Session 4: Scelestus Familia
Session 4: Scelestus Familia
Chair: Paul Davies
Bad or Mad? Parents Who Kill and Press Coverage in Israel
Gabriel Cavaglion
Department of Criminology and School of Social Work, Ashkelon Academic College, Ashkelon, Israel
This paper explores how Israeli newspapers disseminate and reproduce cultural beliefs about the personalities of fathers and mothers who kill. Based on textual content analysis, it examines sixty six articles from the three most popular Israeli daily newspapers that reported notorious cases of filicide between 1991 and 2002. The coverage during the first few days, at the critical initial stages of the process of definition and designation of the events, receives more in-depth examination. The study of these cases shows that the press opts not to use descriptors reflecting purported madness or social distress of the male perpetrators. Fathers’ filicide is usually portrayed as a premeditated, rational, criminal and evil act of murder, and the press is resistant to explanations of mental disorders as one of the causes of the crime. On the other hand, the study of six cases of maternal filicide shows that the media disseminate images of madness for half of the cases, of social distress for one other case and of badness for the remaining two cases. In this way, images of normative/Jewish/ married ‘insane’ mothers are distinguished from those of underprivileged, unwed and/or Arab ‘bad’ mothers.
The media representation of filicide plays a significant role in the construction and reinforcement of the gender order, a system of power relations between males and females.
Fatherhood is not taken for granted, but rather is perceived as acquired, learned or modeled. The portrayal of men who kill usually adheres to traditional, stereotypical roles of masculinity. There is more space for will, intention, volition and rationality. On the other hand, motherhood is taken for granted, is thought to be natural and biological; therefore, mothers who kill elicit cognitive dissonance as regards the popular definition of their natural attributes.
The Medea Complex: ‘Radical Evil’ and Modern Motherhood
Belinda Morrissey
School of Professional Communication, University of Canberra, Bruce, Australia
In 1999, English woman, Sally Clark, was convicted of murdering her two young sons over a two year period and sentenced to prison. Expert witness, Roy Meadows, testified she was suffering from a condition he claimed to have uncovered and named Munchausen’s By Proxy (MBP) syndrome. In 2003, Clark was freed, and her ‘diagnosis’ overturned and mocked as non-existent. In 2003, Australian woman, Kathleen Folbigg, was convicted of murdering her four infant children over a ten-year period. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. The deaths of the children of both women were initially ruled as having been the result of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). In 1995, American woman, Susan Smith, was convicted of murder after having driven her two boys into a lake while still strapped into the family car, thus drowning them. It was claimed at the time that she took this action because her boyfriend had rejected her on the grounds that he didn’t want children.
All three of these women were considerably indubitably evil by both judges and media. Even though their cases are demonstrably entirely dissimilar, their wickedness was seen in exactly the same way, as beyond comprehension, devoid of explanation. This paper examines why this should have happened in these women’s cases, when it is not necessarily a feature of most cases where women have killed their children.
Drawing on Eve Garrard’s notion that evil action is a consequence of a person continuing to act in an injurious manner to another, despite their awareness that there are valid reasons to desist (2002, 324), I will show that the particular characterisations of Clark, Folbigg and Smith laid them open to this charge of ‘evil’. If we incorporate societal myths of motherhood into Garrard’s thesis, mothers would be doubly evil as they, of all people, should have strongly inbuilt barriers towards acting harmfully towards their own young. I will deploy this understanding of evil alongside Immanuel Kant’s concept of ‘radical evil’, which he insisted was “always evident in the fact that man devotes his will to the pursuit of egoistic gain”, and, rather than being unusual, was universally true of everyone (Copjec, 1996, xii). Garrard’s understanding of ‘evil’ as pertaining only to some, will thus be read within and through ‘radical evil’ to configure a different concept of ‘evil’, and especially of ‘evil mothers’. Kant’s universality and Garrard’s partiality will collide over the supposedly timeless concept of motherhood, which from one perspective can mean that mothers, like everyone, retain a capacity for evil, and from the other, that only some are impervious to anyone’s demands but their own.
The paper will demonstrate the interesting continuum along which these cases lie. It will begin with the case of Susan Smith, whose behaviour places her closest to the ‘diagnosis’ of evil laid down by Garrard, and concurrently demonstrates ‘radical evil’ in full action. Kathleen Folbigg will be considered as a more ambiguous case, where some doubt as to the manner of her children’s death still lingers, and thus whose behaviour can neither confirm nor deny either Garrard’s or Kant’s conclusions. The paper will conclude with an analysis of the Sally Clark debacle, whose eventual pardoning forces a re-examination of the ways we ascribe and understand what ‘evil’ is and who ‘evil-doers’ are.
Archetypal Evil in Literature
Roshanak Pashaee
Department of English, University of Kashan, Kashan, Iran.
Felony according to Nikos Kazantzakis is the most ancient arcane desire in the dark recesses of human mind to be gratified. Man out of cruelty would simply tear apart the fine threads that bind him to his fellow humans, more specifically his brothers, and slay them in an instant of rage.
Instances of fratricide are to be found in mythologies, and religions around the world. Thus in Egyptian mythology, Osiris, the handsome first born of Geb and Nut, was suffocated by his ugly brother, Set, and in the Story of Creation Cain murdered his brother Abel.
Having as two of its major sources of reference mythology and religion, literature has been appropriate ground to bring forth the matter. There is an array of literary works on the subject of fratricide. Steinbeck’s Charles and Caleb Trask are rightful heirs to Cain’s anguish and frustration the moment they find their offerings to their fathers have not been favored. Insightful as it is, East of Eden offers as the root of all evil love not given on an equal basis, but is that all there is to it? Faulkner has another view in The Sound and the Fury. No actual case of physical murder takes place in this novel. No brother takes an axe to fulfill his archetypal responsibility; but then, one cannot help wondering which is worse: the tangible infliction of death by one brother on the other, or having him castrated and then committed to an asylum. Fratricide takes place in The Sound and the Fury on a symbolic basis. Jason, the representative of a modern society, castrates Benjy, the symbol of humanity and brotherhood at its most basic form uncontaminated by the germ of civilization. Why? This is what my paper will be discussing.
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