3。 An introduction to Infanticide Matrix

From time immemorial, infanticide has been in existence with its special social origin。 Many works worked on this motif。 Infanticide, as a kind of social phenomenon, is widespread in each period of the human history and each kind of culture in the world; it also runs through the western histories of literature and anthropology。 Novels from the Greek mythology to American dramatist Eugene O’Neill’s play Desire under the Elms wrote about infanticide stories, so does the African-American woman writer Toni Morrison’ s novel(Beloved) 。 While research on the motif of infanticide did not draw people’s attention extensively, and research on this field is not much。 The critics seem to avoid facing this literary phenomenon for its sensibility。 

In Beloved, Sethe’s infanticide is frightening, her despair, crazy and extreme love turns into a handsaw of killing, but it is this heinous act that exposes and accuses the cruelty and barbarity of the white southern manor owner。 As a black woman writer, Morrison has shown the unique vision and sharp insight in her writings of Beloved。 She inherited the traditional infanticide motif to reveal the endless harms that caused by criminal slavery and raised the world’s concern on black people’s suffering, love, mystery, gender, violence; meanwhile, she used postmodernism writing techniques in her creation, such as multiple narrative angles, sequential inversion, to reconstitute the real story, to expose the evil of slavery and clarify that infanticide is the revolt against the white people under the slavery, and express the female slaves’ unique and vigorous love from the female perspective。 

4。 The Inheritance of the Traditional Infanticide in Beloved

4。1 The traditional infanticide来*自~优|尔^论:文+网www.chuibin.com +QQ752018766*

The traditional infanticide is an avoidance of fear or guilty, even a release of hostility。 As the classic story of infanticide, ‘Medea’ describes a mother whose heart is full of hatred and revenge。 She killed her children to avenge her husband’s betrayal。 This kind of infanticide mentality is called ‘Medea Complex’。 In recent years, Josephine Mcdona, a British scholar who paid attention to infanticide of British mothers from the 18th to the 19th century, pided this kind of writings into two categories。 One is sympathetic narration, referring to some literary works in the 18th century while women and children are the victims of men’s sins; meanwhile, women and children are always in a position of being tempted, utilized, and enslaved。 For example, Yingying in The Joy Luck Club written by Chinese American Amy Tan, who played a role as a deserted wife, could do nothing but killed her own child after her husband’s abandon, and her infanticide came from her hatred。 The other is narration with salvation intentions, which is infanticide for love。 (Mori 106) All parents love their children, and maternal love is human nature。 In traditional infanticide, especially in the bottom of society, mothers who have suffered the extreme misery that ordinary person could hardly endure take the action to vent their discontent, or to revolt against society, or to revenge or just for love to prevent their children from bearing the same fate。 Their behaviors are often shocking。