I think we have to blame it on what you've said in other threads, that it seems like John Jakes favored the Mains (except for maybe Ashton, but it seems like even she redeemed herself in the end), so he just made the LaMottes more or less rotten to make them look good in comparison. Nevertheless though, there probably were quite a few ***hole husbands like Justin back then, who felt a need to practically torture their wives to show them who was the boss. Even today, many women are abused by the man in their life. And if these people had existed in real life, they would have lived more than 150 years ago, when a wife legally was her husband's property.
But maybe it could also be so, that some kind of mental illness ran in the LaMotte family? Because when you look at what Justin does, he does a lot of illogical things. Like when he whipped Madeline for accidentally catching him having sex with a slave? Of course, it seems like he thought that she had "spied on him" (or at least that's what he accused her of). But does that really sound like a sane man to you? Not to mention that he killed Maum Sally, because she was brave enough to stand up against his bull****, and he almost starved Madeline and had her drugged against her will for several years. Even for an abusive husband and slave owner, that was a new low...
Intelligence and purity.
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rikajessie
9 years ago
Yes, I assume there probably was supposed to be some kind of mental illness in the family. We're never given an explanation for their motives, so it would seem they were born sociopaths. This is true of most of Jakes' villains, at least in this book series. There are no explanations given for why they behave the way they do.
I don't know if Justin's behavior would be classified as sociopath or psycopath though.
And as someone once said in regards to an anime character villain we were discussing, it's hard to say what they deserve or don't deserve when you have little to no background information on what triggered their behavior. Not that having a bad childhood or whatever is an excuse, but it does at least give you some explanation of what happened.
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rikajessie
9 years ago
Yes, I assume there probably was supposed to be some kind of mental illness in the family. We're never given an explanation for their motives, so it would seem they were born sociopaths. This is true of most of Jakes' villains, at least in this book series. There are no explanations given for why they behave the way they do.
I don't know if Justin's behavior would be classified as sociopath or psycopath though.
And as someone once said in regards to an anime character villain we were discussing, it's hard to say what they deserve or don't deserve when you have little to no background information on what triggered their behavior. Not that having a bad childhood or whatever is an excuse, but it does at least give you some explanation of what happened.
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