No abstract

No abstract

Sentimental reconstructions of motherhood in legal cases, and editorial representations of those legal cases, contributed to a decrease in the number of women convicted of infanticide in late eighteenth-century France. Couched in the language of natural law, this European-wide phenomenon suggests the degree to which infanticide trials enabled the articulation of a temporary insanity as women benefited from the application of Enlightenment ideas to jurisprudence.The day will undoubtedly come ... when the cry of the nation's enlightened men will be raised up against the opinion which seems to place a girl between dishonor and death, and bring this important issue before the attention of the legislator.A woman has made a mistake: she counted on the faith of a man who should legitimize a premature engagement and protect her from the suspicion that she is concealing a pregnancy: how many such monsters, after have sacrificed victims to their passion, finish by betraying them? [1] In the mid-eighteenth century, Lawyer Robin defended his client against charges of infanticide by castigating both the man who wronged her in the first place and the society which forced a victimized woman to face dishonor or death, to bear the shame of an illegitimate child or the guilt of causing her infant to die. In this article, I offer a close reading of popularized accounts of infanticide in Les Causes célèbres, curieuses et intéressantes de toutes les cours souveraines du Royaume avec les jugements qui les ont décidées, edited by Nicolas Toussaint le Moyne des Essarts and published in Paris between 1773 and 1789. As representations, these trials shed light on the evolution of the crime of passion defense in the context of eighteenth-

I NTIMACIES, bodies, detritus. Naturally, the detritus comes after: the last word, the lasting impression, the legacy of empire-the wreckage, the leftovers, the scraps and scars that forever serve as reminders. There are other ways bodies are intimate, and so there are other remnants. The Chinese scalp preserved in South Africa (Rachel Bright); a French bawdy cartoon, torn and yellowed from a newspaper in Hanoi (Michael Vann); faded dossiers from the not-quite colonial archives of Lebanon (John Boonstra) and El Salvador (Aldo Garcia-Guevara); containers of foreclosed intimacies and barely suppressed violence. More often the colonial archive is stained with traces of terrible violence: women enduring sexual slavery in the Straits Settlements of the nineteenth century (Shawna Herzog) or in postwar Japan over one hundred years later (Robert Kramm), giving the lie to the narrative of global progress. But detritus may be benign, even beautiful: a nutritious recipe from Nigeria (Lacey Sparks); a silver buckle from Malaya (Matthew Schauer). After all, some colonial actors meant well, and of course colonial subjects weren't merely subjects. Model Japanese homemakers in Brazil weren't really colonizers (Sidney Lu) and Indians after the Raj weren't exactly white supremacists even though they censured interracial intimacies (Timothy Nicholson).In each morsel of detritus resides a clue, a piece of a life, or rather intersecting lives, lives which can never really be known by a * I wish to thank Judith P. Zinsser for inspiring me to undertake this ambitious project. I thank her, along with Kerry Ward, John Boonstra, Steven Gerontakis, and Aldo Garcia-Guevara for constructive criticism as this essay evolved. I am also incredibly grateful to the editors and staff at JWH who worked very hard to bring this double issue to fruition, and to the peer reviewers, without which this special issue would have been impossible: Trevor Getz and Heather Streets-Salter.

of French women, the suppression of the guilds had little impact.More detrimental to women was the new language of women's work that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Hafter is particularly able at outlining just how thinking about women and work shifted in the eighteenth century. Royal officials began to talk about the preservation of "women's modesty" and the "natural" inferiority of women's minds and bodies. The old language of privilege championed by the guild mistresses gave way to the vocabulary of sex and female subordination. "As the touchstone of privilege waned," remarks Hafter, "sex difference came to stand in its place" (p. 179).