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Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Dr Daniel Riha
Advisory Board
2010
Best Served Cold:
Studies on Revenge
Edited by
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2010
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/
ISBN: 978-1-84888-043-6
First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2010. First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Sheila C. Bibb & Daniel Escandell Montiel
Krisanna M. Scheiter
Abstract
Aristotle defines anger as a desire for revenge aroused by an intentional and
undeserved slight. His remarks on revenge are scattered throughout his corpus
causing many commentators to overlook or oversimplify his account of revenge.
Stocker and Hegeman, for example, claim that for Aristotle the purpose of revenge
is to make the offender suffer and take pleasure in his suffering. David Konstan
claims that the purpose of revenge is to restore one’s sense of honour and social
status. Both these claims are correct, but the main purpose of revenge for Aristotle,
I argue, is to restore justice and ensure that we are not mistreated by the offender in
the future. I begin by showing that for Aristotle revenge entails three things. First,
we desire to cause the offender pain; second, we want the offender to know that we
are the cause of his pain; and third, we want him to know that we are causing him
pain because he mistreated us. If the purpose of revenge was merely to take
pleasure in the offender’s suffering, these last two criteria would be unnecessary. I
further show that the desire for revenge is not a desire to destroy or ruin the
offender. Killing another person or ruining their reputation would be an act of
hatred, according to Aristotle, not revenge. This is an important point and one that
many contemporary philosophers writing on revenge have failed to make. For
Aristotle, revenge is analogous to punishment. We punish people for stealing so
that they will refrain from stealing in the future. Similarly, we seek revenge
because we believe the offender wronged us; we want to cause him pain so that he
will not wrong us in the future.
*****
Introduction
There is a tendency in contemporary Western culture to view revenge as
immoral, even irrational.1 Jon Elster, for example, claims that revenge is not
compatible with reason or goal-oriented behaviour because it ‘involves only costs
and risks, no benefits’ (862).2 Suzanne Uniacke claims that revenge is wrong
because it is motivated by resentment, rather than moral indignation (67).3
Aristotle, however, comes from a culture where revenge is often the norm, and so
he has a much different perspective.4 In the Nicomachean Ethics he claims that
there are times when it is virtuous and rational to desire revenge (EN IV.5,
1125b33-1126a8).5 In order to understand how revenge can be both moral and
4 Aristotle on the Purpose of Revenge
__________________________________________________________________
rational we must figure out what Aristotle considers to be the purpose of revenge,
which is the task of this paper.
Stocker and Hegeman claim that for Aristotle the purpose of revenge is to make
the offender suffer and take pleasure in his suffering (282). David Konstan claims
that the purpose of revenge is to restore one’s honour and reputation. Both claims
are correct, but neither one captures what I take to be the ultimate goal of revenge
(114). In this paper I argue that the aim of revenge for Aristotle is not simply the
suffering of the other person or saving face in front of other people; rather the
purpose of revenge is to right a wrong and to ensure that we are not treated unjustly
in the future.
I begin by discussing Aristotle’s account of slighting, which he claims gives
rise to our desire for revenge. We desire revenge when we think that we have been
undeservedly and intentionally slighted. In the second section I give two reasons
why the purpose of revenge cannot be just the suffering of another person and I
argue instead that revenge is aimed at protecting oneself against injustice, restoring
one’s sense of self worth by making sure that the wrongdoer does not slight one in
the future. In the final section I claim that revenge is not just a form of punishment,
but it is closely related to punishment in that it can be both rational and moral.
4. Conclusion
Aristotle and the ancient Athenians have a much different view of revenge than
we do today. They understood that revenge could be vicious, destructive and
immoral. Aristotle even says in the Nicomachean Ethics that the virtuous person
will err on the side of forgiveness and will not give into his passions. Nevertheless
he claims that there may be times when the virtuous person ought to get angry and
seek revenge. For Aristotle, and the ancient Athenians, revenge is not necessarily
irrational or immoral.
As I have shown, the purpose of revenge, on Aristotle’s account, is not to take
pleasure in the wrongdoer’s suffering. Rather the goal of revenge is to prevent the
wrongdoer from slighting us in the future. Just as punishment can be rational and
moral, so can revenge. Punishment is not moral if we are malicious, extreme or
wrong about what kinds of acts we ought to punish. Likewise revenge is not moral
if we overestimate our worth or what we are owed or if we seek malicious revenge
that aims at harming the other person rather than trying to change their behaviour
towards us. Punishment is aimed at preventing future injustice in general and
making the one punished more just. Revenge is aimed at preventing injustice from
happening to us. The important point to take away from Aristotle is that revenge,
being for our own benefit, does not in itself make it immoral or irrational.
Notes
1
Tamler Sommers points out that honour cultures (like ancient Athens) do not
have the same negative attitudes towards revenge as non-honour cultures. ‘Two
Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honour’, Biology and
Philosophy, Vol. 24, No.1, 2009, pp. 35-50 .
2
For a response to Elster see AP Hamlin, ‘Rational Revenge’, Ethics, Vol. 101,
No. 2, 1991, pp. 374-381.
Krisanna M. Scheiter 9
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3
S Uniacke, ‘Why is Revenge Wrong?’, The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 34,
2000, pp. 61-69. I do not think that Aristotle would disagree with Uniacke’s claim
that revenge is motivated by resentment (or what I call ‘anger’), but even so the
desire for revenge can be virtuous for Aristotle.
4
See G Herman for a discussion about ancient Athenian attitudes towards revenge.
He claims that not all ancient Athenians thought revenge was morally permissible.
‘Honour, Revenge and the State in Fourth-Century Athens’, Die athenische
Demokratie im 4.Jahrhundert v. Chr, Franz Steiner, W Eder (ed), Verlag, Stuttgart,
1995.
5
For Aristotle acting virtuously just is to act rationally.
6
Thumos is the other Greek word that is often translated as anger in Aristotle and
Plato, however it has a much more broader usage than orge. Orge is used by
Aristotle to refer only to our desire for revenge that arises when we believe we
have been slighted. Thumos, however, can also refer to our desire for honour,
reputation and victory (see Plato Republic IV).
7
Aristotle does not actually give examples of things that are just by nature versus
things that are just by law or custom.
8
There is some debate regarding whether or not emotions are always attended by
pleasure and pain. See, for example, WW Fortenbaugh, 1970 & 2008, S Leighton,
1996 and J Cooper, 1996.
Bibiography
Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vols. 1 & 2, Barnes, J. (ed), Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1984.
Elster, J., ‘Norms of Revenge’. Ethics. Vol. 100, No. 4, 1990, pp. 862-885.
Hamlin, A.P., ‘Rational Revenge’. Ethics. Vol. 101, No. 2, 1991, pp.374-381.
Herman, G., ‘Honour, Revenge and the State in Fourth-Century Athens’. Die
athenishce Demokratie im 4.Jahrhundert v. Chr. Franz Steiner. Eder, W. (ed),
Verlag, Stuttgart, 1995.
Konstan, D., ‘Aristotle on Anger and the Emotions’. Ancient Anger: Perspectives
from Homer to Galen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.
Plato, Complete Works. Cooper, J. & Hutchinson, D.S. (eds), Hackett Publishing,
Indianapolis, 1997.
10 Aristotle on the Purpose of Revenge
__________________________________________________________________
Sommers, T., ‘Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of
Honor’. Biology and Philosophy. Vol. 24, No. 1, 2009, pp. 35-50.
Stocker, M. & Hegeman, E., ‘The Complex Evaluative World of Aristotle’s Angry
Man’. Valuing Emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
Uniacke, S., ‘Why is Revenge Wrong?’. The Journal of Value Inquiry. Vol. 34,
2000, pp. 61-69.
Related Readings
Allen, D.S., The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic
Athens. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1999.
Chamberlin, A.F., ‘On the Words for ‘Anger’ in Certain Languages: A Study in
Linguistic Psychology’. The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1895,
pp. 585-592.
Harris, W.V., ‘The Rage of Women’. Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to
Galen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003.
Herman, G., ‘Honour, Revenge and the State in Fourth-Century Athens’. Die
athenishce Demokratie im 4.Jahrhundert v. Chr. Franz Steiner. Eder, W. (ed),
Verlag, Stuttgart, 1995.
Konstan, D., The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and
Classical Literature. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2006.
____
, ‘Aristotle on Anger and the Emotions’. Ancient Anger: Perspectives from
Homer to Galen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.
Koziak, B., ‘Homeric Thumos: The Early History of Gender, Emotion and
Politics’. The Journal of Politics. Vol. 61, No. 4, 1999, pp. 1068-1091.
____
, ‘Aristotle’s Account of Anger: Narcissism and Illusions of Self-Sufficiency’.
Ratio. Vol. XV, 1 March 2002.
____
, ‘Aristotle and the Emotions’. Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Oksenberg-
Rorty, A. (ed), University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996.
Martin, T.W., ‘Sorting the Syntax of Aristotle’s Anger’. Hermes. Vol. 129, No. 4,
2001, pp. 474-478.
Stephen Banks
Abstract
The desire for revenge may be aroused by physical loss caused by the malicious act
of another. Deprived of what was his or hers, the avenger seeks to inflict retaliatory
damage on the transgressor. Yet a history of revenge, which confined itself to
disputes over material objects, would be impoverished indeed. Historically, the
desire for revenge has been peculiarly invited not by disputes over things, but by
conflicts over states of being, by those assaults upon reputation and by those social
humiliations, which although intangible, nurture the deepest feelings of enmity. In
the contemporary context one need only think of the spontaneous shootings in
violent neighbourhoods occasioned not by disputes over drugs or territory per se
but by the perpetration, sometimes unwittingly, of acts alleged to show disrespect.
My paper will examine social slights and social humiliations as instigators of acts
of violence, but it will do so in the very particular context of English honour
culture. It will consider what it was to be a gentleman, the nuances of social
placing and the particular social capital to be acquired by responding to slights by
challenging the offender to a duel. It will argue that the obligation to right a wrong
was particularly imposed upon gentlemen by the arrival, towards the end of the
sixteenth century, of a courtesy literature that was not afraid to contradict the
teachings of the Church. In its wake came duelling, an apparently somewhat severe
method of resolving honour disputes. I shall argue however, that in fact duelling
was a highly nuanced activity which evolved to both contain the desire for revenge
and to divert it into a system of reparation to be offered, perhaps paradoxically, by
the party offended rather than by the offender.
*****
Was it not from the fear of being called on for redress in this
manner, many persons whose fortunes and interest are large,
would, without scruple, injure and oppress their inferiors in those
respects...Money will carry through any thing; power and interest
Stephen Banks 17
__________________________________________________________________
will work similar effects, but, happy is it, neither will turn a
pistol ball, nor ward off the thrust of a rapier; otherwise
gentlemen who are deficient in riches, would be subject to
continual injuries and insults. 16
Notes
1
TB Howell (ed), A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 Vols, London, 1809-
1826, ii, col. 745.
2
Ibid, col. 747.
3
Howell, State Trials, ii, col. 751.
Stephen Banks 19
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4
Castiglione’s Courtier was first translated into English in 1561 and soon
inspired home-grown works such as S Robson, The Courte of Ciuill Courtesie
(1577), A Romei, The Courtiers Academie (1598) and W Segar, Honor Military
and Ciuill (1602).
5
Between 1603 and 1625 there were about 200 such cases heard in Star Chamber.
TG Barnes, List and Index to the Proceedings in Star Chamber for the Reign of
James I (1603-1625) in the Public Record Office, London, Class STAC8, The
Foundation, Chicago, 1975, pp. 159-163.
6
VG Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of
Aristocracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988, p. 48
7
M Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and
Honour, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 78.
8
T Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, F Tonnies (ed), Frank
Cass, London, 1969, p. 34.
9
N Tolstoy, The Half-Mad Lord: Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelsford, Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1978, p. 91.
10
Diary of Colonel Bayley 12th Regiment, 1796-1803 Army and Navy Cooperative
Society, London, 1896, pp. 113-4.
11
D Erskine & W Kimber, Augustus Hervey’s Journal: Being The Intimate
Account Of The Life Of A Captain In The Royal Navy Ashore and Afloat 1746-
1759, W. Kimber, London, 1953, p. 12.
12
ibid., p. 50.
13
L Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1965, p. 250.
14
S Banks, ‘Killing with Courtesy: The English Duelist, 1785-1845’, The Journal
of British Studies, Vol. 47, 2008 pp. 528-558, p. 554.
15
P Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992, p.
121.
16
S Stanton, The Principles of Duelling with Rules to be Observed in Every
Particular Respecting It, Hookham, London, 1790, pp. 21-23.
17
The Spectator II, 99 1794.
18
R Hey, A Dissertation on Duelling, Magdalen College, Cambridge, 1784, p. 77.
19
S Banks, ‘Dangerous Friends: The Second and the Later English Duel’ The
Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 32 (1), 2009 pp. 87-106, p. 91.
20
The Times, 16 June 1828 p. 6 col. f.
Bibliography
Banks, S., ‘Dangerous Friends: The Second and the Later English Duel’. The
Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies. Vol. 32 (1), 2009, pp. 87-106.
20 Dead Before Breakfast
__________________________________________________________________
Barnes, T.G., List and Index to the Proceedings in Star Chamber for the Reign of
James I (1603-1625) in the Public Record Office, London, Class STAC8. The
Foundation, Chicago, 1975.
Bayley, Col., Diary of Colonel Bayley 12th Regiment, 1796-1803. Army and Navy
Cooperative Society, London, 1896.
Bourdieu, P., Language and Symbolic Power. Thompson, J.B. (ed), Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1992.
Hervey, A., Augustus Hervey’s Journal: Being The Intimate Account Of The Life
Of A Captain In The Royal Navy Ashore and Afloat 1746-1759. Erskine, D. &
Kimber, W. (eds), W. Kimber, London, 1953.
Hobbes, T., The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics. Tonnies, F. (ed), Frank
Cass, London, 1969.
Howell, T.B. (ed), A Complete Collection of State Trials. 33 Vols. London, 1809-
1826.
Kiernan, V.G., The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of
Aristocracy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988.
Peltonen, M., The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.
Stone, L., The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641. Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1965.
Tolstoy, N., The Half-Mad Lord: Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelsford. Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1978.
Stephen Banks 21
__________________________________________________________________
Stephen Banks is a lecturer in criminal law and legal history at the University of
Reading and researches in the area of violence, honour culture and the
development of the doctrine of provocation.
The Anthropology of Revenge, Ancestral Wrath:
A Modern Day Dilemma?
Sheila C. Bibb
Abstract:
Anthropological thought has frequently encountered and acknowledged the role of
the ancestors in many societies. This role has varied depending on circumstances
and the specific situation encountered. In many instances this role is assumed to be
a relic of a former time and of little real consequence in modern society. However,
drawing on my own research together with current literature, I will examine the
role of ancestors within Ghana, South Africa, Namibia and Mali, along with
similar societies in China, Nepal and Tibet, to establish the current ancestral
beliefs, practices and attitudes. I will specifically focus on the impact these may
have on daily behaviour patterns and their effectiveness as forms of social control.
In so doing I will seek to answer the question as to whether the wrath of the
ancestors and their capacity for revenge might indeed pose a modern-day dilemma
for members of those, and other, societies.
*****
1. Introduction
Anthropological thought has frequently encountered and acknowledged the role
of the ancestors in many societies. Although this role varies depending on the
society, the circumstances and the specific situation encountered, the consensus is
that to become an ancestor is a primary goal during life and, once attained, the
duties or obligations may well be considered benevolent and passive. While this
may be considered a safe assumption to make, it is only that – an assumption. By
examining concepts and practices in both Asia and Africa, I show that there are
instances where the ancestors are believed to be active and display characteristics
where revenge, not benevolence, is the goal and the fear of incurring this wrath
impacts the daily behaviour of descendants. This in turn forms a means of social
control and both instances indicate a modern-day dilemma affecting beliefs,
behaviour and daily life in many societies.
2. Ancestors in Asia
There are certain ideas associated with ancestors in this part of the world,
which can be summarized as follows. On death the family of the deceased ensures
that all the necessary funeral rites are carried out, together with ongoing
ceremonies held at specific times during the following year(s). This not only
allows the deceased to reach full ancestral status but also facilitates their being able
24 The Anthropology of Revenge, Ancestral Wrath
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to function fully in their new state. Often a shrine will be built and strategically
placed within the home thereby ensuring that the person is remembered, honoured,
maybe even worshipped. In such instances the new ancestor will be seen as a
guardian, a protector, someone who will look benevolently on their family
members. However, even within these generalities there can be marked
differences.
Practices in China serve to demonstrate the point well. Rubie Watson1
describes burial practices among the Ha Tsuen who are primarily based in the New
Territories, a region in southeastern China adjacent to Hong Kong. Here the focus
is on providing a burial place for both the body and the soul. However, since the
local belief is that the physical remains serve as conduits or conductors for the
powers such as wind and water that originate in nature, then great attention has to
be given to where those remains reside. Here geomancy dominates and the link
between the ancestor, his grave and his descendants is strong and has measurable
consequences for all involved. Watson’s research, and also that of Freedman,2
indicates that the ancestors themselves are not thought of as having any special
powers. A failure to properly align the gravesite may result in a lack of worldly
success, but this is ones’ own fault, not that of the ancestor. In contrast, Emily
Ahern3 in her studies in northern Taiwan found that it is ‘the ancestor himself, not
the [geomancy] of the gravesite, [which will] bring good fortune.’ Here then, lack
of success may apparently be attributed to a disgruntled ancestor.
A further contrast is found in Tibet, where despite the strong Buddhist
influence, evidence may still be found of an older belief, that of Bon. While this
does not directly involve ancestors, it does facilitate a strong belief in spirits,
deities and ghosts. Both here and in China ghosts are thought to be the souls of the
dead who have died accidentally or who have failed to successfully achieve
ancestor status. Referring to the Gurungs, originally from Tibet but now found
mainly in Nepal, Mumford states, ‘the dead are nearby and recallable.’4 Here then
we see an instance of the dead who must be settled for their own sake and also to
ensure harmony and balance among the living. This is usually accomplished by
invoking the efforts of a shaman. Similarly, in daily living there is a recognized
need to appease the spirits and this is displayed by the rituals carried out within and
around each home as well as the ritual or symbolic objects that may be located
there.
In Nepal, Charlotte Hardman has investigated the strong belief in the influence
of the dead on the living in great detail5 as she examined notions of self and
emotion among the Lohorung Rai. In one chapter she describes in detail the
necessity of keeping the ancestors fed and happy. Failure to do so can result in
such diverse conditions as ‘illness’, poor crops, landslides, death of animals and
depression.6 Her book contains many references to the ways in which the ancestors
impact the daily life of the inhabitants and these are well summarized by David
Gellner in his review of Hardman’s book when he says, ‘The main causal agents,
Sheila C. Bibb 25
__________________________________________________________________
as far as the Lohorung are concerned, are different categories of ancestors who are
believed to be capricious and needy ‘like children’…they are a very real presence
for all the Lohorung with whom Hardman was acquainted.’7 These ancestors then
would seem to be less benevolent entities.
For example I can sit here and put down my mobile phone and
somebody comes along and steals it. So I can say, ‘OK, you have
stolen my phone,’ so what I am going to do maybe is say I will
let all the family members have tuberculosis and I will do it and
it will become lasting and you will see that the family members
have tuberculosis all the time. I will call on my ancestors and
they will do this and every man will die and you see that is the
spiritual tuberculosis.8
In this instance we see that the ancestors are manipulated by the living and used
as a mean to achieve revenge. This is introducing another dimension to our
understanding of ancestral behaviour and the implications here are far-reaching for
if a society truly believes that each one has the ability to call upon their ancestors
and ask them to perform certain requests then this must act as a form of social
control – particularly when it seems that these requests can be vengeful. There is
no evidence that the ancestors themselves are aware of or encouraging the
malicious intent of their descendants, yet the result – a family being stricken with
tuberculosis – is very real.
Moving to southern Africa, I wish to look briefly at beliefs among the Himba of
Namibia. Here we find a belief system which centers on Mukuru, an omnipotent
deity to whom the ancestors are subservient. Mukuru himself is believed to be born
of fire and every Himba homestead has an ancestral fire which forms a central part
of both daily and ceremonial life, being regulated by specific rules and
conventions, one of which is that the fire-keeper will approach the ancestral fire on
a weekly basis in order to communicate with Mukuru and the ancestors. Writing on
this subject, David Crandall records a conversation between a Himba father and
son:
Mukuru then does only good but the ancestors are not so constrained.
Sheila C. Bibb 27
__________________________________________________________________
In neighbouring South Africa much has been noted and written about various
belief systems and a constant theme has been the need to explain the misfortunes
which befall a family or individual. Adam Ashforth,10 in various writings,
discusses the normal interaction between ancestors and humans and then tells what
happens when the ancestors become angry. The examples he gives indicate that
rather than the angry ancestor actively causing harm to befall the object of his
wrath, he is more likely to withhold or modify the protection which he would
normally give.11 This negative application of ancestral protection and guardianship
highlights another aspect which may feature in our consideration, that of
indifference which may even result in the death of a family member.
4. Discussion
Whether passive or active, benevolent or malicious the ancestors are there and
are a force to be reckoned with. Failure to ensure they are respected, honoured and
fully-transitioned to their new status may incur ancestral displeasure at the least
and wrath in some instances, and may well be seen as a cause of current
misfortune. Occasionally there is the possibility that the ancestor is indeed
malicious and intent on wreaking havoc and inflicting abuse on family members
from beyond the grave. In most instances, there are ritual methods of appeasing the
offended ancestor and restoring harmony.
This leads us to consider daily practices and behaviour. If there are daily rituals
which when observed ensure the continued benevolence and protection of the
ancestors, then it behoves the family to follow these practices. Similarly, the
holding of feasts as well as the attention to graves and other obligations, should be
incorporated into normal life. However, these practices do raise questions about the
applicability of acknowledging ancestral wrath in today’s societies. Does this
actually pose a modern-day dilemma?
In all cases discussed the family or individual concerned either acknowledged
their belief in ancestral abilities and sought to meet all their obligations on a
regular basis thus adjusting their lives to accommodate all the requirements and
restrictions this might impose; or neglected or ignored the ancestor until some
mishap occurred. In both instances, there was an acknowledgement that no matter
what conditions might prevail in their specific society, whether this be advanced
technology, communication, higher education, medical advancements, travel or
any of the other attributes thought to comprise modern day living, these had to be
placed alongside an underlying belief in an invisible agent which impacted lives –
the ancestors. Here is where we really become aware of the dilemma in two ways.
First the practical application of essential obligations may interfere and even be at
odds with other secular demands upon the individual or family. Employers,
especially those who do not hold such beliefs, may well be less than
accommodating towards employees who wish to participate in lengthy or repetitive
rituals. Those persons who choose to leave their beliefs behind may nonetheless
28 The Anthropology of Revenge, Ancestral Wrath
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undergo some guilt or mental trauma at having done so. Also, as modern living
often necessitates working away from home and multiple relationships become the
norm, so families become fragmented and knowledge is lost. Ashforth, speaking of
some of his Sowetan friends said, ‘None of my friends attended initiation schools.
There are no formal institutions devoted to the teaching of custom or tradition in
urban areas.’12 So the important ceremonies and rituals, rules and obligations are
not automatically being passed on. A new generation is carrying forward the
beliefs but is unequipped to deal with them.
We have also seen the possibility of a wrathful or malevolent force acting as a
form of social control encouraging specific modes of behaviour. Conversely it can
also be abused and used by corrupt political or religious forces as a threat to
maintain power and authority.
5. Summary
Using examples from Asia and Africa, I have discussed the role of ancestors in
general and the ways in which they remain connected to their descendants. While
these are normally positive and benevolent I have also shown that when neglected,
the ancestors can become agents of revenge meting out punishment to those who
disregard them in an effort to bring them back into compliance. Whilst it may be
argued that the ancestors are not actually malicious, and indeed may even be
manipulated by humans, it remains a fact that if they are thought to be an
instrument of revenge, then all behaviour attributed to them assumes a role of great
importance. Traditionally it was possible to rectify any lapses by complying with
established rituals and restoring a balance to the ancestor-human relationship.
Today, with fragmented families, an increase in urban dwelling and a subsequent
loss of traditional knowledge it is much harder to overcome the perceived effects
of ancestral wrath. At the same time, the existence of these invisible agents of
revenge can be more easily manipulated and invoked by the unscrupulous and the
corrupt. For many the fear of incurring ancestral wrath may well impact their daily
behaviour, their beliefs, and also form a means of social control.
Notes
1
R Watson, ‘Remembering the Dead: Graves and Politics in Southeastern China’,
Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, JL Watson & ES Rawski (eds),
University of California Press, 1988, p. 206.
2
M Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. Athlone
Press, London & Humanities Press, New York, 1966, p. 143.
3
E Ahern, The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 1973, p. 185-188.
Sheila C. Bibb 29
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4
SR Mumford, Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in
Nepal, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI, 1989, p. 181.
5
C Hardman, Other Worlds: Notions of Self and Emotion among the Lohorung
Rai, Berg, Oxford, 2000, pp. 41- 56.
6
ibid. p. 45.
7
DN Gellner, Review of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (N.S.)
Vol. 9, 2003, p.601.
8
SC Bibb, Ghana Fieldnotes, Unpublished, 2005.
