Thread:AustinDR/@comment-26205772-20160228093928/@comment-2175012-20160307214607

To be honest, I was uncertain regarding Ruth, mostly because I had only seen the film once before I watched it a few more times. The reason as to why I was uncertain about this candidate concerned Ruth's relationship with her children. In the film, she arguably shows affection towards them at first by giving them beer and cigarettes, but as the film went on, she started to treat them as her henchmen. Ruth allowing her sons to have their way with Meg wasn't out of any affection; rather, she only did this to further humiliate Meg. She manipulates her sons into thinking that Meg's punishment was a game. If she ever had any affection for her sons at one point, then it's gone towards the end.

The book actually goes more in depth with Ruth's motivations for torturing Meg. According to Ruth, she believed that since the Fall of Man, women were cursed to be used as sexual objects and bear children. She witnessed her mother getting beaten by her father, and she grew to despise women since then. She claimed that she was liberating Meg through torturing her, though, of course this is a front to take her frustrations out on Meg. After this, she was divorced by her husband, and she was forced to care for their children by herself. She actually resents her sons, because they reminded her of her husband.

Of course, you can make the argument that she has a freudian excuse due to her slowly becoming mentally unstable, but it was to the point that she didn't have a firm grasp on morality.