ON 23 DECEMBER 1858, the Times reported the proceedings of the trial in Reading of Mary Newell, a servant, for the willful murder of her three-month-old child, whose body had been discovered in the Thames by boys who had gone fishing. Since Newell herself had admitted the crime in a statement to the constables who came to her mother's house to arrest her, the focus of the trial was not so much on establishing the guilt or innocence of the prisoner as it was on determining what could have motivated such an extreme and seemingly unnatural act of violence in order to decide the severity of her punishment. According to the testimony of a fellow inmate in the workhouse where she lived, Newell had been “a kind and affectionate mother” to the infant and had “suckled it to the last”; the prisoner's defense counsel, seeking to reconcile this description with the seriousness of her crime, invited the medical witness to affirm that she might have been “seized by a destructive impulse” that made her “destroy [that] to which [she] was most fondly attached.” While Newell's defense hoped to establish mental instability as the likeliest conceivable explanation for her act, the prisoner's confession to the constables, describing her hopelessness on being turned away by the child's father, pointed to another motivation, that of economic desperation:

Though the consequences of Mary Newell's economic circumstances were, in one sense, glaringly obvious and shockingly direct–a dead child and a trial at which her own life was at stake–the meaning communicated by her tale of economic distress was by no means straightforward. On the one hand, hers was a familiar story of victimization: Newell's testimony animates an image of the seduced and abandoned woman, left alone by a heartless and selfish cad to bear the shame and the burden of an illegitimate child, that was of long standing in popular and literary traditions by the mid-nineteenth century. Not herself aggressively sexual, but rather a victim of predatory male instincts, the victim of seduction remained intelligible within a paradigm of womanhood, rooted in the bourgeois family ideal, that excluded the active expression of sexual desire, and she could therefore be an object of middle-class sympathy.¹ The financial pressures faced by the seduced woman are incorporated into the story as part of her victimization, imposed primarily from without, whether by the father of the child (who is almost always figured as withholding support that he could give, rather than as personally lacking the means to provide for infant and mother) or by social strictures that would result in the unmarried mother's loss of employment. But, on the other hand, in admitting an economic motivation for her crime, Newell risks telling a story that puts her outside the culturally accepted bounds of natural–and civilized–femininity. Twenty-four years before her trial, for instance, the 1834 Report of the Commission on the Poor Laws answered critics who expressed concern that a vast increase in infanticide would result from the New Poor Law's provision to deny women a claim to support for the maintenance of their illegitimate children by confidently pronouncing, “We do not believe that infanticide arises from any calculation as to expense. We believe that in no civilised country, and scarcely any barbarous country, has such a thing been heard of as a mother killing her child in order to save the expense of feeding it” (qtd. in Rose 26). Though women might experience economic strain, it was beyond thinkable that this would be the force that drove their actions, as the New Poor Law's critics contended. How could a mother allow economic necessity to overwhelm her feelings for her child? To so violate the terms of the nurturing, self-sacrificing womanly ideal would make her monstrous.

Fortunately for Mary Newell, it was the first interpretation of her testimony that prevailed in her trial, deflecting attention from the more troubling economic aspects of her story. Thus, in summing up her case Newell's lawyer appealed to the men of the jury to act according to the best impulses of their gender to remedy the wrong that had been done to her by the worst: “there was no necessity for him to excite the pity of the jury for the prisoner, for he felt that they must be either more or less than men if they could be unmoved by the details to which they had listened. He had no doubt the jury would do their duty, but in discharging it they would bring to bear all the better feelings of the heart” (“Criminal Courts” 23 Dec. 1858). Newell was found guilty of willful murder and was sentenced to death, but was recommended for mercy.

In its circumstances and its outcome, Mary Newell's case was not unusual. It was one of a number of trials that year for infanticide and the related crime of concealment of birth, a lesser charge premised on the notion that while clear evidence of murder may have been difficult to obtain, the conjunction of infant death and secret pregnancy was suspicious enough to be criminal; in an era before effective and accessible birth control and abortion, there were almost certainly many more instances that eluded the courts and even discovery.²

Of the cases that went to trial, even those that resulted in conviction, historian Ann Higginbotham notes that most of the accused were “treated with what seems a surprising leniency. Few women were convicted of infanticide, and those who were found guilty routinely received pardons. After 1849, no woman was hanged for the murder of her own infant under one year old, legitimate or illegitimate” (323). In fact, many mid-century observers, sensing a rise in the incidence of the crime, complained that in cases of infanticide acquittals or reductions in punishment prompted by sympathetic narratives such as the one invoked by Newell's testimony were more the norm than the exception. The Saturday Review, for instance, deplored the fact that where infanticide was concerned it was “undeniable” that England had reached “such a deadlock in judicial matters” that it was “next to impossible to get a conviction for the crime at all. At the worst, it is always committed amongst ourselves under such extenuating circumstances, that the accused invariably gets the benefit of the doubt, if the doubt is not created for her advantage.” At least, the author of this article sighed in relief, the sentimental recounting of the “psychological” histories of defendants and their seducers had not attained the degree of prominence and decisiveness in English courtrooms that it had in France, where trials seemed to operate “by the canons of the novel, and the axiomatic principles of the feuilleton”–a response that smacks more of nationalist smugness than of insight into the rhetorical conventions of English infanticide trials, as Newell's case suggests (“The Lemoine Infanticide”).

In contrast to such sympathetic representations, and in the midst of a growing conviction that child murder was on the rise, another picture of the infanticidal mother began to circulate widely in the mid-nineteenth century, one that would place quite a different emphasis on the economic circumstances of cases such as Newell's. In this account, women like her were neither innocent nor victims, forced by extreme hardship into otherwise unimaginable measures. Instead they were ruthless creatures for whom pregnancies and murders were simply calculations intended to promote their economic rise. An 1856 article, for example, describes what it deems the common practice of lower-class country girls and young working women, who employ a capitalist and contractual logic to speculate on their sexuality and their reproductive powers to gain profits:

Significantly, the author directs his outrage not so much to the fact that these girls are expressing and acting on sexual desire–indeed, physical lust is remarkably underplayed in this otherwise fervid passage, a merely “unfortunate” matter in a litany of horrors–but rather more to the fact that they are exhibiting economic motives and behaviors. The act of murder itself, bracketed by references to the laboring girls' “daily work,” is rhetorically made to disappear nearly seamlessly into their working day, as if childbirth, death, and disposal of bodies were of a piece with their paid employment, facilitated by the girls' ability to conceal and suppress their “natural” maternal responses. Within the terms of the writer's scenario, this is almost not surprising; after all, as the language suggests, the girls have engaged in bargaining and investment from the very first, exchanging sex and speculating on the possibility of pregnancy for a promise of marriage. When the speculation fails, the author claims, they have determined that to “kill an infant outright” is “a better investment” than waiting for the child to die through neglect or abuse, because of the leniency they can expect from the courts (“Infanticide” 9 Aug. 1856, 336).

