subjects into objects, and this transformation is the
reason why the victims of cruelty experience such
a disruption of their worldview. Victims of cruelty
move from “life—to a kind of death” (Arnault 7).
They feel they can never go back to the vision of
life before. There can be no redemption, no happy
ending. While life may go on, the meaning of life is
forever changed for them.
Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good
Man Is Hard to Find” is an excellent example of
how cruelty disrupts meaning. The family who are
murdered in the story do not resist their deaths; the
moments in which they are taken into the woods
and shot seem surreal. The grandmother refuses to
comprehend what is happening around her, exhort-
ing The Misfit to “Pray!” and insisting, beyond rea-
son, that he would not kill an old lady.
In Emily Brontë’s wutherinG heiGhts, Heath-
cliff endures cruelty throughout his life. He is,
almost like a stray dog, brought home to Wuther-
ing Heights by Mr. Earnshaw. Although he is fed
and clothed, he is treated more as an animal than
a human, with no one save Catherine encouraging
him to have feelings. When Mr. Earnshaw dies,
Heathcliff endures even greater cruelty at the hands
of the sadistic Hindley. As he grows to adulthood,
Heathcliff never establishes the human connections
that would make it possible to be merciful. Instead,
he learns that cruelty is the only way and turns that
cruelty on Isabella, Hareton, Linton, and Cathy.
Cruelty, and the evil that lurks behind it, has
devastating consequences for both victims and vic-
timizers. Victimizers tend to lose their humanity,
even as they force themselves to view their victims
as something less than human. Victims, on the
other hand, tend to enter a new, incomprehensible
world, one in which they have no rights, no agency,
no dignity, no humanity. Ultimately, although they
may move past the cruelty physically and emotion-
ally, they are unable to see the world the same way
ever again.
See also Coetzee, J. M.: waitinG For the
barbarians; Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: hound
oF the baskerviLLes; Frank, Anne: anne Frank:
the diary oF a younG GirL; Golding, Wil-
liam: Lord oF the FLies; Hinton, S. E.: out-
siders, the; Orwell, George: aniMaL FarM;
Poe, Edgar Allan: “Tell-Tale Heart, The”:
Salinger, J. D.: catcher in the rye, the; Virgil:
aeneid, the; Williams, Tennessee: streetcar
naMed desire, a.
FURTHER READING
Arnault, Lynne. “Cruelty, Horror, and the Will to
Redemption.” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 155–188.
Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and
Violence. New York: Freeman, 1997.
Edgerton, Robert B. The Balance of Human Kindness
and Cruelty: Why We Are the Way We Are. Lewiston,
N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2005
Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People
Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Jennifer McClinton-Templedeath
In Poetics, Aristotle recognized literature’s value for
humanity when he stated that “the object of art is
an imitation of life.” Writers have always used the
situations and events of everyday life in their writ-
ing, and since death is just as much a part of life as
anything else, it is arguably one of the most recur-
ring themes in all of literature. In poetry, fiction,
and drama, death is seen as a central theme that
gives way to other themes ranging from justice to
rites of passage to grief. Death is a crucial fact of
life, and from the emotional response to death to
the various religious frameworks through which it
is interpreted, it is obvious why death is used as a
theme in literature so extensively.
In ancient literature, the theme of death is seen
regularly. In Gilgamesh, the ancient epic of Mesopo-
tamia, death is clearly illustrated through relation-
ships, responding to the deaths of loved ones, and
war. Once Gilgamesh comes to love Enkidu, he dies,
and the reader is left with Gilgamesh’s thoughts
and response to his friend’s death. In ancient Greek
mythology, the Trojan War provided a framework
for a myriad of stories, including Homer’s The iLiad
and The odyssey; both stories recount numerous
lengthy battles and gruesome scenes of death. Later,
Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, the three great
Greek tragedians, created death-driven plays, such
as Sophocles’ oedipus the kinG and antiGone,death 23