Motherhood Quote by Franz Grillparzer

Abolition, in Grillparzer's hands, isn’t a slogan; it’s a domestic ultimatum. The line tightens the moral noose by relocating slavery from the plantation or battlefield to the most intimate chamber of social life: the home. “There shall be no slave in your home” sounds like law, not sentiment, a household constitution that makes complicity impossible to aestheticize. Then comes the twist of the knife: “Least of all the mother of your son.” If slavery can be tolerated at a distance, the poet forces it into kinship, genealogy, and inheritance. The subtext is blunt: a society that permits the enslavement of women is also a society willing to build its future on coerced reproduction.

Grillparzer, an Austrian dramatist steeped in the ethics of tragedy, understands how moral arguments land hardest when they expose hypocrisy. The phrase “your son” implicates the male citizen who benefits from the arrangement, not the abstract “humanity” who merely condemns it. It also turns the logic of patriarchy against itself: if lineage, honor, and the sanctity of the household are the bourgeois obsessions of the era, then enslaving the mother of your child is not just cruel but contaminating - a scandal to the very order that excuses it.

Historically, the quote resonates with 19th-century Europe’s anxious self-image: enlightened in theory, compromised in practice, happy to pity bondage abroad while preserving hierarchies at home. Grillparzer’s intent is to collapse that distance, insisting that domination isn’t an exotic atrocity; it’s a family arrangement with nicer curtains.