Heroic...??

Last week on "The Biggest Loser", Heba said that her husband didn't mind giving her the chance to compete in the finals. Vote for her. Naturally, not many did. She lost 16% to her husband's 84%.

I admire anyone who can work that hard to change their lives. Seriously, all of those people on that show amazed me. It was just the weight loss, it was that they looked HEALTHY. They beamed. And I think it was because they overcame all the lies they have heard about themselves to blossom into who they really are. That is beautiful.

Last night, I heard Heba's truth. She had brought them both to the show so that they could have a chance for a healthy pregnancy. That is beautiful. I can identify with that. I would have voted for that. Throwing her husband under the bus so she can compete? Not so much.

It got me to thinking about writing and characters. No one is going to identify with someone who will sacrifice another for their own good. It's emotionally impossible -- because it's ungodly, unloving and downright rude. Great characters sacrifice themselves for the good of another. But why? Why does revenge feel so good in a novel? I mean, it's supposed to be the Lord's, we know that...and yet revenge can be a little heroic. Who does not cheer when Dantes takes Danglars down in the "Count of Monte Cristo"?

When "Tess" (of the D'urbervilles) takes a knife to the man who raped her, you have to admit, there's a little pleasure in that, and wow, does that make you feel wrong. LOL But after you've watched her bury her baby outside the church cemetery (they wouldn't let her bury a "bastard" there.) Hardy ups the stakes until YOU want to kill the man.

Tess is very anti-God when her rapist comes to tell her of his conversion, and his "ministry" and Tess responds, "I can't believe in such sudden things! I feel indignant with you for talking to me like this, when you know--when you know what harm you've done me! You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on the earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!"

His answer a few lines later, "Well," he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to spring out at a moment's notice, "God forbid that I should say I am a good man -- and you know I don't say such a thing. I am new to goodness, trutly, but new comers see furthest sometimes."

Okay, if you don't want to hurt him yet, you are far less human than me. Why does it feel so good to watch pride fall? When we have enough of it ourselves?

So you think he's come back to apologize, make things right when he meets her a few days later. "Tess -- don't look at me so -- I cannot stand your looks! There were never such eyes, surely, before Christianity or since!. I won't lose my head; I dare not. I own that the sight of you has waked up my love for you, which, I believed, was extinguished with all such feelings. But I thought that our marriage might be a sanctification for us both, 'The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband.' I said to myself."

So what is it about revenge that feels satisfying?