9
DP Crandall, The Place of Stunted Ironwood Trees, Continuum International
Publishing Group, New York, 2000, p.185.
10
A Ashforth, Witchcraft, Democracy and Violence in South Africa, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2005, pp.202-206.
11
ibid. P.202
12
ibid pp.203-204.
Bibliography
Ahern, E., The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village. Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 1973.
Freedman, M., Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. Athlone
Press, London & Humanities Press, New York, 1966.
Hardman, C.E., Other Worlds: Notions of Self and Emotion among the Lohorung
Rai. Berg, Oxford, 2000.
Watson, R., ‘Remembering the Dead: Graves and Politics in Southeastern China’.
Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Watson, J.L. & Rawski, E.S.
(eds), University of California Press, 1988.
Terry Scarborough
Abstract
Recent scholarship attempting to elucidate the nature of revenge has identified
recurring patterns in cycles of vengeance and questioned their connections to
justice. Notably, Jennifer L. Culbert identifies a perpetual cycle of reprisal, which
in its retaliatory nature suggests an incessant chain of vengeful acts rooted in
primal injury. Many attempts have been made to trace this cycle to primitive
cultures, and even to animals, through surveying cultural attempts to disrupt this
chain through blood sacrifice and other ritual practices. Culbert demonstrates
through her diction the very essence of revenge as unknown, haunting and fearful
through reference to a ‘specter’ to be ‘exorcized.’ Such attempts to understand and
master revenge then naturally suggest the ghost, specifically the ghost story, as a
means to mediate fear of revenge as a haunting reminder of and reaction to past
injustice and primal injury. Following contemporary theories connecting revenge
and justice, this paper will examine revenge as reflected in the ghost stories of
Montague Rhodes James. The analysis will span recent and Victorian analyses of
revenge to reveal James’s fascination with primal vengeance and reprisal as
reflected in the ghost story. I will examine James’s fixation on antiquarianism,
specifically the Gothic trope of the found manuscript and archeology, to reveal an
intricate commentary on the primal nature of anxieties surrounding revenge.
Positing that the ghost or specter functions for James as an archetypal reflection of
the human fear of vengeance and its resultant violence, I will address the common
claim that James’s ghosts are vengeful, and explain the nature and function of this
drive.
*****
Notes
1
EA Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, The Portable Poe, Penguin, Ontario, 1973,
p. 309.
2
MR James, ‘The Mezzotint’, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, Penguin,
Toronto, 2005. p .27.
3
Ibid., p. 25.
4
Ibid., p. 36.
5
Ibid., p. 35.
Terry Scarborough 37
__________________________________________________________________
6
Ibid., p. 36.
7
Ibid., p. 36.
8
Ibid., p. 36.
9
Ibid., p. 36.
10
Ibid., p. 36; emphasis added.
11
Ibid., p. 36.
12
Ibid., p. 36.
13
JL Culbert, ‘Reprising Revenge’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 1,
2005, pp.302-315.
14
Ibid., p. 313.
15
Ibid., pp. 302-303.
16
Ibid., p. 313.
17
James, op. cit., p. 35.
18
MR James, ‘The Ash Tree’, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, Penguin,
Toronto, 2005, p. 38.
19
Ibid., p. 38.
20
Ibid., p. 39.
21
Ibid., p. 38.
22
Ibid., p. 41.
23
Ibid., p. 43.
24
Ibid., p. 43.
25
E Westermarck, ‘The Essence of Revenge’, Mind: A Quarterly Review of
Psychology and Philosophy, Vol. 7.No. 27, 1898, p 289-310.
26
Ibid., p.295.
27
Ibid., p. 295
28
James, ‘The Ash Tree’, loc. cit.
29
Poe distinguishes in ‘The Cask’ between injury and insult, the latter being the far
more serious offence. Montresor states, ‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had
borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.’
30
Westermarck, op. cit., 19.
31
James, ‘The Ash Tree’, p. 50.
32
Culbert, emphasis added, p. 313.
33
MR James, ‘A School Story’, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, Penguin,
Toronto, 2005, p. 123.
34
Ibid., p. 124
35
Ibid., p. 125
36
Ibid., p. 126
37
Ibid., p. 126
38
Ibid., p. 127
39
Ibid., p. 127
40
Ibid., p. 127
38 ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you’
__________________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Culbert, J.L., ‘Reprising Revenge’. Law, Culture and the Humanities. Vol. 1, 2005,
p. 302-315.
James, M.R., ‘A School Story’. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Penguin,
Toronto, 2005.
–––, ‘The Ash Tree’. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Penguin, Toronto,
2005.
–––, ‘The Mezzotint’. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Penguin, Toronto,
2005.
Poe, E.A., ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. The Portable Poe. Penguin, Ontario, 1973.
Claudie Bernard
Abstract
The English word revenge has two equivalents in French: vengeance (revenge
proper), and revanche (a settling of scores). This paper examines the functioning of
these two concepts, as well as that of reprisals (the revenge of a group against
another group), and their bearing on the question of racial justice in the novel
Georges by Alexandre Dumas (1843). Georges is a free mixed-blood from
Mauritius who dreams of ‘killing the colour prejudice’ against the mulattos. In
order to prove to the whites that he is equal and even superior to them, he plans a
shining settling of scores: the conquest of the white lady. His settlement turns to
revenge when the whites threaten him, and, when they treat him like a ‘Negro,’
pushes him to lead the reprisals of the black slaves against their masters. In the
end, can the protagonist claim to have ‘killed the colour prejudice’ against the
mulattos? Obviously not. I interrogate the reasons of this failure, linking it to the
heroic model cultivated by the mixed-blood, that of the proud (white) knight
fighting a monster.
*****
The word revenge in English comes from an old French word (revengier), itself
from a Latin root (vindicare). Revengier has given two terms in modern French:
vengeance, and revanche. Vengeance (revenge proper) is a retaliation, which
responds to an offence, and renders a wrong for a wrong, in order to re-establish
the balance of justice. Revanche, which I will translate as a settling of scores,
responds not so much to an offence as to a humiliation, and consists in taking the
upper hand after having been defeated. Revenge hurts by returning the wrong done
by the other; revanche hurts by doing better than the other. In revenge, this other is
an offender, an enemy; revanche deals with an adversary, whose tactics it borrows;
for, in contrast to revenge, revanche presupposes an initial parity between the
parties. In addition to these two concepts, my paper will make use of that of
reprisals, which I reserve for the revenge of a group against another group.
I would like to examine the functioning of these notions and their bearing on
the question of racial justice in Georges, an adventure novel replete with exotic and
melodramatic elements, published by Alexandre Dumas in 1843. Dumas, a prolific
author of popular novels in the Romantic era, was a quarter black by his paternal
grandmother, a slave from the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti).
After the bloody insurrection in Saint-Domingue in 1791, slavery was abolished by
42 The Mixed-Blood Settles Scores
__________________________________________________________________
the French Revolution in all its colonies, but reinstituted by Bonaparte in 1802, on
the pressure of the planters’ lobbies, in spite of the resistance of rebel leader
Toussaint Louverture and the proclamation of Haiti’s independence in 1804. The
triangular trade was forbidden in 1815 - which did not prevent it from continuing
illegally -, and, following the example of the United Kingdom, the IId Republic put
an end to slavery, for economic as well as humanitarian reasons - a measure which
did not, however, put an end to imperialism, exploitation, and pigmentocracy. In
Paris, the debates surrounding these issues were very lively, and had strong
repercussions in literature: the Black, as cursed figure, superlative victim or
exceptional hero, made a good Romantic character, while urgently raising the
question of distributive and retributive justice (in Ourika by Mme de Duras,
Tamango by Mérimée, Toussaint Louverture by Lamartine, Bug-Jargal by Hugo).
Mulattos had been present in the colonies from their inception. Whereas a
relationship between a white female, precious property of the colonials, and a black
male was unacceptable, the fornication of white masters with their black female
slaves was common. The degree of hybridism of the offspring was carefully
classified, the slightest stain in the blood precipitating them into métissage.
Mulattos could be servile or free, free by birth or by emancipation. In spite of their
juridical rights, the free mulattos suffered multiple forms of discrimination;
demographically and economically active, occasionally slave owners, they were
perceived both as allies, and as a threat by the white minority. Their rancour
against this elite was all the more bitter as they dreamed of integrating into it, and
their brutality vis-à-vis the inferior masses was all the harsher as they wanted to
separate from them. In the Romantic period, the duality of the mulatto can elicit a
dream of ethnic reconciliation; more often, he is depicted as torn between his blood
lines, or as trying to assimilate to one while denying the other; too black for some,
too white for others, he accumulates the vices of both races, and excels in the role
of traitor (Habibrah in Bug-Jargal). And the female mulatto is all the more
disquieting as she is particularly erotic (Toni in Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo
by Kleist).
And Dumas? His rapport to his black ascendancy, which in no way prevented
his mundane, amorous, and literary success, is ambiguous. In his Memoirs, he
either omits it, attenuates it, or jokes about it. More disappointingly, he did not
support the négrophiles or the abolitionists, and only on a few occasions took a
position in favour of his ‘coloured brothers.’ Can one surmise that, along with his
contradictions, he bequeathed to his fictional hero Georges a share of his hidden
frustrations, and entrusted him with his revanche?
Georges is a free mixed-blood from Ile de France, a French colony in the Indian
Ocean, conquered by the British in 1810, and rebaptized Mauritius. Georges has
assigned himself a mission: ‘I came back here to realize a destiny […] I have a
prejudice to fight. Either it will crush me, or I will kill it.’1 This pre-judice, the
colour prejudice against the mulattos, is not only a hasty, false judgment: it is an
Claudie Bernard 43
__________________________________________________________________
unjust judgment, in view of a conception inherited from the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution, which declares that all men are born equal. Fighting racism
will be fighting for justice.
The novel starts with a bucolic description of the tropical island which the
narrator persists in calling Ile de France, a utopian, timeless topos. Unfortunately,
the island has been invaded by history. After evoking the nearby rock of Saint
Helena haunted by the ghost of Napoleon, ‘the modern Prometheus,’ the narrator
describes the heavily felt presence of the new masters of the territory. And the
beginning of the plot brings us back to the battle of 1810, in which the perfidious
Albion defeated the French.
It is in this context that Georges, then a child, goes through an original trauma.
His father, a rich mulatto ordinarily subservient in front of the master race - ‘he
ended up considering this supremacy not only as an acquired right, but as a natural
superiority’,2 yet hoping that colour preferences will be forgotten for the sake of
the endangered fatherland, offers his services to the Creole commander, M. de
Malmédie: he is scornfully rejected. The old man then takes the lead of a band of
Negroes and wrenches a flag from the enemy, which he gives to Georges to keep.
But Georges is beaten up by Malmédie’s son, Henri, who steals the trophy, strikes
him with his toy sword, and calls him ‘mulatto!’ To which Georges replies:
‘coward!’ an epithet which, beyond the hue of the skin, qualifies the very nature of
the person, the worth of his blood. The adults promptly re-establish colonial, that
is, white order. Georges, who has internalised the incident, looks beyond revenge:
what would revenge change in the colonial situation? He intends to confront the
prejudice which infects both the persecutors and the persecuted, ‘to fight with it
hand to hand like Hercules against Antaeus […]. Young Annibal, spurred by his
father, had sworn to eternally hate a nation; young Georges, in spite of his father,
swore to fight to the death with a prejudice.’3
Instead of revenge, Georges plans a shining settling of scores: he will prove to
the whites that he is equal and even superior to them, and, by his example, that the
mulattos are as worthy as them. During the fourteen years of his exile in France
and England, he strives to make of himself, through a series of physical and
psychological preliminary trials, a superman, and comes back to Mauritius in 1824,
a highly educated and accomplished young man, ready to ‘kill single-handedly the
prejudice which no coloured man had dared fight.’4 In the posture of an epic hero,
Georges will confront the prejudice as if it were a dragon. And in so doing, in the
posture of a courteous knight, he will conquer the treasure that the dragon keeps
with the utmost care: the white Lady.
The white Lady, the most desirable Creole on the island, is the niece of M. de
Malmédie, and the fiancée of Henri. In his quest for Sara de Malmédie, Georges
goes through several qualifying trials: the killing of a sea monster, the overcoming
of a tropical tempest, and finally the winning of the horse races, a contest in which
he appears as glorious in his immaculate costume as Lancelot in his first joust.
44 The Mixed-Blood Settles Scores
__________________________________________________________________
Gradually, Sara, whose life he has saved, recognizes his gallantry, falls for him,
accepts to be his wife. Yet, when he asks her guardians for her hand in marriage,
they scoff at him; Henri even shakes his cane at him just as, fourteen years before,
he had his toy sword. This gesture, which reactivates the original trauma,
transforms Georges’s desire for revanche into a thirst for revenge. Not the
impulsive revenge dictated by crude resentment though, but the more refined and
codified form current among high born people: the duel. The duel, a chivalric
institution, initially appeared as a way to control the violence elicited by animosity
between noble peers; as revanche, it presupposes parity between the parties. This is
why Henri, the pure blood, refuses to take up the sword against a mixed blood. To
force him to do so, Georges publicly administers him a lash of his horse whip
which, in his mind, constitutes ‘not only a provocation to a rival, but a declaration
of war to all the whites,’5 in his larger duel against the colour prejudice. Alas,
Henri’s response is to threaten his opponent with a flogging…‘a negro’s
punishment!’6
Treated like a black, Georges will turn to the blacks to pursue his enterprise. A
decision all the more complicated, as his father is an affluent slave owner! Of
course, accustomed to the ways of England and France, Georges treats his laborers
in a paternalistic way; he carefully distributes punishments and rewards, does not
let them be bullied by their guards, gives them decent living and working
conditions, in short, exerts a conscientious retributive and distributive justice - yet
the justice of a slave-holder! In its comic description of the primitive comportment
of the blacks - to the dismay of modern readers - the text participates in the
prejudice against them. The ambivalence of Georges’s position is embodied in the
novel by his two antithetical ‘brothers.’ His older, biological brother, is a slave
trader; a figure of the Romantic adventurer, he is presented as a good relative and a
good person, and, although heavily ironic in its account of him, the text avoids
condemnation as well as approbation of his traffic in human flesh. Georges’s
younger, spiritual brother, is a slave; he belonged to the brutal M. de Malmédie
until Georges, recognizing in him a generosity (from genus, extraction, race)
typical of a good blood, bought and freed him. This character, a mixed blood in his
own right (half Black, half Arabic), physically and morally superior, and
hopelessly in love with Sara de Malmédie, appears as a modest double of the
protagonist. He, too, is keen on fighting the colour prejudice - not in the camp of
the mulattos, but in that of the blacks.
This Mauritian Spartacus does not seek revanche, but revenge, collective
revenge, that is, reprisals; thirty years after the Santo Domingo insurrection, he
prepares the revolt of the oppressed masses, and designates Georges as their leader.
Whereas revanche and revenge pitted Georges against the guardians of his Lady,
the reprisals bring him up against the guardian of the public order: the British
governor. Anxious to maintain the status quo between the ethnic components of the
segregationist society, the governor was ready to force Malmédie to give his niece
Claudie Bernard 45
__________________________________________________________________
to Georges, in the hope of aggregating the mulattos to the Creole minority; when
Georges sides with the insurgents, the governor has him arrested. And to stop the
mutiny, he avails himself of a ruse: he has alcohol distributed to the brutes so as to
divert their vindictive violence; their ‘clamours of rage and vengeance’7 turn into a
hideous turmoil, and the heroic enterprise into a grotesque farce.
While his last companions are massacred by the governor’s troops, Georges
faces his supreme trial: a judicial trial, at the hands of a hostile tribunal which,
rather than inflict an impartial penalty, imposes the vengeance of a class. The
mixed blood receives his condemnation without flinching, and offers a last ‘lesson
of courage’ to his antagonistic public.8 At this point though, in conformity with the
pattern of the heroic quest, Georges’s supreme trial converts into a triumphal one
when his paramour, Sara de Malmédie, publicly proclaims that she is ready to
marry him. This event restores to Georges his epic aura:
he was a victor laid low at the moment of his victory.’ ‘By the
sheer influence of his personal value, he, the mulatto, had
conquered the love of a white lady […] Now, Georges could die;
[…] he had fought hand to hand with the prejudice, and, while
costing Georges his life, the prejudice had been killed in the
struggle.9
The mixed blood has settled his scores. Better even, since a novel of
melodramatic adventures requires a happy ending, Georges’s father and brother
suddenly come up and help the newlyweds escape by sea.
Let us ponder this ending. If Georges has settled his own scores against the
whites and, in particular, against the Malmédies, obviously, the prejudice has not
thereby been killed. What about the liberation of the blacks? It looks as if the slave
brother had been the sacrificial victim whose immolation allows the hero to
survive, as if the haemorrhage of black blood had symbolically cleansed his mixed
blood. And what about the crusade on behalf of the mulattos, only represented in
the text by Georges and his family? However mortified, the Malmédies and their
ilk remain the masters of the ideological terrain - that of prejudice, precisely. In
fact, Georges has been trapped in the heroic model, which informs his revanche:
the myths of Hercules, of Annibal, of Napoleon, of the knight crushing the
dragon…Firstly, it is never clear whether the champion of the mulattos, and
occasionally of the blacks, is fighting for the collective cause - ‘these men are my
brothers’,10 as a new Toussaint Louverture, or primarily for himself, savouring
‘that great revenge he was to draw from society, that great compensation fate was
to give him’?11 Obsessed with the healing of his narcissistic wounds, that is, of the
prejudice of inferiority from which he has suffered, he is eager to wrest a judgment
of superiority from the whites; the need for recognition pushes him to cultivate his
exceptionality, while the very formula of revanche incites him to adopt his
46 The Mixed-Blood Settles Scores
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adversaries’ criteria and models - among which the chivalric one - and, as his
whiteness is visibly imperfect, to exaggerate them; he is elegant to the point of
dandyism, generous to the point of prodigality, courageous to the point of temerity.
His pride and his pose isolate him from the blacks, which are at the crux of his
mixed nature, and at the core of the racial question.
Secondly, the heroic model locks him in retributive justice. In order to
eradicate a prejudice, a judgment intellectually erroneous and morally unfair, direct
confrontation is not enough. If the prejudice is a monster, it is a protean,
ubiquitous, treacherous one; in order to destroy it, one has to scrutinize and attack
the socio-economic infrastructures which generate it, the cultural foundations
which feed it; reforming them is the only way to extirpate the monster. In short,
beyond retributive justice, one has to address distributive justice.
Georges ends on an idyllic note. The mixed-blood and the white Lady got
married, seemed bound to live happily ever after, and to have many children -
children whiter than their father... In the meantime, where will the fugitive direct
their boat? Towards France? The mixed-blood do not belong to the ‘pure’ blood of
the Nation. Towards Europe, the land of the white lords? Towards Africa, the land
of the black supplies? Towards America, a land of immigration but also, in 1824,
of slavery? The novel abandons them in the void of the ocean, as if they had no
place anywhere. The novel of the mixed-blood is, finally, not as black and white as
it might seem.
Notes
1
A. Dumas, Georges, Gallimard, Folio, Paris, 2003, p.270. My translation.
2
Ibid., p.349. My translation.
3
Ibid., p.105. My translation.
4
Ibid., p.121. My translation.
5
Ibid. p.291. My translation.
6
Ibid., p.301. My translation.
7
Ibid., p.341. My translation.
8
Ibid., p.410. My translation.
9
Ibid., p.415. My translation.
10
Ibid., p.334. My translation.
11
Ibid., p.318. My translation.
Bibliography
Paula Guimarães
Abstract
Literature generally likes to illustrate the noble passions and not the more evil and
ignoble ones, like envy, jealousy, avarice, hatred or revenge. When these are
portrayed in the plays of Shakespeare or in a novel such as Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights, they are driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly
accumulates around them, they master the body and soul, the intellect and the will,
like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim into madness.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) took some of those terrible powers and made them
obsessive subjects in his poetry. Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in his
dramas and longer poems but also in the smaller compositions. The combination,
for example, of envy and hatred resolved in vengeance in The Laboratory is too
intense for any pity to intrude. But in A Forgiveness our natural revolt against the
work of hatred is modified into pity even though the ‘justice’ of revenge is
accomplished. Unlike many of his Victorian contemporaries, Browning
deliberately populated his poetic creations with evil people – who not only commit
crimes and sins, ranging from simple hatred to cold-blooded murder, but who are
also crafty, intelligent, argumentative and capable of lying. In this sense, the poems
we propose to analyse provide interesting snapshots of his speakers and their often
deranged personalities. By channelling the voice of a character, Browning explores
evil without actually being evil himself, allowing several forms of consciousness
and self-representation to emerge. He thus seems to question the artist’s
responsibilities (in his creations) and the direct relationship between art and
morality, issues that were only developed later in the century.
Key Words: Revenge, forgiveness, poetry, drama, Browning, Brontë, good, evil,
adultery, death.
*****
Good, to forgive;
Best, to forget!
Living, we fret;
Dying, we live.
Fretless and free,
Soul, clap thy pinion!
Earth have dominion,
Body, o’er thee!
(R. Browning, 1878)
50 Analysing Darker Motives
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The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written wisely and
sensitively of the psychological, moral and cultural foundation for revenge:
The primitive sense of the just – [...] – starts from the notion that
a human life is a vulnerable thing, a thing that can be invaded,
wounded, violated by another’s act in many ways. For this
penetration, the only remedy that seems appropriate is a counter
invasion, equally deliberate, equally grave.1
But other writings by Brontë, namely her Gondalian poems and Belgian devoirs,
contain those elements.8
Like his contemporary, Robert Browning (1812-1889) was a poet who saw all
life as a conflict, not only between good and evil but also between instinct and
intellect, the masculine and the feminine, trying to resolve the artistic dilemma
posed by a double awareness of things: moral and aesthetic. Like Brontë, he
developed a form of dramatic perception, in which inner and outer consciousness
could either split or become fused into unity by a single act of apprehension. What
his dialectical poems progressively offer is not so much the throb of passion, but
‘the psychoanalytic investigation of motives behind impulses which never
themselves get actualized.’9 Browning was interested in exposing the devious ways
in which our minds work and the complexity of our motives, but he tends ‘at one
further remove to refuse emotional involvement in the situations he evokes.’10
Like Emily Brontë, Browning believed that God had created an imperfect
world – one of falsehood and violence – as a kind of testing ground for man.11
There are few forms of human character the poet does not study, catching each
individual at the supreme moment of his life, and in the hardest stress of
circumstance, under which the inmost working of his nature is revealed.12 In
particular, Browning’s gallery of villains – murderers, sadistic husbands, mean and
petty manipulators – is a surprising and extraordinary one.13 Browning is interested
in demonstrating the moral-aesthetic dimension of this grotesque and violent world
mainly through the dialectics of human relationships, in particular those between
man and woman, inside and outside the institution of marriage.
We must now follow him into this region, in which he attempts to deal directly
with the speculative difficulties that crowd around the conception of evil, or that
which lurks within a being’s mind waiting to be inadvertently released by speech.14
Browning’s dramatic monologues start suddenly in the midst of things; the reader
is plunged abruptly into the midst of a consciousness, voicing its own assumptions
and limitations. His monologists go down layer after layer until they reach the truth
which is hidden in their hearts. 15
‘The Laboratory’ (1844), as its subtitle ‘Ancien Régime’ suggests, takes place
in France before the French Revolution and is in many ways a really sinister
poem.16 Browning presents a high society woman around the King’s court, who
52 Analysing Darker Motives
__________________________________________________________________
has been betrayed by her husband or lover with another woman and is determined
to get her revenge. She secretly visits a chemist who agrees, for a large pay, to
make her a deadly poison, with which she will be able to kill her rival. In a mere
forty-eight lines, the story develops full of vivid detail and we literally enter into
the psychopathic mind of the speaker, witnessing not only her raging jealousy and
sense of betrayal but also her utter fascination with the chemist’s work in the
laboratory (characterized as a ‘devil’s-smithy’). Masked for both protection and
concealment, she is delighted at the idea that the poison could be hidden away in a
ring and she wants actually to witness the moment of her rival’s death and the way
her face contorts in agony:
Although she sounds deranged and seems to have forgotten any moral norms,
the reader has to think of the corrupt world of eighteenth-century French
aristocracy and that this woman is determined not to be done down. In accordance
with the woman’s highly excited state of mind, the strong dactylic beat creates a
fast intense movement in the verse; in the same way, the poem’s combination of
envy and hatred resolved on vengeance becomes too intense for any pity to intrude.
Likewise, in ‘My Last Duchess’ (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842), the feelings of pity and
forgiveness seem inexistent on the part of the avenger: the lack of a final judgment
further implying that vice escapes unpunished. The speaker of the poem is a
powerful Italian ruler, who the poem suggests has had his ‘last Duchess’ put to
death for her familiar manner with other men, as a matter of masculine pride and
honour.18 But his late wife, though dead, has become a permanent part of his art
collection: ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / […] I call/ That piece a
wonder’.19 The Duke claims she flirted with everyone (‘her looks went
everywhere’) and did not appreciate his ‘gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name.’20
Nevertheless, his words betray the fact that the Duchess’s genuine depth and
passion contrast greatly with the Duke’s coldness and artfulness. As his monologue
continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in
fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behaviour escalated, ‘[he] gave
commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.’21 Having made this disclosure, the
Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage; the moral
horror is thus concealed until the last lines when the visitor he is addressing is
revealed as the emissary for this new arrangement. The smoothness and polish of
the Duke’s discourse contrasts with his perfidious and deranged character. He is
‘helped’ not only by Browning’s tactful use of understatement and omission but
Paula Guimarães 53
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also by the flowing fluidity of the poet’s rhyming couplets and the use of
enjambment, a subtle driving force behind the duke’s compulsive revelations.
