Revenge and Justice
What This Theme Explores
Revenge and justice in Freida McFadden’s The Teacher are not noble pursuits but intimate, volatile responses to injury and powerlessness. The novel asks whether “justice” can exist outside institutions, and what it costs to pursue it when those institutions fail. It probes how grievance metastasizes into vigilantism, transforming victims into perpetrators and redefining right and wrong as matters of perspective. As characters cross lines to reclaim agency, the story exposes how retribution promises closure yet often spreads harm.
How It Develops
The theme first surfaces in the social wreckage after the Art Tuttle scandal, where “justice” looks like ostracism. Kenzie Montgomery enforces an unspoken school code by targeting Addie Severson, punishing her not through law but through humiliation. On the adult side, Eve Bennett nurses a quieter sense of moral imbalance: Tuttle’s career is ruined, Addie is publicly shamed, and yet those who orchestrate or exploit the fallout remain untouched.
In the middle stretch, Addie’s passivity erodes. Small acts—like stealing Kenzie’s keys—become rehearsals for retaliation, while her relationship with Nate Bennett functions as a defiant grab at power in a world that branded her. Once Eve discovers Nate’s predation and betrayal, her abstract fantasies of karmic ruin harden into plans. She reframes revenge as corrective justice, plotting to dismantle his reputation and then, when she concludes that institutions won’t protect future victims, to eliminate the threat outright.
The climax converts simmering grievance into physical violence. Addie’s desperate attack on Eve with a frying pan exposes how the will to “protect love” mirrors the logic of vengeance: harm to prevent loss. Eve’s final reversal—burying Nate in the grave he dug for her—fully dissolves the boundary between justice and revenge; she becomes judge, jury, and executioner. The Epilogue leaves a fraught equilibrium: predators removed, survivors breathing—but peace that tastes of soil and secrecy.
Key Examples
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Social revenge and bullying: Kenzie’s orchestrated humiliations—from blocking Addie on the steps to vandalizing her locker—translate moral outrage into social punishment. She appoints herself arbiter of the school’s ethics, making cruelty feel like order restored.
“Woe is me, my clothes were let free, and now everyone will see my hairy knee.” The mocking rhyme trivializes suffering, revealing how “justice” becomes spectacle and how a community can sanctify harm when it feels righteous.
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The revenge letter: Nate channels Addie’s anger into an assignment, asking her to write a “revenge letter” to her bully. What seems therapeutic becomes weaponized; the letter later frames Addie as dangerous, showing how claims to justice can be manipulated by those in power to deflect blame and entrap victims.
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Addie’s attack on Eve: When Eve threatens to expose the affair, Addie strikes with a frying pan, a frantic attempt to protect what she believes is hers. The moment exposes revenge’s impulsive core: it masquerades as self-defense while intensifying the cycle of injury.
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Eve’s ultimate “justice”: Concluding that the system won’t hold Nate to account, Eve buries him alive in the grave he intended for her. The act literalizes moral reversal—punishment precisely fitted to the crime—yet it also stains the avenger, blurring vindication with atrocity.
I stare down at my husband. When I stood before him in front of a judge on our wedding day—the happiest day of my life—I never imagined that I could hate him as much as I do at this moment. “You tried to kill me. You buried me in this hole.”
Character Connections
Eve Bennett embodies the theme’s darkest promise: that justice, when privatized, can feel pure even as it corrodes. Her shift from victim to architect of retribution is rooted in a protective fury for herself and others; each step she takes toward violence feels, to her, like closing a moral ledger. Yet her success—unpunished, effective—forces the reader to consider whether outcomes can cleanse methods.
Addie Severson illustrates how social punishment breeds further transgression. Ostracized and humiliated, she searches for control in dangerous places, mistaking a predatory relationship for agency. Her escalation from petty defiance to physical violence shows how the desire to be seen and safe can curdle into retaliation that endangers everyone.
Nate Bennett refracts the theme through self-preservation masquerading as order. He curates narratives, assigns the revenge letter, and ultimately attempts murder to preempt exposure. For Nate, “justice” is the maintenance of his power; the moment it’s threatened, he declares open season on the truth.
Kenzie Montgomery begins as the crowd’s conscience and becomes its corrective. Once she learns what Nate is, her cruelty toward Addie gives way to a lawful impulse: go to the police, pursue institutional redress. Her pivot suggests the healthiest resolution the book offers—channeling outrage into systems—yet it arrives late, after damage has multiplied.
Symbolic Elements
The grave: First dug for Eve, then filled with Nate, the grave symbolizes justice as finality—irreversible, silent, secret. It buries both a predator and the proof of revenge, asking whether concealed justice is justice at all or simply a new injustice with better aim.
The frying pan: A domestic utensil turned weapon, it collapses the boundary between home and harm. Its transformation shows how betrayal detonates in ordinary spaces, and how revenge can erupt from tools meant for care.
The pumpkin patch: Rotting pumpkins frame the finale with seasonal decay, a harvest of misconduct finally reaped. The setting becomes a moral compost heap where past wrongs feed a grim, necessary growth—and where what’s buried may still nourish future corruption.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel resonates in a world where institutional responses to abuse often falter or arrive too late. It channels the anger of movements that demand accountability, capturing both the catharsis of predators facing consequences and the peril of bypassing due process. By granting Eve success, the story stages an unsettling question: when systems fail, is vigilantism a moral emergency brake or a gateway to new abuses? The Teacher refuses easy answers, compelling readers to weigh safety, truth, and the corrosive costs of taking justice into private hands.
Essential Quote
I stare down at my husband. When I stood before him in front of a judge on our wedding day—the happiest day of my life—I never imagined that I could hate him as much as I do at this moment. “You tried to kill me. You buried me in this hole.”
This passage crystallizes the theme’s moral inversion: vows and institutions fail, so Eve writes a new sentence in earth. The language of wedding and courtroom collides with the language of death, revealing how intimate betrayal transforms love’s rituals into a rationale for retribution. In that convergence, justice and revenge become indistinguishable—and terrifyingly persuasive.