Among the voices that weighed in during the explosion of concern about infanticide in the 1850s and 60s, the question as to what kind of woman would kill her child inevitably shaded into the question of what exactly women were. Were they self-sacrificing nurturers of the private sphere, pitiable victims of masculine sexual aggression, or hard-headed economic calculators who could almost effortlessly disguise their bodies and souls, to the point of hiding the process that was imagined to be most central to their womanhood? As woman's nature became increasingly contested terrain at mid century, the debates over infanticide helped to reinforce the ideal of women's essential privacy, but also to shape it to remove the resistance that privacy posed to social control. A constant challenge to complacency about progress, infanticide came to be seen as a “foul current of life, running like a pestilential sewer beneath the smooth surface of society which makes us doubt whether all our boasts about the superior morality of our domestic relations are not just a trifle premature” (“Infanticide” 5 Aug. 1865, 162). The ideological burden that “domestic relations” were called upon to bear as capitalist social and economic relations took hold in Britain is by now a familiar feature of our cultural histories: central to the determination of the “superior morality” of these relations was the definition of women as naturally private, belonging properly to a domestic sphere constructed as nonalienated and noneconomic, untainted by the logic of capitalism that seemed both to promise prosperity and to threaten to subsume all social relations and questions of value– even moral value–to its rules of supply and demand, production, consumption, and exchange. Defined thus, women and the domestic sphere could be charged with safeguarding a kind of transcendent moral value from the encroachments of the logic of the marketplace. In the middle decades of the century, as this paradigm was increasingly put under stress both by overt political challenges by women and by undeniable economic and demographic facts, such as the number of working and/or “surplus” unmarried women, concern about a breakdown in this definition of women– and therefore concern about the preservation of a realm of transcendent value–comes to be articulated in and through discussions of infanticide in newspapers, periodicals, social scientific and medical discourse, and novels, the most notable of which to have come down to us is George Eliot's Adam Bede. Because it was such an extreme action, infanticide was uniquely available to underwrite the supposed naturalness of women's position in the private sphere as wives and (especially) mothers. Economic women–women who engaged in wage labor, female consumers, and women whose roles seemed to mix domesticity and the market, such as wet-nurses and baby-minders–were figures who particularly focused anxiety about the perversion of true value with market value; such women were represented on a continuum of unnaturalness of which the final point was infanticide. But at the same time as it was employed to shore up the gendered division between public and private, discussions (not to mention episodes) of infanticide threatened to expose the artificiality of that construction, as well as its internal inconsistencies. Infanticide and the cultural practices to which it was linked tended to reveal the repressed economic character of the domestic sphere and the labor that occurred therein. Furthermore, the question of concealment that was closely linked to infanticide both in legal terms and in public suspicion suggested a tension at the heart of the definition of women as private: concealment was, in a way, the logic of privacy taken to an extreme and turned upon itself to produce the unsettling possibility of feminine secrecy and false representation. Infanticide discourse at mid century, then, is concerned not only to enact the privatization of women by casting its shadow over women's economic participation, but also to regulate the terms of this privacy, making it always subject to public incursions, inspections, and controls. Recognizing these twin tendencies may shift our understanding of Eliot's novel's connection to this discourse by highlighting the conservative and disciplinary mechanisms that creep into the text, troubling its efforts to negotiate the possibility of a nonalienated, virtuous female subjectivity, and reminding us that the relationship between literary representations and social regulation is not always–or not wholly–antagonistic.

IN HIS 1862 BOOK, Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History, William Burke Ryan urged his readers to recognize “how widespread is the crime of infanticide, how keenly the pulse of the nation beats to its existence, and how general is the conviction of its increase,” since the presence of “systematic child-murder” was enough to place the country “on trial before the civilised world” (80, 1, 80). Indeed, in Ryan's account, to live in England is to be assailed by the “feeble wail of murdered childhood in its agony…at every turn”:

No place is unsullied in Ryan's vision–not the modern space of the railway, not the rural space of the wood, and not the domestic space of the bedroom; the murdered infant is the sign of a moral degeneration that has penetrated all facets of English daily life.

The “discovery” that an action which seemed characteristic of the uncivilized colonies was in fact occurring in the heart of the imperial power was deeply troubling to many in England during the 1850s. During this decade, a great deal of interest had initially been focused on the incidence of the crime of “female infanticide” in India. What seemed particularly shocking to metropolitan commentators was the economic nexus in which Indian practitioners of infanticide–typically represented as the father– seemed to place their girl children.³

Outraged writers such as the author of this passage in the Times deplored the practice of killing daughters for whom a suitable dowry–one that maintained the status of the father–could not be provided, a practice that seemed, unacceptably, to articulate human value on a financial scale: “It is a question…between the father's wealth and the daughter's life, and the life is taken and the wealth retained” (“Infanticide in the Punjab”).⁴ Such a misapprehension of value was figured within an imperial narrative as a sign of undercivilization; its appearance in the mother country, perpetrated this time by women, the supposed guarantors of imperial civilization, seemed to indicate a disturbing remnant of savagery.

But even more disturbing to mid-century commentators, the same problematic equation of human and economic value that was represented as barbaric in the colonies could also be seen to inhere in the logic of political economy, which evaluated human character, behavior, and morality according to the laws of the market. Thus, capitalism could be seen at once as both the condition of possibility for progress and the marker of civilization and as a threat to the moral values characteristic of civilization. The disparity between British economic and imperial energy and the moral listlessness signaled by indifference to infanticide is a recurring charge in many texts from the period, emerging clearly in this passage from Ryan:

In his account of infanticide throughout history, Ryan lingers over a description of the practice among the Romans in the late stages of the empire, announcing that “amongst the depraved customs of this luxurious people the crime of killing children for gain was not uncommon” (208). As this focus on a moment of imperial decay would suggest, the act of infanticide came to be associated not only with undercivilization, but more particularly with a degeneration that grows out of the very processes of civilization. In ancient Rome, in Ryan's account, the link between infanticide and profit-driven economic activity was direct; in Britain, the new imperial power, the connection (at least in this passage) between the quest for profit and the murder of children is more oblique, though the responsibility is no less acute, as a nation besotted by the pursuit of wealth directs its abundant energies to business rather than the protection of infants.

The connection between infanticide and political economy was of long standing in Britain by the time Ryan issued his call for the rededication of national energies in the early 1860s, but it had taken many forms. At its most basic, the association was grounded in political economy's model of a human existence governed by calculation; children, no less than any other feature of social life, could be conceptualized in terms of gain and loss, pleasures and pains. For decades the bastardy provisions of the New Poor Law, which adopted these assumptions in attempting to modify sexual behavior by changing the calculus women would face if they became pregnant, were widely blamed for the perceived rise in infanticide.⁵

Strikingly, as the new law was being debated, both its supporters and detractors seemed to admit the assumption that an infant was an occasion for calculation: proponents sought to remove the incentive for mothers to look to the production of children out of wedlock as a means of gaining income through child support or poor relief, and calculated on behalf of the community by proposing to save rate payers the costs of supporting these children; critics, raising the specter of an increase in infanticide, accepted that women might be driven to murder by the expense of keeping the child.⁶ Well into the 1860s commentators continued to charge that political economists would look mildly on child murders prompted by such calculations, seeing them as a kind of Malthusian check on vice. “We shall have no occasion to go to the days of Herod for a picture of the ‘Murder of the Innocents”’ Harold King announced in an article in Once a Week, “and yet we are told that all this is as it should be; that these are the checks which Providence has imposed on licentiousness.” Though “infanticide and its prevention” were “uppermost in the minds of…philanthropists and political economists” alike, according to King, there is little doubt which group he considers best equipped to offer solutions: the only consolation for a mother faced with the prospect of bearing an illegitimate child that she could not support, he claims, was that “the Saviour of the world was not a political economist” (King 335, 334, 335).⁷

