Unsettled households: Domestic homicide in seventeenth-century England
Description
This dissertation explores the popular representations of domestic homicide in seventeenth-century England through an examination of cheap-print criminal literature. These murder narratives act as windows into how seventeenth-century English society constructed deviance, criminality and disorder This dissertation focuses on five different forms of domestic homicide. The first section, consisting of three chapters on petty treason, infanticide and maternal child-murder, explores the way that the criminal narratives conceived of and structured stories of female disorder and how it undermined the stability of the household. The representation of petty treason evolved over the course of the century, shifting from a focus primarily on a wife's sexual infidelity to concentrating on her violence and verbal insubordination. Similarly, the depictions of infanticide also downplayed the sexuality of offenders as the century progressed as authors focused more on the women's rejection of motherhood. The representations of married mothers who murdered their children, however, appeared rather static, killing as a result of precarious finances or marital discord The second section of the dissertation, consisting of chapters on wife-killing and paternal child-murder, examines the ways in which men could unsettle the household by violating the basic tenets of 'manhood', reason and self-control. The murderous husbands and fathers engaged in vices, particularly profligacy and illicit sexual relations, which undermined not only the stability of the household but also the very foundation of their authority. The narratives depicted husbands resorting to murder either in a fit of uncontrolled passion or as a result of adultery while the fathers were presented as killing to erase their patriarchal failures The primary intention of these murder narratives was not to address the killings but the behavior which led to them. The murders merely acted as the vehicle through which authors could convey their cautionary tales. Through a closer analysis of these pieces of ephemera, this dissertation argues that tales of domestic homicide tell us more about the nature of what unsettled households than merely murder