance for her crime, Hetty—along with thedangerous sexuality and destructive maternity that she represents—can ultimately find no redemption and thus no place in her nativetown. Adam, the Poysers, and the rest of the townspeople can only re-cover some sense of the natural rhythm of their community once Hettyis removed from the landscape of Hayslope once and for all. Even withthe elimination of the ‘‘fallen woman,’’ this rural community cannever be fully restored to its former sense of wholeness nor regainits equilibrium.
In George Eliot’s version of maternal infanticide, Hetty’s maritalstatus profoundly affects the way she is represented in the novel. Asan unmarried woman whose fertility has not been sanctioned by theinstitution of matrimony, Hetty’s story epitomizes one of the mostdreaded fears of Victorian society. Her loss of sexual purity and lackof maternal feeling threaten the very foundations of Victorian culture.The same is clearly not the case in Clifford’s Mrs. Keith’s Crime andHarkness’s A Manchester Shirtmaker. Maggie Keith and Mary Dillonare young widows whose pregnancies and childbirths are ‘‘respectable’’because they occur within marriage. Maggie and Mary do notextinguish their children’s lives because they are the products of illicitsexuality; instead, these widows kill their daughters to protect themfrom intolerable living conditions. In sharp contrast to Hetty, whomEliot depicts as unmistakably anti-maternal, Harkness and Cliffordcharacterize Maggie Keith and Mary Dillon as extremely motherlycharacters who believe that violence offers them the only way to fulfilltheir maternal obligations. The infanticidal mothers in Mrs. Keith’sCrime and A Manchester Shirtmaker are thus a radical departurefrom the norm Eliot establishes in Adam Bede.
II. INFANTICIDE AS EXPRESSION OF MATERNAL LOVE INMRS. KEITH’S CRIME AND A MANCHESTER SHIRTMAKER
Unlike George Eliot, who is one of the more prominent female Victor-ian authors and whose fiction is a staple of the college curriculum,Margaret Harkness and Lucy Clifford are almost completely unknownto modern readers. At first glance, Margaret Harkness would seem tohave little in common with Lucy Clifford. Harkness was a journalistand the author of late Victorian socialist novels such as A City Girl(1887) that drew attention to the oppression of the industrial workingclass in the slums of London’s East End. She was, first and foremost, a
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deeply committed social activist, supporter of the labour union move-ment, one-time member of the Social Democratic Federation, and asecond cousin of the eminent socialist Beatrice Webb. Her stark,realistic novels were written to expose the inequities of a capitalisticsociety and to awaken in her (mostly middle-class) readers a senseof compassion and moral responsibility for the poor. Lucy Cliffordled a distinctly different life from Harkness. Clifford, the wife of famedmathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford, was aninfluential patron of the arts, a playwright, and an author of children’sstories and popular novels like Love-Letters of a Worldly Woman(1891) and Aunt Anne (1892) that featured respectable middle-classcharacters. In contrast to Harkness, Lucy Clifford did not see herselfas a social crusader and had no desire to use her writing to advanceparticular political or humanitarian causes.
Although these women wrote novels for very different purposes—Clifford primarily to entertain and Harkness to inspire socialreform—Harkness’s A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890) containsremarkable similarities in theme and tone to Clifford’s first and mostcontroversial novel, Mrs. Keith’s Crime, which appeared anonymouslyin 1885. The central characters in both novels are young widows oflimited financial and emotional resources who kill their young daugh-ters with the help of medicine (opium in Manchester and chloroform inMrs. Keith’s Crime). What connects these disturbing novels is notsimply the dangerous subject-matter of child-murder, but the way inwhich Harkness and Clifford depict fictional mothers who not onlyrationalize their premeditated decision to end the lives of their ownchildren but even go so far as to characterize the killings as acts oflove. In a sense both of these women find a modern counterpart in ToniMorrison’s Beloved (1987), where Sethe self-righteously justifies mur-dering her baby girl to save her from a return to a life of slavery. LikeSethe, Maggie Keith and Mary Dillon view their infanticides as self-less, altruistic acts which signify the depth of their mother-love.