If the New Poor Law seemed to demonstrate that political economy promoted a climate of calculation that might ultimately encourage infanticide and that undermined the moral grounds on which the crime might be resisted and sanctioned, the 1840s and 50s brought new concerns about other institutions that threatened to generate infanticide for profit. Burial clubs, a form of funeral insurance for the working classes, and life insurance companies were seen as particularly ominous developments for infants: “The diabolical enormity has obtained among mothers in the poorer classes of poisoning their children previously entered in burial clubs, for the sake of the money thereupon paid: so rife has this become in some parts of Lancashire, that it is a common saying among the women of the lower classes, ‘such a child will not live long, he is in the burial club”’ (Symons 45). Allegations that poor parents were murdering their children for burial money came to the attention of such noted reformers as Edwin Chadwick early in the 1840s; committees investigating the system of burial and life insurance were quickly established; and legislation banning life insurance for children under six was passed in 1846. (In fact, the organizations themselves were already skittish about insuring infants: burial clubs, for instance, generally kept benefits for young children low and didn't admit newborn infants, both for business reasons–since death in the first days of life was so common–and to avoid being accused of fostering crime; for similar reasons it wasn't until 1860 that the first life insurance company covered infants.) Nonetheless, so-called burial insurance murders continued to make news through the mid-1850s, as legislators struggled to balance working-class resentment of the slighting of their love for their children, a desire to promote independence among the poor and to avoid having them bury their children at parish expense, and the wish to avoid creating financial incentives for child murder. The various compromises that they reached–requiring certification of deaths and paying benefits directly to undertakers, for example–were not wholly satisfying to any of the constituencies. Working-class parents continued to resent the implication of burial insurance regulations, and though anxieties that insurance created opportunities to capitalize on infant murder dimmed somewhat in the 1860s, replaced by concerns over other modes of trading in infant life, as late as 1871 the Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life suggested banning the inclusion of infants and young children in burial clubs and life insurance policies to prevent the temptation to profit.⁸

In the debates over the poor laws, it was women who were most apt to face the accusation of actively attempting to make infant life a source of income; as burial club murders gained national attention, it was somewhat more common to find fathers along with mothers charged with being murderous profiteers. (Throughout the decades in Britain, women were more likely than men to face accusations of infanticide and remained the likeliest perpetrators of child murder whose economic motivation was avoidance of expense, a less aggressively profit-driven mode of economic calculation.) But in the 1850s and 60s, the agents of infanticide for gain in the public imagination once again became almost exclusively women: tellingly, Tennyson's 1855 poem Maud represents the burial club murderer, who formerly might have been imagined as a father, as a “Mammonite mother” who “kills her babe for a burial fee” (216, line 45). And this time, the connection between capitalism and infanticide was even more starkly and disturbingly drawn. Commentators speak of the operation of “an organized system of foeticide” (here used to refer to neonates) among “a certain number of female practitioners,” with advertisements and set fees for services–the pregnant woman would be asked “whether she wishes for a living child or not,” and informed that the “fee for the delivery of a living child is so much; for one still-born so much more” (Greaves, “Observations” 10, 11). The language of business and trade that runs through discussions of infanticide comes to cast women as ever more active entrepreneurs and speculators in infant life and infant death.

Why did this new pattern arise at this moment? The answer to this question, I would suggest, lies in the challenges presented at mid century to the ideal of the middle-class, private, domestic woman, charged with the task of preserving the moral values of English civilization in the face of the new economic regime. The “humble monitress” of Sarah Stickney Ellis's classic formulation, guided by “moral feelings…less liable to be impaired by the pecuniary objects which too often constitute[d] the chief end of man,” and exercising her influence from home on the husband who passed his days in “the mart, the exchange, or the public assembly,” was to form the line of moral defense that would keep Britain safe from– and for–capitalism, enabling the nation to enjoy its benefits by guarding against its excesses (18, 17). By the 1850s, however, this paradigm seemed to be coming under greater and greater pressure, as economic necessity pushed middle-class women, particularly those who were unmarried or widowed, to enter the workforce, while political challenges such as the 1857 Married Women's Property Bill forced the issue of women's relationship to property to the center of national debate. The fear that middle-class women would slide towards the status of working-class women by engaging in economic activity, as well as the threatened breakdown of the separation between women–constructed as naturally self-sacrificing, undesiring, and nonalienated–and property and commerce seemed to portend disaster for the middle-class family, and through it, for the nation. “The results of female labour,” the Saturday Review opined in 1857, would be “stunted children, a dirty home, social duties neglected, daughters uncared for, the marriage vow slighted, home comforts unknown”; the picture of the speculating, murderous working women that the periodical had presented some months earlier, and that it, along with other journals, would echo in the years to come, resonated with such arguments about female labor and helped to make the case even more dramatically (“Queen Bees” 173). As the pressures on the ideology of separate spheres mounted, infanticide became a term that symbolically articulated anxieties about the private nature of women and the domestic sphere, about their relation to the market economy, and about the dangers to the nation if the separation between private and public were not maintained.

Even when cases of infanticide were not directly linked to a covert system of feminine business, the crime was frequently narrated through a lens that cast the murdering mother as “economic woman.” One instance of this pattern is the reporting of a case that occurred in London in 1857, in which a Mr. and Mrs. Bacon were charged with slitting the throats of their two infant children. The day after the murder, the husband, a smith (who, it was later determined, did not kill the children), was “totally unable to do his work” and was marked by an “absence and confusion of manner.” In contrast, Mrs. Bacon is described as able to perform her domestic labor and to conduct monetary transactions with no sign of distress:

The rent book and the coin, even more than her domestic diligence, proved objects of fascination at the trial, at which she was asked, “Why had she coolly gone out with her rent-book and a half-sovereign in her hand to pay her rent?” (“Criminal Courts” 15 May 1857). The violence of the crime and the coolness of economic activity interact to heighten the story's horror, each one reflecting on the other to produce its unnaturalness.

The contamination of femininity and domesticity by economic interest had already been associated with infanticide in the popular imagination of the first half of the nineteenth century through the assumption that it was most widely practiced by female domestic servants, farm workers, and factory girls–laboring women who had a relationship to property that proved difficult to assimilate to the middle-class ideology of privacy. However, during the 1850s and 60s the association of infanticide with female economic interest and activity branches out in different directions. While interest persisted in individual cases in which murder seemed obvious–as with the slit throats of the Bacons' children, for instance–the discourse of infanticide shifted and expanded during this period to include not only violent acts but also less apparent forms of killing, such as neglect and poor feeding, and with this expansion came new economic associations. As the “failure to mother” was increasingly criminalized, the name of the most unnatural crime a woman could commit became more and more applicable to a variety of female activities.⁹

During the 1860s, two institutions that seemed in many ways to threaten proper motherhood came under particularly strong attack as forms of infanticide: baby-farming and wet-nursing. By the end of the 1860s, in fact, the focus of reformist discourse had shifted almost entirely to these institutions; the major piece of legislation to emerge from the infanticide scare of the period was the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, which proposed to regulate baby-farming to prevent its worst abuses.

