Don’t get mad, and for God’s sake, don’t get weepy. Get even.
These words become the motto of Kelly McCann in my latest novel, Her, Too. She’s a lawyer who’s built her career defending men accused of sexual assault. When she’s raped by her own client, she convinces herself that she can’t report him to the police without destroying her reputation. But her trauma manifests as rage, and soon it becomes corrosive. So instead of seeking justice, she charts a course for revenge.
Hell hath no fury like a woman—assaulted? In four of the following novels, the victims chart the same course as Kelly, and their revenge proves sweet if morally debatable. In only one does the victim find revenge through the justice system, an outcome that might be the sweetest of all.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, Lisbeth Salander is placed into the guardianship of Nils Bjurman, a corrupt sadist who repeatedly rapes her. She secretly videotapes one of his attacks, then returns to his apartment to taser him, tie him up, and sodomize him with one of his sex toys—a literal rape for a rape. She threatens him with release of the videotape if he doesn’t end the guardianship. Finally, she tattoos the words “I AM A RAPIST” on his chest. Lisbeth not only achieves her own personal revenge, she also gains a measure of justice by assuring that no other woman will suffer at his hands.
In Big Driver by Stephen King, mystery author Tessa Thorne is lured into an ambush where a man brutally rapes her and leaves her for dead, stuffing her into a culvert where she awakes in horror to discover the corpses of his previous victims. She doesn’t report her attack, fearing the public embarrassment that would follow. She has a passing thought for his other victims, but finds herself too tired to worry about moral responsibility. She asks herself What’s in it for me? Eventually, though, those bodies in the culvert call to her, and she kills her rapist, accomplishing revenge for herself while also protecting those women who would have been his future victims. But she goes on to kill his mother and brother, too, for facilitating his crimes. These murders read as pure revenge. Nonetheless she apparently goes on to live happily ever after, untroubled by what she’s done.
The moral issues get even murkier in Pretty Evil by Zoe Rossi. Camilla Black, a glamorous magazine editor by day, has a secret vigilante life by night. Brutally abused as a child, she now seeks a form of revenge by entrapping other sexual predators and killing them. She’s much like Dexter in Jeff Lindsey’s novels: she kills only bad guys, but she does it with the bloodthirsty relish of a serial killer. She pulls off a final, satisfying coup de grace, then retires to live happily ever after with her lover. Assuming she can control her obvious psychopathy.
If you’re one of the three people on the planet who hasn’t yet read Where the Crawdads Sing, STOP READING RIGHT NOW. In this much loved novel by Delia Owen, a little girl named Kya is abandoned by her family and learns to survive on her own in the marshes of coastal North Carolina. The novel is rich in its descriptions of the natural world and gives us much to admire in the character of Kya. But it has a jarringly discordant ending. Chase, the town’s golden boy and Kya’s onetime suitor, attempts to rape her, though she successfully fights him off. She then painstakingly plans his murder, lures him to his death, and constructs a diabolically clever alibi. She commits the cold-blooded murder of a man who is not a murderer himself; technically he’s not even a rapist. Yet Kya suffers no remorse. She goes on to have a successful career as a nature writer and a blissful life with the man she loves.
Contrast the revenge arcs in these novels with Dark Chapter, Winnie M. Li’s excellent first novel. Vivian is hiking alone near Belfast when she’s beaten and raped by a thuggish teenager. She immediately reports the crime to the local police and submits to all the appalling forensic exams and interviews. She suffers horribly from PTSD, but she grits her teeth and sees the process through the arrest and trial of her rapist. After she endures a brutal cross-examination, her rapist is convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term. She’s achieved justice for herself and for every other woman or girl her rapist would have attacked. At the end, Vivian is climbing toward recovery from her trauma. (Hopefully the author has done the same in real life. This novel was based on her own harrowing experience as a rape victim.)
Of course, Vivian’s course may not work for all women. Kya in Crawdads is the town pariah, while Chase is its golden boy. There’s little hope that her accusation against him would lead to prosecution, let alone conviction. It’s equally unlikely that the state would intervene on behalf of Lisbeth Salander against her state-appointed guardian in Dragon Tattoo.
In Big Driver, Tessa doesn’t go to the police because she fears public embarrassment and damage to her reputation. These are the same fears that haunt Kelly in Her, Too, and convince her instead to seek revenge by ruining her rapist’s fortune and reputation. But eventually she realizes how ill-conceived her plan is. She isn’t his first victim, and unless she goes public, she won’t be his last. Her silence, along with the silence of all his other victims, has allowed him to continue his crimes. At the end she knows she has to come forward with the truth.
For Vivian in Dark Chapter and, ultimately, Kelly in Her, Too, revenge isn’t the answer. Justice is the sweeter reward.
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