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Deuntray Monroe
December 9, 2015
Ethics and Morals Environment Term Paper
The Standards of Society
It is common knowledge that the way we act in public is not how we always act in
private. For example, it is considered inappropriate to go to the grocery store in pajamas, it’s
against the law to drink and drive, and it’s illegal to have sex when you are less than sixteen
years old. But how many people have had a beer and then driven home? How many teenagers
have had sex when they were younger than sixteen? And how many of us have showed up to the
grocery store in what can only be described as PJ’s? For some people the answer to those
questions might be never, but for some that answer is yes. However, they might not admit it
because in our society we have certain standards on ethics and morals that tell us what is okay
and not okay to do. Therefore, I decided to write my term paper on the standards of society in 18th
century. I have done a lot of readings in my spare time related to ethic topics and one that stood
out to me in particular was the ethics and immortality of the book Perfume by Patrick Suskind.I
specifically chose to analyze this book because it analyzes what was and was not acceptable in
their society at that time period, and today a lot of those standards remain the same.
In France during the 18th century, their government consisted of an aristocracy
community. Essentially what this means is that government had a ruling authority over
citizens. The hierarchy of the aristocracy influences and has direct control over the society. The
author, Suskind, goes into detail in portraying the large, or more specifically, the overwhelming
population of France. In particular, Suskind, sheds light on the large amount of people in the
French population that struggled with low income and accepted low standard jobs. The main job
he repeatedly discusses is the occupation of wet nurses. A wet nurse is basically a woman that
breastfeeds and, takes care of another woman’s child. In France it was considered an extremely
low standard job that only desperate women would do in order to fund their necessities. Suskind
illustrates the standards of society in France by shedding light on the struggle and troubles of
women who worked as wet nurses. In addition, he also shows the society’s stance on murder and
not accepting the act of murder.
In the novel the author portrays the struggle and troubles of wet nursing women by
showing how difficult it was to breastfeed the main character, the murderer, Grenouille. In their
standards of society during this time period, women were considered insignificant because the
economy was based mainly on land and the landowners were predominantly men. Women