In other poems of the evil passions the relieving element is pity, as in the two
compositions entitled ‘Before’ and ‘After’ (Men and Women, 1855), in which
Browning refers to the moments just before and after a duel.22 The first poem is a
statement of one of the ‘seconds’ that the duel is absolutely necessary. The
challenger has been deeply wronged and he cannot and will not let forgiveness
intermit his vengeance. Although the male reader may identify with that feeling,
his Christian or more feminine side seems to say, ‘Forgive, let God do the
judgment’. But, in the end, the passion of revenge will have its way and the guilty
one falls dead. In the follow-up poem, After, the perspective changes because
forgiveness begins to seem right and the vengeance-fury wrong; it appears that for
Browning the dead man has escaped (to heaven) while the living one cannot escape
the wrath of conscience; pity then becomes all that is left for the tragic survivor:
While the first poem seems to state the universal impunity of the moral sin
represented by the duel – ‘When the sky, which noticed all, makes no disclosure, /
And the earth keeps up her terrible composure’,24 the second one questions the
effectiveness of the deed for both the subject and his victim.
In The Ring and the Book (1868-9) Browning found his theme in the court
records of an old criminal trial: the case history of Count Guido Franceschini’s
murder of his allegedly adulterous wife.25 This is the poet’s treatment of the
conflict between good and evil in terms of domestic tragedy. For E. D. H. Johnson,
‘It not only presents a full-scale vindication of Browning’s intuitional psychology,
it also embodies the author’s moral and aesthetic philosophy.’26 But the interest
could be said to reside as much in its villains and half-villains. The conflicting
interpretations of the characters directly involved in this seventeenth-century
murder drama are skewed by their respective moral formations. ‘Half-Rome’, or
the representative of patriarchy run mad, concludes that Franceschini was within
his rights to murder his wife, Pompilia, presumed to have been having an affair.
The sentimental would-be feminist voice, representing the ‘Other Half-Rome’,
54 Analysing Darker Motives
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asserts that the wife was both honest and innocent and that the husband was a
murderer. The first speaker clearly aligns himself with the discriminating code of
revenge that is fashionable in their social circles:
‘Half-Rome’s phrasing is not only superiorly aloof but also narcissistic and
cruel: language acting as an index of character and moral insight. He supports
Franceschini’s revenge for its control and exactness and is oblivious to the sadism
implicit in his own viewpoint. Browning thus portrays Tuscan society as ruthlessly
stratified, filled with corrupt aristocrats, where women are traded in marriage.28
The same theme of adultery would emerge in A Forgiveness (from
Pacchiarotto, 1876), a sustained and subtle analysis of contempt, hatred and
revenge. Its ambiguous title marks how the feeling of pity accompanied and
followed the revenge, even if the justice of the act was finally accomplished on the
woman. The wife of a prominent Spanish statesman, jealous of her husband’s
dedication to his work, decides to take a lover as a form of retaliation: ‘Since my
right in you seemed lost, / I stung myself to teach you, to your cost,/ What you
rejected could be prized …’29 The unsuspecting husband is unable to carry out his
revenge there and then because he only feels a cold contempt for her: ‘I have too
much despised you to divert / My life from its set course by help or hurt of your
all-despicable life.’30 After some years of keeping up appearances, the wife
confesses her love for the deceived husband; but the dramatic disclosure of truth
causes a sudden change in the husband’s attitude, who now becomes obsessed with
the idea of killing:
Now was finally the time, he thinks, to accomplish his just revenge; he is ready
to forgive his wife if she dies there and then (a dagger in her heart) and writes his
pardon with her own blood.
Paula Guimarães 55
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The identity of the mysterious lover (symbolized by the cloak wrapped about
his head) is finally revealed when, in cold-blood, the husband suddenly kills the
monk in the confessional. Ironically, this is the same ‘Father’ to whom he had been
‘confessing’ the details of his revenge. These moments are thus postponed to the
very end, in accordance with the maxim ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’. The
husband comments that he despises a crime of passion, preferring those avengers
that wait for the right moment:
This close knowledge of the revenger’s mind allows Browning to conclude that
man can be good or evil and that it is the liberty of doing evil that gives the ‘doing
good’ a grace. Revenge and forgiveness are thus intimately associated for the poet.
It is this apparent mixture of shade and light in life, the conflict of seeming good
with seeming evil in the world that makes it a testing ground:
For Browning, good and evil are relative to each other, and each is known only
through its contrary: ‘Type needs antitype.’ How would forgiveness be understood
without the presence of revenge? The extinction of one of the terms would imply
the extinction of the other.
Notes
1
This feature is ‘remarkably constant from several ancient cultures to modern
institutions;’ so that the balance can be truly righted, Nussbaum adds, ‘the
retribution must be exactly, strictly proportional to the original encroachment.’ M
Nussbaum, ‘Equity and Mercy’ in Sex and Social Justice, Oxford University Press,
Oxford and New York, 1999, pp. 157-58 (my emphasis).
2
M Nussbaum, ‘Revenge and Mercy’, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 396.
3
The first great tragedies which have survived from ancient Athens and from
Elizabethan England – the Oresteia of Aeschylus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet – are
56 Analysing Darker Motives
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revenge plays. Both tragedies involve the shameful killing of a great king and the
adultery of his consort; both impose upon the son of the dead man a task which
either way will cost him dear.
4
In the primitive conflict of Beowulf and Grendel, the duty to avenge a slain
kinsman is absolute; but even Grendel’s mother seems to receive some sympathy
for her vengeance-raid and Grendel pity as a disinherited exile.
5
‘I was angry with my friend: / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry
with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow.’ W Blake, The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 1993, p.
40, 1-4 (my emphasis).
6
As Hillis Miller has stated, ‘both God and man are represented as waiting, with
ill-concealed impatience, through the legally required time of mercy and
forgiveness, until they can get down to the ‘pleasant’ business of doing justified
violence on one another to the limit of their powers.’ The Disappearance of God,
1963, p. 189.
7
Brontë, op. cit., Volume II, Chapter III, p. 159 (my emphasis).
8
The state of existence as a ‘fall’, which is described in the first chapters of the
novel, matches that of Emily’s Gondal poems, with their wars and rebellions and
sadistic cruelties. Love in the poems and the novel is a form of destruction, the
most shocking example of the law of nature which says that every creature must be
the relentless instrument of death to the others or himself cease to live.
9
EDH Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of the Poetic
Imagination in Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1952, p. 139.
10
ibid, p. 140. For example, the skill with which the protagonist in Fifine at the
Fair (1872) rationalizes his selfish desires, and thereby reduces morality to
conform to private convenience, shows how the emotions become the plaything of
intellectual casuistry when deprived of any ethical sanction (139-40).
11
Like Brontë, Browning was interested in dramatizing spiritual destinies. But,
unlike Brontë, was well aware that he had brought upon himself the hard task of
showing that pain, weakness, ignorance, failure, doubt, death, misery, and vice, in
all their complex forms, could somehow find their legitimate place in a scheme of
love.
12
Theories of the relation of mind and body, mental health and personality
abounded at this time, namely Thomas Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the
Mind (1820). Browning seems to have been aware of the developments of
nineteenth-century psychology, namely A Bain, The Senses and the Intellect,
published in London in 1855, and Emotions and the Will (1859), which together
could be said to mark the advent of modern psychology.
13
Browning appears to have been inspired by the Roman Stoic philosopher Lucius
Annaeus Seneca (1st century A.D.), who wrote a set of rhetorical plays based on
Paula Guimarães 57
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Browning’s afterwards move to his wife’s views are reflected in ‘Before’ and its
companion.
23
Browning, op. cit., p. 243-44, 3-12 (my emphasis).
24
ibid,15-16 (my emphasis).
25
The middle-aged Guido grows dissatisfied with his young wife, Pompilia, and
accuses her of having adulterous relations with a handsome priest who, like St.
George, had tried to rescue her from the dragon’s den in which her husband
confined her. Eventually Guido stabs his wife to death and is himself executed. In a
series of twelve books, Browning retells this tale of violence, presenting it from the
contrasting points of view of the participants and spectators. In its experiments
with multiple points of view, the work anticipates later novels.
26
Johnson, op. cit., p. 120.
27
Browning, op. cit., p. 627, 26-32. This code claimed that the deceived husband
had the right not only to take his wife’s life but also to disfigure her.
28
‘The reader is appalled to realize that this world should after all provide so fair a
field for the exercise of man’s infernal potentialities.’ Johnson, op. cit., p. 126.
29
Browning, op. cit., p. 538-543, 73-76.
30
ibid, 80-83.
31
ibid, 90-94 (my emphasis).
32
ibid, 121-126 (my emphasis). In the case of Sebald and Ottima in Pippa Passes
(1841), a collection of sordid tales of adultery, pity also rules in spite of the fact
that those two have slaked their hate and murdered Luca, Ottima’s husband. Their
crime only creeps like a snake, half asleep, about the bottom of their hearts. The
outburst of horror and repentance may be the greater in the end as Browning
introduces the pity of God.
33
Browning, from Francis Furini, 1881, op. cit., pp. 835-850, 39-42 (my
emphasis).
Bibliography
Abrams, M.H. (ed), The Norton Anthology of English Literature. W. W. Norton &
Company, New York and London, 1993.
Bacon, F., ‘Of Revenge’. The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Ld.
Verulam Viscount St. Albans. Authorama Public Domain Books, Viewed on 8 May
2010, <http://www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-5.html>.
Paula Guimarães 59
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Brontë, E., Wuthering Heights. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York,
1998.
Browning, R., The Works. The Wordsworth Poetry Library, Wordsworth Editions,
Ware, 1994.
Hawlin, S., The Complete Critical Guide to Robert Browning. Routledge, London
and New York, 2002.
Johnson, E.D.H., The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of the Poetic
Imagination in Tennyson, Browning and Arnold. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1952.
Nussbaum, M., ‘Equity and Mercy’. Sex and Social Justice. Oxford University
Press, Oxford and New York, 1999, pp. 157-58.
Petch, S., ‘Equity and Natural Law in The Ring and the Book’. Victorian Poetry.
Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 1997, pp. 105-111.
Esra Melikoğlu
Abstract
The ghosts, in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, attest to an unacknowledged cultural
crime- and consequent trauma- that must be both remembered and revenged: class-
division. Brontë’s servant character Ellen Dean’s story of masters/mistresses and
servants, into which she inserts the story of her own underprivileged life, expands
to a history of the crimes committed by both the feudal yeomanry and industrial
middle class against servants. This article aims at examining the servant’s role as
Nemesis, in which she unleashes her desire for retribution for the wrongdoing,
hubris and undeserved good fortune of her social superiors. Her surname, ‘Dean’,
alludes to the fact that she wreaks her retribution not merely as an individual, but
on behalf of an institution or community. Yet as the agent of retribution, Ellen
must renounce lawless retaliation. Genteel Lockwood lets blood, as punishment for
his class-arrogance, but the desire for bloodthirsty revenge is checked by the
concept of proportionate revenge or measure for measure. Lockwood is subjected
to humiliation, expropriation and exclusion, which are the traditional crimes
committed against the servant. It will also be argued that revenge is, however, only
the prelude to reconciliation. Story-telling is not only instrumental in the act of
taking revenge, but also in coping with trauma and reconciling the victim with the
offender. We see a foreshadowing of the concept of modern restorative justice, for
criminal Lockwood shall be reformed through Ellen’s tale. Restorative justice
encourages both the victim and offender to narrate the full impact of the crime on
his/ her life. Indeed, Ellen and Lockwood enter into dialogue as narrator and
recipient of a story, respectively. Although this dialogue suggests the possibility of
reconciliation, social reform, as envisioned by future-facing restorative justice,
remains a utopia.
*****
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights opens with a date, 1801, which ushers in
millennial fears, superstitious belief and the ghosts of an unresolved past. Like the
ghost of Hamlet’s father, Brontë’s ghosts haunting the Yorkshire moors attest to an
unacknowledged or half-acknowledged crime that must be remembered, revenged
and righted, for the future to begin. In Wuthering Heights, the ghosts attest to a
collective crime: class-division.
62 The Servant as an Agent of Retributive and Restorative Justice
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The dispossessed servant, Heathcliff, speaks of ‘‘painting the house-front with
Hindley’s blood’’1, but bloodthirsty revenge, despite the raging class-conflict,
plays surprisingly little role in the novel. The weapons Heathcliff uses against his
gentrified oppressors, Arnold Kettle states, ‘are their weapons of money and
arranged marriages.’2 Ellen Dean emerges as another underprivileged servant
character that adopts the strategy of like for like or proportionate revenge or
retributive justice. It is, principally, in her role as Nemesis, the dispenser of dues,
that Ellen exacts retribution for her social superiors’ excessive pride and
undeserved good fortune. Yet this proportionate revenge is only the prelude to
reconciliation.
The exchange of like for like, ideally, restores the balance of equality between
victim and offender. What Nemesis, in her role as arbiter of class-conflict,
redresses is not merely the balance between two individuals, but the classes in a
community. In Wuthering Heights, this balance is also redressed by a
foreshadowing of modern restorative justice practice. Carrie Menkel-Meadow
notes that this practice encourages both the victim and offender to narrate the full
impact of the crime on their lives. The objects are to make possible direct and
democratic participation, foster empathy between victim and offender, through
dialogue, and reform the offender and reintegrate him or her into the community.3
In the novel, both Ellen, the victim, and the pompous, genteel Lockwood, the
offender, engage in such story-telling. Yet, in the novel, this involves a certain
ambiguity. Story-telling is, at once, Ellen’s principal means of wreaking her
revenge on the recipient of her story, Lockwood, who is brought low by her
exposure of the pomposity and cruelty of his class as well as a means of fostering
in him sympathy for slighted servants.
Wuthering Heights, thus, brings together all the parties affected by the crime of
class-division and the tear in the social texture, in an attempt to restore a kind of
equilibrium: the victim, offender and the community as represented by the
Victorian and post-Victorian readers, who have access to both Ellen’s and
Lockwood’s narratives and act as the public conscience weighing each narrative
against the other. The collective injury, its root causes, implications for the
different parties, the proper balance between crime and punishment and the
possibility of restitution for the victim and reintegration for the wrongdoer and
social reform are contemplated collectively and dialogically.
The novel also ponders the question of who shall have control over crime,
punishment and reconciliation: the victim, offender, community, larger society or
the state? Ellen, in fact, is, at once, victim, prosecutor, advocate, judge and
executor of the punishment, which is, precisely, what the law upholding
impartiality tries to prevent. On the other hand, restorative justice, Menkel-
Meadow notes, argues for a ‘Personalized and direct participation’ of the affected
parties.4 Certain circumstances, moreover, appear to justify this privatisation of
justice. Ellen, actually, steps into a vacancy, since the law in Wuthering Heights,
Esra Melikoğlu 63
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proves to be corrupt- Heathcliff bribes the lawyer, Green, in order to seize Edgar
Linton’s possessions- and legislation regulating the servant-master/mistress
relationship non-existent. Cruel class-division is also a crime that quite some
portion of society and the law do not recognise as such. R. Posner observes that ‘In
a world without government and legal system’ or one that does not operate
properly, ‘the practice of revenge complements that of self-protection.’5
Again, Ellen is not merely an individual, but a representative speaking on
behalf of the professional group of servants. Her representational function as well
as the legitimacy of her judicial role are alluded to by both her surname, Dean,
which suggests a dignitary or senior member of an ecclesiastical or lay body, and
her role as trustee of Cathy’s and Hareton’s estate, trustees often being chosen
from among highly esteemed lawyers. It is, then, not merely the role of an
individual but a public servant that she occupies.
Ellen, ultimately, derives her legitimacy from a divine source, Nemesis. Some
of the goddess’s many attributes are also hers: Nemesis’ apple-branch is alluded to
by the apples that Mr. Earnshaw promises to bring Ellen from Liverpool, while her
avenging sword is translated into Ellen’s knitting needles. The act of knitting
functions as a metaphor for narration, which, as noted above, constitutes the
servant’s principal means of taking revenge. Nemesis, is, moreover, associated
with Fate. The implicit thread, thus, alludes to the thread of a story and of life, here
knit, rather than spun, by Ellen, in her role as Fate. Servants, who are said to peep
through keyholes and eavesdrop, possess a god-like omniscience, which
encourages, as Bruce Robbins states, ‘the notion of the servant as Fate, at once
avenging and arbitrary.’ The servants’ hands that feed their masters and mistresses
might, at any given moment, strike against them.6
Margaret Atwood answers her question of why she writes with a long list of
motives, among them: ‘To satisfy my desire for revenge’.7 It is in the space of her
story that Ellen exposes the cruelty of her superiors and her own suffering. Adam
Phillips points to the therapeutic nature of both revenge and story-telling: ‘If rage
renders us helpless, revenge gives us something to do. It organizes our disarray.
Revenge is one way of making the world or one’s life make sense. Revenge turns
rupture into story.’8 Ellen’s revenge exacted through story-telling, helps her to
cope with trauma, caused by her social superiors’ refusal to acknowledge her as an
equal. Trauma traps individuals into, usually, non-verbal, mechanical re-enactment
of it; it is through, eventually, putting the story of their injury into empowering and
liberating words that they recover a sense of agency and control and turn rupture
into a meaningful story. Her narrative of masters/mistresses and servants, into
which Ellen, covertly, inserts the story of her own underprivileged life, expands to
a history of the crimes committed by both the feudal yeomanry and middle class
against the dispossessed servants, who, in the Victorian period, represented one of
the largest and, at times, the largest professional group. Ellen is recruited from a
poor family to drudge as a legally unprotected and unpaid child servant in the
64 The Servant as an Agent of Retributive and Restorative Justice
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Earnshaw household. Servants were expected to self-sacrificially serve their
superiors; consequently, Ellen does not have a life and family of her own. As an
adult, she neither marries nor bears any children.
A crime involves damage to a person’s body, psychology, capacities to
function, life, plans, and/or resources. Joshua Searle-White, however, accentuates
that ‘Revenge seeks to right not the physical aspect of the injury, but the
psychological ones’ by restoring a balance of equality between victim and
victimiser. The aggrieved individual takes revenge ‘preferably by changing the
aggressor’s evaluation of the aggrieved. I want the mugger to recognize that he is
not better than me.’9 The desire for revenge is, basically, a desire for equilibrium.
What is restored, in Wuthering Heights, is, as noted above, not merely the balance
of equality between victim and victimiser, but the classes. Nemesis is an arbiter in
matters of class-conflict. Robert Graves states that ‘But if it ever happens that a
man, whom [Tyche or fortune] has favoured, boasts of his abundant riches and
neither sacrifices a part to the gods, nor alleviates the poverty of his fellow-
citizens, then the ancient goddess Nemesis steps in to humiliate him.’10 Ellen, as
Nemesis, brings low the wrongdoer, who believes that he or she is of greater value
than the socially underprivileged victim. She relates to the excessively proud
Lockwood: ‘I vexed [Catherine]’, that is, the daughter of the house, ‘frequently by
trying to bring down her arrogance.’11 The notion of equality also dictates the
nature of Ellen’s revenge: she must exact proportionate class revenge or measure
for measure. Joycelyn M. Pollock states that ‘retributive justice […. ] in an extreme
form…takes the form of lex talionis, a vengeance-oriented justice concerned with
equal retaliation (‘an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth’).12
Lockwood is, consequently, subjected to humiliation, expropriation and
exclusion, which are the traditional crimes committed against the servant. That he
is, indeed, on trial is suggested by his dream, in which he is publicly exposed and
excommunicated’, in a chapel. The sin Lockwood is guilty of is not disclosed, but
the fact that the congregation consists of the poor and that a servant, Joseph, proves
the first to physically assault him, suggests class revenge in adherence to the Old
Testament dictum of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. Lockwood, earlier in
the novel, attempts to acquit himself of the crimes of ‘underbred pride’ and
‘heartlessness.’13 He not only refers to Ellen, his housekeeper, at the Grange, as
‘My human fixture’14, but relates that his second visit to Wuthering Heights was
motivated by his disgust with a servant-girl raising dust in his room.
Brontë, too, emerges as Nemesis, as she, in an act of retributive story-telling,
treats or permits her servant characters to treat Lockwood like a servant. Robbins
states that the servant characters in literature are often reduced to butts ‘with much
the same repertory of comic gestures’, rather than being allowed to display any
potential for heroism and genuine suffering.15 George J. Worth states that
‘Lockwood is the only genuinely comic figure in Wuthering Heights.’16 The
servants ignore Lockwood’s wishes and treat him like a servant. In fact, the
Esra Melikoğlu 65
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servant-girl’s raising of dust, which threatens to rain down on him and thereby
pollute him, is not only reminiscent of the popular ‘motif of servant contagion’-
transmitted, as Robbins states, usually, through illness as a form of ‘accidental
class revenge’17- but will also reduce him to a sooty servant, who provokes fear
and disgust in the gentility. Ellen, moreover, turns a deaf ear to his request to be
served his dinner at a late hour, and the maidservant extinguishes the fire, thereby
crossing his ‘lazy intention’18 to spend the afternoon by the fire. Both servants
disrupt his leisurely life-style and treat him like air. Ellen, towards the end of the
novel, gives an irritated but complying Lockwood, who is going to the Heights, a
note for Cathy. A servant is treating a gentleman like a messenger boy.
At Wuthering Heights, the slapstick comedy culminates in Lockwood’s being
apprehended as a thief, by a servant, Joseph- in a reversal of the traditional
situation, in which the servant is accused by the master of stealing things in the
house- assaulted by the dogs of the house, pulled into the servants’ kitchen, and
poured over with ice-cold water by another servant, Zillah, to cure his nosebleed.
Lockwood must let a little symbolical amount of blood, despite the check on the
desire for bloodthirsty revenge. The gentrified ex-servant, Heathcliff, threatens to
cast Lockwood out on the marshes, in a raging snowstorm, as suggestive of
Lockwood’s subjection to the servant’s traditional fate of expropriation and
exclusion, and Zillah, finally, makes him sleep in the haunted room.
The servants’ collective revenge, in fact, not merely represents release of their
repressed frustration and fury, but prepares Lockwood for his role as recipient of a
servant’s reformatory story of the intertwined lives of servants and
masters/mistresses. Lockwood is forced into recognition of the servant’s existence
and tempering his pride. Yet he must also be incapacitated or laid low through
illness in order for him to prove willing to listen to a servant’s story. His severe
cold is as much the result of the contagious dust that the servant girl raises and the
cold water Zillah pours over him as it is of the cold weather.
Ellen and Lockwood commit themselves to a ‘Personalized and direct
participation in a process of speaking and listening’, which is, as Menkel-Meadow
notes, central in modern restorative justice practice.19 J. Hillis Miller points to
Lockwood’s role as reader, albeit an, at times, inept one.20 Yet the victim’s story of
the full impact of the crime on her life does succeed in re-educating the offender.
Modern restorative justice, Menkel-Meadow comments, ultimately, aims at healing
for the offender, the victim and the community in which they are embedded. It
‘usually involves direct communication,’ or mutual story-telling, ‘often with a
facilitator, of victims and offenders, often with some or full representation of the
relevant affected community.’21 Both Ellen and Lockwood tell their stories, but
Ellen, has no access to the offender’s story. Margaret Homans also points to the
possibility that Lockwood might have tempered with Ellen’s story.22 A ‘facilitator’
is absent, while the Victorian readers represented the ‘affected community’ and
contemporary readers, a global community. Despite some divergences, modern
66 The Servant as an Agent of Retributive and Restorative Justice
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restorative justice practice is foreshadowed in the novel. Lockwood’s remark: ‘I’ll
extract wholesome medicines from Mrs Dean’s bitter herbs’23, alludes to both the
servant’s story-telling as a means of revenge and of reforming the wrongdoer.
Towards the end of the novel, on his journey to a friend in the north, a sudden
impulse takes Lockwood, once again, to the Grange. His leaving behind his servant
and great civility to both the unnamed old housekeeper and Ellen attest to his
reformation. His gift of sovereigns to Ellen and Joseph, which he, with a new
consideration for the servants’ delicacy of feeling, evaluates as ‘rudeness’24, on his
part, shows that he is no longer the rich man who refuses to alleviate the poverty of
others and is, consequently, brought low by Nemesis. This gift also accords with
the practice in restorative justice to encourage the offender to offer ‘apologies and
material exchanges or payments’ to the victim.25 Ellen’s welcoming attitude and
offer of nourishing food and drink to Lockwood suggests healing and forgiveness,
on her part. His reformation and her forgiveness also pave the way to Lockwood’s
reintegration into the community. The man who recoiled from human
companionship, has already accepted an invitation to stay with a friend.
