Valentine's Day: Women Against Men, Stories of Revenge. - Review - book review

National Catholic Reporter, June 15, 2001 by Theresa Sanders

Fast-talking dames wage battle with words. Their slower-speaking sisters, however, sometimes have to resort to other means of making themselves heard. Like murder.

Such is the premise of Valentine's Day: Women Against Men, Stories of Revenge (Duckworth, London). The book is a collection of 19 stories by modern women writers including Agatha Christie, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates and Carol Shields.

The occasions for revenge in the stories range from simple inattention on a husband's part to infidelity to, in a few cases, physical abuse. The acts of revenge undertaken by the women scorned include smothering, stabbing and poisoning, though not all the stories are quite so grim. One woman merely fantasizes about feeding her husband to a man-eating hippopotamus, and another's worst crime is to serve her husband cat-food sandwiches carefully garnished with watercress. (Why is it that so many of the stories involve food? It seems that even at their most murderous, women are still confined to the kitchen.)

For those troubled by the iniquity of these characters' acts of retribution, editor Alice Thomas Ellis, who provides the work's introduction, agrees that "we should hearken more attentively to the injunction of the Lord, `Vengeance is mine.' Still," she continues. "reading about it can be, to our fallen human nature, not only salutary but sometimes deplorably satisfying."

Theresa Sanders is an associate professor of theology at Georgetown University.