This Is Paradise

Infanticide and Romance

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s     
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— 

So Philip Larkin wrote in one of his best poems, “High Windows.” Although the poem moves into a more reflective mood as it proceeds, I love it for its bold opening. Birth control as the watershed that split human history in two, that divided one generation from the next: it feels about right. When you spend much time reading demographic history, you see that the struggle to control reproduction influenced every aspect of culture. You also realize that, for much of the past, people were extremely bad at it. Men and women had sex, children came, and human beings multiplied and filled the earth. 

It’s not that people didn’t have any methods of family planning at their disposal. On the contrary! To begin with, there was always abstinence. Withdrawal was known at least since the days of the biblical Onan—which is to say, about 2,500 years ago—though its use really seems to have taken off around the time of the French Revolution. The Romans, among others, developed surgical forms of abortion, though these had the side effect of frequently killing the mother alongside the fetus. Herbal contraceptives and abortifacients were widely used, while barrier methods were rarer but not unknown. All of these techniques were adopted by at least some people some of the time. The problem was that their results were, at best, mixed. They failed as often, or quite a bit more often, than they succeeded. But there was one method that worked infallibly, guaranteeing the elimination of unwanted children with little risk to the mother: infanticide.

There’s very little agreement about the precise extent of infanticide globally. But it’s pretty clear that it was practiced in many, perhaps most, regions at one point or another in their history. The Greeks and Romans, like people in ancient Egypt, India, and China, routinely killed or exposed infants who had serious disabilities or seemed unlikely to thrive. In many places, including the Roman empire, there was no legal sanction against killing, exposing, or otherwise getting rid of healthy but unwanted infants—for instance, girls. A certain Hilarion, writing in the year 1 BCE, instructed his pregnant wife, 

If you are delivered of a child [before I come home] if it is a boy, keep it. If it is a girl, discard it. You have sent me word, ‘don’t forget me.’ How can I forget you. I beg you not to worry.”¹

As a result of these customs, some estimates suggest that the sex ratio of men to women in Rome was as high as 130:100. 

Infanticide in Christian Europe

In theory, the history of infanticide in Europe and the Mediterranean ended with Christianity. The Abrahamic religions all had a strong taboo against the practice, and so when Constantine converted, it became a crime. No one supposed, of course, that it disappeared entirely. But for a long time, most people studying medieval or early modern Europe assumed it became marginal—a desperate act, typically practiced by unmarried women to conceal illegitimate births. 

Official declarations, laws, and court records from the period certainly give this impression. In England, for instance, what is often referred to by scholars as the 1624 Infanticide Act was actually entitled “An act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children.” (Perhaps its actual title is too indelicate.) This notoriously cruel law held women who concealed the death of an infant to be guilty of murder, reversing the usual burden of proof and almost certainly leading to the execution of some women whose only crime was the misfortune of a stillbirth. But the law applied only to single women: there was no suggestion that married couples might kill their legitimate offspring. Likewise, until the 18th century, the foundling hospitals established across Europe to prevent infanticide typically only accepted the children of unmarried women.

But did routine infanticide actually disappear from Europe? Or did it simply go underground? In the last few years, a number of books and articles have argued for the latter possibility. It’s an intriguing idea, though it’s fiendishly difficult to prove: the factors that make it plausible that large-scale infanticide went overlooked for centuries make the facts nearly impossible to establish today. The inner life of the family has always been shrouded in secrecy, and infants, then as now, were fragile appendages of their parents. Even if officials wished to investigate the death of a newborn, which they virtually never did, it wasn’t easy to tell if it had died of natural causes or if its end had been hastened. Only rarely were clear marks of violence present. The unmarried Genovese woman Lucia Cremonini, for instance, killed her newborn in 1709 by slitting its throat; it’s likely that we know about her act, and her subsequent trial and execution, only because of the method she used.² The choice sealed her fate: even with the best will in the world, there were some things the authorities couldn’t overlook.

Page from a baptismal register for Mansfield St. Peter’s in 1594

There is, however, one fairly reliable way to establish large-scale infanticide even in the absence of explicit testimony: sex ratios.³ If the ratio of men to women diverges too sharply from the natural ratio of 105:100 (nature produces more males) for an extended period of time, we can assume that sex-selective infanticide is the reason. Not only that, we can infer that infanticide was practiced by married couples, since male and female children were equally disastrous for single women.

This is the form of evidence that Gregory Hanlon draws on in Death Control in the West, 1500-1800, the most ambitious and convincing of the recent studies on the topic. Hanlon combs through baptismal records in Italy, France, and England to show that the ratio of male to female baptisms was often suspiciously high, particularly in times of scarcity. In Tuscany, for instance, ratios of male to female infants hovered around 135:100 in years with bad harvests. The logic behind these numbers isn’t hard to follow. In peasant societies, male children were more valuable as a source of labor. At the same time, the high dowries required for women could be a crippling financial burden. When male children were a net gain, and female children a net loss, the consequences were predictable. 

