In the short story Nineteen Thirty-Seven, Josephine is born after her laboring mother swims across a river that was red with the blood of her countrymen, including Josephine’s grandmother. As Josephine grows, she joins her mother in a yearly pilgrimage to the Massacre River, performing rituals to honor the dead. However, even these memorial rites are interpreted as evil, as humans by nature fear what we do not understand. When Josephine’s mother is discovered as a witch, she is imprisoned for it. Divide and conquer is a concept nearly as old as conflict itself, and sowing dissent in a community makes it easier for a smaller elite group to control it. In addition, using one demographic as a scapegoat for all of society’s ills keeps scrutiny
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Her husband cheats on her while she is grieving the miscarriages of her babies, breaking her heart all over again. When she tries to move on from the past, she enters into a physical relationship with the Dominican gardener of the estate employing her. One day, she finds a baby on the street and thinks it is a gift sent to her. As she talking to the baby, whom she names Rose, and dresses her up, the baby starts to decompose. She tries to cover up the scent with perfume which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t work, so she finally surrenders to reality and begins to bury the baby so her soul can be free. However, before she can finish, the gardener confronts her, accusing her of being an evil creature that murdered the infant for her own nefarious purposes. It is implied that these accusations are as a result of her own difficulty conceiving; he paints her as a witch who eats the souls of children. People feared this woman because she never had a baby and was alone, and in a society where the role of women were first and foremost the Mother and the Wife, this made her a dangerous aberration. The oppression of women in, to varying degrees, virtually every society in the history of civilization favored the ruling class in that it offered a structure of how things were meant to be. Men were strong and, for example, could be impelled into war with the promise that they were
Her husband cheats on her while she is grieving the miscarriages of her babies, breaking her heart all over again. When she tries to move on from the past, she enters into a physical relationship with the Dominican gardener of the estate employing her. One day, she finds a baby on the street and thinks it is a gift sent to her. As she talking to the baby, whom she names Rose, and dresses her up, the baby starts to decompose. She tries to cover up the scent with perfume which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t work, so she finally surrenders to reality and begins to bury the baby so her soul can be free. However, before she can finish, the gardener confronts her, accusing her of being an evil creature that murdered the infant for her own nefarious purposes. It is implied that these accusations are as a result of her own difficulty conceiving; he paints her as a witch who eats the souls of children. People feared this woman because she never had a baby and was alone, and in a society where the role of women were first and foremost the Mother and the Wife, this made her a dangerous aberration. The oppression of women in, to varying degrees, virtually every society in the history of civilization favored the ruling class in that it offered a structure of how things were meant to be. Men were strong and, for example, could be impelled into war with the promise that they were