The Importance of Andrea Dworkin's "Mercy": Mitigating Circumstances and Narrative Jurisprudence

Abstract

Andrea Dworkin knows that the world can be cruel and harrowing place for women. She writes shocking essays, proposes controversial antipornography legislation, and, every now and then, creates novel filled with rage. Mercy is one such contentious novel. It has been dismissed as engaging in rhetorical trickery that calls women together in crusade of pointless retributive violence' and as a long, largely unpunctuated, scream in which Dworkin wants to thrust her fist down the throats of feminists.2 The most comprehensive condemnation was issued by Martha Nussbaum who asserts that Mercy is striking modern example of the strict retributivist position in which there is no mercy. Nussbaum is disturbed about the narrator's angry refusal of mercy and her lack of concern for the identity of the particulars of the various who molest, beat, and rape her.3 Nussbaum complains that, like the women in male pornography, Dworkin's men have no history, no psychology, no reasons for action; they are just knives that cut, arms that beat, penises that maim by the very act of penetration.4 This view, of course, is premised on the assumption that these are the offenders who should be shown leniency. Yet, if the perspective is shifted and the karate-kicking narrator, Andrea, is viewed as the perpetrator of crimes against innocent victims, rather than revenge-seeking victim, new view of the text emerges. Mercy becomes, to borrow Nussbaum's phrase, vision of the particulars-Andrea's particulars.5 And so, Dworkin's readers are positioned as triers of fact whose purpose is not only to