As Hanlon is quick to acknowledge, his evidence is of varying quality, and his results aren’t all equally clear. The case for sex-selective infanticide in certain regions in Italy and France is stronger than in any of the English samples, where it remains, at most, an open question rather than a settled fact. Still, it’s impossible to read Death Control in the West without being convinced that sex-selective infanticide was a reality in medieval and early modern Europe. And that, in turn, opens the possibility of a much wider use of infanticide as a form of family limitation. Once we begin to look, a great deal of qualitative evidence points in the same direction. We’ll never know the precise rates of infanticide in premodern Europe. But we can no longer suppose it to have been absent from the reproductive strategies of married couples. In many times and places, it must have been an unacknowledged element of the private life of the family. 

Romance

Rethinking the history of European infanticide has very real implications for anyone interested in literature, for infanticide is at the heart of literary history. This may seem like a surprising assertion, given that infanticide appears only rarely in the plays, novels, and poems of the past. There are a handful of exceptions, including Medea and her many doubles. The realist novel of the nineteenth century also turned its attention to the issue as part of a panoramic ambition to depict society in all its lights and shadows (especially shadows). But it’s not so much the reality as the possibility of infanticide that colors literary history. 

A great deal of fiction hinges on the improbable recovery of an abandoned or exposed infant. They’re everywhere in classical literature: Oedipus, Romulus and Remus, Daphnis and Chloe, among many others. But they’re also omnipresent in the genre of romance, made use of by ancient and modern writers alike, from Cervantes to Shakespeare to George Eliot to Cesar Aira.  

In these stories, abandonment is often a proxy for infanticide, if not simply a version of it. It’s a connection that’s often made explicit. In Terence’s comedy The Self-Tormentor, the plot hinges on the rediscovery of a daughter her father had commanded to be killed, apparently for no reason other than her sex. Disobeying his orders, her mother instead abandoned her. “If you had wished to see / My orders carried out,” Chremes complains years later, “you’d certainly / Have killed the child.”⁴ But, of course, her disobedience proves to be a lucky decision, the very thing needed to make the plot come out right. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Leontes makes the same decision. Falsely suspecting that his newborn daughter is illegitimate, he at first commands his courtier to “take it hence / And see it instantly consumed with fire.” It’s only when the indignant lord protests that he changes the order. The child should instead be carried “To some remote and desert place” and there abandoned “to its own protection / And favour of the climate.”

Paulina implores Leontes on behalf of his daughter, from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare

In reality, death was usually the consequence of exposure or abandonment, whether or not it was the intent. The odds of survival were likely slim for exposed infants in the classical world—and, since survival often meant enslavement, it may not always have been the happier fate. In the eighteenth century, when foundling hospitals began to accept the children of married couples, up to 80 percent of children placed in them died during the first year of life alone.⁵ (Rousseau’s defense of his decision to abandon his four children to a foundling hospital seems especially brazen in light of these figures.) Writers of the past understood clearly the proximity of infanticide and abandonment. But the sliver of a chance is all that’s needed for the plot to come to its smooth conclusion. Its redemptive magic works because of, not despite, its improbability.

As I’ve been reading more demographic history, I’ve come to think we often misunderstand the literature of the past because we fail to think our way into what a society with high mortality and devastating scarcity actually looks like. Infanticide is an example of this. Understanding its prevalence helps to make the nature of romance, myth, comedy, and legend clearer. It helps us to understand the real world that literary happy endings responded to—and deliberately departed from. In modern fantasy, absolute good is often poised against absolute evil, two equally extreme, and equally unreal, polarities. But romance isn’t like that. Its wickedness and its wonders aren’t symmetrical. The brutal world it begins with is simply the real world of the past. It’s only its redemptive promise that’s a fiction or a fantasy. This may seem like a depressing take on the history of literature. But I don’t think it is. It forces you to read about terrible acts with compassion. It makes the need for redemption more urgent and real. And it testifies to the extraordinary power of fiction in being able to provide it, if only for a time. Most of all, maybe, it reminds us that in one very concrete sense, “this is paradise / Everyone old has dreamed all of their lives.”

1. Hilarion to Alis, qtd. in Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 98. And also quoted in every other discussion of Roman reproduction.

2. Her trial is the subject of a very interesting microhistory, Adriano Prosperi, Infantice, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016).

3. Even here there is the issue of possible under registration of female children, as Walter Scheidel discusses in the case of Rome, “Graeco-Roman Sex Ratios in Comparative Perspective,” Stanford Working Papers, 2010.

4. Terence, The Self-Tormentor, trans. Christian Kelk, “Poetry in Translation.”

5. Alysa Levene, “The Estimation of Mortality at the London Foundling Hospital, 1741–99,” Population Studies 59.1 (2005): 87-97.