Showing papers on "Cruelty published in 1986"

Violence against animals and people: is aggression against living creatures generalized?

Abstract: An association between childhood cruelty to animals and dangerous aggression against people at a later age could have important implications regarding early detection and treatment, preventive psychiatry, and a social ethic that encourages positive attitudes toward living creatures in general. Research reports in the literature are inconsistent and inconclusive regarding a possible relationship between animal cruelty and aggression against people. Although a single act is not predictive of another act, a pattern of substantial animal abuse may conceivably be associated with a pattern of recurrent violence directed against people. In the present study, extensive interview schedules were administered to aggressive criminals, nonaggressive criminals, and noncriminals. The nature of abuse was described for each subject who gave a history of substantial abuse. A clear relationship was found between early substantial abuse and recurrent violence against people. Possible explanations for conflicting results in the literature are discussed.

Law, sex, cruelty, and divorce in Victorian America, 1840-1900.

Abstract: IN 1874, JUSTICE JOHN M. SCOTT OF THE ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT DESCRIBED THE damage a husband inflicted upon his wife by his false allegations of infidelity: "Cruel treatment does not always consist of actual violence. There are words of false accusation that inflict deeper anguish than physical injuries to the personmore enduring and lacerating to the wounded spirit of a gentle woman, than actual violence to the person, though severe."' Sometime later the Oregon Supreme Court addressed the same issue and underscored the dire impact such accusations had on innocent wives: "To charge a woman, in the presence and hearing of others, with the commission of the crime of adultery, is to render her subject to the gross insults of lustful men who may hear and believe the rumor, which, whether true or false, tends to rob her of her good name, alienate her friends and acquaintances, and deprive her of their society and companionship."2 Both justices then proceeded in each case to sunder the bonds of matrimony, the very foundation of Victorian social order. Their decisions, while restrained and wedded to precedent, nevertheless directly or obliquely reflected contemporary debates over family stability, marital cruelty, conceptions of manhood, woman's place in nineteenth-century society, and Victorian attitudes about sexuality. The two judges were no more immune to these issues than anyone else and probably less so, for they held the responsibility of reconciling middle-class hopes for family cohesion with changing sex roles, marital expectations, and legal definitions of domestic cruelty.3 These two appellate decisions, supplemented by about one hundred others dealing with sexual cruelty, thus provide a way to investigate the complicated connections among Victorian ideology, sexual behavior, and acceptable marital conduct. If the judges were not always consistent, if they sometimes favored marital indissolubility over freedom from objectionable marriage bonds and at other times preferred the reverse, their ambivalence or inconsistency surely reflected wider confusion over the competing claims of family life and personal autonomy.4 Despite this ambivalence, judges during the nineteenth century nevertheless

Sexual Cruelty and the Case for Divorce in Victorian America

Abstract: In February 1876, Abigail English filed for a legal separation from her husband John on the ground of extreme cruelty. Specifically, the New Jersey resident described the physical suffering she incurred because of her husband's excessive sexual demands: oblivious to her pleas for restraint, insensitive to her uterine disease, which made intercourse painful, unmindful of a physician's recommendation of sexual abstinence, he relentlessly insisted on sexual intercourse. When she resisted, he used brute strength to force her to submit to his lust. Despite the judge's hope that the recovery of her health might someday permit a reconciliation, the New Jersey Court of Chancery decided that his behavior constituted extreme cruelty under the statute and granted Abigail a divorce a mensa et thoro. The decision seemed eminently reasonable under the circumstances and dovetailed with late nineteenth-century assumptions about male lust and the need to promote male continence within and outside marriage. After all, here was a brutish husband so heedless of his wife's well-being as to threaten her already delicate health in order to satisfy his base desires. While no court explicitly recognized marital rape as a ground for separation