In Mrs. Keith’s Crime, Lucy Clifford creates a heroine whose veryidentity is defined by her motherhood. Eager to save the life of herfive-year-old consumptive daughter Molly, Maggie Keith, an artist,brings her to the warm Spanish climate of Malaga. Maggie is a singlemother who must face the enormous economic and psychological chal-lenges of raising her child alone due to her husband’s untimely demise.She develops a support network among the other English who inhabitthe hotel at Zahra, but as Molly’s condition deteriorates, Maggie dis-tances herself from her friends and is actually relieved when theyleave Spain because she is no longer willing to share her daughterwith anyone.
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The sudden death of her son Jack early in the novel helps to explainMaggie’s jealous desire to stay close to her sick daughter as well as herreluctance to leave Molly in the care of others. Jack contracts scarletfever from his loving but thoughtless nurse, and Maggie is forbiddento stay by his bedside for fear that she might be contaminated by thisexposure and possibly spread the disease to the fragile Molly. Thisenforced separation from her needy child causes Maggie almost unen-durable agony; she regrets that ‘‘no mother is there with him—hereaway from him I have no control’’ (41). Only at the moment of deathis she finally allowed into the sanctuary of the sickroom. Maggie’smemory of the circumstances surrounding her son’s death fuels herpassionate wish to remain by Molly’s side throughout her illness andher mistrust of other caregivers. Under no circumstances is she willingto relinquish power over the body of her only living child.
As she and Molly settle into the hotel, Maggie instinctivelyperceives a potential threat to her daughter’s well-being from thecold-blooded landlady Manuela, a childless woman who espouses analmost Darwinian philosophy that the sick and weak should be leftto die, for ‘‘what are they to do with life?’’ (95). While Manuela’sinsensitive comments are themselves a real cause for concern, racialbias almost certainly plays a role in Maggie’s aversion to her; swayedby the bigoted invective of her two Jewish friends, Mr. Josephs andMr. Cohen, who characterize the Spanish people as a whole as crueland lazy, Maggie vows never to let Molly fall into the clutches ofManuela. Before Maggie even realizes that she too is terminally ill,she goes in search of a suitable companion for Molly should she herselfbecome ill; but her efforts to secure an English nurse fall through,and as her friends depart the hotel one by one, she is left ‘‘the onlyEnglishwoman in Zahra’’ (208), a veritable stranger in a strange land.Although the absence of her countrymen does make Maggie feelvulnerable, it also frees her to retreat into a kind of solipsisticuniverse, where only she and Molly exist.
But Dr. Murray’s shocking revelation that she will in all likelihoodpredecease Molly causes Maggie to regret her desire for isolation fromthe rest of English society. She desperately longs for a worthy—that is,non-Spanish—substitute mother to take her place by Molly’s death-bed. It is impossible for Maggie to reach her friends and fellowEnglishwomen May Vincent and Nellie Josephs, who are on theirway back to England, and a distant cousin refuses her entreaty tocome and care for Molly. Dr. Murray, afraid that Molly will be need-lessly traumatized if she shares the same bed with a mother whomay be a corpse the next morning, implores her to ‘‘do what is bestfor your child and let her go. . . : You would not die beside her?’’
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(220). At this point, the identities of mother and daughter have becomeso tightly fused that any attempt to unravel them is perilous. Thedoctor’s suggestion that it is in Molly’s best interests to be separatedfrom her mother and looked after by Manuela in an adjoining roomis the catalyst for Maggie’s radical determination that she must pro-tect her child from an inadequate maternal substitute by killing her.The mere thought of the unfeeling Manuela, with her ‘‘bold, blackeyes’’ (231) and her ‘‘large dark hands’’ (225) taking over her role asMolly’s intimate companion at the moment of death fills her with ter-ror: ‘‘Let that cruel woman tend her, and strange hands smooth herpillow, and cold hearts watch her die?’’ Maggie cries. ‘‘Oh no—no—no, I cannot . . .’’ (221).
