Wild Justice: The Evolution Of Revenge

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The changing relationship between revenge and justice from literary, religious and legal perspectives. Includes taboo, metaphor and sexual revenge.

KIRKUS REVIEW

Though not quite the sweeping synthesis it would like to be, this historical-philosophical essay on the meaning and forms of revenge is nonetheless clear, vigorous, balanced, and generally persuasive. Freelancer Jacoby (Moscow Conversations, The Possible She, etc.) surveys a vast territory: from the wrath of Achilles to Charles Bronson's berserk exploits in Death Wish I and II; from Medea to Francine Hughes (the Michigan woman who burnt her sadistic drunken husband to death); from the Torah to the trial of Eichmann. But all this provides not so much a systematic introduction as a colorful, crowded background to her main subject--the role of retribution (as opposed to deterrence and rehabilitation) in modern systems of criminal justice. While ""retributive desires"" may simply express a blind instinct to strike back, they also, Jacoby argues, "flow from a need to restore 'something missing--a sense of physical and emotional integrity that is shattered by violence." Liberals may be tempted to call this "legalized revenge," echoing the psychoanalytic belief that wrongdoers have no more free will than the rest of us and that the wish to punish them (rather than to cure them) is beneath the dignity of a mature adult. Not so, Jacoby counters: public outrage as the under-punishment of obvious felons (Richard Herrin, John Hinckley, Jr.) is perfectly justified. The American therapeutic mentality has so discredited retribution that, for example, witnesses at the trial of the brutal ex-Nazi Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan could acknowledge no other motive for testifying against her than a pure love of truth, tinged with compassion for the defendant. Jacoby in no way glorifies revenge--in fact, she makes a strong case against capital punishment as irrationally excessive. "Proportionality" is her guiding ideal, the force behind every humane legal reform in history, from the unfairly maligned lex talionis to changes in the evidence required for rape convictions. Though her research is basically sound, Jacoby sometimes misreads texts (claiming that the gods condone Agamemnon's murder of Iphigeneia in the Oresteia, that the Book of Daniel "is a clear projection of the Jews' hatred for their Babylonian captors," that Jesus was a Pharisee), and her book could use a little more anthropological meat on its bones. But the overall performance is solid and satisfying (especially the chapter on "Sexual Revenge" a distinct contribution to current debate on crime and punishment.

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