Book Name: Hell Hath No Fury

Edited by: Shinie Antony

Published by: Hachette

Price: Rs 599

Hell Hath No Fury, edited by Shinie Antony, is an anthology of thirteen short stories brought together by the theme of revenge. Quite like the idiom from which the title is taken, ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, these stories depict the actions of women rejected by men and by society. Little did William Congreve know back in 1697 when he wrote The Mourning Bride that his lines will travel through time, becoming a subject of contention. Is it, for instance, a sexist presentation of women’s response to disrespect? Or is it a cautionary tale? Whatever be the case, people and literature share a dialectical relationship. For an idiom to survive, there must be some truth to it.

Men have expressed their emotions dramatically through acts of violence since the dawn of time. It’s the women who have often been resigned to being either the angel in the house or the mad woman in the attic. In the introduction to the collection, Shinie Antony states, “Women... keep calm until betrayed. Then all bets are off. A woman who plots revenge reinvents herself, reclaims the planet: ‘This place is mine too.’ She is not waiting for applause or a pat on the back, for the history books to record – just righting wrongs. Taking into her own hands what she is told she can’t.”

The women in these stories sometimes inspire awe, and, at other times, disgust. They are tinted with the grey shade. Many a time, their actions seem unjust reactions to a perceived threat or rejection. These women are twisted and discomforting, everything that patriarchy won’t allow them to be. All the authors in the book, men and women, explore revenge in distinct ways. Sometimes, it’s loud and direct. Sometimes, it is subtle. It empowers, and it destroys. It paves paths towards death and rebirth. It leaves readers wondering about their interpretation of the word and its limitations in action.

Another interesting aspect of these stories is the settings. Revenge here transgresses space and realms — urban and rural India; city, parks and closed apartments; on the road, always on the run. In the opening story, “The Woman Who Lost Her Head”, Madhavi Mahadevan retells the mythological story of Renuka being hunted and killed by her son, Rama. She inverts the glory of Parashurama, the one with the axe, into his helplessness, the one who cannot get rid of the axe that sinned. In “Three Days in Hong Kong” by Catherine Mcnamara, a story that beautifully grasps the reader with its second-person narration, revenge is the act of transgressing from a closed hiding space into the openness of the world. In “Vibha”, written with Anukrti Upadhyay’s characteristic minute detailing, the horror of revenge hits hard because it’s a cold-blooded act to reclaim a workspace by eliminating anything that reminds the protagonist of a past and a place she cannot tolerate.

Each of these stories is preceded by the authors’ perception of the theme. Anil Menon, who looks at revenge bringing more suffering, narrates an engrossing tale by layering art, machine learning, and relationships with anagnorisis in “Rückenfigur”. Jahnavi Barua looks at revenge as an “act of retaliation that may feel more empty than the hurt it seeks to avenge”. In “The Thorny Apple”, she brings forth a confident but atypical protagonist who redefines her fate upon learning of her husband’s adultery.

This anthology serves the reader with a wide-ranging platter of poison to pick from. The women — be they motherly figures, ghosts, witches, children, mistresses or lawfully-wedded wives — in all the stories share a thing in common: their desire to claim what they believe is theirs, no matter what it takes.