... --Isaiah 49:15 Forgetting indeed remains the disturbing threat that lurks in the background of the phenomenology of memory and of the epistemology of history. --Paul Ricoeur (1)

In 1624, the same year James I issued the Infanticide Statute that outlawed newborn child murder, a broadside ballad of topical import was printed for London publisher and bookseller John Trundle (See Figure 1). (2) The broadside appears in two columns with a fifty-two-line ballad in rhyming couplets on each side, one attributed to a son, one Nathaniel Tyndale, who had murdered his mother (an act of matricide), and the other to a mother, one Anne Musket, who drowned her nine-year-old daughter (an act of filicide). (3) These opposing poems, suggestively placed side by side on the page, point to a sociocultural split regarding the mother in early modern England. The loaded discourse of both the "new mother" and the "murderous mother" or Medea figure of the sixteenth century is still potent well into the seventeenth century, and motherhood becomes mediated not only by the male writers of these crimes but also by the female community whose duty it was to monitor all things maternal. The foci of this essay are both the ways in which this convergence of new maternal authority and power affected both men and women and the ways the myriad discourses of the seventeenth century highlighted the ambiguity and often unsettling potentiality of the murderous mother. I first examine the pamphlet A Pitilesse Mother (1616) and the previously mentioned 1624 broadside, both written by men in the opening decades of the seventeenth century, and discuss how each complicates, contests, and expands previously received notions of motherhood. (4) I argue that these texts emphasize the disruptive power of maternal forgetting, a dissident social practice that challenges male sovereignty and signals a breakdown of female community. Furthermore, both works point to the increasing anxiety and opposition to this liminal figure of the murderous mother and also participate in the changing conceptions about how a murderous mother could and should be regarded in light of her potential both to create and to destroy. I conclude the essay with an examination of a brief but powerful scene in John Ford's tragedy Love's Sacrifice (1633), where three mothers come together to murder the man who fathered each of their children. Unlike the earlier texts, Ford's play, I argue, shows how these mothers remember their maternal duties by effectively erasing the memory of a corrupted father. The essay explores how these maternal figures at once destabilized the emerging reconstructions of motherhood and considers to what extent these mothers expanded the realm of female power within this same discourse.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The early modern woman was granted a greater degree of agency than ever before, and with the rise of humanism, a new awareness arose of the necessity of a mother's influence in the raising of her children. (5) Betty S. Travitsky has keenly mapped out the changing theories of women's roles in sixteenth-century England and points to the construction of the "new mother" at this time, one who was "pious" with an "increased and clear-cut responsibility for the raising of her children and a clearly recognized right to self-development for her own sake, but a woman who could use her new resources only within the confines of her own family." (6) Nevertheless, Travitsky claims, the development of these "new mothers" occurred in a society where "women remained rigidly subordinated to male authority." (7) From the final decades of the sixteenth century onward, when the divorce debate reached its zenith, the English state reformulated ideas of social order and designated the individual household (the "private") as the primary unit of social control. (8) Catherine Belsey remarks, "'Hearth and home,' 'the bosom of the family': the phrases evoke warmth and affection. They also have the effect of isolating women in a private realm of domesticity which is seen as outside politics and therefore outside the operations of power." (9) Belsey makes a similar point in The Subject of Tragedy: "The new family of the seventeenth century, still under 'the government of one,' remains a place in which power is exercised privately in the interests of public order." (10) Maternal child murder seems, however, to blatantly overturn domesticity and in turn disrupt patriarchal power. (11) The tension between a patriarchal view of maternal domestic responsibility and a mother's burgeoning sense of autonomy contributed to the rise of a conflicted state of motherhood. (12)

Being made public through print or performance, Stuart Kane remarks, was representative of a literary practice of "True Discovery, or the making visible and, more importantly, making public of a previously domestic, invisible, and private crime." (13) Exposing secrets, making the invisible visible, underscored a male anxiety about the feared potentiality of women. The public struggled to read or understand this new cultural construct; there was no space for this new maternal figure, and the writing of her crime still resisted an ability to read this woman without at first acknowledging an uneasy anxiety about doing so. (14) In fact, murderous mothers at this historical moment could have expanded the emerging distinctions of female power in the construction of motherhood. Murder and the forgetting of maternal duty served as a way for any woman to resist or subvert subordination or confinement. The murderous mother gets cast into a sphere of anxiety and undecidability, somewhere between private and public, transgressive and progressive, a cultural liminal space reserved only for one with the powers of construction and destruction. Male writers "making public" private transgressions, it would seem, actually create a new space, one that poses a challenge to hegemonic models of social control. The domestic figure becomes refashioned through murder, and the mother, in many ways the central construct of the seventeenth-century household, is thus afforded a new space, a new conception, activated by the very public writing of the male figure, one who had once maintained power or control over this maternal figure but now is faced with coming to terms with the new and ultimately threatening potentiality of motherhood.

A murderous mother forgetting maternal nature, domestic duty, and the expectations of male and female communities worked to destabilize and mobilize maternal agency. Maternal memory in the first two texts I examine works to complicate received notions about domestic maternal care. By taking the transgressive mother figure out of the private sphere and placing her into the public sphere, male writers of these crimes sought to ensure that the public did not forget, a reminder that the mother or mother-to-be needed a greater degree of surveillance. But maternal amnesia in these texts is often an empowering gesture (although the male writers often ascribe Satan as the source of forgetfulness), unsettling the essentialism associated with women. As Alan Sinfield has remarked, "dissident potential derives ultimately not from essential qualities in individuals (though they have qualities) but from conflict and contradiction that the social order inevitably produces within itself, even as it attempts to sustain itself." (15) Juliet Fleming has argued that writing in early modern England was understood as a procedure "for the gathering, storage, and redeployment of well-framed wisdom"; she concludes, "writing is that which frames truth to catch the eye or memory." (16) Ultimately, the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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