Even as she prepares to end her child’s life, Maggie shows hermaternal tenderness when she wishes that her lips, and not a che-mist’s physic, could stifle Molly’s last breath; she murmurs, ‘‘if I couldbut kiss the life out of you . . .’’ (231). Maggie’s inner thoughts revealthat she views herself not as an angel of death but an angel of mercy:
She shall never toss and gasp [. . .] alone, and calling for mother [. . .]mother, who could not bear her pain and died; mother [. . .] [who] hadnot courage to take her little one with her. . . : [Y]ou shall die in mother’sarms, my sweet—in mother’s arms that love you [. . .] I will kill you; oh,my dear, I love you enough even for that [. . . .] (221)
Euthanasia offers Maggie a way to prove that she is willing to makethe supreme sacrifice to preserve the sacred union between motherand child. In her analysis of Mrs. Keith’s Crime, Marysa Demoordescribes the death of Molly and Maggie as ‘‘quasi simultaneous’’ (61);and indeed this is what Maggie tries to achieve. She imagines death asa final, glorious consummation of their love as mother and daughter.
Even though Maggie’s lucidity begins to wane as her illness takesits toll on her mental faculties, she clearly understands that the out-side world will judge her harshly for her extreme decision and callher ‘‘a murderess’’ (226). Because she dies shortly after she poisonsMolly, however, Maggie is not subject to earthly justice. She escapesthe consequences of her actions in Spain but cannot avoid them afterdeath. In what is surely one of the more bizarre scenes in Victorianfiction, Clifford briefly yet vividly depicts the afterlife. As Maggieenters the afterworld, she notices that her husband Arthur willneither look at nor speak to her, and although she hears the telltalesound of Jack’s rocking horse, to her horror she finds no evidenceof Molly. Maggie interprets her husband’s silence, as well as herinability to find her daughter, as the worst kind of condemnation of
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her mercy-killing. Maggie’s carefully contrived plan has backfired: farfrom preserving the intimate bond between mother and daughter, herviolence drives a wedge between them. Her fantasy of a happy reunionin death with her husband and children is shattered.
A Manchester Shirtmaker presents another mother who succumbsto the terrible temptation to use violence as a means of expressing lovefor her ailing child. This infanticide occurs not in the exotic locale ofSpain but in the slums of one of England’s most prominentmanufacturing cities. Harkness uses sympathetic infanticide for aspecific purpose: to expose the dehumanizing elements of ruthlesscapitalism, the exploitation of sweated labor, and that most dreadedof Victorian ‘‘benevolent’’ institutions, the workhouse. The novelbegins with a brief history of the tragic life of the recently widowedMary Dillon, who moves with her baby daughter Daisy into the ironi-cally named Angel Meadow, ‘‘[T]he worst slum in Manchester’’ (7),after the accidental death of her middle-class husband, a tradesmanwhose relatives disowned him because he chose to marry a domesticservant tainted by the stigma of a workhouse upbringing. From theoutset, Harkness envisions Manchester as a spiritual wasteland,peopled by hopeless, miserable, and largely unemployed members ofthe underclass tottering on the brink of starvation and suicide. Witha grim sense of irony, the narrator notes that life is both short andcheap in Manchester, whose denizens are ‘‘hatched, matched, anddispatched at the shortest possible notice’’ (48). Mary witnesses this cal-lousness towards human life when a neighbor accidentally rolls over onand smothers her child during the night, a not-uncommon occurrenceamong the slum-dwellers, the result of drunkenness and indifference.Mary is disgusted at the news because she imagines herself a superiormother, one who is completely devoted to her baby and attentive to herevery need. Little does she know that she, too, will be responsible forher child’s death, though under radically different circumstances.
