Violence in Literature

At Issue

Violence has long occupied a prominent place in Western literature. Accounts of violence may be serious or satirical. They sometimes involve natural violence, such as earthquakes, but usually describe human-caused disaster such as war, torture, crime, and abuse of others.

Two literary forms in which the earliest and most powerful treatments of violence appear are epics and dramas. Epics are long narrative poems; they need to be read rather than acted. Since they are about a hero or heroic event or the founding of a nation, it is logical that violence is involved in the epic genre. These criteria also make the epic poem important to cultural identity. No self-respecting nation could claim to be cultured without an epic.

Epic violence is natural and human in origin. Natural disaster is implied, for example, when Zeus is called “the earthquake-making god.” Human violence is much more prominent. Blood and gore are so much a part of the Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.), the Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.), Beowulf (c. 1000), Cantar de mío Cid (early thirteenth century; Poem of the Cid, 1808), the Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), and other great epics, that they almost blot out the other aspects of the epic.

In the Iliad, Homer uses violence satirically, to show how ridiculous the Greeks are. Vergil, however, does not satirize his violence in the Aeneid. Roman literature is famous for its appetite for patriotic gore. Furthermore, the Greeks taunted their conquering Romans that, even though the Romans had superior military power, the Greeks had their epic poem and were therefore superior culturally. As a result, the Emperor Caesar Augustus commanded Vergil to write the great Roman epic, the Aeneid. Following his emperor’s orders, Vergil would not have dared call his heroes childish or silly, as Homer does. Thus violence in the Aeneid exposes patriotic heroism rather than the useless and foolish egotism that Homer considers violence to reveal.

Because they are long, epics have to be read or recited over several sittings. Plays, however, may be acted in a single afternoon. Ancient Greek and Roman plays tend, therefore, to focus on individual killings rather than on great battles, as epics do. Comedies as well as tragedies may depict violence, but comic violence is rarely harmful to anything but a character’s pride. Tragic violence, on the other hand, often entails death or painful and permanent damage to a character’s life. The Greek playwright Sophocles created the classic example in his play Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429 b.c.e.). Freudian theory projects the agony and misery of Oedipus, who kills his father and blinds himself, to modern times.

In the Poetics (c. 334-323 b.c.e.), Aristotle prefers the epic as more sophisticated than tragedy, because a narrative requires a more sophisticated audience than a play does. Regardless of Aristotle’s preference, violence is used in both literary forms with savage power, whether in the killing of entire tribes of people, as happens in the Nibelungenlied, or in the killing of one’s own family members, as happens in the Oresteia trilogy of Greek plays (c. 458 b.c.e.). In both genres, violence often amounts to what Aristotle calls spectacle and leads to a cleansing or purification, which he terms “catharsis.”

After Greek and Roman plays ceased to be produced, the Church engendered medieval drama. The stage was quick to depict violence equal to its classic ancestor. Presenting or describing individual killings or warfare, playwrights such as Lope de Vega Carpio and William Shakespeare enraptured audiences with violence. Some Spanish playwrights even discuss the value of violence in their plays in essays, echoing Aristotle’s observations. Violence, so popular on the Elizabethan stage, was not, it may be argued, an indication that the society itself was experiencing unusual or uncontrollable violence. It may be too simple to connect the acted violence of a revenge tragedy to the historical fact of contemporaneous public torture and executions.

Violence continues to thrive on the stage as a major attraction. In America, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill established violence in their plays, which have been repeated and revised by successive generations. The technological step from stage to film has transported representations of violence from the public stage into private homes.

As American literature entered its formative years, English, German, Russian, and other literatures were creating new dimensions for violence. Prometheus Unbound (1820), a lyrical drama by Percy Bysshe Shelley, indicates two new directions for violence. The first direction is gothic horror, another example of which is his wife Mary Shelley’s profoundly influential Frankenstein (1818), which established a model for the gothic novel. The other direction involves an expansion of violence to metaphysical levels. Shelley’s Prometheus became a paradigm for the superman, which in turn influenced the English playwright George Bernard Shaw.

