Landscapes of Fear

3. The Child as Unformed Nature

a The Child as Unformed Nature Children have reason to fear adults, even those closest to them. Throughout history and in widely different parts of the world, infants and young children have often been treated as of small account and with extraordinary cruelty. Killing the newborn child was an accepted practice in many societies. Until the fourth century A.D., neither law nor public opinion found infanticide wrong in Greece or Rome. Ancient writers could openly approve of the act.A man had the right to do what he wanted with his children. The Greek philosopher Aristippus (435-356 B.C.) asked, "Do we not cast away from us our spittle, lice, and such like, as things unprofitable,which nevertheless are engendered and bred out of our own selves?" The Roman philosopher Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65) seemed to argue the reasonableness of infanticide with these words: "Mad dogs we knock on the head, the fierce and savage ox we slay;sickly sheep we put to the knife to keep them from infecting the flock; unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly or abnormal. Yet it is not anger, but reason, that separates the harmful from the sound."1 Why have people killed their own offspring? It seems to us a grotesque and unnatural act. But ideas on what constitutes a human personality change. Just as many people now question the full human status of the month-oldfetus and argue that they should be allowed the choice to dispose of it, so many societies in the past denied human standing tothe newborn child. Human dignity was granted only when the child reached a certain age. Perhaps the frequency of infant deaths in Europe until the late eighteenth century, as in the non-Western world even in our time, made it emotionally expedient for parents to withhold Landscapes of Fear 26 human status from an infant who might not survive. Awidely shared feeling in the past was that one had several children in order to keep just one or two.Marcus Aurelius thoughtthe wish "Let my dear children live" as unreasonable as the wish "Let all men praise whatever I may do."2 Montaignecalmly observed,"I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow." Many people probably felt, like Montaigne, that infants had "neither mental activities nor recognizable bodily shape."3 When there were too many children to be raised and not enough food and clothing to raise them with, some have had to be killed in order that others might live. Parents steeled themselves to loss; they grew callous. In the Orient, among the Chinese , the Japanese, and the Indians it was customary, as the Japanese peasants put it, to "thin the rows" of the population much as one thins the rows of growing vegetables. In Europe before the nineteenth century, infanticide was practiced on a substantial scale. One reason for its decline was the establishment of foundling hospitals, which allowed mothers toabandon rather than kill their unwanted offspring. Thomas Coram, an English sea captain, was sodepressed by the daily sight ofinfant corpses thrown on the dustheaps of London that he worked for seventeen years toestablish a hospital for foundlings. The hospital was chartered in 1739." In 1756 it received the support of the English Parliament, which also recommended that asylums be opened in all the counties, ridings, and divisions ofthekingdom. In France, Napoleon decreed in 1811 that there should be hospitals in every department. However,the demand for the service of such institutions far exceeded their resources.5 By the 1830s, the situation in France had become desperate; in 1833 the number of babies left with the foundlinghospitals reached the fantastic figure of 164,319.6 Killing and abandonment: parents have committedthese two horrors against their children. Althoughstatistical evidence is scanty, researchers have shown that both practices were far more commonin Europeand in other parts ofthe worldthan we are willing to believe.7 Extenuating circumstances explain much of the cruelty, of course, but were the circumstances always so extenuating? In Europe parents demonstratedremarkable readiness to part with their offspring when they were still at a young age. Poor folk might have had tofarm out their young children to the care of strangers in order to find work, but the well-to-do and the rich did the same. During the Italian Renaissance , virtually every child born to a well-to-do city family...