Abraham and dilemma: Kierkegaard's teleological suspension revisited

Abstract: The Genesis story of Abraham and Isaac can seem, in turn, fascinating and repellant, a story of integrity and a story of betrayal, of steadfast loyalty and of murderous cruelty. What are we to make of God's demand that Abraham sacrifice his son? Worse, how are we to respond to Abraham's willingness to honor that demand? In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard bears witness to the depths of conflict triggered by this enigmatic and awful trial, to the difficulty of coming to some stable overview of the issues, profound and central as they must be. Kierkegaard focuses these issues in the notorious question: Can there be a teleological suspension of the ethical? Can Abraham be defended in setting ethics and Isaac aside? Can his loyalty be seen as anything but morally abhorrent and wildly irrational?1 Kierkegaard is not alone in finding within this story a sign of Abraham's greatness, a cause for the accolade "father of faith," or, indeed, "knight of faith." But on what grounds, this praise? Given that Abraham is caught in a cruel test of commitments, it is natural to think that he is a knight of faith because he makes the right choice. He opts for God over Isaac, faith over ethics, unreason over reason. But how can that choice underwrite greatness? Wouldn't it be better to throw down the book, to frankly admit what our untutored conscience would declare anyway, that Abraham has made the wrong choice, and that Kierkegaard is sadly, greatly, deluded in his effort to glorify such outrage? If one refuses such wholesale dismissal, as I must, one may try to show that appearances aside, Abraham does not overthrow reason or ethics, at least not in a really damaging way. But this tactic can fail. In trying to make it reasonable and moral -at least not that bad for Abraham to have sided with God against Isaac, the intensity of Abraham's dilemma will be diluted. Surely it will be bad, terribly bad, no matter what Abraham does. Can turning one's back on God be an improvement on turning one's back on Isaac? To start a plausible interpretation, one must challenge an assumption that to my knowledge has gone unchallenged in the large literature on Fear and Trembling. Why assume that Abraham has made the right choice? I don't mean it would have been better to have rejected God, but why assume that in this crisis there is an objectively correct response?2 If we take Abraham's choice to have been correct, we undercut an aspect of the

The Language of Cruelty: Dialogue Strategies and the Spectator in Gambaro's El desatino and Pinter's The Birthday Party

Abstract: Several studies of the works of Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro have examined the relationship between her plays and Antonin Artaud's appeals for a new, concrete theatre language. Tamara Holzapfel, for example, notes that Gambaro's dramas carry out the revolutionary vision of Artaud's The Theater and Its Double "by using non-rhetorical language integrated with gestures and all kinds of sound, by incorporating psychological cruelty and physical violence, and by assigning primary importance to the mise-en-scene" (5-6). In a similar vein, Sandra Messinger Cypess considers Gambaro's plays in light of Artaud's "theories on the importance of physical imagery on stage," concluding that it is primarily through violent physical images, rather than dialogue, that Gambaro's plays communicate their own, cruel vision of existence ("Physical Imagery" 357).2 This, she contends, is in keeping with Artaud's demand for the devaluation of verbal language in favor of a physical, stage language which bypasses words and addresses itself directly to the spectator's senses. But while her plays are indeed highly theatrical, fully exploiting the non­ verbal elements of dramatic performance, Gambaro's dramatic texts explore and expand the functions of verbal language as well. Often a peculiar interaction between the plays' verbal and non-verbal elements works to highlight the fundamental relationship between speech and action on the stage. Her dialogue's excessive stylization, the speakers' questionable sin­ cerity, and the characters' attempts to dominate one another by linguistic means also testify to Gambaro's interest in the powers of the spoken word. Commenting on the connections between speech and action in drama, the Polish theorist Roman Ingarden notes, "The spoken word can be a form of acting on whomever it is directed to, and sometimes on those who are merely witnesses to what is said" (388). To a certain extent this has always been true of dramatic language; yet this gestural aspect appears in a most extreme form

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and the Monstrous Critics.

Abstract: Over thirty years ago, James Sledd reversed the prevailing critical opinion about one of Chaucer's most perplexing tales in his essay, "The Clerk's Tale: The Monsters and the Critics." He refuted the arguments about the monstrous cruelty of Walter in testing his wife and of Griselda in surrendering her children by insisting that the tale must not be read as a realistic fiction. "Our difficulties will be lessened," Sledd writes, "if we remember that Chaucer does not invite us, but ultimately forbids us, to apply the rules of his fictional world outside his fiction" (169).

