|
kalikshama -> RE: Bullying? (10/17/2012 9:48:13 AM)
|
Loopholes
Prologue.
Ira Glass: Well, it's just like they say in Us Weekly, people in the 18th century, they're just like us. At least they are when they're not in situations like the one I'm about to describe to you. It's 1761, Austria, cue the Mozart music, which, by an act of Congress in 1974, is required in any Public Radio story like this. Mozart, please.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ava Litzelfelnerin gets married. She's 25, moves from her parents' farm to her husband's farm 16 miles away, which back then seemed really, really far away.
Kathy Stuart: She feels like she's in a foreign country when she's moved these 16 miles to the new village. And she says things like, oh, I don't know what the local customs are here.
Ira Glass: That's Kathy Stuart, a professor of history at the University of California Davis. She says that from hundreds of pages of archived criminal testimony, we know that this was an arranged marriage, that Ava met her husband days before the wedding, and that Ava's new mother-in-law dominated the household, wouldn't even let Ava give gifts to the neighbors when she moved in. The mother-in-law gave the field hands smaller portions of food than Ava thought was right, and she wouldn't let Ava change it or take charge. Ava tells people how unhappy she is in this new life far from the life she'd known.
Kathy Stuart: She is constantly articulating to her husband, her brother, her mother that she wants to leave this world, and she can find no happiness in this world. And the only response she gets is go home and pray and work.
Ira Glass: So she decides to end her life, but there's a problem. At the time, suicide was considered a worse sin than murder. Kathy Stuart says the logic was, if you committed a murder, you could confess your sin, and if you were truly repentant, you could get yourself into Heaven. Obviously, if you kill yourself, you don't get that chance, and you are doomed to eternal damnation. And Ava did not want to go to Hell, but she thought of a loophole-- a morbid, little loophole.
Kathy Stuart: She thought, OK, wait a minute. What if I commit suicide in a way that is really slow and secret. And I can get myself to a priest on time to confess before I die, and then nobody need know that I committed suicide, and I'll get to Heaven anyway. So what she does is, she goes to a nearby town, and she goes from store to store trying to buy arsenic.
Ira Glass: She testifies later this turns out to be really, really hard. Arsenic is a controlled substance. Nobody wants to sell it to her. Finally, she makes up a story about working for a farmer who has a rodent problem, which works.
Kathy Stuart: And then she goes home and she takes the arsenic. But she takes apparently just a little bit of arsenic, the way she describes it, as much as you could get on the point of a butter knife.
Ira Glass: It's delicate, right? She wants to take enough arsenic that it'll kill her, but not so much that it'll kill her quickly. She needs time to get to a priest first to confess the sin.
Kathy Stuart: So she takes this little bit of arsenic. But apparently it was enough to make her violently ill, and for a week, every time she ate, she vomited. But it wasn't enough to make her think that she was now going to die.
Ira Glass: So she never goes to the priest. Figuring out the proper dosage, she testifies later, is just a vexing problem that she doesn't know how to solve. And she gives up that plan, which brings her to a much more disturbing plan. She decides to do something that, to us, to our modern sensibility, is so much worse than killing yourself. From our point of view, she decides to do one of the worst things a person could possibly do.
Read more: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/473/transcript
|
|
|
|