Yet modern restorative justice aims, as Menkel-Meadow points out, at larger
‘institutional and social reform.’26 Wuthering Heights, indeed, suggests the
possibility of healing and reconciliation for an entire class-divided community. At
the end, Ellen has risen to a position of relative power as the surrogate-mother of
Cathy and Hareton and trustee of their estate, while Lockwood adopts the identity
of a peeping and eavesdropping servant. At Wuthering Heights, he peeps into the
sitting-room and overhears Cathy and Hareton’s conversation, but enters the
kitchen, where sit Ellen and Joseph. Ellen’s story about the reconciliation of the
proud Cathy and the slighted Hareton, who too is of genteel birth, albeit, for years,
reduced to a servant by Heathliff, again, attests to the possibility of an equilibrium
between the classes. On the other hand, Lockwood’s encounter with an old servant
and child servant, in front of the Grange, as emblematic of the continuing exilic
condition of servants, suggests that reconciliation and social reform are rather a
utopia, than an actuality. Jacques Derrida warns that ‘Forgiveness is not, it should
not be, normal, normative, normalizing.’ When forgiveness aims to re-establish
normality, there is the danger of repressing an unresolved political and
interpersonal trauma.27 Modern restorative justice, Menkel-Meadow states,
similarly, advocates ‘forgiveness of the individual, without forgetfulness of the
act.’28 And it is haunting ghosts that ensure awareness of a cultural crime and the
need to right it.
Esra Melikoğlu 67
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Notes
1
E Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 2nd edn, Wordsworth Classics, Ware,
Hertfordshire, 2000, p.33.
2
A Kettle, ‘Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights’, Twentieth Century Interpretations
Of Wuthering Heights: A Collection Of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968, p. 38.
3
C Menkel-Meadow, ‘Restorative Justice: What Is It and Does It Work?’, Annual
Review of Law and Social Science, Vol. 3, July 2007, p. 10.3, Published online by
Annual Reviews, 2007, Viewed on 19 June 2010, http://www.law.georgetown.
edu/faculty/documents/MMRestorativeJustice.AnnuRev.LawSocSci.pdf.
4
ibid.
5
R Posner, Law and Literature- a Misunderstood Relation, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p. 34.
6
B Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction From Below, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1986, p.141.
7
M Atwood, ‘Introduction: Into the Labyrinth’, Negotiating With The Dead: A
Writer on Writing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
8
A Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery, Faber and Faber, London, 1998, p. 98.
9
J Searle-White, The Psychology of Nationalism, Palgrave, New York, 2001, p.
95.
10
R Graves, The Greek Myths: 1, 6th edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
1964, vol.1, p. 125.
11
Brontë, op. cit., p. 46.
12
JM Pollock, Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice, 5th edn,
Thomson Wadsworth, Australia et al., 2007, p. 109.
13
Brontë, op. cit., p. 3.
14
ibid, p. 22.
15
Robbins, op. cit., p. 6.
16
GJ Worth, ‘Emily Brontë’s Mr. Lockwood’, A Wuthering Heights Handbook,
Odyssey Press, New York, 1961, p. 174.
17
Robbins, op. cit. , p. 144.
18
Brontë, op. cit., p. 5.
19
Menkel-Meadow, op. cit., p. 10.3.
20
J Hillis-Miller, ‘Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the Uncanny’, Bloom’s
Modern Critical Views, the Brontës, Chelsea House Publishers, New York and
Philadelphia, 1987, p. 170.
21
Menkel-Meadow, op. cit., p.10.1.
22
M Homans, ‘Repression and Sublimation of Nature in Wuthering Heights’,
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, the Brontës, Chelsea House Publishers, New York
and Philadelphia, 1987, p. 93.
23
Brontë, op. cit., p. 112.
68 The Servant as an Agent of Retributive and Restorative Justice
__________________________________________________________________
24
ibid., p. 245.
25
Menkel-Meadow, op. cit., p. 10.1.
26
ibid., p. 10.2.
27
J Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Routledge,
New York, 2001, p. 32.
28
Menkel-Meadow, op. cit., p. 10.3.
Bibliography
Atwood, M., ‘Introduction: Into the Labyrinth’. Negotiating With The Dead: A
Writer on Writing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
Brontë, E., Wuthering Heights, 2nd edn. Wordsworth Classics, Ware, Hertfordshire,
2000.
Graves, R., The Greek Myths: 1, 6th edn. Vol. 1. Penguin, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, 1964
Miller, J., ‘Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the Uncanny’. Bloom’s Modern
Critical Views, the Brontës. Chelsea House Publishers, New York and
Philadelphia, 1987.
Phillips, A., The Beast in the Nursery. Faber and Faber, London, 1998.
Esra Melikoğlu 69
__________________________________________________________________
Pollock, J.M., Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice, 5th edn.
Thomson Wadsworth, Australia et al., 2007.
Robbins, B., The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction From Below. Columbia
University Press, New York, 1986.
*****
The paradox of revenge is that whether the victims are capable of perceiving
that they will not be entangled in an endless cycle of revenge and counter-revenge
and get what they expect. People assume that they can get even after they fight
back. But the cycle of revenge and counter-revenge will turn to be an irresistible
but unhealthy force that constantly disturbs the avengers and stimulates them to
stop or keep going. If they are aware that revenge is harmful, they will get rid of
the trap of revenge by means of forgiveness. If not, they allow hatred to stick in
their mind and remain in the cycle, as Heathcliff does. I will explore how
Heathcliff deliberately starts his schemes for revenge with his two motives,
belatedly awakens to see the absurdity of his hellish and meaningless existence,
and starkly dies as the only consolation he gains from revenge.
Catherine attempts to use her marriage as a means to let her remain in both the
cultured world of Edgar and the rebellious world of Heathcliff, but this attempt can
never be successful because Heathcliff decides to destroy everything when he
returns and begins his self-destructive journey.
3. Revenge on Betrayal
Catherine starts betraying Heathcliff when she decides not to behave like him
as the ‘vulgar young ruffian’ and ‘worse than a brut,’ but intends to ‘practise
politeness.’ 5 So a clear breach emerges as she marks her difference from him.
Heathcliff has no way to stop this ongoing breach and her forthcoming marriage;
he is conscious of his nothingness as a wide brute, which is the reason that makes
him believe he is degraded and chooses to leave. After a few years, he returns there
as a rich and civilised man, who looks ‘intelligent’ and retains ‘no marks of former
degradation.’6 Heathcliff realises that being with Catherine can never be fulfilled,
so he uses his wealth as a powerful weapon to destroy the cultured world where the
Earnshaws and the Lintons stay and believes his shameful degradation can be
erased by way of taking revenge on them in front of Catherine and letting her feel
regretful for what she has done to him.
Heathcliff’s scheme for revenge works out when he seduces Isabella to fall in
love and elope with him, forcing her to live in Wuthering Heights with hatred, and
also engages in battle against his abhorrent enemy Hindley. However, he is not
conscious of the death of Catherine, the unexpected and unwanted result that he
will never be ready to accept. Catherine does not want to lose neither Heathcliff
nor Edgar, but she is incapable of ending the uncompromising clash between them
and dies in sorrow and misery. Her unexpected death for Heathcliff is an
irresistible force, as her rebellious nature, that cannot terminate his vengeance. As
Cecil argues, Heathcliff is not ‘a wicked man voluntarily yielding to his wicked
impulses’ but ‘a manifestation of natural forces acting involuntarily under the
74 A Self-Destructive Path to Dead End
__________________________________________________________________
pressure of his own nature.’ 7 The death of Catherine reminds Heathcliff of his
unbearable pain of losing her forever, as he says, ‘Two words would comprehend
my future – death and hell; existence, after losing her, would be hell.’8
The death of Catherine stirs up Heathcliff so intensely that he cannot help
becoming ‘destructive’ at last as ‘a natural force which has been frustrated of its
natural outlet.’ 9 For obsessively lamenting his permanent loss of Catherine,
Heathcliff does not decrease his hatred but intensifies it so much that it severely
damages not only Hindley and Edgar but also the next generation.
4. Revenge on Loss
Midgley points out, ‘obsession is a possibility for all of us, and a danger to
many, because the balance of motives which we normally maintain is incomplete
and insecure.’10 Heathcliff’s obsession is more disastrous. His intolerable fear of
loss distorts his mind, leading him to be a violent bigot who falsely believes that
what he loses can be regained by what he possesses. His hopeless despair turns to
be an uncontrollable energy from the wildness that regards the next generation as
his despicable possessions, and takes revenge on them by confining and
maltreating them in the isolated world where he has been left alone.
After the death of his father, Hareton is ‘reduced to a state of complete
dependence on his father’s inveterate enemy,’ and lives as an inferior servant ‘who
is deprived of the advantage of wages, and quite unable to right himself.’11 In order
to take revenge on Hindley, Heathcliff teaches Hareton to ‘scorn everything extra-
animal as silly and weak’ and trains him as a coarse and uneducated person who
has already lost his ‘first-rate qualities’ from the Earnshaws.12
Linton, the son whom Heathcliff despises, is the next one that he shuts in
Wuthering Heights. As Heathcliff declares, ‘he’s mine, and I want the triumph of
seeing my descendent fairly lord of their estates, my child hiring their children to
till their fathers’ lands for wages,’ Linton is used by his father as a means to attack
Edgar and get the property which belongs to Linton when he dies soon.13 Young
Catherine is the last victim; Heathcliff is determined to let Edgar suffer by
compelling her to be Linton’s wife, as he expresses, ‘I desire their union, and am
resolved to bring it about.’14
Yet Heathcliff is not conscious of the difference between human nature and
possessions. He can cultivate evil in his nature remaining in hatred as he wishes,
but he is unable to foster evil in others if they reject, including his son. Everything
starts to change when Linton decides not to obey his father as a worthless and bad-
tempered boy. Linton cannot stop behaving wretched with his distorted nature
when he lives in Wuthering Heights, but he gives young Catherine a slight favour
by fetching her the key and letting her leave there and see her father before his
death. Linton’s favour strengthens her belief in love as well as weakens
Heathcliff’s power of revenge. Later on, by perceiving the spirit of Catherine and
viewing her image vividly reflected on Hareton and young Catherine, Heathcliff
Kuo-Ping Claudia Tai 75
__________________________________________________________________
belatedly awakens to realise peace that he longs for can be attained not by living in
an earthly hell with his futile revenge but by uniting with Catherine in their lost
world.
6. Conclusion
Emerson says, ‘A man’s fortunes are the fruit of his character.’25 Heathcliff is
sadly damaged by his character. He is not only a merciless avenger who destroys
the people around him, but also a poor human being who is deceived by his
misconception of revenge. As Neiman argues, ‘The problem of evil was
meaningless suffering.’26 Heathcliff is too late to understand that revenge is useless
because the only significant thing in his life is to unite with Catherine and stay
together in their ideal world of wildness. First, Catherine does not forsake the
Lintons but reproaches Heathcliff’s attempt to revenge, and she dies suddenly
beyond his expectation. Second, Heathcliff’s continuous cruelty to others is
senseless because it never brings dead Catherine back but let him live in
abhorrence ‘worse than the devil.’27 Heathcliff’s revenge is futile because he never
gets even and fulfils his wish. As Neiman argues that ‘we invented sin and
redemption. Sin gave pain an origin, and redemption gave it a telos.’28 Heathcliff is
unusual; he does not invent redemption but only sin in his entire life, which is the
means for him to express his unbearable pain of losing Catherine. Heathcliff
cannot regain the lost Garden of Eden, which symbolises purity and innocence,
when he becomes an avenger.
Heathcliff finally realises that Wuthering Heights and the world of wildness are
his heaven where he can fulfil his wish and stay with the spirit of Catherine, as
Nelly describes, ‘They [Heathcliff and Catherine] are afraid of nothing. Together,
they would brave satan and all his legions.’29 As his absurd existence in the earthly
world, the end of his life is the point that Heathcliff starts enjoying the unique
heaven which belongs to him. Goodridge argues that Wuthering Heights ‘leaves us
with a host of unanswered questions and embodies no consistent philosophy of
life.’30 Emily Brontë creates an extraordinary and wild figure Heathcliff, which is
doomed to reach his dead end by his self-destructive nature.
Notes
1
T Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge, Routledge, London, 2002, p. 2.
2
Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge, p. 9.
Kuo-Ping Claudia Tai 77
__________________________________________________________________
3
E Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Signet Classic, New York, 2004, p. 44.
4
D Cecil, ‘Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights’, Twentieth Century
Interpretation of Wuthering Heights, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1968, p.103.
5
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 65.
6
ibid., p. 93.
7
Cecil, ‘Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights’, p. 103.
8
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 144.
9
Cecil, ‘Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights’, p. 103.
10
M Midgley, Wickedness, Routledge, London, 1984, p. 151.
11
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 181.
12
ibid., p. 210.
13
ibid., p. 200.
14
ibid., p. 206.
15
ibid., p. 109.
16
RF Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, W. H. Freeman, New
York, 1997, p. 123.
17
F Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p.
194.
18
S Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002,
p. 212.
19
Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, p. 124.
20
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 277.
21
ibid., p. 308.
22
G J Mead, ‘The Social Self’, Pragmatism: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, Vol
1, Routledge, Abingdon, 2005, p. 273.
23
Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 220.
24
JH Miller, ‘Emily Brontë’, Twentieth Century Interpretation of Wuthering
Heights, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1968, p. 115.
25
RW Emerson, ‘Fate’, Nature and Selected Essays, Penguin, New York, 2003, p.
385.
26
Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p.216.
27
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 319.
28
Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p.216.
29
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 322.
30
JF Goodridge, ‘The Circumambient Universe’, Twentieth Century Interpretation
of Wuthering Heights, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1968, p. 77.
78 A Self-Destructive Path to Dead End
__________________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Baumeister, R.F., Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. W. H. Freeman, New
York, 1997.
Emerson, R.W., ‘Fate’. Nature and Selected Essays. Penguin, New York, 2003, pp.
361-391.
Mead, G.H., ‘The Social Self’. Pragmatism: Critical Concepts in Philosophy. Vol
1, Routledge, Abingdon, 2005, pp. 271-276.
Neiman, S., Evil in Modern Thought. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002.
Nietzsche, F., The Gay Science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe’s two later narratives ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) and
‘Hop-Frog’ (1849) can be interpreted as parallel texts which illustrate the
circularity of Poe’s poetics of revenge. In both tales, Montresor and Hop-Frog as
avenging figures adopt a Socratic approach whereby they conceal their real
intentions. Both characters display an analytical methodology to detect their
nemesis’ special vulnerability. Likewise, their strategy for revenge requires a trap
into which the victim must fall willingly so as to discover eventually he has
trapped himself. Nonetheless, this apparent sense of retribution is equivocal.
Despite his flawless execution, Montresor’s anxiety and guilt are ultimately
betrayed by his confessional recollections half a century later, just like the happily-
ever-after ending in ‘Hop-Frog’ seems to underline Poe’s acknowledgement that
only in a purely imaginary world can one silence his own enemy. A parallelism is
also established between victim and avenger as the victim of revenge invariably
reflects the self the avenger seeks to destroy. It is the aim of this paper to interpret
both tales as a unique narrative which displays Poe’s circular poetics of never-
ending revenge.
Key Words: Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘Hop-Frog’, poetics of
revenge, intertextuality, memory, circularity, confession, guilt, the double.
*****
1. Introduction
Having published several tales underscoring the nature of retribution and
ongoing enmity, Poe consolidated the poetics of revenge in his later tale ‘The Cask
of Amontillado’ (1846), amalgamating and perfecting many of the characteristics
he had already disseminated in previous tales of revenge such as ‘Metzengerstein’,
‘William Wilson’ or ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. Likewise, ‘Hop-Frog’ (1849), a
less explored piece, was Poe’s last tale of revenge, published only some months
before his death and including many features of the poetics of revenge he had
already presented in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. Both tales, including many
intertextual links that are repeated and reversed, can be interpreted as parallel texts
illustrating Poe’s poetics of revenge and the never-ending quality of retribution.
Taking these two tales as a point of departure, this paper aims at decoding Poe’s
poetics of revenge, identifying intertextual links between these two narratives, and
underlining the circularity of vengeance as illustrated in these texts.
80 Montresor and Hop-Frog Strike Back
__________________________________________________________________
2. Poe’s Poetics of Revenge
‘The Cask of Amontillado’ has openly been classified as a tale of revenge, but
it is also a tale of confession. Montresor, being unable to forget his crime after
fifty years, unfolds the testimony of his wicked deed, mentally enacting and
voicing each scene once more. His confession underlines both his vanity for what
he presumes to be a perfect crime, as well as foreshadows his necessity to recall
and retell his deed half a century later. As Fisher contends, once Montresor has
repressed ‘the ‘fortunate’ part of his being, he becomes fated never to forget that
event.’1 Montresor thus exemplifies two recurring themes in Poe’s fiction: analysis
and obsession. Even if he personifies one of Poe’s neurotic narrators, his
testimony of a carefully-projected crime endows him with the qualities of an
analyst. As Magistrale asserts, Montresor is coolly rational on the surface, but
truly raging inside.2 His painstaking confession responds to his analytical quality,
while his obsessive nature results in accomplishing his projected reprisal.
Vengeance and confession, obsession and analysis thus come hand in hand, just as
the public acknowledgement of retribution seems necessarily entangled in the act
of revenge.
Montresor’s analytical qualities are shown when he theorises about the nature
of ideal revenge despite his frenzied condition:
3. Ironic Doubleness
Montresor also relies on ironic doubleness, a Socratic approach, adopting a
manner which is precisely the opposite of his real intentions, thus confessing: ‘It
must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to
doubt my good will.’7 Montresor cunningly weaves a trap to ensnare Fortunato,
urging him to taste his Amontillado, but constantly repeating he should have asked
Luchresi instead. Montresor’s strategy of revenge requires a trap, in which the
victim must fall by choice, believing he is proving his own talent and genius even
if ultimately paving the ground for his own destruction. Following Poe’s poetics of
revenge, the snare should involve an element of play, since the victim must have a
choice. Fortunato must not be overtly coerced, as he should eventually know he
has trapped himself. The victim’s awareness of his inability to extricate himself
from the trap brings about the ascendancy of the avenger. Finally, the avenger
silences the enemy denying any sort of retaliation, as the victim is well aware
there is no one else to blame but himself for his misfortune.
After all, Fortunato is punished for his inability to read the signs Montresor has
carefully presented. It is due to his ineptitude to detect Montresor’s clues that
Fortunato meets his ‘unfortunate’ end. All through their descent into his family’s
vaults, Montresor wears a black mask, resembling an executioner, Fortunato is
conducted to a crypt, and so as to convince Fortunato he is a mason, Montresor
shows his trowel, which anticipates Fortunato’s end. Likewise, Montresor’s
display of his family’s coat of arms and its motto, nemo me impune lacessit (no
one offends me with impunity), can be interpreted as an explicit affront to
Fortunato. In any case, dressed as a jester, Fortunato remains mystified all the way
through, despite Montresor’s recurrent insinuations during their descent into the
vaults. The downward path to the crypt reflects both Montresor’s ancestry and the
decline of his noble origins, as well as his sinful fall into the caverns of his own
unconsciousness. Montresor methodically weaves his trap through the use of
language, in a sort of verbal duel, which reaches its climax when Fortunato
challenges him to prove he is mason. This particular episode will reverberate at the
end of the tale when Fortunato hopelessly asks for mercy and the love of God.
82 Montresor and Hop-Frog Strike Back
__________________________________________________________________
4. The Victim, Myself
In order to prepare for revenge, Montresor observes Fortunato to emulate him
and anticipate his movements, so that Montresor’s strategy inevitably entails some
sort of identification with his rival. The antagonism between both opponents lies in
their mutual resemblance as well as their reciprocal fear. Thus, the desire for
revenge is articulated along with ontological fear, just like violence is projected as
a reification of displaced anxiety.
René Girard pointed at a mimetic desire, a rivalry, a mutuality of desire which
enforces a perverse bonding. All desire is a desire to be, that is to say, the dream of
a fullness attributed to the mediator, who separates the subject from the object, thus
the desire for a certain object always brings about the desire of another person for
this same object. Consequently, each character develops an obsessive awareness of
the ‘other’, an intimate identification. They anticipate each other’s strategies and
assume their nature, so that the distinction between self and other becomes blurred.
The rival becomes linked to the attributes of the self we seek to deny, so in aiming
to destroy our rival we attempt to destroy our most vexing qualities. The attack
upon one’s double thus becomes a suicidal gesture; a mechanism of self-
destruction. Every wound is the reciprocation of a previous injury through a history
of enmity as the desire for ascendancy ensures the repetition of the exchange.
Aware that his own actions will prompt retaliation, the rival seeks his own
suffering, and this is how the economy of revenge ensures the recirculation of evil.
Revenge unleashes to strike the balance between rivals once their antagonistic
equilibrium has been disrupted and needs to be re-established. In this respect, Poe’s
‘The Cask of Amontillado’ can also be interpreted as a roman-à-clef. Critics such
as Reynolds have referred to ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ as Poe’s vindictive
narrative against two prominent New York literati, the author Thomas Dunn
English and the newspaper editor Hiram Fuller. Taking this background into
consideration, the narrator Montresor (Poe) seeks revenge on his enemy Fortunato
(English) for a recent insult, using their mutual friend Luchresi (Fuller) as a foil in
his scheme.8
5. Mirroring Texts
This assumed duality as well as the constant need to hide one’s intentions is
especially characteristic of the season. It is significant to notice that Montresor
intends to accomplish his revenge during the carnival festivities, either to mask his
activity or to insinuate his intentions. He puts on a mask of black silk, thus
signalling the role of an executioner, while Fortunato looks like a jester.
Nonetheless, both are disguised and they both present several points in common as
fitting rivals. Montresor seems to have released himself from his double, from that
part of the self he loathes. Thus, his final exclamation in pace requiescat, which
can be referring to both himself and Fortunato, seems to point at a wish rather than
a reality. Retelling the same tale after fifty years paves the ground for shaping an
Marta Miquel-Baldellou 83
__________________________________________________________________
unforgettable memory which never seems to reach its proper end. Consequently,
‘The Cask of Amontillado’, due to its ambiguous conclusion - as Montresor feels
sick at heart and can still hear Fortunato’s jingling of bells - can be interpreted as
an open-ended tale.
These two roles, executioner and jester, are also repeated in Poe’s last tale
‘Hop-Frog’, even though roles are eventually reversed through both stories. If
Fortunato, disguised as a jester, ultimately becomes Montresor’s victim in ‘The
Cask of Amontillado’, in ‘Hop-Frog’, it is the jester who eventually takes revenge.
The similar characterisation between Fortunato and the jester is particularly
striking and foreshadows a close parallelism that can be established between Poe’s
two later tales.
The mirroring effect established between Montresor and Fortunato, avenger and
victim, already pointed out by Gerald Kennedy, can be expanded and further
developed in relation to the King and the jester in ‘Hop-Frog’, as both tales
present many intertextual points in common. In tales of revenge, there is often the
need to give voice to the deed committed, which can be interpreted as an act of
narcissism, as an act of confession or as a sign of weakness on the part of the
avenger. The perpetrator’s sense of superiority vanishes when the victim ceases to
exist, consequently the avenger needs to enact the crime endlessly retelling the
same tale and echoing the same feeling in different tales. As Girard asserts,
characters in great fiction evolve in a system of relationships which reverberate
through different texts.
Having been immured in the vaults of Montresor’s family, Fortunato’s
appearance bears a close resemblance with the jester in Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’, wearing
motley, caps and bells, seeking to effect revenge. In contrast, Montresor’s
aristocratic origins and ancestral vaults render him closer to the King in ‘Hop-
Frog’. Thus, a reversal of roles has been articulated so as to underline the
circularity of revenge. However, as all characters are often in disguise, Montresor
also shares his wit with the jester, while the King’s mesmerized condition bears a
close resemblance with Fortunato’s inability to unravel Montresor’s riddles. In any
case, ‘Hop-Frog’ as a tale bears many parallelisms with ‘The Cask of
Amontillado’ to the extent both tales can be read as parallel texts mirroring each
other.
If Montresor and Fortunato accentuate the mutual resemblance between
perpetrator and victim, Hop-Frog and the King, despite being rivals, are also
84 Montresor and Hop-Frog Strike Back
__________________________________________________________________
counterparts and often complement each other. Gradually, the apparent difference
established between the King and his fool is reversed so as to show the jester’s
real wit and the King’s true foolishness. If Fortunato’s vanity was his expertise in
wine, the King’s vanity lies in his fondness of joking. Likewise, as rivals,
Montresor also shares Fortunato’s knowledge of wine, while the King and the
jester are both especially proficient in cracking good jokes. Despite these
parallelisms, the antagonism between rivals in both couples remains fairly
obvious.
Notes
1
BF Fisher, The Cambridge Introduction of Edgar Allan Poe, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2008, p.69.
2
T Magistrale, Student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Greenwood Press, London,
2001, p.92.
3
EA Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe,
Norton, London and New York, 2004, p.415.
4
JG Kennedy, Poe, Death and the Life of Writing, Yale University Press, New
Haven and London, 1987, p.139.
86 Montresor and Hop-Frog Strike Back
__________________________________________________________________
5
EA Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, p.415.
6
JG Kennedy, op. cit., p.137-8.
7
EA Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, p.415.
8
DS Reynolds, ‘Poe’s Art of Transformation: ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ in Its
Cultural Context’, New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1995, p.93.
