Dueling in Lit

            Dueling was always condemned by moralists, but the imagination of writers worked hard to shock and humiliate it out of style. Sir Richard Steele pointed out in The Tatler that it was an odd way of getting satisfaction from a man (there are female instances: http://listverse.com/2017/09/04/top-10-female-duels-and-duelists/) to give him the opportunity of shooting you through the head. Shakespeare makes a joke of it: the terrified coxcomb urged to the fight, the terrified woman disguised as a man, almost forced into a duel by the jokers who later humiliate Malvolio. Pushkin, later to die in a duel himself, has his foolish hero Eugene Onegin kill his best friend in a duel growing out of petty irritation. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon believes himself to have killed his dueling opponent when in fact their pistols were loaded with blanks. In The Radetzky March, we are in the twentieth century, though the officers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire have barely heard the news, when Lieutenant Trotta’s best friend dies in a duel Trotta’s behavior has provoked, though he does not fire the shot. For our authors, dueling represents many centuries of petty resentment, forced acquiescence to a murderous practice, deadly misunderstandings, tragic and needless consequences.