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Abstract

Representations of murdering children aged beyond infancy but under 18 at the hands of their own mother or father date back to The Old Testament, Homer and Greek tragedy and have had a strong presence in literature, theatre and the visual arts ever since. Historic texts testify, that the most common form of this kind of infanticide in ancient times was committed by fathers whose sacrifice of their son or daughter served the goal of obeying god’s order or securing the goodwill of gods. Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son Isaac, who is saved by God at the last minute and Iphigenia’s sacrifice by Agamemnon are widely known stories from the Bible and Greek mythology. In the eponymous protagonist of Medea, Euripides created a dramatic character that embodies an exception to the sacrificial paradigm. Continuing this line, the theme of infanticide by mothers gained more currency; in the early modern English theatre Medea-like, murderous mother figures appeared whose diverse motives ranged from revenge and manipulation to feelings of devastation and shame. Later, maternal, or more rarely, paternal filicide became associated with social conditions of inequality and poverty in literary works portraying deprivation, fear of the future and hopelessness. Close to our time a most obvious example is Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a novel in which the female protagonist Sethe is haunted by her dead child. As Homi K. Bhabha astutely observes, ‘Beloved, the child murdered by her own mother, Sethe, is a daemonic, belated repetition of the violent history of black infant deaths, during slavery’.