The institution of baby-farming raised the specter of economic motherhood in a number of different ways. Baby-farming was a system by which mothers– frequently but by no means always unmarried–would turn their babies over to another woman, to whom they would pay a lump sum or a weekly fee to care for the child. The mothers would thus avoid the shame (if unmarried) and/or the economic consequences of having a baby, which might include the loss of a domestic service position, difficulty going to work outside the home, or simply the financial burden of raising another child. The level of outrage that such calculation prompted was matched or topped by the opprobrium directed at the other party to the transaction, the baby-farmer, who seemed to have every incentive to skimp on the care and feeding of the child and to let it die off as quickly as possible in order to maximize profit, particularly if a lump sum was paid. In fact, many felt that the baby-farmer's stated business of providing care was simply a smokescreen, and that the real purpose was to “make a business of murdering illegitimate offsprings” by quite direct methods. As the broadsheet marking her execution announced, Charlotte Winsor, the infamous Torquay baby-farmer, was reputed to suggest to mothers, “Get four pounds together dear, and your child shall die today” (Jackson frontispiece). Accounts of baby-farming emphasize the advertising skills of the “professional child murderer” (“Infanticide” 5 Aug. 1865, 162); more euphemistic, in general, than this story of Mrs. Winsor suggests, they were said to take out notices in newspapers, particularly those popular with working girls and women, “fish[ing] wholesale for customers” who would understand the implications of an offer, for instance, to “adopt” an infant “for the small sum of Twelve pounds”–as long as the baby was less than two months old (Greenwood 14, 15).

The horror of this “nefarious trade” in infant life, as it was called during the proceedings of the 1871 Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life, was that it seemed to suggest vividly the collapse of any notion of personal value distinct from market value (7: 372: 3). The Saturday Review, continuing and expanding its crusade against infanticide, called baby-farming one of the “first signs and tokens that we have passed that happiest stage of national life in which every new citizen is, politically as well as religiously, considered God's best gift”; the evocation of a religious, transcendental understanding of the value of human life as a “gift,” outside of the processes of exchange for profit, responds to the sense that this trade is but the furthest extension of the logic of capitalism: “For, however sound may be the teachings of political economy on the social immorality of bringing children into the world whom their parents cannot support, we cannot yet afford to allow facilities to parents to introduce the sort of preventive check which seems to be systematized down in Devonshire,” the site of Mrs. Winsor's baby-farm (“Infanticide” 5 Aug. 1865, 161). However, in the two passages just quoted, a tension symptomatic of the period's ambivalence towards capitalism may be read. The first points to the degradation of human value that the system may always imply, while the second displays the desire to hold on to key tenets of political economy. The tension is managed by displacing the anxiety created by the logic of the market onto the exercise of that logic in the feminine and the domestic sphere. Thus, the debates about baby-farming construct monstrous icons of commercial femininity, the worst of which are the “she-butchers” who advertise for babies, “sub-let” them for a profit, and dispose of them “for a limited sum” (“Report from the Select Committee” 7: 372: 69, 26, 4). However, not only the woman who takes the infant but also the woman who gives it away–allowing economic reasoning to take priority over affection for her child–comes under attack as similarly deviant, as evidenced in the statement of one witness who argued before the Select Committee that the problem should be confronted by overseeing childcare institutions rather than attempting to influence mothers: “I cannot make the mothers natural if they are unnatural, but I can take care of the infant after it is born” (7: 372: 111). (However, the suggestion of another witness that committees of–volunteer–women could be enlisted to act as the state's inspectors proposed to counter the unnatural drive for female paid employment that took much of the blame for baby-farming by supplying a more suitable role for “the number of ladies desirous to find some useful occupation” [7: 372: 13].) And the obsessive concern during the hearings of the committee to find out what class of woman filled these two roles suggests that another horrifying aspect of the institution of baby-farming was the possibility that more and more middle-class women were engaging in both aspects of the trade, displaying the same competitive desire for profits as men, and having no regard for the values they were supposed to preserve.¹⁰

But even as baby-farming was represented as degraded and murderous in order to reinforce the separation of proper domesticity from the market, the existence of this commercial form of motherhood threatened to explode that distinction. The institution of baby-farming took mothers' work, stripped it of the mystifying glow of maternal feeling, and placed it on the market, thus allowing it to become visible as labor, rather than natural and spontaneous womanly self-sacrifice. Hence, to justify his reason for suggesting that baby-farms be subject to regulation, a proposal that caused something of a dilemma since it seemed to mandate state interference in caregiving activities that were deemed part of the private sphere, one witness before the Select Committee focused on the baby-farms' difference from “real” families: “without any reasons of natural affection but for motives of gain, they have undertaken a business of which the ostensible object is to take care of an infant citizen” (7: 372: 13). That women were able to make a business out of such care, of course, suggested that there might be nothing intrinsically unalienable or natural about this work, whether it was performed in a commercial setting, such as a baby-farm, or in the privacy of the middle-class home.

The institution of wet-nursing raised anxieties for similar reasons, since it represented the alienability of the biological reproductive power that had been increasingly viewed as the essence of femininity, and as the source of the natural affections which made the home a refuge from capitalist alienation.¹¹

Wet-nursing was also closely linked to infanticide in both medical discourse and social commentary, in part because the children of wet-nurses seemed to die at alarming rates, whether because they were sent off to baby-farms or because the infant whose feeding was paid for received the greater share of food at the expense of the nurse's own child. In anti-wet-nursing arguments, however, it frequently becomes difficult to tell who is being charged with the greater crime: the nurse who abandons or deprives her natural child, or the employer of the wet-nurse, represented in a pamphlet by the Ladies' Sanitary Association, an anti-wet nursing organization, as a “fashionable mother, who lives a butterfly life at the ball, concert and theatre and leaves her little ones to die through neglect” while disapprovingly watching the trial of “some poor downtrodden dupe of a seducer” who kills her baby out of shame (qtd. in Rose 53).¹² The pamphlet's ironic scenario not only insists on the equivalence of the actions of the woman of fashion and the more conventional infanticidal mother, but rhetorically replaces the sexual narrative of seduction and shame with a story of frivolous and selfish consumer wants that can call forth no sympathy. Both the wet-nurse and her customer deviate from the standard of noneconomic motherhood, one by selling her reproductive power, and the other by abandoning the nurturing role that was expected naturally to be hers in favor of a life of convenience and consumption. Women who saw maternal nurturance as something that could be bought and sold, taken up and put aside, could be viewed as child-murderers whether their neglect was physical, or consisted simply of a failure to exhibit the proper maternal emotional interest in the child.

The statement of another commentator, who wrote of wet-nursing that it “leads to the commission of the crime [of infanticide] by producing its victims,” points to the concern that women were manipulating their reproductive power as a kind of property in itself, and as a means to produce a property–a baby or the capacity to feed one–which could be traded for social and economic benefits, or disposed of if the speculation failed. A wet-nurse, for instance, was represented as selling her biological labor power in order to join a higher-class household, where she “eats and drinks of the best; she is clothed in the cast-off finery of her mistress, and is her companion”; on leaving the position, it was feared, the wet-nurse would produce–and abandon–another child in order to return to “luxurious ease.” The person who acquiesces to this definition of property “by purchasing from a woman that which is not hers to sell” is, “jointly with her, guilty” should the sale lead to the death of her child (Greaves, “Observations” 18, 19, 22).

