Abstract

Turn-of-the-twentieth-century women were thought to be genetically wired to make home and hearth a protective sphere, safe from the “soiled” world beyond. In short works of fiction, late Victorian/Progressive-era US authors imagine female protagonists who enact this paradigm perversely: they kill beloved children to ensure, in death, a refuge that otherwise they are powerless to provide. Taken together, these stories suggest their authors’ literary problematizing of “true womanhood,” the ideal wherein women of every race and class were to exemplify moral sanctity for the sake of family. Surprisingly, the four authors indict, not their protagonists as mothers “gone bad,” but the patriarchal, misogynist, and racist society that excludes women of both need and privilege from maternal authority over their young. In Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby,” Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “Old Woman Magoun,” Sui Sin Far’s “The Wisdom of the New,” and Angela Weld Grimké’s “The Closing Door,” four marginalized, desperate women disrupt the aims of men who would do harm. Considering Progressive-era views on motherhood and contemporary perspectives on the gendering of violent crime, this article examines the implications of ideology that presumes women to be morally “good” by nature. Instead of the authors casting murdering mothers as “masculinized” or monstrous, they are, more complexly, aligned with both the “feminine” and with feminist interests. Thus, the devoted caretakers in these stories paradoxically perform the era’s maternal ideal while simultaneously acting to subvert that ideal as they dismantle the looming threat to their young that domineering men impose.