American Revenge Narratives

This chapter engages the full spectrum of tragedy theory in arguing for a view of Morrison’s Beloved as a formal tragedy, a generic translation of fiction and tragedy thus a “novel-tragedy” in Kliger’s phrasing. Much scholarship on this novel uses analytic frames from gender and women’s studies, the feminist trope of the body, race in its connections with historical slavery, motherhood and maternal matters, as well as history and the status of the novel as against that question. Few take up the specific matter of reparations, still fewer the politics of genre, craft, and form. From the massive response to this significant text, important here are scholarly treatments addressing the form of the novel and the specter of reparations in it, as well as those concerned with legal matters and intertextual valences in Beloved. In this reading, the character Beloved is the core around which the novel orbits. She is positioned as a postmodern, new-American version of the Greek mythological Erinyes; the title character’s true function regards vengeance and the reparation of past injuries. This chapter argues, ultimately, that the novel’s first concern is justice and its chief aim is to serve as clarion call for material—and not merely symbolic—reparations for slavery.

In Louise Erdrich’s “Rape on the Reservation,” a February 26, 2013, op-ed piece for The New York Times, she brings readers’ attention to the complex history of the Violence Against Women Act and the struggle to persuade Congress to reauthorize the act with provisions that allowed for an expansion of Tribal authority in the prosecution of non-Native offenders. The article evidences her interest in bearing witness to this issue, which has plagued tribal communities for generations. How can a community find redress, and its attendant peace, without any means of official justice? On the reservation, then, the search for justice and accountability often looks like violent retribution or revenge. Violence against Native American women, with perpetrators acting with impunity, is the central theme in her National Book Award-winning novel, The Round House (2012). In fact, the theme of justice has been central to a trio of Erdrich’s most recent novels, which I refer to as the “Justice” trilogy: The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016). Each novel takes up the situational complexities of vigilante justice and the enduring, even generational, consequences of such actions on Native American individuals, families, and communities. None of Erdrich’s novels is as focused on the theme of revenge as the “Justice” trilogy. The three works revolve around different moments of violence introduced in the opening chapters: The Plague of Doves investigates the murder of a local farmer and his family and the subsequent killing of three innocent Ojibwe men and one child from a neighboring reservation by a white lynch mob from the farming community; The Round House narrates the violent rape and attempted murder of an Ojibwe woman; and LaRose begins with the accidental shooting of an Ojibwe boy by his Ojibwe neighbor. Each novel then asks the reader to consider one central question: What are a person’s or a family’s or a community’s options for avenging an act of violence when no legal framework exists to mete out justice or accountability? This chapter explores Erdrich’s answer to that question through an analysis of the three novels.

Percival Everett’s The Water Cure asserts that revenge is the US body politic’s calm, right, and proper function. Emerging from John Locke’s functional revenge fantasy, Everett’s novel slices apart Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), especially Query XIV and its white supremacist disquisition that culminates with the infamous “But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration….” As if in responding to Jefferson’s racist claim, narrator Ishmael Kidder eschews even the appearance of “plain narration,” churns the novel’s “fragments” into a tour de force of philosophical and aesthetic retribution, and forces Jefferson’s work to stand in for the person who may never be punished for raping and murdering Kidder’s daughter.

This chapter surveys and maps the late twentieth-century American sub-genre of “nature takes revenge” films. It shows how this strand of animal horror cinema follows complex narrative templates with different ecological messages. Through comparative analysis, it tracks five types of tales: (1) Humans venture into “nature,” where they encounter wild animals. (2) Animals are reduced to projection screens for the human. (3) Explicitly environmentalist horror films that employ animals as nature’s tools to restore order and the “natural” balance on the planet, relieving humanity of ecological accountability. (4) Films about mutations and hybridizations caused by human actions that highlight the entanglement of nature and culture. (5) Animal apocalypse films that envision an imminent post-human age suffering from the vestiges of anthropogenic actions.

Since the Vietnam War, trauma as both theme and trope has become integral to the popular representation of combat veterans and, as a result, to American culture’s understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, narrative portrayals of combat-induced trauma have often also been employed to more overtly political ends. The 1980s, especially, were dominated by hypermasculinist revenge fantasies—such as the Rambo and Missing in Action film trilogies—that equated the veteran’s recovery from trauma with the post-Vietnam renewal of American militarism. In such narratives, the existential crisis posed by the figure of the traumatized veteran is ultimately resolved by the vengeful repudiation and revision of objective historical truth. This thematic is particularly exemplified in the Rambo trilogy and in Tony Scott’s Top Gun, an emblematic film in which white male veteran experience is rendered normative by veterans who teach non-veterans—and, thus, the audience—about combat-induced trauma and how properly to contend with it. Essential to the messages of this cinema of vengeance are the films’ concerted dismantling of the history of the Vietnam War, one that casts these films in the role of justifying the persistence of American military expansionism throughout the world.

Vigilante justice has a long history in film. From Dirty Harry to Death Wish to Death Sentence, Hollywood frequently depicts male protagonists committing violent acts as a way to exact revenge or extrajudicial punishment. These male characters are frequently depicted as heroes and their actions are portrayed as understandable and justifiable. They go after violent criminals and are doing what the legal system can’t or won’t. The audience is meant to identify with the male protagonist and cheer them on as they take matters into their own hands. Female protagonists, on the other hand, are not often featured in mainstream films that focus on vigilante justice. Two of the more recent examples are 1996’s Eye for an Eye, starring Sally Field, and 2007’s The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster. Each film depicts a woman seeking justice outside of the law after a loved one is brutally murdered. They defy law enforcement and resort to vigilantism after concluding it’s the only way to attain justice. What role does gender play in the way these films showcase the protagonists seeking vengeance? How do they compare with similar films that feature male protagonists? Is the audience meant to identify with and cheer for them? What kinds of ideological messages are present? I’m interested in attempting to answer those questions while exploring how gender influences the way mainstream films depict vigilante justice and the messages Hollywood is sending audiences through these films.

The chapter examines the dependence of female characters on males to achieve revenge in two recent Western films: Delilah, the mutilated prostitute in Unforgiven, and Mattie, the teenage daughter of a murdered man in True Grit. Both films portray the patriarchal social order’s unwillingness to provide justice for the wrongs suffered by the two women. This forces the prostitutes of Big Whiskey and Mattie into mercenary economic arrangements with males in order to achieve their revenge. In addition, revenge in both films is negotiated through a biblical subtext, which ultimately reveals the significant cost of revenge on the revengers: William Munny and Mattie.