Perceived
Humiliation Followed by Revenge
Bob Wallace
September 2,
2010
When I
was in college, for a year-and-a-half I lived in a studio apartment attached
to an old two-story house, in which lived 11 or 12 girls. I got to know them
quite well.
Some
stayed there the entire time but some left and others arrived, so altogether
I got to know maybe 15 girls. It was an eye-opening experience.
One night
I was in the room of one of them, listening to her records (this was before
CDs, obviously). She was 21 years old, very attractive, very curvaceous.
For some
unknown reason she began to tell me about when she was 12 years old. She had
been ostracized in the seventh grade, she told me. She showed me a picture.
She
didn’t look bad, just a gawky 12-year-old with glasses. A little pudgy. The
word “nerdy” occurred to me. All these things together were enough for her
to be ostracized.
That
summer, within three months, she blossomed. The baby fat melted, she got
contacts, she got taller, she filled out. It was the proverbial case of the
ugly duckling turning into a swan.
When she
went back to school in the eighth grade, all of the kids who had ostracized
her now wanted to be her friends. She ignored every one of them. She told me
from that time forward she was never attracted to “what most women consider
good-looking men” — the kind who had ostracized her.
I
remembered that story because it made such a vivid impression on me. Years
later, when I began to think about it, I realized what had happened to her.
It was a case of humiliation
followed by revenge. I never asked her, but I wouldn’t doubt
that if some really good-looking guy asked her out she turned him down.
Neither would I doubt that she enjoyed it.
I tried
to put myself in her place. How would I feel? Rejected? Offended? Hurt
feelings (whatever that means)? Anger, resentment? Self-pity? Perhaps.
Humiliated? The desire for revenge? In some form, yes.
Humiliation followed by revenge is the story of Cain and Abel, except in
that case it led to murder. In this girl’s case, being much milder than that
of those two unfortunate brothers, it took the form of rejecting or
completely ignoring the kind of guys who had humiliated her when she was 12
years old. She was doing to them what they did to her.
What
happened to her for those several months in the seventh grade affected her
for the rest of her life. You could use the word “trauma,” although I think
it’s a bit strong. But there is an old saying, “Trauma demands repetition,”
which is done in order to relive the trauma and make it turn out right. It
might be why some people who have been (or think they have been) humiliated
seek revenge over and over.
I
mentioned this girl was nerdy at 12 but very good-looking at 13. That
reminded me of the well-known movie,
The Revenge of the Nerds. And what was it about? Humiliation followed by
revenge (for that matter, the same goes for
Animal House). That formula is an
archetype that everyone, the world over, understands. You could probably
show both those movies without any sound, and people would
still understand it.
I was
also reminded of Stephen King’s first novel,
Carrie, about a girl who gets revenge on her high school — and the
entire town — by destroying both.
Then of
course there is the classic revenge novel, one that has influenced so many
writers — The Count of Monte Cristo,
which, in my copy, is over 1300 pages devoted to vengeance.
I don’t
see much difference, if any, between humiliation and shame — in both cases
the sufferers perceive themselves as diminished. In the story of the Garden
of Eden, Adam and Eve (who, ominously, are Cain and Abel’s parents), are
ashamed when they realize they are naked. And Cain is shamed and humiliated
when God rejects his sacrifice and accepts Abel’s.