Without hope of financial assistance from her husband’s contemptu-ous family, Mary, a talented seamstress, attempts to support herselfand Daisy first by dressmaking, then by shirtmaking when she cannotfind work. Harkness’s choice of profession for her heroine is a calcu-lated one. In The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction from1832�1867, Catherine Gallagher writes that
the most popular cheap magazine stories about women workers wereseamstress tales. . . : [S]eamstresses were even more appealing sufferersthan other working women because their trade was unmistakably femi-nine. Women who worked in mines or factories . . .were often imagined tobe mannish or even brutish. But upper-class and middle-class readers
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could easily identify themselves, their wives, or their daughters with thestarving seamstresses they read about. . . . Because almost all womensewed, the seamstress seemed at least as much woman as worker. (130)
Harkness deliberately creates a character who is likely to win the sym-pathy of her audience: Mary is skilled in a womanly domestic art and,because she desperately looks for work throughout the novel, cannotbe classified as one of the ‘‘idle’’ poor.6
As she undertakes her Odyssean quest for a job, Mary finds thatunemployment is an almost constant topic of conversation wherevershe goes. The competition of foreign trade and reduced wages paidby profit-minded merchants, whom Harkness refers to as ‘‘Mammon’spriests,’’ (33) all contribute to a climate of despair that permeates thedark urban landscape of Manchester.7 One nameless old womanasserts, ‘‘I’ve never known work so scarce, and pay so low as it isnow’’ (42). Mary’s hopes for gainful employment are buoyed by anadvertisement for shirtmakers wanted at the South Eastern Manufac-turing Company. When she arrives at the factory to ask for work,however, Mary discovers that the ad is meaningless and is turnedaway. Before she leaves, Mary witnesses a hoard of female shirt-makers gang up on a sweatshop owner named Cohen, who is tryingto farm out work from the factory to be done for slave wages. Marydecides that her only hope for employment is to make shirts for theunprincipled sweater, who demands that she give him her rent moneyas security for the garments that she takes home to sew. When thenaive Mary returns the finished shirts, Cohen claims they are ruinedand not only refuses to pay her wages but keeps her rent money aswell. Now penniless, Mary has no choice but to pawn her only remain-ing possession of any value: her sewing machine.
Mary’s spirit is irrevocably broken by the sweater, and her situationbecomes unbearable when malnutrition causes her to lose her mostprecious natural resource—her breast milk—and she can no longerfeed her baby. Thus her very femininity is diminished by poverty.The guilt Mary feels because of her inability to provide nourishmentis readily apparent when she imagines that Daisy asks, ‘‘[W]hy doyou starve me like this?’’ (98). In Mary’s tortured imagination, herinfant’s emaciated body is a reproach to her motherhood. After monthsof looking for work, Mary’s only job offer is prostitution; she is solicitedby a man immediately after she departs the pawnshop, but she refusesto abandon her honor and self-respect. Cheated by the sweater, havingpawned her only means of making an honest living, she sees heroptions for employment as appallingly limited, and again and againshe asks herself, ‘‘[W]hich is better—Death or the Workhouse?’’ (97).
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Like Betty Higden in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Mary ishaunted by the specter of the workhouse and determined to avoidit at all costs. The controversial and almost universally despisedPoor Law Amendment Act of 1834 discouraged the dispensation of‘‘out-relief’’—what amounts to our modern conception of the welfarecheck—for the able-bodied poor and instead recommendedincarceration in workhouses that were constructed to be as unpleasantand undesirable as possible, hoping to deter the poor from applying forassistance from the state. Of course, as Richard Altick points out inVictorian People and Ideas, the New Poor Laws were never fullyenforced; many of the destitute continued to receive financial supportoutside the walls of the workhouse despite the new provisions(122�23). Nevertheless, because she herself grew up in the workhouseand is without friends or relatives to help her in her time of need,Mary firmly believes that she has no other alternative than the odiousunion. She vividly recalls the details of her childhood in that depress-ing place: the uniforms inmates had to wear, the corporal punishmentshe endured at the hands of the chaplain, and, perhaps worst of all,the pathetic old women who would cry and lament, ‘‘I never thoughtI’d come to this. . . : Ah me! so I’ll die in the union!’’ (90).8
The idea of returning to the prison-like institution in which she wasraised, and condemning her daughter to share a similar upbringing,is unthinkable. Mary declares, ‘‘My baby must be—shall be happy. . . :It shall not be a workhouse brat! a pauper servant!’’ (89). In her mind,the lethal dose of opium that she steals from a chemist’s shop is notpoison but a gift that enables her to take care of her baby, to endthe agony of a prolonged starvation, and, most significantly, to makesure that Daisy is never subjected to the degradation of the work-house.9 Mary’s motive for murder here coincides with Maggie Keith’s:she fears that her child will be trapped within an environment that isunbearable—in Mary’s case, the workhouse; with Maggie, underManuela’s indifferent gaze. Both mothers kill to protect their childrenfrom a fate they believe is worse than death.