9
EA Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, p.416.
10
EA Poe, ‘Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs’, The Selected
Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Norton, London and New York, 2004, p.422.
11
DS Reynolds, op. cit., p.99.
12
LS Person, ‘Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation’, Romancing the Shadow: Poe
and Race, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p.218.
Bibliography
De Quincey, T., On Murder. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.
Girard, R., Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. John
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1966.
Kennedy, J.G., Poe, Death and the Life of Writing. Yale University Press, New
Haven and London, 1987.
Magistrale, T., Student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Greenwood Press, London,
2001.
Poe, E.A., ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe.
Norton, London and New York, 2004, pp.415-421.
–––, ‘Hop-Frog: or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs’. The Selected Writings of
Edgar Allan Poe. Norton, London and New York, 2004, pp.421-428.
Iwona Bojarska
Abstract
Revenge is something that many attempted and so many more have lusted after.
Being such a powerful feeling, it corrupted the minds of those seeking revenge and
became a disdain for their targets. Regardless of the way revenge is acted out,
whether it is an instinctive act or a well orchestrated plot, it becomes a fatal
machinery aimed at the ones who did us wrong, and consumes many more that
become affected among it’s way. While conducting their mischievous plan,
avengers would let others get hurt in order to achieve the blissful satisfaction of
getting even. In my paper I investigate revenge in terms of how it is bound to
terminally effect not just the avengers and their targets but many more as, very
often, it also involves foreign agents who somehow get trapped in the process of
revenge and get sacrificed in order for it to take place. In my exploration of the
topic I relate to Modern English Drama in the writing of Alan Ayckbourn. In his
play, The Revengers’ Comedies, Ayckbourn portrays a magnificent example of
revenge where the two main characters, Karen and Henry, use each other to deliver
their punishment. Karen has lost her lover, Henry has lost his job and as a result
they both intend to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames. Luckily, Henry is
interrupted by Karen’s failed attempt and by helping Karen, he pulls himself out of
his dreadful feelings. Ironically, that suicidal interference of two people, that
initially saves them from hurting themselves, triggers a revengeful scheme that
results in a number of lives being cruelly destroyed.
*****
Revenge is often discussed in terms of whether the avenger has a moral right or
even a moral duty to avenge for the wrong that was done to them. Since the law
does not take sides on matters of affection, revenge may become the last resort
when the judicial system fails. Very often it is mainly the perspective of the
avenger that is being examined as well rather than the one of the victim, let alone
of those who are neither the avengers nor the victims therefore their impact is often
belittled. Regardless of the perspective, once put into motion revenge initially
affects everyone involved. The main focus of this paper is to examine why so
many have to be affected and must fall victim in the process of revenge even
though they may not necessarily be the ones at which the revenge is being targeted
at. Very often they find themselves involuntarily engaged in other people’s
conflicts. I would like to show that the number of victims and the extent to which
92 The Involuntary Casualties of Revenge
__________________________________________________________________
they are affected by the avenger is very much dependent on the very nature of
revenge itself and the way it progresses. In order to do so I will look at several
characteristics of revenge and demonstrate that regardless of the avengers’ reasons
or intentions revenge is bound to adversely affect more than just the avenger and
their targets. In my exploration of the topic, I relate to modern English Drama in
the writing of Alan Ayckbourn. In his play The Revengers’ Comedies, Alan
presents the corrupted results of vengeance and what effect it may have on those
involved; often unaware of the role they play in the process. Before I begin a basic
outline of the play is in order.
Two strangers, Henry and Karen, meet at one of the London’s bridges. Karen
has lost her lover, Anthony, who decides to go back to his wife, Imogen; Henry is
elbowed out from his job by Bruce Tick, but is also betrayed by his co-workers
with whom he worked for years and whom he considered to be his family. As a
result of their loss, they both intend to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames.
Luckily, Henry is interrupted by Karen’s failed attempt and by helping her
entangle the coat from the ironwork of the bridge, he pulls himself out of these
dreadful feelings. That crucial meeting results in a pact being made. Karen and
Henry swear to exact revenge for each other and even though Henry only seems to
sign up for the ride to enjoy the perks of Karen’s hospitality, Karen takes it more
seriously. Ironically, that suicidal interference of two people that, at least initially,
saves them from hurting themselves, in the end triggers a revengeful mechanism
that results in a number of lives being cunningly and at times cruelly destroyed.
Revenge is a powerful force but most importantly a very destructive one and
should not be justified in a society of high values and morals. In an ideal world the
victimiser would be punished for whatever harm they did, but once they escape
that justice, or the victim decides that too much leniency was given to their
offender, the victims may become the victimisers themselves. Even though they act
in the name of what they perceive as justice, the actions they take are not a result of
self defence but simply well calculated steps aimed to cause suffering. Social
psychologist, psychoanalyst and humanistic philosopher, Erich Fromm, suggested:
‘Revenge can be differentiated from normal defensive aggression in two ways: it
occurs after the damage has been done, and hence is not a defence against threat, is
of much greater intensity, and is often cruel, lustful and insatiable.’1 Fromm
separates these two: revenge and defensive aggression, and brings our attention to
the fact that revenge is a calculated mean of causing hurt rather than an instant
reaction to what someone has done to us. This is skilfully portrayed in the play.
Karen and Henry plan their revenge well in advance. Karen admits that herself and
Henry are ‘unquiet spirits, if you like, with unfinished business. The wrongs that
have been done to [them] have got to be put right. [They]’re never going to rest,
either of [them], until [they]’ve done that.’2 Exacting revenge for each other seems
like an excellent idea as this way they can easily escape justice. Karen admits: ‘It’s
brilliant. No motive. No trace. Cold, calculated revenge.’3 What follows is indeed a
Iwona Bojarska 93
__________________________________________________________________
calculated plan aimed to seek their victims’ weaknesses and teach their offenders a
bitter lesson by giving them ‘as much as they gave.’4
Karen does not waste time proceeding with her plan. She skilfully arranges for
the secretarial job description to include qualifications that make the position seem
less achievable. That reduces the number of applicants thus making her
introduction to Henry’s company much easier. At the interview Karen convinces
the only other applicant, Tracey, that the job is for ‘someone with glamour and
buckets of sex appeal.’5 Misinformed, Tracey tries to sustain the sort of image
matching Karen’s description, makes a horrible impression, and subsequently, is
turned down for the position. After being made a secretary to Bruce, Henry’s
detested ex work colleague who led to Henry’s wrongful dismissal, Karen quickly
manages to find his weak points. She leads Hilary (Bruce’s wife) to believe that he
is having an affair. Initially Bruce is unaware of what is going on especially that
Karen presents herself as a very unattractive woman therefore is of no interest to
Bruce. Hilary finally leaves Henry after finding a piece of lady’s underwear in
Bruce’s pocket, which ironically he empties out to give Hilary a present, but finds
Karen’s panties instead. As if that was not enough, Karen suggests that they all
meet and this way Hilary may find out for herself that Karen is of no threat to their
marriage. Bruce embraces the idea: they all meet but Karen turns up looking
attractive, even provocative, which only ascertains Hilary of her husband’s
adultery. Bruce finally realises he was being played all along. Not being able to
stand the pressure and as a result of his health issues, he collapses on the floor
gasping for air. At this point Karen reveals to Bruce who his true avenger is and
seconds later he dies. Bruce becomes Karen’s first deadly victim yet the immensity
of hurt she causes at this point is nothing compared to what she is capable of later
on, proving that revenge is never accidental, involves careful planning and always
involves innocent victims like Tracey or Hilary. Bruce’s death is Karen’s
achievement in the deal she made with Henry. Yet, it turns out that getting even
with Bruce is not satisfactory enough which leads me on to the next part of my
research.
Fromm describes revenge being of much greater intensity, which indicates that
victims are purely driven by emotion such as anger, hate, disappointment,
unreciprocal love etc. This is a key element when it comes to calculating the
number and a kind of victims involved in the revenge process. Once victims
become avengers their actions are purely based on these negative emotions, which
makes it very difficult, if possible at all, to reason with them. Revenge is therefore
more of a result of someone’s inability to process these emotions. Although the
way revenge is orchestrated may be a masterpiece in its form, it still comes from an
unstable mind. Such is the mind of Karen Knightly, a chief avenger and a trickster
in disguise, cunningly engineering for whom she sees as her enemy to be
destroyed. As Ayckbourn commented:
94 The Involuntary Casualties of Revenge
__________________________________________________________________
I just think [revenge] is a terribly strong emotion, it’s a
dangerous emotion, it’s as strong as love. It’s based on love
which turns to hate. It’s obsessive, it refuses to see reason. The
revenge of normal people lasts about 20 minutes. You have an
instinctive fury about what someone’s done to you, but with most
of us, thank God, the emotion passes. Otherwise there would be
very few people left alive.6
In case of Karen that emotion never passes. In fact, it gets stronger every time
her need for getting revenge is not sustained through Henry’s actions. Both Henry
and Karen hope that through their revenge they can regain their peace of mind, but
as they experience themselves, hurt and revenge cannot cancel each other out. This
can never happen as hurt, like any other emotion, has a sort of timeless quality.
Even though it may be weakened for a while by the act of revenge, it will come
back whenever the feelings of hurt are renewed. The process of delivering revenge
is therefore a way of rebalancing – the more guilt one feels, the stronger the need
for revenge; analogically the closer one is in getting even, his/her feelings of hurt
will lessen. This manifests itself in Karen’s behaviour and has a direct impact on
people around her.
Once revenge is delivered and Karen brings the news to Henry, instead of
seeing Henry celebrating, she sees him trying to back out. Karen’s need for
revenge is renewed and so she continues pursuing Henry’s ex co-workers. Within a
short time Karen manages to make another director die; Mr Seeds, a very nervous
man who comes back to work after a heart attack, rushes on the roof of the
building and jumps off as a result Karen communicating that they need to evacuate
as the whole building is on fire. Soon she takes another secretarial job within the
same company. It is Veronica Webb this time, a very shy and hard working girl,
that falls under Karen’s mischievous game. She is led to believe that her boss
Jeremy has fallen for her. As a result Veronica builds up strong feelings towards
Jeremy but when seeing Karen and Jeremy flirting she realises she was of no
interest to Jeremy, which basically breaks her heart. As much as we could try and
justify the way Karen deals with Bruce, it is hard to do so when it comes to the rest
of the company workers that become the involuntary victims of her actions. At this
stage it becomes very clear that Karen’s fury has no end and it is very doubtful she
will ever stop. The enormity of hurt that she causes in no way equals the hurt she
could have possibly received which becomes my next point of interest in this
paper.
People consider their own pain and suffering to have more meaning than other
people’s hence the need for the realisation of that pain, which can manifest itself in
the form of revenge. Applying the punishment makes the offence seem more
significant to us. It also makes others acknowledge the harm that was done to us.
Very often though, revenge carries more harm than the harm one experienced in
Iwona Bojarska 95
__________________________________________________________________
the first place, as is the case with Karen. Her reason for revenge is to make a
women pay for taking her lover, Anthony. It is not the men himself she blames, but
his wife, Imogen to whom he supposedly decides to come back after having a fling
with Karen. By protecting Anthony and blaming Imogen, Karen can both cling to
the idea that Anthony loves her and at the same time focus her negative emotion on
the easy target of revenge, which is Imogen. Knowing her reasons for getting even
and her inability to understand that she could be the one that is at fault, we can see
that there is no comparison between what she suffered and what she does to others.
Few scientists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology at University
College London have shown that we underestimate the amount of pain we inflict
on other people. They conducted an experiment during which patients were asked
to take part in ‘tit-for-tat’ situations. A fixed force was applied to one finger of
only one member of each group after which these were asked to apply the same
amount of force they received on their partners. The second group was
subsequently asked to apply that power back to the initial partners and that cycle
was carried out eight times. Scientists observed that by the end of the experiment
the force applied was 14 times greater than the original one. It turned out that in
some cases this amount doubled by 50% but still in most of them it went up by at
least a third. They observed that all participants consistently applied a greater force
when using their right index finger to directly match the externally applied target
force; they consistently underestimated the force they were applying because their
perception of the force was likely to be attenuated.7 This would partially explain
why so many fall victim of Karen’s hurt. She is not capable of keeping the level of
pain she endured same to the level of hurt she is inflicting on everyone else. Once
Henry announces his intentions towards Imogen have changed and that he now
plans on marrying Karen’s prime enemy, she feels defeated and betrayed. In her
rage, fury and disappointment, she sets fire to her house thus making herself, her
brother and her loyal servants homeless. In the end, she throws herself into the
Thames shouting ‘revenge’, which is the last word being said in the play. We could
only assume that by doing so Karen would hope to put some sort of curse on Henry
and Imogen’s new relationship. This only proves how strong and destructive
revenge can be and how far people will go with it, no matter who or what stands in
their way, even if it is themselves they eventually destroy. That finally brings me to
conclude on the subject of my paper.
Karen explains in the beginning of the play: ‘I’d kill myself when I had a very
good reason for doing so. A stronger reason than the reason I had for living. There
is a difference, I promise there is.’8 Regardless of the reasons one might have to
avenge and regardless of the way it is acted out, whether it is an instinctive act or a
well orchestrated plot, revenge becomes a fatal machinery aimed at the ones who
did us wrong, consuming many more along it’s way. Most importantly it comes
and is dependent on a human being who is very often corrupted, whose morale
may be questioned and whose actions are mostly based on anger and feelings of
96 The Involuntary Casualties of Revenge
__________________________________________________________________
hurt. While conducting their mischievous plan, the avengers would let others get
hurt in order to achieve the blissful satisfaction of getting even. Moreover
delivering revenge can never be enough in itself as even when served, the pain
remains. Revenge is therefore a short-sighted solution in dealing’s with one’s anger
and disappointment destroying the lives of anyone standing in its way, including
the avenger’s.
Notes
1
E Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Penguin, London, 1990, p.
386.
2
A Ayckbourn, The Revengers’ Comedies, Faber and Faber, London, 1991, p. 20.
3
ibid., p. 21.
4
ibid., p. 22.
5
ibid., p. 52.
6
A Ayckbourn, ‘The Revengers’ Comedies Quotes By Alan Ayckbourn’, Daily
Mail. 07 October 1991, Viewed on 17 May 2010, http://therevengerscomedies.
alanayckbourn.net/TRC_AAQuotes.htm.
7
SS Shergill, G Samons, PM Bays, CD Frith & DM Wolpert. ‘Evidence for
Sensory Prediction Deficits in Schizophrenia’, AM J Psychiatry, December 2005,
viewed on 27 April 2010, http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/162/12/
2384.
8
Ayckbourn, op. cit., p. 11.
Bibliography
Ayckbourn, A., The Revengers’ Comedies. Faber and Faber, London, 1991.
Shergill, S.S. et. Al., ‘Evidence for Sensory Prediction Deficits in Schizophrenia’.
AM J Psychiatry, December 2005, viewed on 27 April 2010, http://ajp.psychiatry
online.org/cgi/content/full/162/12/2384.
Key Words: Revenge, film, 1970s, victim, Nixon, framing, American Dream,
urban, crime.
*****
It is often said that revenge is sweet, but in the United States in the 1970s it was
better than sweet, it was a goldmine. Producers quickly discovered that they could
make revenge themed like Dirty Harry and Death Wish film with a small budget
and reap huge profits. Why were these films so popular? What was the responsive
chord that this subgenre of struck that made them resonate so powerfully within the
consciousness of the American people? Film theorist James Monaco best sums up
the relationship between the movies and vengeance in his 1979 book American
Film Now:
During the sixties and seventies, with war in Viet Nam, political
assassinations, and the rise of urban crime, violence became part
of our everyday life. Inevitably, the movie screen became
bloodier, and while movies about bad guys and antiheroes were
still popular, vigilante films became equally successful.11
The symbol of the decay of the social and legal system in 1970s America was
its cities. Cities were perceived as centers of civil unrest fermented by African
American radicals. Public spaces such as parks once seen as a slice of sylvan peace
for families were being occupied by radical elements of society where the rule of
law no longer applied. To that end both Dirty Harry and Death Wish portray their
urban settings as an insane asylum or war zone. During one night patrol Callahan
100 Revenge, American Cinema and Framing the Decade of the 1970s
__________________________________________________________________
views describes the people on the streets as ‘loonies,’ and ‘they ought to throw a
net over the whole bunch of them.’
Death Wish was even more blatant with its framing of the city as a place where
innocent citizens were in constant danger of being murdered. When Kersey returns
to New York City from his Hawaiian vacation he learns from a co-worker the grim
statistics regarding the number of homicides that have occurred in the city during
his absence. The co-worker then proceeds to compare New York City to a war
zone and all of the criminals should be confined to concentration camps.
Be it insane asylum or war zone it was up to Callahan and Kersey to take their
cities back not just from the lunatics and enemy combatants who ruled the streets,
but also from the liberal legal and social policies of the 1960s that had empowered
them in the first place. Callahan and Kersey must, through any means, impose their
moral vengeance for sake of the innocent victims, ‘The Silent Majority’ who have
been made powerless by, to use the rhetoric of Vice President Agnew, ‘liberal
intellectuals’ who he had a ‘masochistic compulsion to destroy their country’s
strength,’ needed an avenger to clean up the streets of the cities because the liberal
legal system would not.
Traditionally, in revenge tragedies ‘Revenge is perceived as the only to address
wrongs at multiple levels.’12 These multiple levels are exemplified in The Spanish
Tragedy that ‘represents Hieronimo’s revenge which is partly that of a grieving
father and partly that of a political scourge, a terrible cleansing of a corrupt state.’13
Both Death Wish and Dirty Harry work at both levels in relation to the revenge of
the grieving father and the revenge of a citizen against a corrupt state.
Paul Kersey in Death Wish is the literal grieving father seeking revenge against
the criminals who broke into upper middle class apartment murdered his wife, and
brutally raped his daughter who survives the attack but in left in a catatonic state.
Her assault is filmed in exacting and sadistic detail. Although Kersey does not
witness the rape the audience must observe this innocent wide eyed white young
woman apparently forced to commit unspeakable acts. Although none of the
assailants are black, one of them, who looks somewhat Hispanic, carries a can of
spray paint that he uses to not only vandalize Kersey’s home with graffiti but also
spray his daughter’s buttocks with red paint. This symbolic act of sodomy goes
beyond the assault on one young woman. Kersey’s daughter is not just a young
white woman she is all young white women. In the large cities of the 1970s the can
of spray paint was often represented not just as a symbol of vandalism but of all
urban crime often committed by violent Hispanic or black criminals. Death Wish
engages the audience to identify with the victim on a personal and social level.
Kersey’s daughter is being sodomized by a not just by a young thug identified as
‘Spraycan’ in the closing credit but also permissive social system that created him.
Steven Spielberg in his film Munich (2005) deliberately manipulates ‘the model
of victimhood so as to expose the underlying trauma that supports it.’14 The
narrative of films that focus on victimhood ‘encourage identification with
William Gombash, III 101
__________________________________________________________________
victimhood, and thus indirectly, extreme acts of retaliation and aggression.’15
Thusly, the rape of Kersey’s daughter not only forces the audience to identify with
Kersey, the grieving father, but also Kersey the American citizen betrayed by a
legal and social system that will not offer him justice. When Kersey asks a police
detective about the probability that the men who murdered his wife and raped his
daughter the response is a rather impotent, ‘Just a chance. In this city that is the
way that it is.’ Kersey vindictive fury against the criminals of New York City is
both the acts of a vengeful father seeking personal retribution and a vengeful
citizen seeking political retribution.
Harry Callahan is not the literal father of fourteen year old Mary Ann Deacon
who was tortured, raped, and murdered by an evil serial killer. The audience never
sees her actual father. Callahan is the symbolic father who berates the district
attorney and a judge who rule that Mary Ann’s killer must be set free because
Callahan broke the law that was created to protect criminal suspects like the man
who killed her. Callahan angrily snaps back ‘Who speaks for her?’ and ‘The Law
is crazy.’ Like Kersey in Death Wish, Callahan commits vengeance for both
personal and political reasons. The audience identifies with both Callahan and
Mary Ann Deacon as victims of a corrupt legal system. Therefore the audience
begins to see themselves as victims and conclude that men like Kersey and
Callahan are to be cheered and venerated for their willingness to stand alone
against a corrupt system that forces them to be vigilantes in the 20th Century.
The vengeance themes in both Death Wish and Dirty Harry are deeply rooted
in the social and political philosophy of The American Dream. Both films also
draw liberally from the mythic conventions of that most uniquely American film
genre, the Western.
After the attack on his family, Kersey’s goes to Tucson, Arizona for a business
trip. It is there where he receives the gift of the gun that he will use to eventually
exact his vengeance in New York City. Kersey also receives a lesson from one of
Tucson’s citizens of the efficacy and value of the American Dream. In Death Wish
Tucson is portrayed as symbolic of the Old West style of frontier justice, where
every law abiding citizens helps keep the peace with their guns the way their
forefathers did in the 19th Century. Unlike New York City, Kersey is told you can
walk safely in the parks at night ‘muggers in this here parts get their asses blown
off.’
In Westerns, communities were often an isolated ‘arena where civilized meet
savage in an interminable mythic contest.’16 The savages in Death Wish are
narrowly drawn from a progressively dominant African-American amalgam of
‘muggers, vandals and kids who carry spray-paint cans (they should be eliminated
too) prefer knives most of the time and thus wouldn’t be able to shoot first or
back.’17
While Kersey fights many unnamed savages, Callahan has but one powerful
Savage. His savage is a wanton sociopathic serial killer who is unnamed and only
102 Revenge, American Cinema and Framing the Decade of the 1970s
__________________________________________________________________
referred to as Scorpio. Scorpio is a hippie-like creature with shaggy hair, colorful
clothing, and even a peace symbol for a belt buckle. He is Scorpio in terms of the
Age of Aquarius. This nameless sociopath is a hippie, love child symbolic of
lawlessness and permissive of the counterculture, the spawn of pagan gods who
has been allowed to mutate and wreak havoc on the innocent because of a lack of
law and order. Scorpio is a straw man, grounded not in the realm of logic but in
an emotional dystopia of a right winger’s nightmare. Pauline Kael attacked the
simplistic portrayal of Scorpio as ‘pure evil’ who ‘stands for everything the
audience fears and loathes. And Harry cannot destroy this walking rot because of
the legal protections, such as the court rulings on Miranda and Escobedo that a
weak, liberal society gives its criminals.’18
The cultural significance of Dirty Harry Callahan may have begun with the oft
quoted ‘Do you feel lucky?’ from Dirty Harry would morph into ‘Go ahead, make
my day’ from the fourth installment on the series Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact
(1983). This phrase of tough-guy avenging bravado would become so iconic that in
1985 President Ronald Reagan would use it when he threatened to veto a bill, he
thought too liberal, passed by Congress. Most of America cheered Reagan
doggedly avenging another symbol of the 1960s.
Notes
1
J Monaco, American Film Now: The People, the Power, the Money, the Movies,
Plume, New York, 1978, p. 287.
2
K Yuill, ‘Another Take on the Nixon Presidency: The First Therapeutic
President?’, Journal of Policy History 21, No. 2, April 2009, pp. 139-141.
3
D Conley & M Ryvicker, ‘Race, Class, and Eyes Upon the Street: Public Space,
Social Control, and the Economies of Three Urban Communities’, Sociological
Forum 16, No. 4, December 2001, pp. 718-759.
4
B D’Arcus, ‘Protest, Scale, and Publicity: The FBI and the H Rap Brown Act’,
Antipode 35, No. 4, September 2003, pp. 718-741.
5
K Yuill, ‘Another Take on the Nixon Presidency: The First Therapeutic
President?’, Journal of Policy History 21, No. 2, April 2009, pp. 138-162.
6
R Dean-Ruzicka, ‘Vengeance, Healing and Justice: Post 9/11 Culture Through
the Lens of CSI’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video 26, No. 2, March 2009, pp.
118-130.
7
J McEntee, ‘I’ll give you acts of God’: God, the Father, and Revenge Tragedy in
Three Billy Connolly Movies’, 49-71, Salisbury University, 2009, p. 52
8
C Orr, ‘Kiefer Madness’, New Republic 234, No. 19, May 22, 2006, p. 17.
9
P Kael, ‘Forward’, Reeling, Warner Books, Boston, 1976, p. 16.
10
V Canby, ‘Screen: ‘Death Wish’ Hunts Muggers: The Cast Story of Gunman
Takes Dim View of City’, New York Times, July 25, 1974, p. 27.
William Gombash, III 103
__________________________________________________________________
11
L Bourzereau, Ultra Violent Movies: From Sam Peckinpah to Quentin
Tarantino, Citadel Press, Secaucus. 1996, p. 127.
12
J McEntee, ‘I’ll give you acts of God’: God, the Father, and Revenge Tragedy in
Three Billy Connolly Movies’, Salisbury University, 2009, p. 53.
13
Ibid., p. 55.
14
R Brand, ‘Identification with Victimhood in Recent Cinema’, Culture, Theory &
Critique, No. 2, October 2008, p. 167.
15
Ibid., p. 165
16
T Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formula, Filmmaking, and the Studio System,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1981, p. 48.
17
V Canby, ‘Screen: ‘Death Wish’ Hunts Muggers: The Cast Story of Gunman
Takes Dim View of City’, New York Times, July 25, 1974, p. 27.
