Serenity Orengo1; 1 University of Illinois Library, United States
Discussion
Written at the height of the Woman Question, Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1864) sees a pregnant Katerina Izmailova murder her young nephew in order to prevent him from becoming an inheritor to her dead husband’s estate. I argue that the text deliberately establishes Katerina as a mother-figure to her nephew, only to have her use her pregnant body to then murder the child in a moment of motherly deviance that has widespread implications. This infanticidal act is not just a comment on expected womanly behavior, but indicative of the role women can play in disrupting the social order. In her quest for liberation from her suffocating provincial life and her husband’s household, Katerina materializes societal anxieties about women’s place in the merchant class, women’s liberation, female adultery, and patrilineal inheritance through her weaponization of her own motherhood.
