Mad As Ophelia

Dorothy Talby is chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against her husband....

--Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Main Street

....see poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia....

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Medical Essays

We simply don't know what to do with the Medeas of the world, mothers who are as "mad as Ophelia," who suffer from psychosis and murder their own children. Execution? Life imprisonment? Commitment to a psychiatric hospital?

It's a question that Americans have wrestled with for nearly 400 years. Before Andrea Yates drowned her children, before Darlie Routier stabbed her children, before Susan Smith drowned her children, before Deanna Laney stoned her children, before Maggie Young drowned her five children in a bathtub in 1965, there was Dorothy Talby, the first woman in North America known to have murdered a child while in the throes of delusion. And the date of the event is very early indeed.

Dorothy Talby and her husband John came from England to settle in Plymouth in colonial Massachusetts. The painstaking records kept by the colonists offer a full picture of their life together. After obtaining an allotment of land, Dorothy and John had several children; the last was a daughter named Difficulty, who was baptized on Christmas, 1636.

The Talby marriage was a tortured one. After the birth of her last child, Mrs. Talby "became melancholy and possessed of delusions." Dorothy quite evidently suffered from a severe mental illness and often threatened her family. Dorothy's husband complained of her bizarre behavior to authorities in Salem, who sentenced her in 1637 to be chained to a post for "frequently laying hands on her husband, to the danger of his life."

The treatment was ineffective, and she was excommunicated. This was also ineffective. When she became increasingly violent, she was publicly whipped. Then in 1638 "her mind again became more clouded." The rest of the story comes from the original records:

She believed that God revealed to her the necessity of taking the life of her baby, in order to save the child from future misery.... she was led to take the child's life, by breaking its neck. She made no secret of the murder, and when apprehended confessed the deed.

In the [Salem] court, on this day, upon her arraignment, she, however, stood mute a good while, -- until the governor told her that if she did not plead she would be pressed to death. She then confessed... she was duly sentenced.... 

Mrs. Talby asked to be beheaded, but the sentence imposed by borrowed English law was hanging in Boston two days after her conviction in December, 1638. At the time of her hanging, she had to be forcibly detained. When her face was covered with a cloth, she ripped it off and stuffed it in the rope that had been placed around her neck. She was then "cast off, and, after a swing or two, she caught at the ladder."

Dorothy Talby was one of the first women executed in the colonies; two females had been executed earlier -- Jane Champion and Margaret Hatch -- but their crimes are lost to history. And thus the history of the death penalty in the United States can be said to begin with a Medea, a woman "mad as Ophelia," and four centuries later we still face the dilemma of what to do with them.

....see poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia, first admonished, then whipped; at last, taking her own little daughter's life; put on trial, and standing mute, threatened to be pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying to be beheaded; and none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder.... The cooper's crazy wife -- crazy in the belief that she has committed the unpardonable sin -- tries to drown her child, to save it from misery; and the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day in a quiet asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself. Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all our children's hands....

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

Comments

[thpunishrr]

Great post!

The unnatural act of a Mother killing her young is a psychological problem that I have never seen an answer for. Maternal instincts should come against an act such as this and with such force that I just can't grasp why this happens. There must be so many under-laying problems and psychosis for a Mother to act this way. Unless they are truly a psychopath, this topic baffles me.

Wonderful site. Very well written.

[David V. Baker, Ph.D., J.D.]

There are 73 recorded cases historically where jurisdictions have executed women in the U.S. for infanticide since 1632 and 1633 when Jane Champion killed her children and Margaret Hatch murdered her infant daughter. Dorothy Talby is the third female execution for infanticide. The historical record is mostly silent on why women have killed their children. We do know, however, that in the early colonial period mostly poor white servant women killed their illegitimate children because of the social stigma of having a child out-of-wedlock. It was a capital offense in most colonial jurisdictions for concealing the birth or death of a child and officials executed most women in the early period for that crime since determining death was usually impossible give the science of the day. Slave women often killed their illegitimate children in reprisal to the sexual brutality waged upon them by their masters. Scholars have also shown an association between infanticide and the witchcraft craze of the 1690s. Clearly, social historians have much work to do in explaining these societal atrocities. Historically, however, most women have killed their abusive husbands and slave masters.