Revenge Stories of Modern Life

Abstract

his claim may come back to haunt me, but my sense is that of the limited number of basic plots we find in nineteenthcentury novels, the one that has received the least critical attention is the plot. If I am correct that the role of has gone relatively unremarked, this may be because it seems relatively unremarkable: on the one hand, its mere presence is no surprise, as 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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