A particular concern about the possibility of speculating on reproductive power was raised by a loophole in the law of infanticide. While the fetus was in the womb, as one commentator pointed out, it had a sort of legal identity, since it was inscribed within the laws of property: “It is capable of having a legacy, or a surrender of a copy-hold estate” (Greaves, “On the Laws” 30). Once born, the child also had legal status as an individual, with a relation to property law that could be easily determined according to its sex and class. However, the infanticide law of the period introduced a disjunction between two different definitions of personhood: a medical definition, which held that a child was a separate, individual entity once circulation and breathing were independent of the mother, which could happen early in the birth process, and the legal stipulation that in order to prove that a person existed–and therefore that murder could be committed–one had to prove that the body of the infant was entirely separate from the body of the mother. This evidential difficulty justified many acquittals.

This disjunction in the law seemed to move the childbirth process outside the normal structures of property. Neither a self-possessed individual person, nor a fully unborn “person” with defined rights to property, the emerging infant starts to look like a piece of alienable property, belonging to the mother's body and produced by her childbed labor. This legal loophole, therefore, seemed to provide mothers with the escape they needed to be able to speculate with impunity on the products of their reproductive labor: “A hand, a foot, an arm, still within the passages of the woman screens the murderess from the penalties of murder. Murder has been committed in this state, and the murderess has been allowed to go at large, with an improved stock of experience for future need” (Ryan 6–7). A figure of degraded economic womanhood, the infanticidal mother markets and speculates on her body's sexual and reproductive potency, thus becoming at once a self-alienated object of property, a producer of alienable property, and an economic actor who manipulate those properties in order to improve her own “stock.” The possibility of bringing the specifically maternal body into such relationships of alienation and exchange seemed to pollute the very essence of feminine privacy with the economics that needed to be excluded for its naturalness to be maintained.

EMERGING AS IT DOES in the highly charged atmosphere of the late 1850s, when concern about infanticide was becoming rampant, the Saturday Review's criticism of George Eliot's 1859 novel Adam Bede, that “the degree of horror and painfulness [produced by the novel's representation of child murder] is…out of keeping with the calm simplicity of rural life,” seems unusual, at odds even with the journal's own rather sordid vision of the behavior of country girls (“Adam Bede” 250). More recent literary critics have had an opposite response to the novel's seduction and infanticide plot, finding it wholly appropriate to the novel's historically astute version of the pastoral mode. In her study of Eliot's treatment of changing models of community, for instance, Suzanne Graver reads the seduction of the country girl Hetty Sorrel by Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire of the neighborhood, and her subsequent infanticide as crimes typical of the rural, more organic “Gemeinschaft” world, which function within the novel to highlight the unjust power relationships that deformed the lives of individuals within that older version of community (Graver 98). Christine Krueger's extremely useful essay on nineteenth-century representations of infanticide begins with a similar assumption, positioning the novel's treatment of Hetty's crime within a literary and ballad tradition that represented child murder as an almost natural element of the pastoral world, but her contention that the text upholds a pastoral, private, and feminine way of interpreting infanticide against the modern, rationalist, and masculine institutions of law and medicine that sought to establish their own definitions of the crime casts the infanticide plot as the vehicle for a different message about traditional and modern social forms than the one Graver has suggested (Krueger 279–80). Both approaches, however, fail to take into account the contemporary resonance of infanticide as a crime typical not–or not only–of the rural past, but of the market-saturated “Gesellschaft” society that increasingly characterized Britain at the time Eliot was writing her novel. Rather than reading infanticide in Adam Bede as a traditional remnant that either critically nuances the older type of community or suggests a resistance to the disciplinary and alienating regimes of the newer type, I suggest that it should be understood as a specifically modern eruption at the center of a story that is at once gently nostalgic for a time past and deeply concerned with the ramifications of market relations for personal autonomy and social and moral community. This shift in perspective illuminates an ambivalence in the novel's treatment of women's role in negotiating–for themselves and for society–the dangers and opportunities presented by capitalist social relations. As Eliot's novel posits feminine privacy as a means to preserve values that transcend the market, infanticide helps to define the parameters of women's private natures. At the same time, however, infanticide raises cause for concern about the very privacy upon which so much ideological weight was placed: in Adam Bede, as in contemporary debates, infanticide–a crime in which the processes that most defined Victorian womanhood were concealed, and around which secret female activities were imagined–designated the frightening logical limit of feminine privacy. In the end, in Eliot's novel infanticide marks privacy as a fraught terrain on which to establish a form of virtuous feminine subjectivity that can both provide a model of social feeling for the changing society and be inhabitable by women.

As many critics have noted, the encroachments of capitalism are by no means absent from Eliot's depiction of the community of Hayslope at the turn of the nineteenth century; in fact, the novel represents a moment of transition between the older order, centered around the estate of Squire Donnithorne and his heir Arthur, and a capitalist economy that can be seen emerging within the community itself in Jonathan Burge's construction business and in the mills beyond Hayslope.¹³

These mills, where Dinah Morris works in order to pursue her calling as a Methodist preacher, stand as an extreme case of feminine, public labor in the industrializing nation, whose counterpart is found in the domestic economy of the Hall Farm. At moments this domestic space seems to elude the alienation that capitalist labor and market relations entail: when Dinah's aunt, Mrs. Poyser, takes up her knitting–“the work she liked best”–and knits while she walks, for example, there is no suggestion that she is losing her self to her work; rather, the action seems to signify the integrity of her self and her labor (121; ch. 6). However, this is not to suggest that the economic significance of the domestic labor on the farm goes unrecognized in the novel. On the contrary, it is foregrounded; for instance, when Squire Donnithorne proposes a contract to supply his estate with dairy products, which would necessitate that the farm increase its dairy production at the expense of its farmland and which would bind the farm and its feminine industry more closely to the Abbey, Mrs. Poyser stakes a claim to participate in the decision-making process on the grounds that by taking the products of her dairy to market she “make[s] one quarter o' the rent,” while her thrift “save[s] th' other quarter” (394; ch. 32). But this recognition is not without anxious consequences for the farmer's wife, as she comes to fear the forced equation of herself–body and soul–with her productions, thematized in her refusal to “worret [her]self as if [she] was a churn wi' butter a-coming in 't,” and to “lie awake o' nights wi' twenty gallons o' milk on [her] mind” (392; ch. 32). Mrs. Poyser's refusal to “sign her soul away” to the squire, a refusal to have the integrity of herself and her labor reduced to the identity of herself and her products, may be seen as a moment in which the text reaches for the possibility of feminine economic participation without alienation.

