There are two great plot twists when it comes to really great stories.
Revenge and Redemption.
Revenge plot twists show the absolute depths a person is willing to sink into their imagination of exacting the most excruciating and sin satisfying payback for wrongs done to them. In their mind, justice is served.
Redemption plot twists on the other hand soar above the heights of human ability to love and forgive. Our imaginations can rarely comprehend the heights of self-sacrifice and mercy and love that lift a fellow human out of the pits of their misery. Redemption moves beyond justice and into new life.
Humans plot revenge.
Humans rarely plot redemption.
Revenge stories are our guilty pleasure.
Redemption stories drive us to our knees in other-worldly, eternal yearning for our own redemption.
In Jane Austen’s Emma, we are brought to tears as Emma calculates her many flaws and failures as a daughter and a friend. She rises above and is resigned to suffer the consequences of her actions. But in the end, she is offered mercy and compassion and ultimately love. All of which she doesn’t deserve.
In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the tale drags on of woe upon woe committed against Tess. The joys of this world are denied her over and over again. Finally, she exacts her revenge denying life to the man who has taken it from her time and time again. Justice. She experiences a flitting moment of ecstasy until justice is served and life snatched from her once and for all. The ending leaves us shaken. There is no hope. There is no redemption. Life is pain and misery.
But revenge is not simply a literary device used by novelists.
We have archeological records of ancient cultures inventing the most excruciating methods of torture as tools of revenge. The worst methods are reserved for those who commit treason.
The Mayan in South America were incredibly skilled in keeping their victim alive while they exacted their torture over months. Fingers would be dismembered and then healed fully and then the arms and then the legs. Flesh would be flayed off and fed to dogs, eaten in the presence of the tortured man.
Ancient Persians had a particular form of torture called “death by milk and honey”. Doesn’t sound so bad! Right? Just wait. Ancient Greek historian, Plutarch, included this episode about Persian emperor Artaxerxes:
[The king] decreed that Mithridates should be put to death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lay down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands, and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, they offer him food, and if he refuse to eat it, they force him to do it by pricking his eyes; then, after he has eaten, they drench him with a mixture of milk and honey, pouring it not only into his mouth, but all over his face. They then keep his face continually turned towards the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must needs do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards. In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired.
In the book of Esther, an ancient Persian advisor to the emperor is plotting revenge. In the end, we find miraculous redemption.