18
P Kael, ‘Saint Cop’, Deeper Into Movies, Warner Books, Boston, 1973, p. 486.
Bibliography
Bourzereau, L., Ultra Violent Movies: From Sam Peckinpah to Quentin Tarantino.
Citadel Press, Secaucus. 1996.
Brand, R., ‘Identification with Victimhood in Recent Cinema’. Culture, Theory &
Critique. No. 2, October 2008, pp. 165-181.
Canby, V., ‘Screen: ‘Death Wish’ Hunts Muggers: The Cast Story of Gunman
Takes Dim View of City’. New York Times. July 25, 1974.
Conley, D. & Ryvicker, M., ‘Race, Class, and Eyes Upon the Street: Public Space,
Social Control, and the Economies of Three Urban Communities’. Sociological
Forum. No. 4, December 2001, p. 759.
,p
D’Arcus, B., ‘Protest, Scale, and Publicity: The FBI and the H Rap Brown Act’.
Antipode. No. 4, September 2003, pp. 718-741.
Dean-Ruzicka, R., ‘Vengeance, Healing and Justice: Post 9/11 Culture Through the
Lens of CSI’. Quarterly Review of Film & Video. No. 2, March 2009, pp. 118-130.
Fernandez-Armesto, F., Ideas that Changed the World. Fall River Press, New
York, 2009.
McEntee, J., ‘I’ll give you acts of God’: God, the Father, and Revenge Tragedy in
Three Billy Connolly Movies’. Salisbury University, 2009.
McGilligan, P., Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff. St. Martins, New York,
1989.
Monaco, J., American Film Now: The People, the Power, the Money, the Movies.
Plume, New York, 1978.
Orr, C., ‘Kiefer Madness’. New Republic. No. 19, May 22, 2006.
Schatz, T., Hollywood Genres: Formula, Filmmaking, and the Studio System.
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1981.
Yuill, K., ‘Another Take on the Nixon Presidency: The First Therapeutic
President?’. Journal of Policy History. No. 2, April 2009, pp. 138-162.
Claire Henry
Abstract
Recent rape-revenge films such as Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/
2004) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-Wook, 2005) display a post-
feminist emphasis on maternity, which impacts the nature of their revenge
narratives. In these contemporary variations on the 1970s exploitation genre,
revenge is never just revenge for rape – the heroine’s construction as ‘mother’ adds
an additional layer to raise the stakes and justify her acts of vengeance. At the same
time, her return to motherhood requires a transformative journey of redemption,
which results in an ambivalence towards revenge.
Key Words: Revenge, rape, postfeminism, maternal, Kill Bill, Lady Vengeance.
*****
Recent rape-revenge films such as Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 (Quentin Tarantino,
2003/ 2004) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-Wook, 2005) display a
post-feminist emphasis on maternity, which impacts the nature of their revenge
narratives. In these contemporary variations on the 1970s exploitation genre,
revenge is never just revenge for rape – the heroine’s construction as ‘mother’ adds
an additional layer to raise the stakes and justify her acts of vengeance. At the same
time, her return to motherhood requires a transformative journey of redemption,
which results in an ambivalence towards revenge.
While the classic rape-revenge narrative transformed the heroine from victim to
avenger, these contemporary variations focus on the heroine ‘becoming mother’.
This reverse transformation from avenger to mother is presented as a redemptive
journey in which the former femme fatale (sexual, violent and a neglectful mother)
gives up on her vengeance mission when her maternal instincts kick in. The
satisfying closure that an eye for an eye once brought for rape avengers is now
disavowed.
1. Kill Bill
The premise of Tarantino’s two-volume epic is the revenge by heroine Beatrix
(Uma Thurman) on her five former fellow assassins. Beatrix is raped multiple
times, shot in the head by Bill (David Carradine), betrayed by her fellow assassins,
buried alive, and worst of all, separated from her child (whom she believes to be
dead). This plethora of injustices is an example of how ‘maternal revenge
continues to be subject to… additional legitimating devices and/or punishment’.1
This gender double standard may partly explain the pressure Tarantino felt from
106 Maternal Revenge and Redemption
__________________________________________________________________
his audience after Vol. 1 to elaborate on the story in Vol. 2 (giving Beatrix a deep
maternal motivation in addition to the rapes and murder attempts). Kill Bill,
particularly Vol. 2, is more than an action, samurai, or Western flick with a basic
revenge plot; it becomes an interesting variation on the rape-revenge flick by
layering a maternal transformation narrative into Tarantino’s genre bricolage.
Through the course of this Oedipal epic, our heroine Beatrix does not only take
vengeance upon her former colleagues, she metamorphoses from warrior to
mother.
Beatrix’s maternal transformation can be summarized by looking at the
contrasting first and last scenes of the epic. Chapter 1 establishes Beatrix as pre-
maternal warrior, trashing a domestic space in her fight with redeemed warrior and
mother to Nikki, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox). With postmodern irony, a primal
scene plays out. Vernita is the Mother, penetrated by Beatrix’s knife; Beatrix is the
Father, in obvious phallic imagery she withdraws her knife from Vernita’s chest
and returns it to the sheath at her hip (emphasized in a close-up); and Nikki
(Ambrosia Kelley) and the spectator represent the child who witnesses this
intercourse or act of aggression by the father. For the child/spectator, the opening
primal scene has induced sexual arousal, castration anxiety, and laid the foundation
for an Oedipal drama to play out as the film continues. This scene establishes
Beatrix as masculine hero. In the role of the Father, she separates mother and child.
In the Last Chapter of Kill Bill, Beatrix meets her own four year-old, BB (Perla
Haney-Jardine), when she goes to confront Bill. It is only this - meeting her child,
whom she believed dead - that can finally disarm Beatrix. She has a second chance
at ‘becoming mother’. She had been castrated; now her child stands before her
alive. The motif of castration is iconic in the rape-revenge genre but usually
appears as the rapists’ punishment. Here it plays out on the body of the mother.
The castration anxiety which arguably underpins the genre now takes the form of
the mother’s loss of her child. Beatrix does not castrate as revenge, she takes
revenge for castration (the removal of her child from her body). The reunion of
mother and child resolves this castration anxiety and takes away her need for
revenge.
The importance to Beatrix of ‘becoming mother’ is reinforced in flashback as
she recounts to Bill the moment when she got a positive result to a pregnancy test.
She tells Bill that she is now motivated completely by wanting to protect her child.
This resorting to an essentialist assumption about all women having a maternal
instinct rings false within the world of the film. After journeying with Beatrix
through multiple deaths and resurrections, sharing in her trauma and her tough
training with Pai Mei (Gordon Liu), and celebrating her triumphant acts of
revenge, her sudden and extreme sacrifice in changing her life so completely
because ‘the strip turned blue’ is narratively (and to me, politically) disappointing.
A pre-feminist vision of the gendered separation of public/private spheres is
nostalgically reinforced.
Claire Henry 107
__________________________________________________________________
The issue is perhaps that Kill Bill is not just a revenge story, or even a narrative
of resurrection and transformation - Tarantino also seeks to make it a narrative of
redemption. By enforcing redemption, Tarantino affects a sort of reverse
transformation, similar to that identified by Jacinda Read in the maternal (proxy)
rape-revenge film.2 In maternal avenger films such as In My Daughter’s Name (Jud
Taylor, 1992) and Eye for an Eye (John Schlesinger, 1996), the mother of the rape
victim undergoes a transformation from mother to aggressor (a variation on the
classic transformation from victim to aggressor). The protagonists in Kill Bill and
Lady Vengeance undergo the reverse transformation - from aggressor to mother -
which is presented as a redemptive journey.
The problem with Beatrix’ redemption from a feminist film theory perspective
is that it is similar to that of the femme fatale’s limited choices in film noir. Noir is
‘often concerned with investigating and establishing the guilt of a woman’3 and she
must be either punished or redeemed for her transgressions as a sexual and violent
woman and a neglectful mother. It is worth keeping in mind here Mary Ann
Doane’s arguments that the femme fatale is ‘the antithesis of the maternal’ and not
a feminist figure so much as a figure of male fears about feminism.4 However, in a
postfeminist context she may be both. The redemption narrative can be read as
charting a contemporary feminist reclamation of maternity, a metaphor for the
feminist movement’s changing position on motherhood. At the same time, the
redemption narrative can be read as part of a trend of ‘representations returning…
to the idealization of woman in the home, which embodies patriarchal need to
control and restrict woman’.5 Post-9/11 American cultural, political, and religious
factors have likely also helped to determine the femme fatale’s fate here. The
femme fatale protagonist of Lady Vengeance similarly faces patriarchal and
religious forces pushing her to redemption, but negotiates her designations as
mother and sinner (within the narrative and Korean society) differently to Beatrix.
2. Lady Vengeance
Where Lady Vengeance differs from, or extends on, Kill Bill (as well as Park’s
previous revenge films, Old Boy (2003) and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002))
is the heroine’s search for atonement. This was Park’s intention, as he commented
in an interview while working on Lady Vengeance: ‘The third film in the trilogy
will be about a character who longs for salvation and atonement rather than anger,
vengeance and violence’.6
Lady Vengeance opens with Geum-ja (Yeong-ae Lee) being released from
prison after thirteen years served for the murder of six year-old schoolboy Won-mo
(Ji-tae Yu), a crime she was framed for by Mr Baek (Min-sik Choi), who
threatened to kill her newborn daughter if she did not confess. Where Beatrix’s
revenge came to an end with her maternal redemption, Geum-ja rejects the
redemption offered to her by a Christian minister and seeks redemption her own
way - via vengeance on evil child killer Mr Baek.
108 Maternal Revenge and Redemption
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Before the introduction of her daughter Jenny (Yea-young Kwon), there are
several ways Geum-ja is constructed as mother. She takes on a maternal role in
prison, donating a kidney to one fellow inmate, and poisoning a rapist in a
calculated act of proxy vengeance for another. The only actual act of rape-revenge
by Geum-ja is against this female rapist in prison, reflecting a postfeminist
perspective on rape, which asserts that men are not the enemy and that women can
rape too. Geum-ja’s gradual poisoning of the rapist is a maternal, benevolent act,
saving her fellow inmate from further abuse; her actions are not impulsive,
emotional, or a selfishly motivated personal vendetta.
A key turning point occurs in the vengeance narrative when Geum-ja realises
that Mr Baek continued to kill children while she was in prison. She gathers
together the parents of all the victims, screens videos of their children being killed,
and conducts a community meeting to decide how to deal with Mr Baek. Typical
of vengeance cinema, the aggrieved decide they cannot place their faith in the law
and choose violent retribution. Pragmatically dressed in raincoats, the parents sit in
a row and wait their turn, each careful not to go too far and kill Mr Baek until
everyone has had a piece of him. Our heroine mobilizes the community to take
revenge on Mr Baek, but communal revenge is linked with premeditation and
challenged as a valid response through the ethical and spiritual questions raised.
The tone of the following scene, in which the parents hold a birthday celebration
for their dead children, hardly feels like a celebration. This reflects director Park’s
perspective on vengeance, for while he understands it is a strong human desire and
difficult to resist, he states that vengeance can never be justified.7 Taking the
pleasure or satisfaction out of the act of revenge underscores this moral point,
questioning the righteousness of their act.
For Park, the victim to aggressor transformation (the transformation which
underpins rape-revenge) produces a sense of guilt, as opposed to a sense of justice,
triumph, empowerment, righteousness, or balance restored through an eye for an
eye. Park describes all of his protagonists in the revenge trilogy as suffering from a
sense of guilt, but it is in this third film with a female protagonist that the theme is
more fully explored, and guilt is linked to the heroine’s maternity and femininity.
The guilt attributed to Park’s avengers is exacerbated in Geum-ja’s case by her
construction as mother, reflecting Jacinda Read’s analysis of earlier Hollywood
maternal avengers: ‘these narratives constantly work to construct the mother not as
morally justified but as guilty’.8 Read attributes this construction to the deployment
of the codes and conventions of classic melodrama and its narrative drive that
pushes women back into the domestic sphere of home and family, legitimating a
backlash politics.9 Park appears to be drawing on (or playing on) the tradition of
South Korean melodramas in which ‘motifs of Christian redemption are mobilized
in ambivalent narrations of imperilled and sometimes fallen femininity’.10 It is
difficult to pin down an origin for the construction of Geum-ja as guilty because
the cultural archetypes of the madonna versus the slut, the self-sacrificing mother
Claire Henry 109
__________________________________________________________________
versus the neglectful working mother, and the femme fatale in need of redemption,
are so prevalent and film buff Park has clearly drawn on a range of these well-worn
images in creating Geum-ja.
The film can considered as part of what Kim Kyung Hyun calls ‘The
Remasculinization of Korean Cinema’ in his 2004 book of the same name. Kim
finds that in contemporary Korean films by directors such as Kim Ki-duk, women
are still objects ‘predicated on the patented image of mother and whore’.11 The
author asks: ‘Could a story ever be conceived in Korean cinema that focuses on a
self-centering woman who is freed from her duties as a mother or a wife, without
framing her in the convention of a vamp?’12 Park does not conceive of such a story
with Lady Vengeance, in fact the persistent archetypes are supported by Park’s
concept of gendered vengeance. He describes the male vengeance in Sympathy for
Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy (the other two films in the trilogy) as impulsive,
messy, and based on emotion, whereas Geum-ja’s vengeance is cold and
calculated, based on intellect more than emotion.13 Park condemns acts of
vengeance as ‘idiotic’ but sees value in Geum-ja’s motivation of redemption (in
contrast to the motivations of the male protagonists in the first two films). He
wanted to go against stereotypes of women as emotional or acting on emotion, but
consequently invokes stereotypes of the cruel mother or beautiful ice queen bitch,
which Damon Smith sees evoked ‘in terms of the color palette and the themes of
ice - the iciness of the revenge impulse paired with white, snow, and the idea of
purity. All of these revolve around the ways women have always been
characterized as particularly catty and vengeful’.14
The spectator is positioned to judge Geum-ja’s success (redemption) or failure
(guilt) by alignment with the victims - Geum-ja’s daughter, Jenny, and to a lesser
extent, the ghost of Won-mo. Geum-ja feels guilt for her role in Won-mo’s death
but the focus within the narrative is the sin of abandoning her daughter. Via the
abandoned daughter (the victim) Geum-ja is made to answer for this sin. Jenny tags
along as Geum-ja prepares her revenge, playing witness to her choices and actions,
as do we the spectators. She confronts her mother in a letter, insisting that she
apologize, and Geum-ja’s reply (read to Jenny in Korean and translated into
English by Mr Baek) illustrates the dynamic between mother, daughter, and
spectator.
Far from the reunion with her daughter ending her revenge mission (as in Kill
Bill), this face-to-face encounter demonstrates that Geum-ja will pursue her
revenge mission (and continue to try to justify it) even at the cost of alienating the
child and spectator. However the face-to-face encounter between Geum-ja and Mr
Baek in the following scene, which also heavily uses looks to camera, depicts
Geum-ja unable to bring herself to take her long-awaited vengeance and shoot
him.15 While she is battling out her internal conflict, Mr Baek’s phone rings,
leading Geum-ja to find the children’s charms he has collected. This is the turning
point in which her personal vendetta ends and she hands over the job of revenge to
110 Maternal Revenge and Redemption
__________________________________________________________________
the aggrieved collective. This pushing away of Jenny/the spectator in Geum-ja’s
letter precipitates the need to see her maternal redemption, her self-sacrifice in
helping other mourning parents take revenge. While at this point the spectator may
still desire to see Mr Baek punished, we are not invested in seeing Geum-ja
personally take the pleasure in it.
The spectator’s (ethical) relationship to the protagonist is fostered through these
face-to-face encounters. In analysing the films of Kim Ki-duk, Steve Choe draws
on Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ‘the question of ethics is emblemized by the
face-to-face encounter, a moment that discloses to the I the infinite separation
between itself and other’.16 This separation is played out visually and narratively in
the scene when Geum-ja reads her letter. It is a potentially traumatic separation for
the daughter/spectator as it entails an acknowledgement of independence between
self and other, mother and child, protagonist and spectator. Jenny/the spectator is
invited to make ethical judgement when she comes face-to-face with Geum-ja, and
again when Geum-ja is face-to-face with Mr Baek and finds that she cannot kill
him. No matter if vengeance is desired so strongly that one dreams about it (as
Geum-ja does), its justification is ethically questioned - perhaps ethically
impossible - in a face-to-face encounter.
Direct to camera looks are frequent in Lady Vengeance and the other two films
in Park Chan-wook’s revenge trilogy, particularly by the protagonists. As in the
scene discussed above, this technique invites the spectator into an ethical
intersubjective relationship with the protagonist and to engage with themes of
revenge and redemption. Where Kill Bill uses Hollywood film language to direct
the spectator to identify with the protagonist, Lady Vengeance uses direct address
to align you with the child who is brought face-to-face with Geum-ja in their
reunion, and like Jenny, the spectator seeks justification and atonement from
Geum-ja. The way that the face is exposed and vulnerable and challenging in these
face-to-face looks unsettles the spectatorial desire for vengeance, making the
revenge mission more ethically complex.
The ethical complexity of revenge in Lady Vengeance, like the emphasis on the
cyclical nature of revenge in Kill Bill, contributes to the image of the maternal
avenger as being in need of redemption. In the 1980s and 1990s proxy maternal
avenger films, the maternal layer added a new right ideology of family values into
the genre and diverted the subversive feminist politics seen in other rape-revenge. 17
As my discussion of Kill Bill and Lady Vengeance has sought to demonstrate, this
ideological project has been perpetuated in twenty-first century articulations of the
genre.
Claire Henry 111
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Notes
1
J Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity, and the Rape-Revenge Cycle,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 236.
2
Ibid., 2000, pp. 205-40.
3
Ibid., 2000, 221.
4
MA Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis,
Routledge, London, 1991, p. 2.
5
EA Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and
Melodrama, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 215.
6
R Cline, ‘Humour in Revenge: A Chat with Korean Filmmaker Park Chan-wook’,
Shadows on the Wall, 2004. Accessed 15/01/2010, http://www.shadows.wall.net/
features/sw-park1.htm, p. 1.
7
P Chan-wook, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, DVD interview.
8
Read, op. cit., 2000, p. 226.
9
Read, op. cit., 2000, p. 18.
10
N Abelmann & K McHugh, ‘Introduction: Gender, Genre, and Nation’, South
Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, Wayne
State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 2005, p. 9.
11
KH Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Duke University Press,
Durham and London, 2004, p. 9.
12
Ibid., 2004, p. 9.
13
P Chan-wook, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-Wook, 2005), DVD
interview.
14
D Smith, ‘Acts of Revenge: Director Park Chan-wook Discusses Lady
Vengeance and More’, Bright Lights Film Journal, Iss. 53, August 2006. Accessed
19/3/2010. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/53/parkiv.php
15
Note that Mr Baek does not undergo any such confrontation with his conscience.
Despite that Geum-ja played a lesser role in the death of Won-mo, the film
continues the common trope in patriarchy, postfeminism, psychoanalysis, film noir
and melodrama, of directing anger and blame toward the mother figure and seeking
her redemption.
16
S Choe, ‘Kim Ki-duk’s Cinema of Cruelty: Ethics and Spectatorship in the
Global Economy,’ Positions, Vol. 15 iss. 1, 2007, p. 66.
17
Read, op. cit., 2000, p. 216.
Bibliography
Abelmann, N. & Choi, J., ‘‘Just Because’: Comedy, Melodrama and Youth
Violence in Attack The Gas Station’. New Korean Cinema. Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh, 2005.
112 Maternal Revenge and Redemption
__________________________________________________________________
Abelmann, N. & McHugh, K., ‘Introduction: Gender, Genre, and Nation’. South
Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema. Wayne
State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 2005.
Choe, S., ‘Kim Ki-duk’s Cinema of Cruelty: Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global
Economy’. Positions. Vol. 15, Iss. 1, 2007, pp. 65-90.
Cline, R., ‘Humour in Revenge: A Chat with Korean Filmmaker Park Chan-wook’.
Shadows on the Wall. 2004. Accessed 15/01/2010, http://www.shadows.wall.
net/features/sw-park1.htm.
Forna, A., Mother of All Myths: How Society Moulds and Constrains Mothers.
HarperCollins, London, 1998.
Gombeaud, A., ‘Joint Security Area’. The Cinema of Japan and Korea. Wallflower
Press, London, 2004.
Le Cain, M., ‘Tarantino and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema.’ Senses of Cinema,
vol. 32, July-Sept 2004. Accessed 19/3/2010. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/
contents/04/32/tarantino.html.
Read, J., The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity, and the Rape-Revenge Cycle.
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000.
Smith, D., ‘Acts of Revenge: Director Park Chan-wook Discusses Lady Vengeance
and More’. Bright Lights Film Journal. Iss. 53, August 2006. Accessed 19/3/2010.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/53/parkiv.php
Filmography
Eye for an Eye (John Schlesinger, 1996).
Timothy McKenry
Abstract
The death, during a camping trip in central Australia, of the nine-week-old baby,
Azaria Chamberlain, and the subsequent trial, imprisonment and eventual
exoneration of her mother, Lindy, for the murder of the child was a seminal event
in recent Australian social history. The issues raised by this event, including
sexism, racism, sectarianism and the abuse of power, left deep scars on the
Australian psyche as the reaction of the Australian public throughout the incident
diverged from the prevailing view of Australian identity as one characterised by
‘mate-ship’, egalitarianism, and a ‘fair-go’. This paper examines how Moya
Henderson’s opera Lindy, functions not only to tell and reinterpret the story
through a fragmented postmodern narrative, but also as an act of ‘cultural revenge’.
In celebrating this retelling of the story through opera, one segment of Australian
society is given the opportunity to punish, marginalise and re-educate another.
Through an examination of the circumstances surrounding the commissioning and
development of the opera, structural aspects of the narrative style employed in the
opera, and the critical reception of the opera, the paper posits that Lindy represents
a cultural tool that enables a catharsis through vengeance.
*****
In The Inquiry, Barbara and Nuwe present evidence in person (in the 2002
production, the defence council quotes an abridged version of this evidence) and a
lively confrontation between Barbara and the prosecuting council ensues (an
exchanged based on an actual transcript). Finally, Barbara and Nuwe feature in the
Timothy McKenry 121
__________________________________________________________________
original ending of the opera, immediately prior to a final duet between Lindy and
Michael Chamberlain. Here, the two Indigenous trackers sing of the shortcomings
of the white-man’s law versus what they claim is the ‘grounded reality’ of
Indigenous law: White people’s law of paper/not much good to us/not much good
to Lindy: paper thin!24
Particularly in the final scene, the inclusion of these characters would have
broken up a static passage of exposition by the defence council and perhaps
mitigated some of the flaws identified by those critiquing the opera. While the
creators25 of the opera have not made public references to the rationale behind
these changes, sensitivities related to the depiction of Indigenous people and the
appropriation of Indigenous language and musical rhetoric most likely influenced
the decision. There is a tradition in Australian art music of appropriating
Indigenous music in an attempt to forge an ‘Australian’ musical identity. The
discourse that surrounds this repertoire has, particularly over the last twenty years,
been scathing of white composers who appropriate actual Indigenous music or
attempt to write pseudo-Indigenous music. In addition, the depiction of Indigenous
characters would have been problematic for the opera company. The roles written
for Nuwe and Barbara require trained opera singers: in the absence of classically
trained Indigenous singers, Opera Australia would have needed to resort to non-
Indigenous singers made up to appear Aboriginal. Such a gross example of cultural
insensitivity would have undercut the moral authority of the piece and the excision
of these sections, while perhaps weakening the dramatic effectiveness of the piece,
hones the opera as an instrument of revenge.
5. Conclusion
In seeking to operate as an instrument of vengeance, the opera Lindy serves a
cultural purpose that transcends simple storytelling or entertainment. The
lambasting of those responsible for Lindy’s ordeal is representative of
‘punishment’ being meted out to the ‘deserving’; the persistently noble
characterisation of Lindy and the defence council represents an attempt to create
new ‘correct’ cultural memories of the event. The transformation of the opera from
1997 to 2002 also highlights a deliberate self-censoring with regard to culturally
sensitive Indigenous issues: an instrument of vengeance cannot be ‘tarred with the
same brush’ as that which it seeks to punish. In spite of what some reviewers saw
as the dramatic flaws in the work, the piece ultimately provides Australian culture
with a catharsis: a means of incorporating the event into a corporate cultural
memory with ‘justice’ not only for Lindy, but also for those aggrieved by what the
event revealed about Australian society in the 1980s.
122 Revenge as Cultural Catharsis in Moya Henderson’s Opera Lindy
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
1
The 1983 film, Who Killed Baby Azaria? predates the portrayals listed here. This
film is a reflection of contemporary public opinion during Lindy Chamberlain’s
murder trial and aligns itself with the later debunked prosecution case.
2
Namely Azaria Chamberlain’s matinee jacket, discovered at the base of Uluru in
1986.
3
Email correspondence with Derryn Hinch, 25 May 2010.
4
Perron later became Chief Minister of the Northern Territory
5
‘Premiers Past – Michael Perron’, Verbatim, radio program, Radio National,
broadcast 16 July 2005.
6
K Goldsworthy, ‘Martyr to Her Sex’, The Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law,
Memory, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2009, p. 38.
