Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps

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СКАЧАТЬ a natural and necessary component of love and the requisite mark of kinship to an all-out condemnation of revenge as unfit for “civilized people.” What happened in the interim? Revenge had a nearly sacrosanct place in early conceptions of justice. What changed the popular opinion concerning revenge from recognizing it as a mark of honor to judging it a desperate and illegal act?

      The willingness of people to abdicate the right to take personal revenge was contingent upon the strength of the central authority. The people’s obedience also depended on the sovereign’s willingness and ability to take on revenge as a state responsibility. By the twelfth century, in most places in the Western world, the state had grown strong enough to fully usurp the right to take vengeance. Private revenge became extralegal as the state claimed a monopoly on legal violence. Homicide ceased to be a private wrong calling for familial response in the form of a death or compensation, but rather became a capital offense, a crime against the state as well as the individual or family. Centralized in this way, revenge became what is commonly called retribution, that is, revenge enacted by the state.¹ Additionally, the state acting in a person’s behalf—taking on one’s violent act, so to speak—became synonymous with justice. To get justice meant getting the state to punish the wrongdoer.

      The degree of private restraint, nonetheless, was always proportional to the strength of the sovereign. The strong arm of the law alone, however, could not convince people to give up what they had regarded as a sacred privilege and duty. The story of the state’s usurpation includes great resistance from people accustomed to righting their own private wrongs. Because revenge was deeply connected to a sense of kinship, family loyalty, and courage, other more subtle maneuvers were necessary to complete the transfer.

      While the pollution doctrine might provide the state with a rationale to justify its participation in punishment, that rationale alone cannot eliminate the desire for private revenge that has been so deeply part of human culture. Paulina does not argue against the state’s right to prosecute, but she does insist that her own needs be taken into account. When she asks Gerardo (standing in for the official state as head of the government commission), “What about my good?” Gerardo has no reply except to ask for her sacrifice. How else can he respond? In the legal system he serves, Paulina’s “good” has no standing. Paulina issues another unanswerable challenge: “Why is it always people like me who always have to sacrifice, who have to concede when concessions are needed, biting my tongue, why?” Clearly, it would be more convenient for the state if Paulina and others like her remained silent, bit their tongues and held their peace. Paulina’s cooperative silence would be guaranteed if her desire for revenge were somehow eliminated. She is expected to suppress her own emotional requirements, her desire and need for some revenge. From the perspective of a less-than-stable state, Paulina should not only allow the government to determine crimes and punishments, she should also be willing to “put the past behind” if that is what the state requires of her.

      As emerging states began to centralize their power and monopolize revenge, another development became necessary so that people would not readily reclaim their ancient right. This development was the removal of emotion from state punishment and the purgation of the victim’s desire for punishment. States needed to insure that even the desire for revenge would be unacceptable. One of the most effective devices for this suppression and silencing was shame, the instructing of each citizen to be ashamed of any citizen, including himself or herself, who might give importance to a desire for revenge. Citizens were taught to believe that they could seek justice (dispassionate state punishment) but not revenge, severing any original nexus that the two might have shared. The situation in Western Europe, particularly in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, provides an example of the cultural strategies employed to change the perception of revenge. Religion, philosophy, and literature were enlisted to convince people to keep the urge for personal revenge restrained. Wherever people gathered—in churches, theaters, and educational institutions—they encountered some sort of argument, subtle or otherwise, against personal revenge.

      In their sermons and religious writings, ministers and theologians reinterpreted the biblical practice and approval of revenge depicted in both the New and Old Testaments. No longer was the emphasis on God’s wrathful vengeance, on his “sword steeped in blood.” Instead theologians roundly denounced revengers and predicted damnation for anyone who took revenge into his or her own hands; the revenger “strips himselfe of Gods protection.”² Elizabethan England was described as a New Jerusalem, in which “there is now no thirsting for reuenge. The law of Retribution is disanuld amongst them…. An eie no longer for an eie; a tooth no longer for a tooth.”³ Influential theologian Joseph Butler (in an interesting foreshadowing of Nietzsche) preached that revenge, which stems from resentment, is contrary to religion and that while “every man naturally feels an indignation upon seeing instances of villainy and baseness,”⁴ at the same time “indulgence of revenge”⁵ has the tendency to propagate itself and thus must not be engaged in “by any one who considers mankind as a community or family, and himself a member of it.”⁶

      Much of the popular drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries set up a similar stark contrast between revenge and justice, often with bloody depictions of revenge and equally bloody portrayals of its consequences. A culture bent on suppressing destructive revenge impulses had to encourage the emergence of stories that contrasted revenge with justice, stories that created the cautionary cultural narrative arguing that revenge and justice are mutually exclusive and, thus excluded, the desire for revenge is shameful and requires suppression. In seeking an extinction of the passion for revenge, the extremes of vengeful behavior were presented, with revenge often portrayed as being sought for trivial wrongs and in excess. Popular dramas portrayed revenge as an agonizing burden that invariably pushed even good people into madness with cataclysmic results. If the notion of revenge entered a hero’s life, it would inevitably “warp his character [and] drive him to insanity.”⁷

      Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1589) was the “most prodigious success of any drama produced and printed between 1580 and 1642.”⁸ In The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd portrays a variety of revengers: the noble but paralyzed Hieronimo who must avenge his murdered son, as well as the malicious Balthazar and Lorenzo, who kill for selfish reasons and trivial wrongs. The actions of all the revengers, good and evil, bring down the state and result in multiple deaths. At the close of the play, the Ghost of Don Andrea, a slain warrior, speaks to a character called Revenge and delineates, with gruesome pleasure, the multiple revenge murders that have occurred:

      I, now my hopes have end in their effects,

      When blood and sorrow finnish my desires:

      Horatio murdered in his Fathers bower,

      Vilde Serberine by Pedringano slaine,

      False Pedringano hangd by quaint device,

      Faire Isabella by her selfe misdone,

      Prince Balthazar by Bel-imperia stabd,

      The Duke of Castile and his wicked Sonne,

      Both done to death by olde Hieronimo.

      My Bel-imperia falne as Dido fell,

      And good Hieronimo slaine by himselfe:

      I these were spectacles to please my soule.⁹

      Nine deaths and the end of the possibility of peace between Spain and Portugal are the fruits of the drive for revenge. In The Spanish Tragedy and in many of the plays that the English audiences attended for several generations, “The act of revenge does not correct an imbalance and restore order … with the even exchange of an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. Revenge is itself an act of excess.”¹⁰ In The СКАЧАТЬ