At other moments in Adam Bede, however, the effort to imagine feminine economic participation is accompanied by the image of infanticide, which had by then achieved almost an iconic referentiality signaling the dangers of the pollution of femininity by the marketplace. Most of the novel's censure falls on the figure of Hetty, Mr. Poyser's niece, an infanticidal mother worthy of the pages of the Saturday Review. The dissatisfaction Hetty feels with the domestic work she must do on the farm and her desire for consumer luxuries lead her to consider inserting herself into a more public labor market by going into service. This motive of economic desire sets her apart from her cousin, Dinah, whose paid work in the mills is represented as compelled by the need to support her true work: her preaching. Dinah's work is at first granted the status of a vocation: it exists outside of the realm of financial exchange, and cannot be considered in terms of buying and selling. In fact, Dinah denies her claim to property in this labor, explaining that her church permits women to preach as long as “their ministry is owned by the conversion of sinners” (134; ch. 8) or by God, who, she says, has “greatly owned [her] work” (79; ch. 3). But despite the fact that her work is thus placed within a realm of transcendent value, the novel finally seems to close down the space for virtuous feminine public labor which Dinah's preaching would suggest. According to the logic of the marriage plot, Dinah's ultimate reward–and her approved vocation –is to leave this public labor and to exercise her moral influence within the domestic sphere of her home with Adam. Significantly, it is in the moment when she hesitates to choose this path that Dinah becomes most closely associated with Hetty. Her explanation for why she does not feel she can give up her work to marry Adam, “‘We are sometimes required to lay our natural, lawful affections on the altar,’” recalling the biblical example of the sacrifice of Isaac, formulates her decision in terms that recall infanticide (554; ch. 52). Although the novel remains somewhat ambivalent in its treatment of domesticity and the market, in ways that I shall discuss below, that it calls in the emotional power of the cultural term of infanticide at such a moment suggests the strength of its effort to shore up the virtues of feminine privacy.

It is, of course, true that the conditions of Dinah's and Hetty's existence place even their domestic potential within a market. Less pastoral in its vision of marriage and family than critics have sometimes acknowledged, the novel recognizes this fact, producing a tension that remains basic to the text's representation of the relation of women to economics.¹⁴

In the marriage market of Hayslope, women seem to be a surplus commodity, as the number of unmarried women–the two Miss Irvines, Arthur's Aunt Lydia, Mary Burge–testifies. Both Hetty and Dinah are at a further disadvantage, since they are poor, orphaned relations; as the narrator says of Hetty, Mrs. Poyser and her husband “would have welcomed the match with Adam for a penniless niece. For what could Hetty have been but a servant elsewhere, if her uncle had not taken her in and brought her up as a domestic help to her aunt?” (143; ch. 9). In a passage remarkable for its explicit mercantile metaphors, the narrator represents Mrs. Poyser's understanding of the rules of “fair play” that govern the marriage market: “every woman was young in her turn, and had her chances of matrimony, which it was a point of honour for other women not to spoil–just as one market-woman who has sold her own eggs must not try to balk another of a customer” (271; ch. 20). While the passage recognizes that women are, in some ways, constructed as marketable property, the emphasis on “fair play” seems to deny women a fully active role: to play the market aggressively or competitively with a view to gaining an economic reward is unacceptable. Thus the novel makes it possible for Dinah to attain the domestic ideal and to have her sexual desires fulfilled precisely because she does not express these desires, nor does she compete for them– indeed, their fulfillment is almost a reward for her passivity. The presence of “quiet Mary Burge, the bridesmaid”–twice a loser in the marriage game, her body a perennial pawn in her father's economic plans–at the wedding of Dinah and Adam stands as a reminder of the trap that women are placed in, unable without fear of censure to manipulate the market in which they are inscribed (578; ch. 55).

Hetty's crime, both literally and metaphorically, is that she actively embraces the market which conditions her existence, in all of its competitive, speculative, profit-bearing potential, and in doing so, holds none of the feminine, properly private aspects of herself, such as her maternity, apart from it. In her willingness to put herself in circulation, her blindness to all kinds of value but its market-driven determinations, and her rapacious consumer desire, Hetty collapses the distinction between public and private and comes to embody at once worker and trader, advertiser and product, consumer and consumed. Throughout the novel, Hetty is figured as an object of desire for male consumption: she is a “tropic bird” (175; ch. 12), a “prize” (197; ch. 15), a “bright-cheeked apple” that “everybody must long for” (254; ch. 19). One mark of Hetty's degradation is that she thoroughly accepts this status. For instance, even as the reader is allowed to glimpse her in the most private of places, her bed-chamber, Hetty is made to seem complicit with the consuming, voyeuristic gaze. Half-undressed, and half-dressed up, wearing tawdry glass earrings and a torn scarf on top of her stays, Hetty has put herself on display as if for an “invisible spectator,” thus collapsing the public and the private (195; ch. 15). Her thoughts at this moment are competitive and economic. She imagines herself the victor in a contest with other women–judged more beautiful than Miss Lydia or Lady Dacey, and inspiring the envy of her rival, Mary Burge, with her coaches and silk dresses (196–97; ch. 15). Furthermore, she implicitly represents herself as just another object that Arthur's money will enable him to purchase; since Arthur “could have his way in everything, and could buy everything he liked,” it is incomprehensible to Hetty that a social law other than the law of the market could stand in the way of their marriage (196; ch. 15). By acquiescing to the belief that the law of the market determines all social relations, Hetty subscribes to a model that represents human value as exchangeable and reducible to money, a model that increasingly found its most inflammatory instance in those persons “who think that [a newborn infant's life] can and ought to be disposed of with the same matter-of-fact reasoning which we apply to the daily interchanges of commercial or other every day occurrences” (“Child Murder” 80).¹⁵

It is therefore no great surprise, within the moral logic of the novel, when testimony at her trial constructs Hetty as having, in a sense, exchanged the infant that she should nurture for the means of material sustenance: when she is discovered by a local laborer, in place of her child Hetty cradles “‘a big piece of bread on her lap’” (481; ch. 43).

In her misapprehension of true value as merely the market value that is attributed to consumable and disposable commodities, Hetty resembles another grotesque economic woman, the consumer. While voracious consumer desire had long been a charge leveled at women, the mid-nineteenth century saw new dangers arise from new modes of consumption, such as the Crystal Palace exhibition of the early 1850s and the expansion of forms of advertising and display, that generated value through representation.¹⁶

Since these representations could be false and could be manipulated, the possibility of locating intrinsic value came to seem even more out of reach. It is this ability to see deeper value that Mrs. Ellis had hoped women would maintain, because they were removed from the sphere of property and exchange. Women must not be “like children, pleased with the glitter and the show” of the produce of capitalism, but rather must be able to see beyond the surface, “to invest material things with the attributes of mind” in order to “assist in redeeming the character of English men from the mere animal, or rather, the mere mechanical state, into which, from the nature and urgency of their occupations, they are in danger of falling” (Ellis 102–03). However in discussions of infanticide during the 1850s and 60s, women are represented as neglecting to discern and respect this kind of transcendent value of persons and things in favor of the display value of consumer goods. The consuming woman becomes the extreme case of economic femininity perhaps because she represented the pollution of middle-class womanhood in particular, and perhaps also because she encoded the fear of class mobility–or the noncongruence of status and appearance. In addition, if real economic pressures could raise a certain amount of sympathy for working-class women who committed the crime, the consumer type could be cast as an unmitigated, unredeemable creature of desire. Thus Ryan, for example, turns in his text from the plight of female workers, for whom the very real and very dire economic consequences of unintended pregnancy might elicit at least some sympathy, to a tirade about “young ‘ladies,’ as they are called” who “sew not, neither do they spin; who spend the last shilling in their father's coffers in flimsy and tawdry dresses, and spend their time at worthless acquirements, or in swallowing the distorted sentiment of trashy novels…ever on the look out, even to the forlorn hope, that ‘something will turn up’” (41). This type of luxury-obsessed, consuming woman becomes a standard icon to fall back on in order to diffuse the possible critique of women's economic dependence and rigid sexual codes that the problem of infanticide suggested.

