ABSTRACT
Mothers have occupied an ambivalent position as both sexual object/nurturer and mistress/servant within the family structure. But during the early modern period, the construction of the mother seems especially problematic and becomes enmeshed with other anxieties as well, anxieties about family relations, religion and economics. The figure of the murdering mother appears repeatedly in early modern dramas, broadsheets and news pamphlets and became popular at the same time that domestic literature was busily redefining the mother’s role. Since women’s power in early modern England is almost wholly within the household, the violence depicted is largely domestic, and at least in the case of married mothers, most often occurs at the point where motherly authority and wifely submission collides. The street literature of seventeenth-century England preys on cultural anxiety about motherhood by carrying the mother’s legitimate power to its most extreme manifestation and intermingling maternal power with other anxieties.
