Revenge Stories of Modern Life

This claim may come back to haunt me, but my sense is that of the limited number of basic plots we find in nineteenth-century novels, the one that has received the least critical attention is the revenge plot. If I am correct that the role of revenge has gone relatively unremarked, this may be because it seems relatively unremarkable: on the one hand, its mere presence is no surprise, as revenge is one of the oldest topics in Western literature and remains to this day a ubiquitous element in popular culture, while on the other hand revenge admittedly does not play the central role in nineteenth-century fiction that it plays in Greek or Elizabethan tragedy. It is more often subplot than plot, and often comes across as a convenient, conventional source of motivation and narrative energy rather than a primary focus of interest. Besides, as Becky Sharp says, "revenge may be wicked, but it's natural" (Thackeray 15): insofar as it is "natural," we treat its presence as a given, and insofar as it is "wicked," we take it at face value. Unlike such virtues as disinterestedness, altruism, and sympathy, that is, revenge does not seem to stand in need of demystification. Nevertheless, or perhaps therefore, I think that the time has come to look more closely at nineteenth-century revenge, and I will start with its relationship to time—in particular, the role revenge plays in novels concerned with the new, the present, the future—in a word, the modern.

Revenge is usually understood as belonging to the past, both structurally and historically: although the seeking of revenge involves planning for the future, this future is conceived of as a direct product of and response to events in the past, while the replacement of revenge by an impersonal system of law-based justice has stood as the foundational gesture of Western civilization since at least the Oresteia. This standard narrative is summarized in an 1880 article in the Pall Mall Gazette titled "The Decay of Revenge," an article perhaps prompted by Balliol College's production in ancient Greek of the first play of Aeschylus's trilogy, Agamemnon, which the paper had noted the previous day: "In savage society," the article explains, "revenge . . . is the virtue without which the social organization would cease to exist." "Gradually," however, "law came into existence, and revenge ceased to be the chief end of man" ("Occasional Notes" 11). In fact, according to this article, "Modern revenge . . . has almost declined into a state of momentary morbid feeling. Some one injures our vanity, and we feel that we could say very disagreeable things about his pictures, poems, or personal appearance. We do not say them, and there is an end of the matter" (11). Victorian views of the persistence of revenge as a desire or, as it is usually called, a "passion," vary widely, from this article's claim for its approaching extinction to the presumption of permanence in James Fitzjames Stephen's memorable dictum that "the criminal law stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite" (qtd. in Lecky 41n1).¹ Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that in modern societies revenge as a custom, duty, or project, is obsolete.² Multiple reasons are adduced to account for this change: not only has the legal system taken the place of sanctioned revenge, but also we no longer believe that "it is . . . part of a son's duty to avenge the wrongs of his father" ("Natural History" 827); Christianity demands forgiveness in place of vengeance; and, in more recent times, it is asserted, the growth in people's capacity for pity or sympathy has reduced their desire or capacity to impose suffering on others. Furthermore, the orientation of modern life is toward the future not the past, with the pace of modern life too rapid to dwell on past wrongs or to allow time to contrive schemes of revenge. More nostalgically, the scale of modern life has become too small—as an 1871 article in The Examiner on "The Natural History of Hatred" argues, "it...