Reproducing the nation: infanticide and antinatalism in early twentieth-century American fiction and drama

Many works of fiction and drama from the early twentieth century United States feature characters who kill their own offspring in response to the systemic violence and discrimination their children will face as they grow up and become adults. Many works also feature characters who reluctantly opt not to have children, for the same reasons. Authors often write the trope of infanticide or antinatalism using gothic conventions, such as the “murderous mother,” haunting, and madness. Instances of infanticide and antinatalism in drama and fiction reveal the gothic violence underpinning the early twentieth century American family and nation.

The act symbolizes the characters’ anxiety about the possibility of a viable future for their families and their communities in the United States. In lynching dramas written by Angelina Weld Grimké, the trope is used to protest the lynching epidemic in the early twentieth century and its threat to the futurity of Black children. William Faulkner’s “poor white” families in Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, when read alongside early twentieth century eugenicist “family studies,” show infanticide as an engagement with the misogyny of eugenics. Short stories by Sui Sin Far depict infanticide or antinatalism committed by Chinese immigrant mothers as way to prevent assimilation and exploitation of Chinese American children amidst Chinese Exclusion. The trope is a tool to get audiences to understand that reproductive freedom is not equally distributed in the U.S., that there are fates worse than death, and that America depends upon certain groups being condemned to those fates.