Madame LeFevre kills her daughter-in-law

Mme Lefebvre’s killing of her daughter-in-law is presented as a crime arising from a violent struggle over maternity, family authority, and the son’s future. In August 1925, during a car trip with her son driving, the sixty-year-old bourgeois woman killed her daughter-in-law, who was six months pregnant. The episode turns the abstract conflict between mother-in-law and wife into a murder, and makes the younger woman’s pregnancy the decisive point at which the older woman’s hostility became lethal.

Family Conflict and the Pregnancy

The book situates the crime within a broader account of maternal possessiveness. A mother may believe that bearing her son has given her a lasting claim on his life, while his wife represents a new bond and a future in which the mother is no longer indispensable. In Mme Lefebvre’s case, the daughter-in-law had long been the object of hatred. When Mme Lefebvre suspected that the younger woman was pregnant, she bought a revolver, supposedly to defend herself against robbers. The pregnancy did not merely intensify an existing family disagreement: it signaled that the son’s life would continue through a new generation, beyond the mother’s exclusive claim.

The Killing and Its Aftermath

The murder took place while the son was driving. Mme Lefebvre was condemned to death and then pardoned; she spent the rest of her life in a reformatory and showed no remorse. Her account of the killing exposed how completely she had cast her daughter-in-law as an enemy: she believed God approved of the act. As the book recounts it, the only specific grievance she offered was that the younger woman had once told her she would now have to take her into account.

Maternal Identity and the Book’s Argument

The book links Mme Lefebvre’s violence to her attachment to maternity after menopause. For twelve years, she had suffered ailments that manifested themselves symbolically as an imaginary pregnancy. Her daughter-in-law’s actual pregnancy thus confronted her with the end of a maternal role she had struggled to preserve. The crime illustrates the book’s claim that, in pathological cases, hostility toward a son’s wife can intensify into neurosis or murder when the mother experiences the younger woman as displacing her and making her no longer central to her son’s life.