Toward Existentialism

Ten years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy completed that giant of violence Voyna i mir (1865–69; War and Peace, 1886). As the parameters of violence continued to mushroom, the Holocaust catapulted the concept of violence to a point almost beyond literary comprehension.

Less known during and after the Holocaust was the even greater violence Joseph Stalin was conducting in the Soviet Union. This violence was eventually exposed by such works as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag Gulag, 1918–1956 (1973–75; Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, 1973–75). Shelley’s Promethean myth can be seen as a launching point for previously unimagined quantities of violence. The twentieth century’s technologies of distribution (trains, communication, weapons, mass production) made one man’s capacity for violence reach previously unthinkable levels.

The Jewish writer Franz Kafka (1884–1924) lent new irrationality to literary depictions of violence. His novels and short stories tell of occupying soldiers eating live oxen on the hoof, a man turning into a six-foot insect, an instrument of torture gone haywire, and a respectable businessman being executed by the state for reasons nobody learns. Kafka’s violence takes on an existential function, heralding the isolation, the misery, and the futility of many later writers.

Reasons for Violence

Most great writers indicate some kind of redeeming message in their depictions of violence, if only one of slim hope. They do not celebrate violence for its own sake. Great writers use violence, sometimes satirically, sometimes seriously, in hopes that humanity will stop doing violent things. This triumph of hope can be seen in all literary forms.

The French satirist François Rabelais depicts violence to criticize the Roman Catholic church. He has a monk of Seville, Friar John, commit some of the most severe brutality ever done to the human body on the written page—and these brutal acts are committed with a crucifix. Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes gave the world its most famous mock-heroic, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (part 1, 1605, part 2, 1615; Don Quixote de la Mancha, 1612–20). Once again, the purpose is not to celebrate but to criticize violence. Cervantes also targets the Roman Catholic church, whose priests burn Quixote’s library. The great French writer Voltaire depicts violence to the same end. Such satirists as these established a reason for depictions of religious violence that writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sinclair Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, and John Kennedy Toole would later use in American literature.

One of the most severely ironic essays in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” is also one of its most savagely violent. Like great satirists before him, Swift is saying one thing while meaning quite another, a common technique in depictions of violence. English nobility, absentee landlords, and wealthy businessmen are targets of this most bitter and violent satire, which is about eating infants and the money to be made thereby.

In Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” a lover suggests that he and the target of his affections “tear our pleasures with rough strife/ through the iron gates of life.” Here violence is used for the purpose of attaining love, in not the gentlest manner. In a sonnet titled “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” John Milton’s speaker laments “the bloody Piedmontese that rolled/ Mother with infant down the rocks,” and echoes their moans through hill and vale. Milton uses violence to decry ethnic savagery. These poems suggest only two kinds of violence that centuries of lyric poetry from many different time periods and nationalities contain.

Violence in American Literature

American literature began in violence, with nonfiction accounts of armed conflict between American Indians and settlers. American literature introduced frontier violence through the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. The violence required to conquer a wilderness was, the literature argues, healthy and had a kind of purity, even though it involved harsh elements, vicious wildlife, and horrible treatment of and by American Indians.

Violence in American literature is rich and varied. Edgar Allan Poe’s violence is not as sinister as it is often described, whether in his prose or in his poetry. Hawthorne’s violence (more symbolic than literal) in The Scarlet Letter (1850) and “Young Goodman Brown” is one of the earliest American attacks on religious Fundamentalism. Herman Melville’s writing blends cosmic with personal violence, a whale symbolizing natural violence and many of his characters enacting human violence. Melville also planted the seeds of depiction of psychological violence, a type Henry James would amplify.

The American Civil War brought the violence of war to the pages of writers such as Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, and Walt Whitman. They were followed by local color writers such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain and followed later by the naturalist school. Writers on the Civil War began to write about violence with a new seriousness, building a basis for protest in works such as Twain’s “Civil War Prayer” and Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay on nonviolent resistance, “Civil Disobedience.”

