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Abstract

Vengeance and forgiveness are considered opposite and divergent responses to the experience of having been wronged. Beginning with the obvious alternative reactions being vengeance versus forgiveness, that are clearly in juxtaposition to each other, this contribution explores the psychological condition that connects them, ultimately arriving at the provocative, yet supported, possibility that forgiveness may be the result of a kind of evolution of vengeance, and that feelings of vengeance may actually constitute the antecedent in the psychological progression of forgiveness. Given the three potential responses to having been treated unfairly, namely forgetting, forgiveness, and vengeance/punishment, analysed via three different endings in the tale of Cinderella, this essay explores how forgiveness may, in its own way, contain a form of vengeance. Indeed, psychological literature highlights a certain overlapping of aspects between vengeance and forgiveness, and perhaps, it is for this reason that when, in the face of having been wronged, the distinction between these two responses may, in some cases, become blurred.