Harkness’s depiction of a mother driven to kill because she cannotsupport her child through honest labor delivers a devastating critiqueof the Victorians’ so-called ‘‘solution’’ to the problems of poverty andunemployment. In Mary’s impassioned speech to the all-male juryshe presents herself as a caring, conscientious mother whose desper-ate act is an indictment of a society which she feels offered her noalternative to violence:
‘‘O, Gentlemen, if you were but women! . . . . If you were women you’dknow what it is to pawn your sewing machine, and then to see your child
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starving. I was reared in a workhouse, and the union’s worse than pris-on. . . . I’ve walked the streets looking for work, I’ve tried at all sorts ofplaces, but I couldn’t get any shirts to make and then I had to pawnmy sewing-machine, because my little baby was starving. I got weakand ill, Gentlemen, and I got so starved myself, I’d no milk to give it.’’(158�59)
Mary’s pathetic testimony wins the sympathy of the judge and jury,who commit her to an insane asylum rather than send her to prison.
Harkness’s portrait of a mother who resorts to violence not todestroy but to protect her child reflects what Frances Dolan claims inDangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England1550�1700, her study of popular depictions of infanticide in pamph-lets, broadsides and other texts that were loosely based on real-lifecrimes: that married women and widows could kill their children asa final act of maternal responsibility. Dolan writes that these accounts‘‘present parents who, motivated by poverty, shame, despair, andisolation, intend to eliminate their children ‘for their own good.’ Farfrom acting out of anger against their children, parents often asserttheir attachment to them rather than attempting to dissociate them-selves through violence’’ (141). Like the mothers Dolan describes,Mary believes that it is her maternal duty to end her child’s anguishby any means necessary; she thus risks arrest and imprisonment tosteal the packet of Dover’s Powders to acquire the medicine that willbring Daisy eternal sleep and relief from the pangs of hunger.Although Mary obviously experiences guilt as a result of her mercy-killing—Harkness conveys her heroine’s tortured thoughts when shewrites that ‘‘[i]t was bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, and shehad killed it’’ (106)—Daisy’s appearance immediately after her deathseems to validate Mary’s perception that her overdose has not harmedbut helped her daughter; the narrator observes that ‘‘[u]pon the child’sface was an unmistakable smile of happiness’’ (103). It is only afterMary ends her child’s suffering that she can attend to her own; shehangs herself, ironically enough, with the silk handkerchief of a conde-scending Manchester millionaire who periodically eases his conscienceby visiting the unfortunates in the lunatic asylum.10
Mary Dillon and Maggie Keith are revolutionary characters whoredefine the Victorian stereotype of the angelic mother because theyinterpret the supreme act of domestic violence as a humane and self-sacrificing gesture that somehow signifies good parenting. But howare readers supposed to feel about these women and their crimes?Most Victorian reviewers found the subject-matter of both novelsshocking and in poor taste; a writer for The Literary World in 1885
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called Mrs. Keith’s Crime an ‘‘intensely disagreeable story’’ anddeclared that ‘‘it is not a wholesome piece of work, and we do notbelieve that any one could be benefitted by its perusal’’ (323). AManchester Shirtmaker inspired similar disgust. One reviewer forThe Academy in 1890 claimed that ‘‘[i]t is difficult to understand theprecise raison d’etre of a novel occupied from beginning to end withnothing but the record of an unbroken series of struggles againststarvation, culminating in child-murder, lunacy, and suicide.’’ Heconcluded that ‘‘[s]urely, morbid reflections of this sort are best leftunillustrated’’ (148). Victorian readers’ sensibilities were offended bysuch direct depictions of maternal violence.