In American poetry, violence is often more compact than in fiction, simply because the space does not exist for lengthy description. Violence in American poetry can also be ambiguous. Does Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” for example, in which a drunken father dances with his young son standing on the father’s feet, reflect love or child abuse? Three of America’s greatest early twentieth-century fiction writers who depicted violence for shock value and for serious exposition of a nation’s ills are William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway.

New Modes of Violence in American Literature

During the twentieth century satire reappeared in American letters. This satirical impulse typically exposes violence as a means of convincing readers not to be violent. From Cooper’s frontier and Twain’s protest violence, readers move into violence of the absurd, ethnic violence, gender violence, psychological violence, and environmental violence.

After a surge of books treating World War II and the war in Korea, more books came out during the 1970s and 1980s about the Vietnam War, the United States’ longest and most controversial war. John P. Hermann’s Allegories of War (1989) includes a discussion on torture.

Ethnic violence in literature is often about slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) captured the United States in one of its first great examples of ethnic violence in literature. One of America’s most recent monuments to ethnic violence in literature is Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winner Beloved (1988).

The pulp Western, one of American literature’s unique genres, also contains ethnic violence, almost always aimed at American Indians. The American Western, however, includes considerably more than ethnic violence. In fact, violence of many kinds is a hallmark of the Western. A Western is not a Western without fistfights and shootings.

Why are publishers of Western books so fond of picturing on their covers women placed in provocative, dangerous situations by men? Jane Tompkins, in West of Everything (1992), claims that the American Western is a reaction by men against the progress women had been making not only on social issues but with their own novels. The entire Western cultural model, she declares, including film and books, is “not for women but for men.”

Toward the end of the twentieth century, a new form of violence took shape in literature: environmental violence. Counteracting the frontier view of natural resources as an enemy to be conquered and exploited, writers deploring environmental violence consider earth, trees, air, water, and wildlife as irreplaceable treasures to be preserved. Many see the destruction of the environment as a symbol of humanity’s destruction. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1976) is one of the most provocative examples of environmental violence in American fiction, because its protagonists use violence to stop environmental violence. The book may be considered as a twist on the classic, male-oriented, violent Western.

It is not surprising to find violence in literature. Writers reflect what they see, read, hear, and experience. Whether gentle or savage, satirical or serious, physical or psychological, great writers describe violence not to celebrate it but to put an end to it.

This proved true into the twenty-first century, as writers' stories continued to include aspects of violence that mirror this inescapable part of American culture. As discussion around domestic violence became increasingly more open, authors such as Kristin Hannah, in her 2018 novel The Great Alone, wrote books dealing with the issue as a significant theme. Concerns regarding increased instances of gun violence, particularly the occurrences of mass shootings, led some writers to explore such acts of inexplicable violence in both nonfiction and fiction, including in such novels as Fierce Kingdom (2017), by Gin Phillips, and Only Child (2018), by Rhiannon Navin.

Bibliography

Albuquerque, Severino João. Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theater. Wayne State UP, 1991. Studies verbal and nonverbal violence, violence of repression and resistance, and the violent double in two-character plays.

Frohock, W. M. The Novel of Violence in America: 1920-1950. Southern Methodist UP, 1950. Final chapter on violence and ethics.

Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Duke UP, 1965. Deals with many writers, including Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell. Discusses climate of violence, revelation in Eudora Welty, integrity of self in Robert Penn Warren, and private and primitive violence.

Howelett, Jana, and Rod Mengham, editors. The Violent Muse: Violence and the Artistic Imagination in Europe, 1910-1939. Manchester UP, 1994. Novels and plays dealing with expressionism, modernism, and the aesthetic, as affected by violence.

Lashgari, Dierdre. Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression. UP of Virginia, 1995. Examines individual silence, collective silence, violence of subjectivity, war writings, slave writings, poetics of violence.

Skurnick, Lizzie. "The Zoo Is a Terrifying Place in 'Fierce Kingdom.'" Review of Fierce Kingdom, by Gin Phillips. NPR, 27 July 2017, www.npr.org/2017/07/27/537086021/the-zoo-is-a-terrifying-place-in-fierce-kingdom. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. Oxford UP, 1992. Defines violence in literature of the US. West, with a special focus on violence done to women by men.