Hetty is doubly inscribed into the model of the critique of the consumer woman, first because she misapprehends value, but also because she figures the instability that was created as value came to be generated in representation. The labor that receives most of Hetty's attention might be read as advertising or display work, the product of which is her body. When Arthur first sees Hetty in the dairy, for example, she is described as seeming “self-possessed” as she turns her domestic labor into a performance that increases the value of the commodity–her body–that she can offer for sale (127; ch. 7). The “tossing movements that give a charming curve to the arm…[the] little patting and rolling movements with the palm of the hand, and nice adaptations and finishings which cannot at all be effected without a great play of the pouting mouth and dark eyes” all enhance her value (129; ch. 7). When Hetty stoops to feed the chicks her face seems to display “maternal delight,” but in fact her apparent pleasure only mocks maternal sentiment; Mrs. Poyser had “bribed her to attend to the young poultry by promising her the proceeds of one out of every brood,” and Hetty's thoughts at the moment are not on the attractions of the chicks themselves, but rather on “the prettiness of the new things she would buy for herself at Treddleston fair with the money they fetched” (200; ch. 15). And she demonstrates no family loyalty or gratitude towards her uncle, reserving her enthusiasm for performing her domestic duty for him for those moments when “a visitor happened to be there, who would have a better opportunity of seeing her as she walked across the hearth” (199; ch. 15). Maternity and domesticity are thus placed at two removes from the possibility of giving access to any stable, transcendent value in (or through) Hetty, since she not only approaches them according to the rules of the market, but also makes them mere performances that become part of her self-advertisement.

The novel responds to these transgressions of feminine propriety by transforming the surface in which Hetty had found a property to be manipulated and marketed–and thus an entry into active economic participation–into the site for her punishment. If Hetty's beauty and her adeptness at masquerade grant her the pseudo-value of a “‘pictur in a shop-winder,’” as the landlord at the end of her journey describes her (423; ch. 36), pregnancy marks her as damaged goods; Hetty's body threatens to betray her and cause her value on the market to plummet. Display and performance, the forms of visual publicity that had once been productive and pleasurable for her, become instead harsh necessities. As “all the force of her nature” concentrates on the “effort of concealment,” Hetty's only desire is to be able to relax her fight to control her own representation, to “walk slowly and not care how her face looks” (411, 410; ch. 35). The consuming gazes of the men on the street and in the public-houses, who “stared at her and joked her rudely,” become punishments, rather than representing the form of vision which constructs her worth (421; ch. 36). The novel's reworking of the consumer model is given a final twist in the scenes of Hetty's trial and hanging, where she becomes a spectacle to be consumed, as Bartle Massey reports, by a crowd of “‘a lot o' foolish women in fine clothes, with gewgaws all up their arms and feathers on their heads,’” who “‘put up their glasses, and stared and whispered’” (women wealthier, perhaps, than Hetty, but otherwise displaying similar values, and women not unlike those hypocritical consumers of wet-nursing services and theatrical entertainments imagined by the Ladies' Sanitary Association) (473; ch. 42). In contrast to the coldness of their consuming vision, the sympathetic response that Hetty receives from Adam is figured as a “mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, [and which] feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man” (477; ch. 43). Placed alongside an earlier scene in which Adam resembles the women at the trial as he angrily contemplates his father's sins and his own wrongs with a mind “as passive as a spectator at a diorama” (91; ch. 4), this moment emphatically contrasts a consumerist social vision–detached and embedded in market values and calculation–and a maternal vision– committed and able to discern and bring out the inner, best, value in a person or thing –as the novel's two poles of moral development. At the moment of her greatest disgrace, the novel reemphasizes the maternal ideal gruesomely violated by Hetty as the antidote to the social degradations threatened by the kind of consumer vision and economic calculation that had ruled her conduct and become her prison. But the striking characterization of Adam as mother suggests the tension in Eliot's analysis. On the one hand, by attributing maternal love to a male observer at the scene Eliot's novel positions the feminine principle as a model for social sympathy that all should embrace, underscoring its value for society; on the other hand, however, in making a man the representative of motherhood in a scene where women conspicuously fail to live up to the ideal, the novel presents a bleaker picture of women's role in practice.

To properly punish Hetty for her manipulations of representation, and to recuperate the sense of stability in representation that is shaken by both her deliberate displays and her concealments, the retributive logic of the novel demands that she be thoroughly exposed. Hence, not only is Hetty submitted to the public shame of the trial, she is also laid open to the reader, who is granted access to her confession and even to her thoughts through the medium of the novel's narrator. Among reviewers, however, the reaction to this strategy was mixed. The Quarterly Review, for example, expressed dismay that “everything about Hetty is most elaborately described: her thoughts throughout the whole course of the seduction, her misery on discovering that there is evidence of her frailty” and so on (“Adam Bede” 475–76). The distress of the Saturday Review was more particularly focused:

Remarkably, this passage advocates, for the sake of propriety, the author's complicity with a practice that the law of the country constructed as part of Hetty's crime: concealment. Far from an isolated sentiment, the outraged reviewer's claim that Eliot's representation of signs of pregnancy would be offensive to the decency of any right-thinking person finds an echo even in medical advice books of the time. For example, Dr. Thomas Bull's Hints to Mothers announces as its reason for existence the altogether appropriate reluctance of women to speak of matters relating to their pregnancies even with their doctors: “In the minds of married women, and especially young females, those feelings of delicacy naturally and commendably exist which prevent a full disclosure of their circumstances, when they find it necessary to consult their medical advisers. To meet this difficulty…is the chief aim of the following pages” (qtd. in Malone 374).¹⁷ As this passage illustrates, concealment may be read as simply an extension of the logic of the ideological construction of women as “naturally and commendably” delicate and reserved–in other words, private. I want to conclude by suggesting the way in which anxieties which erupted around infanticide and concealment were intrinsic to the split between private and public that the mid-nineteenth-century model of gender depended upon.

The difficulty of producing evidence in cases of suspected infanticide had caused concealment of the birth of illegitimate children to be designated a capital crime in English law since 1624; other statutes in 1803, 1828, and 1861 preserved the criminality of concealment, but made it a separate, less serious charge.¹⁸

The mid-Victorian discussions of infanticide that I have been examining demonstrate as much anxiety over the fact that women might act secretly, or possess secret spaces, as they do over the acts that were assumed to be taking place concealed in secrecy: As this passage graphically illustrates, the threat posed by the issue of concealment was that women–of all classes–might be inscrutable and unknowable.

