Infanticide and the Symbolism of Evil in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Dear Husband”

Abstract

In 2001, a Texan housewife, Andrea Yates, drowned her five children in a bathtub, claiming that she had killed them to save them from evil. Her life sentence for murder was later suspended, and Yates was transferred to a psychiatric facility. In 2009, Joyce Carol Oates published the short story “Dear Husband,” inspired by the Yates case. The author structured her story as a letter which Lauri Lynn writes to her husband to confess to the murder of their five children before she takes her life. The aim of this article is to analyze the story using the categories elaborated by Paul Ricoeur to define evil and its symbolism and to try to answer the question: is Andrea Yates/Lauri Lynn a villain or a victim?