18th century

The 18th century serves as a hinge in the book’s history of infanticide, linking older social and religious judgments to the literary figure of the desperate mother. Rather than offering a comprehensive account of the period, the narrative uses it to show how poverty, stigma, and the concealment of dishonor shaped stories about mothers who killed their newborns—and how those stories continued to inform later legal distinctions.

Social and Moral Conditions

The account describes a contradiction in the Church’s position: it opposed infanticide while condemning children born outside marriage to lasting social exclusion. Well into the 18th century, such children had no legal rights or protection and were treated as outcasts, burdened by the stigma attributed to their mothers. The period’s history is therefore framed not only through prohibitions against killing, but also through the social conditions imposed on mothers and children who fell outside marriage.

Swift’s Satirical Proposal

In 1729, Jonathan Swift proposed that poor Irish families sell their children as food, presenting the suggestion as a grotesque practical answer to poverty and hunger. The book recounts the proposal as satire, but places it beside the real desperation that can accompany famine, including later reports of mothers resorting to cannibalism during the famine in Ukraine under Stalin. The juxtaposition makes the satire’s target more than individual cruelty: it exposes the brutal logic that treats children as a burden to be managed when society offers no reliable provision.

The Desperate Mother in Literature

The book identifies Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust as an archetypal literary figure, established from the 18th century onward. After Faust seduces her, she gives birth and kills the newborn to hide the dishonor. She is condemned, while Faust—who is in love with her—seeks the devil’s help to secure her release. By then, however, Gretchen has lost the will to escape and dies consumed by guilt in Faust’s arms. Her story joins concealed pregnancy, social shame, punishment, and mental collapse in a single tragic arc, making the mother’s act legible as both a crime and the consequence of a devastating social predicament.

Afterlives in Law and Literature

The narrative follows this pattern beyond the 18th century. In 1898, the Catalan writer Victor Catalá, whose real name was Caterina Albert, won a literary prize for the monologue La infanticida, which repeats the sequence of seduction, pregnancy, abandonment, despair, a newborn’s death, and lifelong confinement in an asylum. Legal treatment also retained a special category for maternal infanticide in Spain: the former criminal code, beginning in 1822, distinguished the killing of a newborn to conceal the mother’s dishonor from homicide, before the 1995 code abolished that separate offense. These later examples show how the 18th-century literary archetype belonged to a longer history in which maternal responsibility was judged through both criminal law and the social meaning of dishonor.