Weekly Blog #4

There are many ways cannibalism can be viewed in terms of disgust, based on a person’s background and experiences and tolerance levels, etc. In the story The Juniper Tree, the father eating the son didn’t even really make me think twice about what had happened, if anything I was more shocked about the mother killing the son, and even then the shock wasn’t because of the actual killing, but rather how suddenly and unexpectedly it had happened, especially after being lured into a false sense of security. Maybe it was some split second subconscious processing on my part, but nothing really made me stop and think, wait…did that really just happen? When imagining cannibalism as the horrific act it is commonly perceived to be, I would have imagined it to be gory and bloody and the complete opposite of your typical well-mannered dining experience. The killing part of it seemed to have been more gruesome than the eating that followed afterwards. There was no blood in the story, or at least none that was described and the flesh had been put into a pot to cook into a nice little stew. Also the father did not knowingly and purposely kill and eat his son; to him he was just eating stew. And the mother being the despicable person she was had already killed the boy by luring him into a trap veiled with fake affection, then blamed the death on the sister, and then chopped the body into pieces. At this point, serving the boys flesh to the father as a nice little homemade stew, as horrible as it may be, doesn’t seem to make the mother seem much worse than she already is.