For, according to the domestic ideal, a woman was to be private, but always totally readable–that is, always in a sense completely public; her surface should coincide with her interior, and her depths should be entirely legible on her surface. However, even in Mrs. Ellis's handbook this formulation seems extremely hard to maintain. Again and again in her text, virtues associated with privacy seem to look less like windows to a soul that corresponds exactly to external signs, and more like masks that might be covering internal difference, and she finds herself needing to argue and reargue the lack of self-division in the good woman. The very need to reassure the reader that “those who know them best are compelled to acknowledge that all the noblest passions, the deepest feelings and the highest aspirations of humanity, may be found within the brooding quiet of an English woman's heart” leaves room for doubt that the quiet heart contains less noble passions and aspirations (Ellis 11). Arguing that the “apparent coldness and reserve” that characterizes good Englishwomen “ought only to be regarded as a means adopted for the preservation of their purity of mind” (Ellis 12) both acknowledges that women could “adopt,” rather than simply be, a certain way, and suggests that the good woman– cold, reserved, quiet–seemed to be marked by a kind of opacity that needed to be explained away. And in both instances, the language of force and obligation–“compelled to acknowledge,” “ought only to be regarded”–suggests that reading woman's virtuous inner nature from its external markers was something less than intuitive. In one especially suggestive passage, the privacy of the domestic sphere–its source of value as a place of respite–takes on the function of a fortress: “Not only must an appearance of outward order and comfort be kept up, but around every domestic scene there must be a strong wall of confidence, which no internal suspicion can undermine, no external enemy break through” (Ellis 10). The “strong wall of confidence” that the virtuous woman creates may be taken two very different ways: first, as a bond of trust that holds the family together; but second, as a means of guarding privacy and repelling prying outsiders. The virtuous woman, in other words, is adept at constructing appearances–of order, of quietness of heart, of coldness and reserve–and maintaining secrecy. And this adeptness renders her a troubling read. The very marks of virtue which were crucial to the ideal of privacy may act as a screen, constructing a secret feminine space in which something–be it desire, dissatisfaction, or crime–could be hidden.

Concealment, therefore, may be read as the flip side of the ethic of feminine privacy: as privacy made grotesque. Perhaps it is because of its implication in the besieged, but still hegemonic construction of gender that the fantasies surrounding concealment become so extreme, and so inclusive. Not only is a secret trade imagined involving covert systems of midwives, abortionists, baby-farmers, and wet-nurses, but a “talismanic sort of communication” is said to inform women of the direction in which they are to seek these services (Ryan 10).¹⁹

Not only are poor, unmarried women imagined to get rid of their illegitimate children, but middle-class married women are feared to be participating in this clandestine system as well. The desire in many of these texts, including Eliot's, to invade privacy–to display and make public the bloody nightdress in the bedroom, the bloody shift, the blood-filled chamber pot, or to elicit a confession from Hetty and to represent her internal confusion and psychological pain–may be seen, somewhat paradoxically, as a way to preserve the private/public gender divide, by wrenching away the possibility of excessive privacy and reconsolidating the demand that the private be always publicly available, and publicly acceptable.

Mid-Victorian writings on infanticide have proven a rich field for scholars over the past decade, not least because of the variety of social analyses and narrative strategies that different constituencies–the medical and legal professions, legislators, women activists, literary writers– brought to bear on the problem. In tracing a tendency in mid century infanticide writings to link the crime to economic calculation, especially on the part of women who were deemed to be betraying their private natures, and by examining the ways in which infanticide at the same time registered an anxiety about feminine privacy, I hope to add a note of caution to recent studies which have downplayed the extent to which Victorian infanticide discourse was focused on women, or emphasized the emergence around infanticide of a kind of literary feminist resistance, based in privacy, to masculine definitions of women's experience. The first position is stated most baldly by Laura Berry in The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel, in which she suggests that “mid-Victorian writing about infanticide–in contrast to both the juridical and the sentimental approaches of earlier periods–is only superficially interested in women. Nineteenth-century writing about infanticide is characterized instead by an effort to widen the scope of the crime, and to see it as a social evil shared communally, across class and gender lines” (132). While Berry's emphasis on infanticide as an occasion for the imagining of social responsibility and social solutions is extremely suggestive, her claim that infanticide discourse is “only superficially interested in women” depends on looking past the specific and voluminous rhetoric surrounding women in the texts she examines–rhetoric of the kind that I have analyzed in this essay–to the often rather empty figure of the dead infant, and seeing the blank slate of that emptiness as exercising more imaginative power than the substantial and vivid treatment of women. The argument that literary accounts of infanticide exemplified a feminist alternative to legal and medical interpretations of infanticide is likewise compelling, but I would suggest that we must be wary of assuming that the focus on private life and experience necessarily placed literary writing in opposition to the disciplinary institutions of mid-Victorian society.²⁰

Christine Krueger, for instance, in reading Hetty's confession to Dinah as part of a literary tradition that defends infanticide as a private matter among women and that resists the efforts of medical men, social reformers, and journalists to expose and punish child murder, fails to take into account what the novel shares with these others. Hetty's confession and the representation of her mental state, after all, are forms of exposure in and of themselves–ones that felt like enough of a violation of feminine privacy that several contemporary reviewers commented on it in dismay. In fact, the incursion into women's privacy that Eliot's novel exemplifies may be among the most significant facets of infanticide writing: as privacy shaded into concealment, it became a matter for exposure, and its status as a ground from which to claim exemption from interference became more tenuous. Thus, the redefinition of women's privacy enacted by infanticide writing may have helped to enable the efforts to regulate reproduction and childrearing that became more common responses to child murder as the century wore on. As it strives at once to render women private and to regulate the terms of this privacy, the degree to which mid century infanticide discourse was decidedly and vexedly engaged in constructing femininity and regulating women's lives should not be underestimated.

WHETHER OR NOT there was a “suspicious bundle” around every corner, and whether hundreds or thousands of “apparently virtuous” women could be said to be concealing a murderous secret, as the outcry of the mid nineteenth century might suggest, infanticide became a powerful cultural term because it focused anxieties surrounding contemporary challenges to the gendered definition of public and private, threatening to reveal the constructedness of that apparently natural dichotomy. Because it also tended to expose the contradictions and instabilities that were internal to this definition, the terms of the discourse of infanticide made it impossible to locate a space for a “proper” feminine subject position–though the specter of improper subjectivity was imagined to be omnipresent. Thus, to return finally to Adam Bede, for the proper woman the space of readable, publicly available privacy is, in a sense, uninhabitable; the kind of self-consistency that it demands seems to depend on an absence of content, on having, like Dinah, “‘no life of [one's] own, no wants, no wishes, for [ones]self’” (552; ch. 52). For Dinah to actively pursue the desires that do well up in her–whether they lead her to want to continue her public labor, or whether they lead her towards marriage–would place her on the continuum that ends in infanticide as a woman who would “‘lay [her] natural, lawful affections on the altar.’” The proper woman, therefore, ends up becoming like a vessel open at both ends: continually open to receive inspiration, and to feel the desires and sufferings of others, and continually flowing outward, pouring out sympathy and comfort, there can be no internal content to her that is not criminal–no desire and, finally, no subjectivity. A final image from the scene in which Eliot visits the two young women in their bed-chambers suggests the bind that the construction of proper, private femininity through the discourse of infanticide trapped women in: if Hetty, “flushed” and “glistening” with the light of her own desire, becomes an infanticide, Dinah, all pity, sympathy, and openness, is represented as “a lovely corpse” (204; ch. 15).