Although twenty-first century readers of Mrs. Keith’s Crime and AManchester Shirtmaker do not possess Victorian inhibitions regardingthe topic of infanticide, it is possible for modern readers to judge thesewomen harshly. Mrs. Keith exhibits a kind of hubris, a glorification ofher act that somehow makes her less sympathetic than the soft-spoken, child-like Mary; but one cannot overlook the fact that Mary’spride prevents her from accepting help in the workhouse that surelywould have prolonged her daughter’s life. The objective observer couldsay that, like Toni Morrison’s Sethe, whose love for her murdered childis condemned by Paul D. as ‘‘too thick,’’ the maternal love evinced byMary Dillon and Maggie Keith is ‘‘too thick,’’ too all-consuming and,ultimately, destructive.
Infanticide was a social evil long before the nineteenth century, butthe amount of attention paid to maternal violence in fiction increasessignificantly during the Victorian period. Despite the obvious differ-ences in the treatment of infanticide in Adam Bede, Mrs. Keith’sCrime, and A Manchester Shirtmaker, there is common ground to befound in all three novels. George Eliot and Margaret Harkness, and,to a lesser degree, Lucy Clifford, exhibit a desire to heighten thereading public’s awareness of environmental conditions present inVictorian England that encouraged child-killing. In these novels,infanticide is the product of such disparate social forces as unemploy-ment, the insurmountable stigma of illegitimate birth, and xeno-phobia. The shocking images of maternal violence in these novelsundercut the Victorian stereotype of the mother as the ‘‘Angel in theHouse’’ while at the same time outlining areas of much-needed socialreform. The preeminence of plots that involve maternal infanticidereflects the Victorians’ growing realization that certain fundamentalaspects of their culture needed to be altered in order for the familyto prosper and to prevent the further decline of the nation.
These novelists imagined infanticide in dramatically different ways.Eliot’s heroine kills her child in an effort to escape maternity
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altogether, while Harkness and Clifford create protagonists whocommit infanticide in a desperate effort to fulfill their maternalresponsibilities. Eliot preferred to distance the action from the presentday (perhaps in an effort to avoid offending her audience), whileHarkness and Clifford strive to create contemporary accounts ofmaternal violence. Child-murder transcends time and place in Victor-ian fiction: it occurs in the bucolic past of Adam Bede as well as theharrowing present of A Manchester Shirtmaker. Because Harkness,Clifford, and Eliot represent infanticide in a variety of settings—urban, pastoral, and, in Clifford’s case, Spanish—these novels demon-strate the omnipresence of child-murder as a theme in Victorian fiction.
NOTES
1. Of course, infanticide is not the exclusive domain of the novel.While the theme of infanticide receives its most extensive treat-ment in the Victorian novels of Eliot, Harkness, and Clifford,the topic exists in poetry as well. The most prominent predecessorto Victorian literary treatments of infanticide is WilliamWordsworth’s ‘‘The Thorn’’ (1798), which explores the motif ofchild-murder within a primitive rural setting very similar to thatwhich Eliot describes in Adam Bede. During the Victorian era,Laetitia E. Landon’s ‘‘Infanticide at Madagascar’’ (1838) and Eli-zabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘‘Cry of the Children’’ (1844) equatethe neglect of poverty-stricken and factory children with a kindof institutionalized infanticide on the part of England. Althoughthese poems produce a scathing indictment of Victorian callous-ness to child welfare, the infanticide they describe is symbolic innature; they are not literally about women who kill their children.While Barrett Browning’s ‘‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’’(1850) does graphically depict a slave who murders her half-whitenewborn, the product of her rape at the hands of her master, it issignificant that the poem is set in America, not England. It is inthe Victorian novel, and particularly in novels written by women,that the disturbing subject of child-murder within an Englishcontext finds its fullest expression.
