hemans vs Aikin

Immediately when reading Heman’s “The Wife of Asdrubal,” I was reminded of the work we read by Aikin last week sometime, “Epistles on Women.” While Myrrha from Sardanapolis also has some similarities to the Wife, I felt the connection was much stronger with the Native American Woman in Epistle II of Aikin’s work. Both the Wife and the Native American woman in these poems are forced to commit infanticide, or the murdering of their own children, in order to protect them from their eventual fate of death, from capture or starvation respectively. There are several differences between their experiences, however, which I find to be very interesting. First of all, it seems that at the end of “The Wife of Asdrubal,” the woman murders herself as well in the line, “Lifts one appealing, frenzied glance on high, / Then deep 'midst rolling flames is lost to mortal eye.” This is in opposition to the Native American woman, who just kills her child, but not herself. Additionally, and I believe most importantly, in “The Wife of Asdrubal,” the murdering of the children is directly related to the actions of a particular man and The Wife’s hand is forced because her husband defects to the other side and leaves her all alone, where as there is no man present in the story of the Native American woman.