By Nicola Goc
In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that
appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional
Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical
Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular
rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed
their babies. Her study takes Foucault’s perspective that the production of
knowledge, of “facts” and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are
inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to
investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century
infanticidal woman - known as ‘the Infanticide’ - into being. The actions of
the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not
only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a
woman’s actions destroyed a man’s lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates,
infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into
interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the
family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century
discourse. For example, the Times
used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in
the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide
narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young
transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a
juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. At the same time,
infanticide news stories created a way of knowing the women who killed their
babies that fed into medical, judicial, and welfare policies regarding the
crime of infanticide, created an acceptable way for society to view these
women, and pathologised the women's actions. Alive to the marked differences
between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced
discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide.
Publication Date: Feb 23, 2013
Publisher: AshgateBuy at Ashgate.