2. Because she was generally perceived as hostile to both marriageand motherhood, the New Woman was often accused in the popu-lar press of contributing the threat of cultural degeneration. InThe New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle(Manchester, England: Manchester UP, 1997), Sally Ledgerobserves that even if a New Woman did have children, she ‘‘wasoften figured in discourse as at best a bad mother and at worst
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an infanticidal one’’ (104). While neither Maggie Keith nor MaryDillon can be defined as a New Woman, since each character isa rather traditional wife and mother until she loses her husbandand resorts to desperate measures to spare her child suffering,Margaret Harkness was most certainly a New Woman. Harknesswas both a feminist and social activist, and never married or hadchildren. It was unmarried, childless ‘‘New’’ women such asHarkness, women who yearned for education and fulfilling careersoutside the home, who appeared threatening to many conservativeVictorians because these women did not produce healthy childrenwithin wedlock who could improve the nation’s stock.
3. Frances Trollope’s 1843 novel Jessie Phillips provides a rareexample of a father, the aristocratic Frederic Dalton, who murdershis newborn, although the baby’s working-class mother is at firstthe prime suspect.
4. Behlmer cites statistics that show England’s infant death rates tobe lower than those of neighboring European countries: ‘‘Accord-ing to the annual reports of the Registrar-General, between1850 and 1900 the infant mortality rate hovered around 150children under one year dying for every 1,000 live births.Although this figure is high by modern standards, VictorianEngland’s infant mortality rates compared favorably with thosefor contemporary Continental nations’’ (403).
5. Lionel Rose reports that infant mortality rates for workhouseillegitimates could be as high as 90% in some districts (23).
6. Harkness’s decision to make Mary a seamstress was also likelyinspired by Thomas Hood’s searing depiction of suffering andexploited seamstresses in his poem ‘‘The Song of the Shirt’’ (1843).
7. The very existence of a novel like A Manchester Shirtmaker beliesChristine L. Krueger’s assertion that ‘‘urban infanticide was notrepresented in bourgeois literature�at least not until ThomasHardy’s spectacular conflation of Darwinian nature and Malthu-sian urban crowding in Father Time’s infanticide-suicide in Judethe Obscure (1895)’’ (288). Although many of her characters maybelong to the working class, Harkness’s novels were gearedtoward the middle classes whom she hoped would initiate much-needed social reforms.
8. In her journalism, Harkness also emphasizes the inadequacies ofthe English workhouse system. In an article entitled ‘‘A Year ofMy Life’’ (New Review 5 [Oct. 1891]: 375�84), she notes that‘‘many men would rather die than accept workhouse assistance’’(380). Harkness herself toured workhouses in Vienna and foundtheir conditions to be vastly superior to those in her native
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England. The unions she visited offered ‘‘light work, holidays andSundays off, good food, comfortable rooms’’ and, significantly, ‘‘noprison discipline’’ (380).
9. In Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories, BarbaraGates mentions a real-life case of a mother’s murder of her childand attempted suicide which made headlines in 1844. The detailsparallel Mary Dillon’s story and may have influenced Harkness.Mary Furley took herself and her baby out of a workhouse, alleg-ing that the child was abused. She failed at trying to make a livingas a shirtmaker and subsequently tried to drown herself alongwith her baby (she survived, and the baby did not). The casearoused considerable sympathy on behalf of Furley, whose deathsentence was commuted to transportation. Dickens himself,among others, believed that even this sentence was too harsh (51).
10. Harkness’s In Darkest London (London, 1891) contains anotheraccount of a mother who commits infanticide and suicide as aresult of unbearable socioeconomic pressures. In a Malthusiansubplot, Mrs. Rhodes is tormented by her husband for havinggiven birth to too many children whose mouths they cannot affordto feed. Unable to withstand his constant denigration of herfecundity, she ends her suicide note with the haunting accusation,‘‘I was drove to it’’ (78). Mrs. Rhodes differs from Mary Dillon,however, in that she destroys herself and her baby simultaneouslyby jumping into the river with her infant in her arms.
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