Content area
Full text
The external world keeps reflecting back what we bring to it. What is out there is not a thing apart. Nature may not be merely a mirror of the mind, but neither is the mind merely a mirror of nature.
-Milner Ball, Lying Down Together: Law, Metaphor and Theology
Andrea Dworkin knows that the world can be a cruel and harrowing place for women. She writes shocking essays, proposes controversial antipornography legislation, and, every now and then, creates a novel filled with rage. Mercy is one such contentious novel. It has been dismissed as engaging in "rhetorical trickery" that "calls women together in a crusade of pointless retributive violence"'l and as "a long, largely unpunctuated, scream" in which Dworkin "wants to thrust her fist down the throats of feminists."2 The most comprehensive condemnation was issued by Martha Nussbaum who asserts that Mercy is a "striking modern example of the strict retributivist position" in which "there is no mercy." Nussbaum is disturbed about the narrator's "angry refusal of mercy" and her lack of "concern for the identity of the particulars" of the various men who molest, beat, and rape her.3 Nussbaum complains that, "like the women in male pornography," Dworkin's "men have no history, no psychology, no reasons for action; they are just knives that cut, arms that beat, penises that maim by the very act of penetration. "4 This view, of course, is premised on the assumption that these men are the offenders who should be shown leniency.
Yet, if the perspective is shifted and the karate-kicking narrator, Andrea, is viewed as the perpetrator of crimes against innocent victims, rather than a revenge-seeking victim, a new view of the text emerges. Mercy becomes, to borrow Nussbaum's phrase, a "vision of the particulars"-Andrea's particulars.5 And so, Dworkin's readers are positioned as triers of fact whose purpose is not only to adjudicate Andreas culpability for murder, but also to consider the mitigating factors presented by her life. Accordingly, after exploring some of the "particulars" of Andreas life, the first argument of this essay considers the way in which Mercy can be read as illustrating the importance of mercy in the criminal justice system. To conclude the analysis here, however, would be to overlook the importance of...