The Primary Cause Of Bathory's Extreme Deviance
The ideas of immortality and vampires have been around for a long time. Long before Dracula, there lived the “Bloody Countess”, who was known to take young peasant girls and torture them before bathing in their blood. Holding the Guinness World Record for ‘the most number of victims attributed to one murderess’, Erzebet (Elizabeth) Bathory killed at least 650 young girls for the sake of staying young and beautiful (Glenday, 2009). The primary cause of Bathory’s extreme social device is nurture. An application of the concepts of Albert Bandura, the secondary agents of socialization, Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, feminist sociology and Karl Marx will be used to prove that nurture is the primary cause of this person’s extreme deviance.
Humans …show more content…
Bathory, even though she was a woman, was well educated and was well over the intelligence average of the Hungarian population. She challenged the norms for men and women, but ended going to lethal extremes doing so. Gender roles were more prevalent during the 16th century and were imposed onto women greatly, and much of the time one’s mindset depended on how they were raised – something that could be extremely different between men and women. Despite that, Bathory grew up demanding to be treated equal as her male counterparts. She was taught many ‘masculine’ skills, and even made her husband take her last name at marriage – something almost unheard of at the time (Craft, 2009). However, she still felt the need to look nice for her husband, even after he had died (Clark, 2008). Karl Marx’s Conflict Theory focused on the economic conflict and power imbalances between contrasting groups, such as between men and women, or majority and minority groups (Todd, 2015). Bathory, who was brought up in a privileged household, clearly used the conflict between the rich and poor to her advantage. Since boys were preferred over girls for labour, Bathory pretended to open a school in her castle and ‘lured noble girls to her castle under the promise of an education’ (Pavlac, 2005). She knew many parents would comply. Because most girls were of low nobility, nobody noticed their disappearances, not until Bathory started going for those of the
Humans …show more content…
Bathory, even though she was a woman, was well educated and was well over the intelligence average of the Hungarian population. She challenged the norms for men and women, but ended going to lethal extremes doing so. Gender roles were more prevalent during the 16th century and were imposed onto women greatly, and much of the time one’s mindset depended on how they were raised – something that could be extremely different between men and women. Despite that, Bathory grew up demanding to be treated equal as her male counterparts. She was taught many ‘masculine’ skills, and even made her husband take her last name at marriage – something almost unheard of at the time (Craft, 2009). However, she still felt the need to look nice for her husband, even after he had died (Clark, 2008). Karl Marx’s Conflict Theory focused on the economic conflict and power imbalances between contrasting groups, such as between men and women, or majority and minority groups (Todd, 2015). Bathory, who was brought up in a privileged household, clearly used the conflict between the rich and poor to her advantage. Since boys were preferred over girls for labour, Bathory pretended to open a school in her castle and ‘lured noble girls to her castle under the promise of an education’ (Pavlac, 2005). She knew many parents would comply. Because most girls were of low nobility, nobody noticed their disappearances, not until Bathory started going for those of the