7
Goldsworthy, p. 38.
8
J Craik, ‘The Azaria Chamberlain Case: Blind Spot or Black Hole in Australian
Cultural Memory?’, in The Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law, Memory, Australian
Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2009, p. 273.
9
The 1967 referendum enabled changes to the Australian Constitution that brought
Indigenous people under the auspices of Federal law and enabled them to be
counted in the national census. Over 90% of Australians voted in favour of the
changes.
10
N Young, Innocence Regained: The Fight to Free Lindy Chamberlain, The
Federation Press, Sydney, 1989, p. 286.
11
Young, p. 283.
12
J Bryson, ‘Against the Tactician’, The Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law,
Memory, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2009, p. 278.
13
J Healey, [CD Liner Notes], Moya Henderson’s Lindy, ABC Classics, 2005, p.
14.
14
J Morgan, ‘Rock Opera’, The Age, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/
2002/10/26/1035504923144.html, 26 October 2002. Accessed 10 May 2010.
15
The final aria of the 2002 production is sung by Lindy and is titled My Family
Stands Steadfast to Receive Me.
16
T Hobbes, Leviathan, Dent, London, 1914, p. 26.
17
‘Ocker’ is an Australian colloquial term that refers to an individual whose speech
and behaviour is uncultured. Depending on the user, the term is employed in both a
pejorative and a positive manner: for some it is an insult, for others a ‘badge of
honour’.
18
M Henderson, ‘The Composer ‘on the Spot’ about Lindy’, [CD Liner Notes],
Moya Henderson’s Lindy, ABC Classics, 2005, p. 8.
19
P McCallum, ‘Lindy, Opera Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, http://www.
smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/27/1035683304577.html, 28 October 2002, Accessed
10 May 2010.
Timothy McKenry 123
__________________________________________________________________
20
D Gyger, ‘International: Australia – Sydney [Opera Review]’, Opera Canada,
vol. 44:1:174, 2003, p. 40-41.
21
H Steiman, ‘International Opera Review: Lindy’, Seen and Heard International,
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2002/Aug02/lindy.html, 08/2002,
(accessed 10 May 2010).
22
N Drury, Making Australian Society: Music and Musicians, Thomas Nelson
Australia, West Melbourne, 1980, p. 50.
23
Anangu: an Indigenous people of Central Australia; Irititja: an Anangu
Dreamtime reference related to the stories and lore of the Dreaming; Tjukurpa: an
Anangu Dreamtime reference relating to traditions of etiquette and law.
24
M Henderson & J Rodriquez, Lindy, [Unpublished Music Score] 1997, scene vii,
bar 883.
25
Remembering that the ultimate structure of the opera was the result of a
collaborative effort extending beyond composer and librettist.
Bibliography
Bryson, J., ‘Against the Tactician’. The Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law, Memory.
Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2009.
Craik, J., ‘The Azaria Chamberlain Case: Blind Spot or Black Hole in Australian
Cultural Memory?’. The Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law, Memory. Australian
Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2009.
Drury, N., Making Australian Society: Music and Musicians. Thomas Nelson
Australia, West Melbourne, 1980.
Goldsworthy, K., ‘Martyr to Her Sex’. The Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law,
Memory. Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2009, pp. 34-38.
Healey, J., [CD Liner Notes], Moya Henderson’s Lindy. ABC Classics, 2005.
Henderson, M., ‘The Composer ‘on the Spot’ about Lindy’. [CD Liner Notes].
Moya Henderson’s Lindy. ABC Classics, 2005, pp. 7-9.
Young, N., Innocence Regained: The Fight to Free Lindy Chamberlain. The
Federation Press, Sydney, 1989.
Key Words: Hernán Casciari, blognovel, blogfiction, literary critics, Más respeto
que soy tu madre.
*****
The relationships established between writers and literary critics have been
characterized, as in any other artistic expression, by the disagreements which have
arisen between the creative front (without forgetting the difference of opinion
among writers themselves) and those who are professional critics, especially as
literary criticism gained importance in the industrialization of the literary market.
As a consequence of the negative criticism, or of those critiques perceived as
negative, authors have employed those resources available to get their own back
for what they did not like, usually focusing on the critic himself, more than on his
discourse. Of course, the writer’s main tool has been his pen, canalized by means
of new literary works or the written press, given the high number of authors who
are also journalists or the journalists who pretend to be men of letters. Although the
transcendence of the confrontation between author and critic is made more obvious
in other cultural industries, literature is not oblivious to these circumstances and,
even if they may be more popular in the theatre world, poets and novelists have
128 The Writer Seeking Vengeance
__________________________________________________________________
also had much to say against their critics, whether they belonged to their own
profession, or they were professional critics, with confrontations and oppositions
that were either ignored or magnified by the studies of the history of literature.
The exchange of rude words or demonstrations of wit derived from these
circumstances proves of no interest in most cases, despite illustrious examples such
as the dialectic scuffle between Quevedo and Góngora in the Spanish Golden Age.
It is not common that the disagreements trespass in such a palpable way the
borders of narrative fiction and permeate the author’s creative work, as the
traditional publishing systems are slow and there is not the chance for a real
dialogue. However, the shift towards digital literary publishing on the Internet and
the quick dissemination of the work by means of this kind of edition is providing
new relevance to the response (or, what is the same thing, the revenge) of the
author who uses his pen -the keyboard- to oppose what literary critics have said.
In this paper we will subsequently study those measures taken by the
Argentinean (though living in Spain) blognovelist Hernán Casciari so as to respond
to negative -and moreover unfounded and wrong- criticism written about his work
Diary of a Fat Woman [Diario de una mujer gorda],1 which won the Best of Blogs
2005 award granted by Deutsche Welle, and which was edited as a book under the
title Show me more respect, I am your mother [Más respeto que soy tu madre]. In
order to do so, we will first establish the conceptual limits of the blognovel which
are essential to understand the criticism that this work received and how Casciari
achieved his revenge.
According to the existing tendency in Spanish literature and to the conception
of the very same authors in their own works,2 a blognovel is understood to be a
novelized narration structuralized as a weblog, written in the first person, and
whose plot unfolds in real time, that is, in sequential time, determined by the real
world in which there is no turning back. The protagonist of the novel is the owner
and author of the blog, behind whom is the writer, who embodies at all times the
role of the abovementioned protagonist, assuming his existence and granting the
character a life outside the novel, which implies that he has to interact with the
readers through the comments on the site.
The writer is then the protagonist, personifying the role as would an actor in a
process of assimilation which transforms the main character in an avatar.3 There is,
hence, a strong hoax component in the narration and creation of the protagonist so
as to deceive the reading public, always masking the writer: to hide his identity,
and to convince the public that what they are reading is actually being written by
an anonymous blogger, just as any else, are some of the main artistic objectives of
the blognovel, which we cannot and must not confuse with the serial novels
published in blogs.
The character’s I or self is, therefore, absolutely domineering in this kind of
narrative in detriment of the author’s I or self; the latter is only revealed -and only
if the author wishes to do so- when the narration is over. There have been cases in
Daniel Escandell Montiel 129
__________________________________________________________________
which clever readers have managed to uncover the writer’s identity: this has as a
consequence blognovels being aborted or continuing with the open complicity of
its readers, who, once they have unveiled the mystery, have decided to continue
playing the narrative game in open and public collaboration with the author.
However, this creates a new narrative game in which the public/reader assumes an
active role in which he ‘fights’ against the author/avatar to take off his mask,
something considered legitimate by many blognovelists. Nevertheless, this causes
many mistakes, failed attempts to uncover its real authorship, and, of course, critics
have not remained indifferent to this tendency.
Although digital literary criticism continues to focus, above all, on works edited
in a traditional fashion, despising the digital medium of which they themselves
took pride as they chose to write online, they are paying an increasing attention to
the digital narrative in its different forms and genres. In the same way, if the
popularity of blogs has opened the way for the creation of specific literary forms
and for a greater dissemination of amateur authors (or at least anonymous ones)
due to the open digital field, it is also true that it has increased the diffusion of
amateur or anonymous critics without the support, nor the pressure, of big
corporations, as happens in the media.
We still do not know who was hiding under the pseudonym of Borjamari, but
between the year 2003 and 2007 he was actively devoted to literary criticism
through his blog Borjamari: Only personal opinions [Borjamari: Sólo opiniones
personales].4 Casciari defined his work as a critic in the following terms: ‘His
characteristics were long headings, texts with literary pretensions, and blue stars
(from one to five) which graded the works’.5 However, his opposition to this critic
did not end there for, as Cascari himself admitted, the homonymous character in
his blognovel was a parody of that same critic to whom he attributes, at least, ‘a
great audience’.6
In any case, Borjamari published several reviews related to Casciari’s work,
even when it was still not known -though it was clearly sensed- that it was a work
of fiction by a writer and not by an anonymous middle-aged Argentinean blogger,
called Mirta Bertotti, who was in charge of a dysfunctional family with a
homophobic and rude husband, a homosexual older child, a teenage daughter who
earns money using her webcam to perform peep-shows online, a younger child
whose greatest success in life is to create what he considers sculptures with his
faeces, and a father-in-law who is a recurrent drug-user.
Borjamari’s main article -after several references in his blog to Cascari’s work-
makes reference to the fact that the visit statistics have been erased of the site (the
statistics were represented as a home-delivery pizza business in the context of the
narration) and tries to unveil the story’s real authorship. He believes that the
disappearance of the statistics responds to the fact that these ‘have started to
decrease to less than one thousand a day (the true reason behind the existence of
130 The Writer Seeking Vengeance
__________________________________________________________________
this soap-opera)’,7 which ‘has started to worry some of the members of its ever-
diminishing fan club’.8
Of course, there exists a space for pure literary criticism:9
They are not happy with just boring us with endless repetitions of
foreseeable stories that have lost their original freshness, he also
has to bare-facedly plagiarise others so as to try to be funny and
because of the lack of his own ideas.10
However, we can sense that what bothers Casciari the most about Borjamari’s
criticism is that he asserts that:
It’s a bad business for the advertising agency that is behind the
whole thing and that prepared everything looking forward to the
appearance of a novel based on the characters of the blog. Not
even the recurrent advertising forced to fit in ‘yonkis’ or ‘el
rellano’11 seems to be working this time.12
As the literary author detaches himself from the blognovel so the avatar
character assumes the role of both narrator and protagonist, there was not an open
exchange between Casciari and Borjamari, but, as we have mentioned before, the
former achieved his revenge by introducing the latter in his novel, to the great
affront of the portrayed critic.
In chapter 89, entitled ‘A dinner that went on for too long’ [‘Una cena
demasiado larga’], dated November 27th 200313, the protagonist’s homosexual son
invites his new love, Borjamari, who works as a makeup artist in a funeral parlour,
to have dinner and eat some pizzas, as the family business is a pizza restaurant. It is
at that moment when his own criticism is ridiculed in the strange conversation that
unfolds over dinner; the conversation arriving, through the humour that permeates
the story, to an ontological discussion on pizza itself:
Notes
1
http://mujergorda.bitacoras.com.
2
Casciari studies the main characteristics of blognovels in some of his papers, such
as ‘El blog en la literatura. Un acercamiento estructural a la novela’ and ‘La ficción
on line. Un espectáculo en directo’, both of them in opposition to Arranz Lago’s
paper ‘Los tortuosos caminos de la blognovela’; all of them are key works to
understand what a blognovel is. For further reading in this topic, see Choi’s paper
‘La literatura en el mundo virtual: los escritores y el ‘blog’ en América Latina’ or
Sánchez-Mesa’s works, such as ‘Las nuevas fronteras de la literatura: La narrativa
electrónica’.
3
D Escandell, ‘El escritor convertido en actor: El blogonovelista en su teatrillo’.
Despalabros, Vol. 4, 2010, pp. S39-S44.
4
http://borjamari.blogspot.com.
5
H Casciari, ‘Una cena demasiado larga’ in Más respeto que soy tu madre, 27
November 2003, Viewed on 5 May 2010, http://mujergorda.bitacoras.com/cap/
000098.php.
6
ibid., <http://mujergorda.bitacoras.com/cap/000098.php>.
7
Borjamari, ‘Nos cuentan que...’, Borjamari. Sólo opinones personales, November
2003, Viewed on 5 May 2010, http://borjamari.blogspot.com/2003/11/nos-cuentan-
que_20.html.
8
ibid., http://borjamari.blogspot.com/2003/11/nos-cuentan-que_20.html.
9
There is an obvious doubt about the authorship, as Borjamari uses indistinctly
‘they’ and ‘he’.
10
Ibid., http://borjamari.blogspot.com/2003/11/nos-cuentan-que_20.html.
11
Both of them are popular Spanish websites among youngster, with humour,
kinky content and weird stories: See both sites http://www.yonkis.com,
http://elrellano.com.
12
Ibid., http://borjamari.blogspot.com/2003/11/nos-cuentan-que_20.html.
13
Casciari, op. cit., http://mujergorda.bitacoras.com/cap/000098.php.
14
Ibid., http://mujergorda.bitacoras.com/cap/000098.php. Original Spanish text:
134 The Writer Seeking Vengeance
__________________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Arranz-Lago, D. F., ‘Los tortuosos caminos de la blognovela’. Literaturas del texto
al hipermedia. Romero López, D. & Sanz-Cabrerizo, A. (eds), Anthropos, Madrid,
2008.
Casciari, H., Diario de una mujer gorda. 2003-2004, Viewed on 5 May 2010,
http://mujergorda.bitacoras.com.
–––, Más respeto, que soy tu madre. Plaza & Janés DeBOLS!LLO, Barcelona,
2005.
Choi, Y., ‘La literatura en el mundo virtual: los escritores y el blog en América
Latina’. Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios. Vol. 33, 2006, Viewed on 20
June 2009, http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero33/blogam.html.
Leyli Jamali
Abstract
The Shahnameh or Book of Kings is the grand national epic of Persia written by the
great Iranian poet Ferdowsi in the 10th century. Containing 60,000 rhyming
couplets this magnificent masterpiece recounts the history of Iran, beginning with
the creation of the world by Kayumars progressing through Iranian legend to
historic times, tracing the reigns of the Sasanian Emperors and ending with the
Arab conquest in 641. Though ostensibly historical, mostly revolving around the
kings of Persia and the heroes who served them, the Shahnameh’s stories are full
of myth and legend, fairies and demons, packed with love stories, tragedies, and
moral obligations faced by the warrior-heroes who must in time also display a
capacity for vengeance, among other virtues, in their battle for truthfulness.
Vengeance for Ferdowsi’s warrior-heroes is not an act of passion but rather an act
of justice baring moral values. The emphasis on ethical aspects of vengeance and
portraying conditions that could make acts of vengeance virtuous are, however,
mainly confined to the beholders of codes of honour and moral authority. The
rationality of vengeance looses its persuasive grip when it turns into a hostile
response in favour of the evil forces illustrating a barbaric sentiment. Moreover,
vengeance seems to be a crucial narrative tool for Ferdowsi who through its
conscious application justifies the causal logic behind the event running in his
grand scale epic. The present paper aims to examine the concept of vengeance in
the Shahnameh, exposing different kinds of vengeance and revenge which connect
its events tracing the logic and motivation behind them.
*****
1. Introduction
Literature on revenge has discussed vengeance and revenge terms as synonyms.
Indeed many authors used both concepts interchangeably and there is no consistent
usage of these terms in the literature.1 Seemingly any definition of the word is
linked to religious background and codes of honour and to the undeniable role of
culture in shaping the notion. In its broadest sense vengeance is defined as an
infliction of punishment or injury in return for perceived wrong.2 Many scholars,
however, have outlined distinctions between vengeance and other similar concepts
of negative reciprocity such as retaliation, hostility and retribution. As Zourring
maintains:
138 Treatment of Vengeance in Ferdowsi’s The Shahnameh: Book of Kings
__________________________________________________________________
Revenge is different from retaliation in terms of rationality,
affect and behavior goal. ... Furthermore, revenge differs from
hostility in that the justification and motivation for vengeful
aggressive acts rest on the perception of having being wronged
rather than undifferentiated feelings of hostility toward others. ...
Moreover, revenge differs from retribution because of its greater
emotional and behavioral intensities.3
Based on such differentiations and in spite of the fact that most moral philosophers
reject vengeance as a barbaric sentiment, from the very early times nations have
wielded vengeance as a legal tool for obtaining justice. As Ho asserts, ‘clearly, for
many, vengeance is justice and the pursuit of justice, is exacting vengeance on the
offender.’4
Peter French, in The Virtues of the Vengeance takes a similar stand while
examining concepts relevant to vengeance. For French, revenge ‘is the technology
of moral empowerment’5 and vengeance can stand as an alternative source for
moral order.6 Making convincing case for the central moral importance of
vengeance, honor and retribution, French exposes important distinctions between
types of moral theories (karmic and non-karmic). Concentrating on the conditions
that could make acts of vengeance virtuous, he investigates the use of vengeance
themes in literature and popular culture by scrutinizing literary examples from
Iliad to Hamlet. As touched by French justice as revenge and getting even has
occupied the storytellers and philosophers for so long. Indeed, ‘the articulation of
these concepts lends itself to narrative more than dry legal formulations. Thus,
literature from Homer’s heroic epics to modern popular fiction has been a site for
human inquiry into the morality of retribution.’7
As one of the world’s greatest literary masterpieces the Shahnameh also
presents magnificent tales of vengeance. As Talebian illustrates the theme of
vengeance is at the heart of almost %7 of the stories in the Shahnameh.8 Sarami
also argues that ‘if the central idea of romances [in the Shahnameh] is love, the true
essence of war tales is vengeance.’9 According to Fazlollah ‘vengeance, revenge,
and warfare are the major themes in the Shahnameh yet they are totally different
from what one encounters in Buddhism, Christianity or Sufi literature.’10 Finally,
Ghafoori maintains that ‘vengeance is one of the three main reasons for the
outbreak of wars in the Shahnameh, the other two being defending the motherland
and obtaining justice.’11
2. Discussion
Ferdowsi Tousi, (935 -1020) was a well-educated member of a social class
called dehghans (the noble landowners) who completed his Shahnameh in 30
years. With 62 stories, 990 chapters, and some 60,000 rhyming couplets, the
Shahnameh is more than seven times the length of Homer’s Iliad consisting of
history of Iran complied and cast into verse based on sources such as Khodynameh,
Leyli Jamali 139
__________________________________________________________________
Pahlavi texts, Persian myths, religious texts and the oral stories related by learned
dehghans.
The whole epic can be divided into three parts; The Mythical Age, as the
shortest section, gives an account of the creation of the world and the story of the
first man/king Kayumars. As the largest section, almost occupying two-thirds of
the grand epic is The Heroic Age, which retells the events from the reign of
Manuchehr to the conquest of Alexander the Great. This section is packed with
incidents about gallant hero-worriers of the Persian Empire especially Rostam. The
Historical Age, as the final section, changes from mythology and legend to
romanticized history and relates the epoch making events from the time of
Alexander the Great to the Arab invasion and the death of the last Iranian king
Yazdgerd III in 641.
The theme of vengeance is apparent in all the three sections of the Shahnameh,
starting in The Mythical Age with the revenge of Syamak, running through, as well
as, composing the main portion of The Heroic Age, culminating in the revenge of
Seyavash, and ending in The Historic Age when Bijan the Turk avenges Mahovi
Sori the killer of Yazdgerd III.
Ferdowsi’s treatment of revenge throughout the entire work centers on the
ancient Persian ideology, which sees vengeance as an instrument of divine justice.
For the ancient Iranians vengeance was not an individual business, but rather a
divine duty to restore impersonal justice. Considered as a virtuous act and a holy
commitment, vengeance of the oppressed was an inevitable responsibility laid
upon all members of society by the providence. Consequences of disobedience
were horrible and the sinner would, in the dooms day, be questioned and punished
by eternal damnation.
Actually, the very first order for vengeance in the Shahnameh is given directly
by Ahurmazd, the god of light, when at the opening of the first section, Syamak,
the son of Kayumars is killed by a monster send by Ahriman, the god of evil who
could not bear Kayumars’s eminence on earth. Ahurdmazd orders Hooshank to
avenge the monster promising to reveal the secret of fire to the earthlings in
reward. Thus the first act of vengeance as a divine duty is ordered to the mortals
and a celestial reward is bestowed to the avenger as a heavenly precedent set for all
the righteous kings if they wished to have the glory or the Farr of Ahurmazd.
The model of glorified or exalted vengeance is followed by all the heroes
through conscious choice of pursuing the course of revenge as an especial
inspiration and a way to fulfil the providential justice. Venting revenge against the
enemies of the selected kings was thus thought to be a divine calling from heaven.
In the Shahnameh, ‘god chooses to exercise his controlling authority through
the institution of monarchy’12 and ‘therefore to challenge the Shah is to challenge
god himself.’13 Moreover, Iran is the holy land, which is chosen to be protected by
the god, and the Iranians are the chosen nation. Iran is, actually, the holy land
which is engaged in a long-lasting mythical battle with Turan, which is known as
140 Treatment of Vengeance in Ferdowsi’s The Shahnameh: Book of Kings
__________________________________________________________________
the embodiment of evil. The fight between Iran and Turan is ‘in fact a
manifestation of primordial fight between good and evil; Ahurmazd and
Ahriman.’14
Acting not as private persons but as instruments of divine retribution the
Iranian heroes followed certain principals in their battles. Never once in the
Shahnameh the Iranians are shown to attack or occupy other lands beyond their
borders or to commence war to expand their territories. ‘Wars are never launched
to rob a country of it wealth or for converting other nations to Iranian religion.’15
The only reason for the initiation of war is the protection of national sovereignty
and avenging the unjust killings.
Throughout his grand epic Ferdowsi condemns war, killing and excessive greed
which leads to bloodshed. In all his stirring narratives he expresses his distaste and
resentment of those who follow the path of evil and pursue their own passions and
desires to kill and destroy. However, when war and killing take the form of
vengeance for the bloods that are unjustly shed he grants his full support regardless
of devastating consequences which might even lead to mass killings.
Although the old sage of Tous has a tender heart, which gives him away in
lines where he strongly condemns bloodshed and denounces the values of war, ‘he
describes the revenge scenes with extraordinary passion and the fullest details.’16 It
is indeed within these descriptive lines and a close reading of the tales of
vengeance that one can see how the concept of inevitability of fate is artfully
woven into the texture of these verses.
The theme of inevitability of fate and the futility of man’s resistance to it is
present in every step made by the kings and heroes especially at the heart of their
acts of vengeance. Although Fredowsi was a Muslim and believed in a single
almighty God, the prevalent idea ruling over his grand epic is seemingly
Zoroastrian. Thus, instead of a single God two powers of good and evil- Ahurmaz
and Ahriman- are present through their perpetual conflict. Another controlling
element, which manifests itself as the eternal and unchangeable power, is fate,
which has its roots in Zarvanism. This philosophy, which existed before
Zoroastrianism, sees the will of endless time or Zervan as the controlling power
over peoples’ destinies and a power that hovers beyond good and evil.
Ferdowsi evokes a powerful sense of fatalism in versification of his tales
making the Shahnameh an amalgam of Zervanist duality and the presence of a
single God. Ferdowsi mixes these two features together so that the God’s choice
becomes the unchallengeable fate, which is not for any man to question. This
philosophy is also at heart of the tales where the Iranian kings, as the divine
symbols of national sovereignty and justice, have to pursue their holy duty by
executing revenge. These kings, however, ‘never attend the wars for vengeance in
person.’17 Although the honour of every victory belongs to the king, it is the hero-
worriers who have to accomplish the revenge missions.
These heroes are motivated by the love of protecting the mother land and
avenging all its enemies embracing what fate offers in full obedience. As
Leyli Jamali 141
__________________________________________________________________
summarized in Bahman Shah’s speech the history of Iran is constructed by the
hands of hero’s that have carried out seven grand acts of revenge in the name of
their kings. These acts of vengeance were of course bound to strict rules and
rituals. Firstly, the act of vengeance worked on the bases of cause and affect
grounded on fate. Secondly, venting vengeance was a duty, which did not wear out
or fade away by time and the spilled blood, forever hot and fresh, waited to be
cleaned by the avenger. Thirdly, executing vengeance was a father son contract and
any son or father who failed to avenge was socially disgraced and stigmatized with
everlasting shame. Moreover, the responsibility to avenge passed from one
generation to the other and all the male kin inherited the duty. In addition, wielding
vengeance had to be carried out man to man, far from the war scene without any
person’s assistance.
Apart from the aforementioned facts, wielding vengeance in times acquires
especial characteristics in the Shahnameh. For instance, whenever justice is
violated and an innocent blood is shed, a plant grows out of the spot standing as a
sign to remind people of their duty. This happens in the story of Syavash, from
whose blood the plant of Syavooshan rises. In other cases, vengeance is carried out
in some symbolic manners. Like when the avenger weilds the vengeance at the
same spot that the killing has been occurred (Kaykhosro pleads to avenge Afrasyab
where Syavash has been murdered), or when the avenger washes his hands in the
blood of the avenged, or even drinks the blood of the man he has killed (Goodarz
cups his hand to drink Prian’s blood). Other brutal methods are also visible like
hanging the body of the avenged from the victor’s horse, mutilation as in the case
of Mahovi, lynching as with Faramarz, and of course burning alive as with
Shaghad or even crucifixion as with Zahak. Swards, spears, arrows, daggers, and
clubs are the deadly weapons that the avengers use very freely to fulfil their divine
duties in restoring justice.