'His Heart Exposed to Prying Eyes, To Pity Has No Claim': Reflections on Hogarth and the Nature of Cruelty

Abstract: In his famous discussion of the source of our duties concerning anirrals, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant approvingly mentions a series of engravings ( \"The Four Stages of Cruelty\") by the English artist William Hogarth as exemplifying one of his central contentions. [2] The approach to our duties regarding anirrals advocated by Kant holds that avoiding cruelty is the most fUndamental duty we can have to nonhuman animals. For convenience, I shall refer to this view as the \"No-Cruelty\" j:X)sition. It is not surprising that Kant cites Hogarth while explaining his own views; Hogarth's engravings provide a rich visual statement about the nature of cruelty and the moral status of its victims.

Slavery and Class Analysis in the Ancient World. A Review Article

Abstract: Ste. Croix's monumental study of class oppression in the ancient Greek world is a great book and deserves a place on the shelf of everyone interested in the social history of antiquity. Not just on the shelf: it is a book to be read slowly, a book to spend a month or more with, and to return to often. For the patient reader, who will mull over the innumerable details and citations of the evidence that Ste. Croix's vast learning places at his disposal, The Class Struggle can provide an entire education in the social relations of ancient Greek (and Roman) civilization. Ste. Croix's book has a leisurely pace, and a loose structure, that leaves room for digressions on topics dear to the author, or for arguments on matters controversial among scholars that may seem to earn disproportionate attention. But the digressions are always interesting (at least to this reader), and the arguments, even those relegated to footnotes, have the fascination peculiar to meticulous reasoning. What is more, a moral fervor or, rather, a moral outrage informs the argument and elevates the book to a document of human sympathy, in which facts speak the misery of ruthlessly oppressed and exploited populations and give courage to those who would defamiliarize cruelty and inequality in any age, not least our own, so that the violence of human history may again seem strange and horrible. This is strong praise, and deserved. It is not meant to forestall criticism of Ste. Croix's book, only to situate that criticism properly. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World-or, to use Ste. Croix's own, very practical system of reference, CSAGW-tells a story we may wish to forget or ignore, whose events are scattered in fragments, concealed in mutilated stones and pages that have been gathered and interpreted by Ste. Croix in a lifetime of dedicated and erudite labor. The result is a book on the scale of Rostovzeff's, or of Ste. Croix's own mentor, A. H. M. Jones, and if it lacks the clear narrative order of those works, this is not from every point of view a blemish. The constant cross-references, the juxtaposition of sociological analysis and narrative history, convey both the process of discovery and the disjointed nature of the story itself, which would be falsified, I suspect, by too dramatic a rendering.

On the Development of the Social Psychology of Art

Abstract: This paper offers three examples of empirical research in a field that has existed at a theoretical level in the USSR for more than a half-century. Among the social psychological purposes of art may be included the encouragement of societal solidarity and the promotion of mutual and self-understanding. Regarding art broadly as one of many communication media, content-analytic studies of magazine stories, focussing on descriptions of marital relationships, of paintings, examining men and women as subjects and their contexts, and of movies, concerning themes of violence and cruelty, are reported. Also discussed are results reflecting ways in which art can have a positive moral effect on people.

Withholding Therapy and Anti-Cruelty Policies

Abstract: Excerpt To the editor: In commenting on the New Jersey Supreme Court decision in the case of Claire Conroy, Lo and Dornbrand (1) point out that the court rejected the distinction between ordinary (

Weberian sociological theory: Heresy, religious and secular

Abstract: What is a heresy? It is an idea, a doctrine, or a symbolic action that provokes righteous anger and often violent repression. A heresy is not simply a position in intellectual discussion. The sides are already firmly chosen. Debate consists rather in showing deviation from canonical principles, and in name-calling. Pronouncing the name of a heresy in an angry tone is the last word in debating tactics: You are but an Albigensian! … a Manichee! … a Communist! … a Trotskyite! The procedure is ritualistic in the Durkheimian sense. The conflict concerns group membership. The doctrine or gesture symbolizes the group and its standards of loyalty; it is a traditional formulation used on ritual occasions, and to depart from the accepted formula is to challenge the group structure: to split it, change its organization, or put forward a new leadership. Hence heresy debate is more than intellectual. The symbols are not necessarily matters of concern in themselves but are vehicles for organizational power and politics. Hence also the prevailing tone of righteous anger. Anger is the automatic response to a moral violation, the shattering of expected social solidarity. That this shades over into repressive violence is not surprising. For if morality extends only up to the boundary of the group, to break from the group puts one beyond the moral pale; those within can feel completely righteous in any degree of cruelty perpetrated against those who reject its community.