Hatred and revenge as cleansing

Hatred and revenge as cleansing is a concept that turns on a contradiction: hatred can sustain a victim through life, while revenge can seem to offer both an end to conflict and a route toward inner release. Through Madeleine’s resolve and Victoria Bergman’s later conversation with Sofia Zetterlund, the novel tests whether vengeance actually heals, or whether the feeling of cleansing depends on memory, guilt, and the story a survivor tells herself.

Hatred as a means of survival

For Madeleine, hatred is not simply a desire to retaliate. She rejects the idea that a longing for revenge is what allows a victim to keep living; instead, she regards hatred itself as the force that has kept her breathing since her earlier ordeal. This distinction matters: revenge looks toward a future act, while hatred is already present, an emotion she experiences as a resource for enduring the present. Her insistence that those responsible cannot be allowed to remain alive makes survival and retaliation seem bound together, though the text does not establish that killing them would bring the peace she seeks.

The thought takes shape during a drive along the Verdon River, where the road winds high above the water beneath a mountain ridge. Low barriers, landslide warnings, and the possibility of a fatal mistake make death feel close; Madeleine even welcomes the prospect of being buried by falling rock. Against that setting, her resolve to live by ensuring that her enemies do not is not presented as calm calculation. The dangerous road gives her choice an immediate, bodily edge, while her appetite for risk sits uneasily beside her determination to survive. When she briefly wonders whether the deaths of her enemies would end her hatred and give her peace, she dismisses the questions as irrelevant: she is free to choose her path. The unresolved possibility of peace remains part of the concept, not a promise the narrative confirms.

Revenge as a social resolution

Madeleine frames vengeance through an account of primitive cultures in which revenge was understood as a duty and a fundamental right. In that conception, retaliation restores a victim’s respect and marks the end of a conflict. Its force lies partly in its apparent simplicity: the act itself resolves the dispute, without the need for further analysis. This model offers Madeleine an alternative to a more uncertain process of reflection, in which the victim must ask what revenge can actually achieve.

The idea also links personal survival to recognition. Revenge is not described only as harm inflicted on an enemy; within this account, it is the means by which a wronged person can reclaim standing. Yet the possibility of closure depends on treating retaliation as a decisive endpoint. The later conversation complicates that assurance by asking whether an enemy’s injury or death actually removes fear, hatred, and guilt. The contrast leaves open whether revenge ends conflict, or merely gives it a visible action that can be mistaken for resolution.

Victoria’s imagined revenge

In a later exchange, Victoria tells Sofia that she hated Lars Magnus Pettersson so intensely that she thought she had killed him, though the revenge had occurred only in her imagination. She calls the imagined act pathetic, but Sofia treats hatred and revenge as serious human forces and suggests that they raise a philosophical question. Her distinction between human beings and animals places vengeance within human reflection: revenge is not just an impulsive response, but something people can interpret as an answer to injury.

Sofia offers an example rather than a parallel event in Victoria’s life. A woman flees after a young man smashes her car window with a metal chain; at home, she discovers that the chain caught in the bumper and tore off his hand. The example makes revenge morally and emotionally ambiguous: the assailant has suffered, but Sofia asks whether the woman is now free of hatred or fear. Victoria understands the problem, but her own answer comes from retrospect rather than from the hypothetical. She says that she no longer hates Lars Magnus Pettersson and that the false memory helped her get over him. The imagined revenge did not amount to a real confrontation; nevertheless, it had an effect on how she lived with the past.

That effect was not uncomplicated. Victoria recalls periods when guilt became unbearable, then describes feeling cleansed in the present conversation. She also admits uncertainty: she may always have doubted, somewhere within herself, that Lars Magnus Pettersson was actually dead. Her memory is hazy, so the relief cannot be separated neatly from the possibility that the imagined act rested on doubt all along. The episode therefore distinguishes emotional consequence from factual revenge. Victoria experiences release without the physical retaliation that Madeleine imagines, but her account does not make that release complete, stable, or free of guilt.

Cleansing, confrontation, and doubt

Sofia articulates revenge as a process with both an external and an internal dimension. Its psychological meaning implies a resolution involving physical confrontation with an enemy as well as an inward process associated with cleansing and self-awareness. The two dimensions do not necessarily coincide in Victoria’s story: she describes an imagined killing and a false memory, then reports that she no longer hates and feels cleansed. The conversation allows the psychological consequence to be real for her without treating the imagined event as an actual act of vengeance.

Victoria’s response also leads her to consider Madeleine. She has brought a notepad containing at least fifteen pages of suppositions about her daughter, many of which she suspects may be wrong or presumptuous. Her starting point is that Madeleine is driven by feelings Victoria recognizes in herself: hatred and revenge. Victoria wonders whether hatred, too, might cleanse. The question brings the two women’s experiences close without making them identical. Madeleine treats hatred as what has kept her alive and turns toward action; Victoria looks back on imagined revenge and its uncertain aftermath. The concept’s lasting tension lies between those positions: hatred can preserve a person’s capacity to endure, and revenge can feel like a resolution, but neither feeling guarantees peace.