Mass killings in the name of vengeance are also seen in some tales, or the
selective killings of those who had had a hand in the death of an innocent. Rostam,
for example, slays Sodabeh, Syavash’s stepmother, whose prohibited love was the
reason for his being behead. In contrast, in some cases a single person is avenged
for the sake of a group, which has been unjustly killed, like when Ghoodarz
avenges Piran clearing the blood of 70 young heroes from his family. Rostam is the
only person in the Shahnameh who gets the chance to vent his own vengeance
against his brother Shaghad by a deadly arrow before meeting his end in his
brother’s trap. Rostam is also the hero who decides to avenge himself when after
unknowingly killing his son Shorab aims to starve himself to death. Heroes of
vengeance tales sometime use disguise to gain their aims. Rostam and Gorgin dress
themselves like merchants to pass the borders of Turan. Deception and
cunningness is also fair in executing vengeance. For example, when Rostam sees
himself trapped in the hands of Sohrab he tricks the inexperienced worrier by
142 Treatment of Vengeance in Ferdowsi’s The Shahnameh: Book of Kings
__________________________________________________________________
telling him that the true heroes never take the lives of their rival in the first round
and sets himself free only to kill the young worrier.
3. Conclusion
From what has been discussed above it could be concluded that Ferdowsi’s
treatment of vengeance centres around two contrasting types of revenge; the just
and the unjust. Indeed, the foundation of the Shahnameh, as the grand Persian epic,
is based on the battle between the good and evil, and the light and darkness. The
dark forces of deception, destruction, greed, envy, and ambition are nourished by
Ahriman, the god of evil, and are represented by ‘natural disasters, demons and
Turanians.’18 The noble and moral values, such as love, loyalty, justice, on the
other hand, are represented by the noble kings and heroes of Iran. Rostam, the
gallant hero of the epic, not only symbolizes the Iranian virtue but also embodies
the resistance and resilience of the Iranian nation against the evil forces. For him
and all the other worriers all the enemies who attack the motherland and shed the
bloods of the innocent and defenceless countrymen are the soldiers of evil and
must be destroyed and avenged. The resentment felt for the enemy is the same as
the hatred felt for the unjust, and vengeance is the act taken to restore justice. Thus
all the ‘wars launched by the Iranians are in the name of justice.’19
Under such circumstances the Shahnameh’s heroes are encouraged to yield to
what has to happen but at the same time to be fair during the wars that are fought in
the name of justice revenge. No harm is to be done to the common, innocent
members of the enemy’s household and no damage caused to their cities.
Forgiveness should be bestowed to those who repent as far as they were not
directly involved in the bloodsheds. All along Ferdowsi reminds his heroes to be
receptive and enjoy what life has to offer and beware that life is a wheeling cycle
which stops where it had started.
This worldview which is based on the circular and not linear progression of the
events is actually the holding pin that binds all the stories of the Shahnameh
together. And attached to these binding pins are Ferdowsi’s tales of vengeance.
Indeed every act of revenge causes the plot to progress it self being a cause for the
next incident thus leading to the completion of the circle which forms the plotline
of Ferdowsi’s grand epic and provides him with a skeleton upon which he can
model his creation.
As Sarami notes ‘the Shahnameh is a progression of man from nothingness
towards nothingness and perhaps this is the uniting point of the beginning and the
end which gives the opening and closing of this grand epic a complete overlap.’20
The Shahnameh opens when Syamak is murdered by Ahriman and closes with the
murder of Yadgerd by Mahovi. ‘Yazdgerd is actually Syamak killed by the
representative of Ahriman. Both killings are followed by vengeance and the
methods of the killings and acts of vengeance are identical.’21 This similarity might
be the best disclosure to explain that killing and vengeance are too close to be the
two separate sides of a same coin. And this is what Ferdowsi offers to the ones
Leyli Jamali 143
__________________________________________________________________
who wish to see beyond the unforgettable narratives of his masterpiece the
Shahnameh.
Notes
1
H Zourring, J Chebat & R. Toffoli, ‘Consumer Revenge Behaviour: A Cross-
Cultural Perspective’, Journal of Business Research, Vol.62, 2009, p. 995.
2
N Stuckless & RGoranson, ‘The Vengeance Scale: Development of a Measure of
Attitude towards Revenge’, J Soc Behav Pers 7, 1992.
3
H Zourring, 995.
4
R Ho, ‘Justice versus Vengeance: Motive Underlying Punitive Judgments’,
Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 33, 2002, p. 365 .
5
P French, The Virtues of the Vengeance, University Press of Kansas, 2001, p. xi.
6
French, p. 63.
7
A Loney, Syllabus Design for CLST 180 Special Topics: The Poetics and Ethics
of Revenge Themes of Retributive Justice in Literature.
8
Y Talebian, ‘The War between Good and Evil: The Theme of Ferdowsi’s the
Shahnameh and the Narrative Archetypes’, Journal of Literature of Mashhad
University, Vol. 158, 2007, p.106.
9
G Sarami, From the Colour of the Flower till the Pain of the Thorn, Science and
Culture Publications, 1998, p.468.
10
R Fazlollah, A Study on Ferdowsi, Science and Culture Publications, 2005, p. 5.
11
M Ghafoori, Narratology of the Shahnameh, Ostad Motahari Publications
Ghom, 2009, p.158.
12
I Dibaj, ‘Hunchback Fate in Tragedy of Rostam and Shrab in Shahnameh,
http://www.elam.com/articles/fate-in-poetry/, Viewed 5 May 2010.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
M Riyahi, Frdowsi, Tarhe No Publiction, 2001, p.198.
16
Sarami, p. 465.
17
Masse, p. 218.
18
Riyahi, p.189.
19
Ibid.
20
Sarami, p. 102.
21
Ghafoori, p.128.
Bioliography
Dibaj, I., ‘Hunchback Fate in Tragedy of Rostam and Shrab in Shahnameh,
http://www.elam.com/articles/fate-in-poetry/. Viewed 5 May 2010.
French, P., The Virtues of the Vengeance. University Press of Kansas, 2001.
144 Treatment of Vengeance in Ferdowsi’s The Shahnameh: Book of Kings
__________________________________________________________________
Loney, A., CLST 180 Special Topics: The Poetics and Ethics of Revenge Themes
of Retributive Justice in Literature. Spring 2009, Viewed on 10 May 2010
http://poeticwordpress.com.
Sarami, G., From the Colour of the Flower till the Pain of the Thorn. Science and
Culture Publications, 1998.
Talebian, Y., ‘The War between Good and Evil: The Theme of Ferdowsi’s The
Shahnameh and the Narrative Archetypes’. Journal of Literature of Mashhad
University. Vol. 158, 2007 pp. 106 – 116.
Jenaeth Markaj
Abstract
This paper addresses the unique contributions of Joyce Carol Oates to
contemporary women’s fiction. Although her voluminous body of work has
received considerable critical acclaim, the explosive sexuality and violence
depicted frequently in her writing, in addition to the apparent passivity of her
female characters, have drawn harsh criticism. Feminists in particular have
condemned her narratives for condoning female victimization. While at first
glance, such an interpretation might seem justified due to the graphic nature of the
subject matter, it neglects a crucial redemptive pattern that surfaces repeatedly in
her writing. Oates posits and demonstrates narration as a cathartic process of
identity development that initiates the emergence of authentic, autonomous female
voice. Her writing affirms the importance of considering not only the events
unfolding in the course of a novel, but the narrative process by which the author
articulates these events when considering the nature of a work’s significance to
gendered experience and authorship. This generative process, when considered as a
means of redefining personal identity, emerges as a more fulfilling, in essence,
more substantive form of retaliation than the type of revenge traditionally played
out in the narrative setting –catharsis for the title character in the form of a
triumphant and violent act may appear the epitome of vengeance in the context of
the novel. But how much more unapologetic and revolutionary is a woman’s
refusal to depict rebellion in service to the reader’s desire for a satisfying
conclusion in favor of a more understated and sincere testament to self-fulfillment
through narration?
*****
1. Introduction
Joyce Carol Oates is an extraordinarily prolific, contemporary American
author, having published numerous poems, essays, short stories, plays, and novels
since the early 1960’s. Her fiction has received much critical attention for its
explosive sexuality and violence and has been criticized by feminists for the
passivity of her female characters. Although these elements factor into Oates’
presentation of the world, an interpretation of her works as approving of female
victimization neglects a redemptive pattern that surfaces repeatedly in her novels in
which constructive narration succeeds characters’ self-destructive experiences with
sexuality.
146 Unlikely Heroines
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In many of Oates’ works, a first-person female narrator relates her story
beginning with childhood; the family structure is profoundly unstable, composed
of unreliable or inappropriate, often sexual relationships. The girl matures in
isolation, developing a low self-image and unnaturally strong attraction to
members of the opposite sex. Sexual desire becomes sexual dependency; the young
woman will endure condescension, humiliation, insult, and pain in her
relationships with men in an attempt to exonerate herself from the boundaries of
memory and personality, barriers to the stability she seeks.
Sexuality, used as the sole instrument of release for women, represents a
violent effort to destroy the self. However, this tactic necessarily fails because
sexual release is a gendered form of self-obliteration. Oates’ depictions of sexual
experience highlight the differences between male and female physicality,
emphasizing the manner in which sexuality creates distinct roles for man and
woman. Thus, the woman fails to destroy her identity because sexual experience
affirms her essentially female characteristics. The woman reaches a crisis point,
generally involving extreme violence, that consists in a recognition of dependence
on sexual involvement. This newfound self-awareness, in turn, initiates her
transition to narrative redemption and self-creation. The woman begins to reflect
upon her situation, integrating past memory with present reflection to construct a
personal narrative. And it is through this act of confession that true redemption
occurs; by writing or telling her story, the woman creates her own identity.
Here Ingrid draws attention to divergent physical images of men and women
through descriptive language. She characterizes the male sexual organ as a
threatening physical instrument, and her perception of Enoch becomes explicitly,
almost exclusively phallic. While Enoch materializes through his penis as ‘thick,’
‘blood-engorged,’ and ‘alive,’ Ingrid presents herself as a fragile dumping ground
for violent attack.
Later in the same scene, Ingrid provides a more comprehensive picture of her
appearance, describing herself in the third person as ‘a naked blond girl skinny
assed, bruised breasts no larger than pears, ribs showing through her skin...’ 4 Each
descriptive phrase in this statement directly conflicts with some aspect of Ingrid’s
recollection of Enoch. Ingrid previously claims that he remained clothed during
their interaction, hesitating only to unbutton his pants.5 This presents a direct
148 Unlikely Heroines
__________________________________________________________________
contrast to Ingrid’s nakedness. Ingrid’s hair is blond, while Enoch boasts ‘long
straggly dead-black hair.’ Ingrid is skinny, while Enoch is thick and ‘sinewy-
muscled.’ 6 The ‘bruised breasts’ of Ingrid’s self-portrait suggest injury and
vulnerability far removed from the impenetrable strength implied by the ‘bronze
mask’ of Enoch’s face.7 Finally, where Ingrid’s ribs protrude through her flesh,
Enoch is a wall of solid muscle. While the characteristics involving hair colour and
body composition are not gender specific, they do enhance Ingrid’s awareness of
the differences between herself and Enoch. The knowledge of gender difference,
heightened through participation in sexual acts, becomes more dramatic through
Ingrid’s recognition of these similarly opposing physical traits.
Gender difference resides not only in structural characteristics but in the type of
behaviour exhibited during intercourse. With Enoch, Ingrid’s sexual passivity
emerges on a dramatic scale: ‘her silly doll head gripped in a man’s big hands and
he’s pumping pumping pumping himself into her mouth, her mouth pried open so
her face is near to splitting, she’s choking, gagging…’ 8 Most significant here is the
opposition established between the actions of the two individuals. Ingrid’s
repetition of ‘pumping’ dramatizes the intrusive role assumed by her sexual male
partners, while she functions as the passive recipient of his violent aggression.
Oates frequently portrays gender difference by presenting male initiatives as
invasive and foreign. Female sexuality, contrarily, is characterized by compliance.
Women characters such as Ingrid and Enid subjugate their bodies in hopes of
escaping personal identity. This behaviour, however, sharpens their awareness of
their gendered selves and ultimately chains them to the very identities they hoped
to elude through the strictures of the gendered experience. Thus, the women’s
sexual experiences ultimately subvert their desire to achieve an elusive, escapist
form of stability, the impulse that lies at the heart of these relationships.
7. Conclusion
Joyce Carol Oates examines, in steely, unflinching prose, horrific
circumstances of physical abuse and sexual victimization that can be difficult to
digest. The shocking nature of these situations has at times overshadowed a
defining quality of her fiction; the depiction of subjugated women initiating and
pursuing the excruciating process of forging new identities by way of narrative
confession.
Perhaps it would be fruitful to re-examine the true meaning of revenge and how
this plays out in the context of narration posited as a mechanism of survival and
identity-building. It is because violent, particularly sexually violent aggression
toward women seeks to suppress the victim’s autonomy and self-worth that the
narrative act constitutes such a subversive and singularly triumphant statement.
Oates dramatizes the potential of revenge to become a positive, redemptive process
rather than a destructive enterprise. The power of an individual to harness the
inherent possibility of revenge lies in her ability to transform its very meaning, its
Jenaeth Markaj 151
__________________________________________________________________
essence into something more fulfilling, cathartic, and lasting than the most fitting
retaliatory act could dream.
Possibly the most significant point related to the social significance of Oates’
writing is that the salvation achieved by her narrators through writing invites
emulation. At a time in history in which many women of the world are deprived of
the opportunity to defend themselves against victimization or exact justice upon
the perpetrators of such abuse, her writing suggests methods by which women can
surmount oppression and recreate themselves through language. Narration, as
modelled in Oates’ fiction, represents a higher form of revenge, an instrument of
empowerment that crosses cultures to touch all classes, races, and generations of
women in its redemptive and generative function.
Notes
1
R Fossum, ‘Only Control: The Novel of Joyce Carol Oates’, Studies in the Novel,
Vol. 7, 1975, p. 286.
2
JC Oates, You Must Remember This, Harper and Row, New York, 1987, p. 185.
3
JC Oates, Man Crazy, The Penguin Group, New York, 1998, p. 212.
4
Ibid., p. 213.
5
Ibid., p. 212.
6
Ibid., p. 213.
7
Ibid., p. 213.
8
Ibid., p. 213.
9
JC Oates, Beasts, Carrol & Graf Publishers, New York, 2002, p. 62
10
Ibid., p. 85.
11
Ibid., p. 26.
12
Oates, Man Crazy, op. cit., p. 5.
13
Oates, Man Crazy, op. cit., p. 1.
14
Oates, Man Crazy, op. cit., p. 6.
15
Oates, Man Crazy, op. cit., p. 7.
Bibliography
Cixous, H., ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. New French Feminisms. Schocken Books,
New York, 1981.
Curti, L., Female Stories Female Bodies. New York University Press, New York,
1998.
Davis, A., Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Vintage, New York, 1998.
152 Unlikely Heroines
__________________________________________________________________
Dike, D., ‘The Aggressive Victim in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates’. Greyfriar:
Siena Studies in Literature. Vol. 15, 1974, pp. 13-29.
Fossum, R., ‘Only Control: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates’. Studies in the
Novel, vol. 7, 1975, pp. 285-297.
Giles, J., ‘Destructive and Redemptive ‘Order’: Joyce Carol Oates’. Marriages and
Infidelities and The Goddess and Other Women’. Ball State University Forum,
1981.
Goodman, C., ‘Women and Madness in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates’. Women
and Literature. Vol. 5, Issue 2, 1977, pp. 17-28.
Johnson, G., ‘Fictions of the New Millennium: An Interview with Joyce Carol
Oates’. Michigan Quarterly Review. Vol. 45, Issue 2, Spring 2006, pp. 387-400.
Oates, J. C., Beasts. Carrol & Graf Publishers, New York, 2002.
–––, You Must Remember This. Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1987.
Petite, J., ‘ ‘Out of the Machine:’ Joyce Carol Oates and the Liberation of Women’.
Kansas Quarterly. Vol. 9, Issue 2, 1977, pp. 75-79.
Steinberg, S. ‘Prolific Oates’. Publishers Weekly. Vol. 251, Issue 37, 2004, pp. 54-
55.
Wesley, M., ‘Reverence, Rape, Resistance: Joyce Carol Oates and Feminist Film
Theory’. Mosaic. Vol. 32, September 1999, pp. 75-86.
Anders Widmark
Abstract
Approaching a decade of US/NATO military engagement in Afghanistan, the
scholarly interest over the area has gradually reawakened. However, emphasis has
though mainly been directed towards the political and social implications of war,
while cultural functions and expressions still remain by and large unexplored. This
is especially true about the Pashtun community.1 Research has suggested that
revenge, included under the Pashto concept of badal, is an essential element
constituting Pashtun identity. Badal, which is part of a larger set of unwritten tribal
codes of honour called pashtūnwalī, does not apply to a neutral conception of
revenge but is more related to the ‘defence of honour’. Previous studies, as well as
the media, have often emphasised this idea rather incautiously, stressing desire of
revenge or vindictiveness to be a main characteristic of this group’s collective
identity. Far from being a static phenomenon, pashtūnwalī displays great variation
of observance depending on both temporal and local context. This study engages
the contemporary Pashto short story genre, being the most popular and widely
practised type of modern narrative prose fiction among the Pashtuns, and explores
how the concept of revenge is formulated upon within this type of texts. The study
delves into the question whether revenge, considering that modern Pashto literature
is mainly an urban reality, is narrated according to its traditional denotation of
‘defending honour’, or if a more neutral or materialistic type of revenge may be
discerned. It will also investigate whether revenge is a typical characteristic of
Pashtun life, as has been proposed in prior descriptions, or if it is a theme of only
peripheral occurrence. Searching for keywords related to ‘revenge’ in Pashto short
stories published on the Internet followed by a close reading analysis of each
entrance, an assessment of the urban Pashtun view upon revenge may be deduced.
Key Words: Pashto, Pashtun, pashtūnwalī, literature, short story, revenge, badal,
honour, Taliban, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
*****
2. Contextualising Revenge
3. Reading Revenge
In the initial quantitative phase of this study the number of keyword hits was
surprisingly high. However, the analysis showed that a majority of these was
related to the secondary meanings of the word badal, that is ‘exchange’ and
‘change’, and not to its denotation of ‘revenge’. Two short stories make explicit
reference to revenge in their titles. In ‘Kasāt’ [Revenge] by Muhammad Nu’mān
Dost,16 the scene is set to a graveyard. The anonymous main character relates that
‘when I approached the cemetery, it screamed, as if it was expecting me. The
graves heaved and then, the lids began to open, and I did not now what to do. I
could have tried to run, but my legs were exhausted and I did not have the power to
move. I was surrounded by skeletons coming from all directions and some of them
were running against me.’ The story turns out to be a nightmare; the dead arise
from their graves and approach the main character saying: ‘Why did you kill us?
What made you a merchandiser of our youth? Why did you orphan our children?’
When he wakes up everybody in the house surrounds him whereupon he says:
‘Thank God I am not a leader.’ The title of the story thus alludes to the kind of
divine revenge that awaits the unjust leader in the afterlife. In ‘Mīna aw Intiqām’
[Love and Revenge] by ‘Asmatullāh Latīfī,17 a recollection of a past memory is
narrated, an eternal triangle drama with all the necessary ingredients, two men and
a woman; love, revenge and death.
Besides these two examples, reference to revenge could only be found in a
dozen of short stories. Readings of these display several types of revenge which
can be categorised into different revenge situations. Honour-based revenge related
to pashtūnwalī proved to be of most frequent occurrence. These situations take
place in a rural setting and are most often triggered by a murder, resulting in a
demand for blood revenge. However, this demand for retribution does not always
lead up to an ‘eye for an eye’ situation, but can be settled by other means. In
‘Parday Petay’ [The Stranger’s Insult] by Sulamal Shīnwārī,18 a woman’s honour is
at stake when a stranger insults and touches her. She urges her husband to avenge
the stranger saying: ‘are you still sitting here, stand up and take revenge for me,
158 Experiences of Revenge
__________________________________________________________________
and should you feel the slightest doubt, let it be my blood that is spilled’. A jirga,
i.e. a council of tribal elders, is called for to settle the dispute; however, the
narrative does not reveal the final destiny of the offender.
In the context of pashtūnwalī, not only murder provoked calls for revenge. The
narratives also related scenarios where men’s sense of honour, or virtue of chivalry
(ghairat), was under threat, resulting in a revenge situation. In the fable-like short
story ‘Dwa Kalī’ [Two Villages] by Nūr Muhammad Lāhū,19 another aspect of
pashtūnwalī is addressed. The main plot revolves around a conflict between two
villages over water. The inhabitants of one of the villages suffer from shortage in
their water supply due to a severe drought. As an act of submission, they decide to
visit the elders of the other village as a plea for help and assistance. However, since
the request is refused, ignoring the obligation to assist someone in need, a violation
upon the Pashtun honour code has been committed, which leads to a demand for
revenge.
Also other revenge situations are related in the narratives. Common to all of
these is how they are evoked in a context of conflict and war. Also in these
situations, demands for vengeance are most often derived from an unjust killing of
a person. However, here the connection with pashtūnwalī is less transparent than it
was in previous situations and invites us to a more neutral interpretation of
revenge; as a natural response to the conditions of life in war and crisis, and to
violations of universal and human principles.
4. Final Comments
Initially, this study addressed the problem of how the Pashtuns have been
depicted in previous works, and how this has come to infect many contemporary
narratives related to this particular group. In references to pashtūnwalī, the
obligation of retaliation is often given primary focus, while other important aspects
of the code are mentioned only in the passing. This, together with a one-sided
focus upon the rural Pashtun, is certainly some of the main reasons why the
Pashtun continues to be characterised as revenge-driven and vindictive.
Considering the fact that revenge situations only could be found in fourteen
short stories, and that most of these did not speak on the subject in any detail, the
analysis of the material cannot claim to present us with any general truths.
However, what it can tell us is how, and under what circumstances, revenge as a
subject or theme is narrated in contemporary Pashto short stories. The analysis
showed that a majority of the revenge situations took place in a rural setting, in a
context of pashtūnwalī. In the revenge situations that took place in an urban milieu,
violation of honour in its tribal sense proved to be of minor importance. Narratives
that problematised the concept and function of revenge in a Pashtun setting were
few and do not stand out as typical in the analysed material.
Anders Widmark 159
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
1
A reduced and modified version of the LOC transcription system of Pashto words
has been used here. No distinction will be made between polygraphemes, i.e.
different graphemes representing one phoneme, such as ( ض – ظ- )ز – ذall
representing the phoneme [z] in Pashto. Retroflex consonants have been
underlined.
2
R Kipling, Kim, MacMillan & Co Ltd, London, 1960 (1st ed 1901), p. 252.
3
WS Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth
Limited, London, 1930, p. 144.
4
AS Ahmed, Millennium and Charisma among Pathans: A Critical Essay in
Social Anthropology, Routledge, London, 1976, p. 57.
5
MN Tair & TC Edwards, Rohi Mataluna: Pashto Proverbs, Revised and
Expanded Edition, Resource Publications, Eugene, Oregon, 2009, p. 69.
6
M Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North West
Frontier, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 208.
7
SA Muslim Dost, ‘They Cannot Help’, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees
Speak, M Falkoff (ed), University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2007, p. 34.
8
S Haleem, Confiture d’orange: nouvelles, Caractères, Paris, 2004, pp. 55-67.
9
Ibid., p. 62.
10
Ibid.
11
W Heston, ‘Landạy’, South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia, Routledge, New
York, London, 2003, p. 351.
12
MN Tair & TC Edwards, op. cit., p. 227.
13
AS Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, Hurst & Company, London, 2010, p. 116.
14
E Margolis, ‘U.S. Stirs a Hornet’s Nest in Pakistan’, Winnipeg Sun [Online], 17
May 2009.
15
Khpəlwāk, ‘Kasāt’ [Revenge], http://www.shahamat1.org, 23 April 2010, cached
copy retrieved 4 May 2010. ‘The Idol-Breaker’ is an allusion to Mahmud of
Ghazni. He attacked India several times during the first half of the 11th century (the
Somnath temple in 1024). PRT is an abbreviation for Provincial Reconstruction
Team. The reference to the Ayyubid dynasty most certainly alludes to Saladin and
The Capture of Jerusalem in 1187.
16
M Nu’mān Dost, ‘Kasāt’ [Revenge], http://www.benawa.com, 10 November
2009, retrieved 20 January 2010.
17
‘I Latīfī, ‘Mīna aw Intiqām’ [Love and Revenge], http://www.benawa.com, 27
August 2009, retrieved 20 January 2010.
18
S Shīnwārī, ‘Parday Petay’ [The Stranger’s Insult], http://www.baheer.com, 20
August 2007, retrieved 2 November 2009.
19
NM Lāhū, ‘Dwa Kalī’ [Two Villages], http://www.benawa.com, 22 August
2009, retrieved 26 January 2010.
160 Experiences of Revenge
__________________________________________________________________
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