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Emma Zunz

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"To relate with certain reality the events of that evening would be difficult and perhaps not right. One attribute of the infernal is its unreality, an attribute that at once mitigates and aggravates its terrors. How could one make an action credible when one did not believe who did it? How can one recuperate this brief chaos which, today, the memory of Emma Zunz repudiates and confounds?"

"Emma Zunz" is a 1948 short story by Jorge Luis Borges, later included in his famous anthology The Aleph.

Emma Zunz is an 18-year-old German girl working in a textile factory. In 1922, she receives a letter informing her that her father, Emanuel Zunz, has commited suicide in Brazil. Six years before, Emanuel was accused of defrauding the factory's money and was put on trial because of this; however, he told his daughter that the actual cuplrit was Aaron Loewenthal, one of the owners of the factory.

Emma decides to avenge her father's death and crafts a risky plan, which leads her places that she wouldn't even imagine...


Tropes appearing in the work:

  • 20 Minutes into the Past: The short story was written and published in 1948, but the action takes place in 1922.
  • Action Girl: Downplayed. Emma isn't a very combat-oriented character, but she has been independent since the age of 12 or 13. She also plans the revenge entirely on her own and isn't afraid to steal Loewenthal's gun and shoot him three times, and get away with it.
  • Alliterative Name: While hiding in Brazil, Emanuel Zunz was known as Manuel Maier.
  • Ambiguously Gay / Ambiguously Bi: Emma's sexuality is left up to debate. The narration states that she's afraid of male bodies, despite being almost 19 and most of her female friends already having partners, but she also thinks that a more handsome sailor "would fill her with tenderness". She herself hates the act of sex and feels bad for her mother having sex with her father. She might be asexual, but that term didn't exist at the time, so it remains unclear if that's the way Borges imagined her.
    "Then they spoke about boyfriends, with no one expecting Emma to speak. She was going to be nineteen in April, but men still inspired almost pathological terror in her..."
  • Anti-Hero / Anti-Villain: Emma is a rather morally grey character, with the moral implications of her deed being left for the reader to interpret. On one hand, she wants to kill Loewenthal to avenge her father's death; on the other hand, she later starts blaming him for her sexual encounter with the sailor and wants to kill him to stop feeling dirty after the traumatic experience.
  • Asshole Victim: Loewenthal was already established as a greedy Jerkass who betrayed and framed Emma's father into the crime he didn't commit, so it's hard to feel sorry for him when Emma shoots him three times from his own gun.
  • Big Bad: Aaron Loewenthal is the target of Emma after he framed her father into defrauding the factory's money, and killing him is her ultimate goal.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Emma murders Loewenthal, just as she planned, and gets away with it, but is left traumatized by what she had to do in order to achieve it.
  • Black-and-Gray Morality: Emma is a morally grey character with ambiguous motivation who murders Aaron Loewenthal, but her enemy is much worse than she is and lacks any redeeming qualities.
  • Daddy's Girl: Emma used to be very close to her father and can barely remember her mother. His death is what causes her to snap and finally murder Loewenthal.
  • Determinator: Deconstructed. Emma is ready to do anything to avenge her father's death, but her Roaring Rampage of Revenge takes a major toll on her, leaving her traumatized and dissatisfied, with the narration implying that it wasn't worth it. Even Emma herself later decides to kill Loewenthal not because of her father, but because of what she had to suffer to get rid of him.
  • Does Not Like Men: Emma is scared of men in a sexual way and her sexual encounter with the sailor fills her with disgust. It's unclear whether she's gay or asexual.
  • Driven to Suicide: Emanuel Zunz kills himself in Brazil in the beginning of the short story by overdosing veronal.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
    • Emma's initial motivation for killing Loewenthal is to avenge her father's death, but it radically changes after she has sex with a sailor.
    • Subverted with Loewenthal himself, who "had cried with much decorum over his wife's unexpected death", but actually only cared about money.
  • Faux Affably Evil: Aaron Loewenthal pretends to be "a serious and reliable man", but is actually greedy and unampethatic, and only cares about money.
  • Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Initially, Emma wants to kill Loewenthal because he framed her father for the crime he did not commit, but later her motivation changes and she wants to kill him, because she blames him for her traumatic sexual encounter with the sailor.
    "Before Aaron Loewenthal, more than the urgency of avenging her father, Emma felt the urgency of punishing the outrage she had suffered because of him. She could not but kill him after this meticulous disgrace."
  • Gainax Ending: Emma murders Loewenthal and lies to the police that he tried to rape her and she shot him in self-defence. However, the final line of the short story muddies the matter more than a bit.
    "As it were, the story was unbelievable, but it prevailed upon everyone because it was substantially true. Emma Zunz’s tone was real, her decency was real, her hate was real. And the outrage which she had suffered was also real: only the circumstances, the time, and one or two names were false."
  • Family Theme Naming: Emma's father was named Emanuel.
  • Greedy Jew: Loewenthal is apparently Jewish and he's described as a greedy Bad Boss, who additionally framed Emanuel for defraudation. However, this portrayal likely wasn't meant to be antisemitic — Borges famously opposed Nazis on various occasions and of various reasons, including the Holocaust.
    "Aaron Loewenthal was, according to everybody, a serious and reliable man; but his few intimates knew him as greedy. He lived upstairs in the factory, alone. It was set up in a run–down area for fear of thieves; he kept a large dog in the factory’s courtyard and in the drawer of his desk, everybody knew, a revolver. Last year he had cried with much decorum over his wife’s unexpected death (a Gauss who bore a good dowry!), but money was his true passion. To his personal embarrassment, he was less talented at making it than keeping it. He was very religious, believing himself to have a secret pact with the Lord which excused him from acting good in exchange for orations and prayers."
  • Karma Houdini: Emma murders Loewenthal and lies to the police that he tried to rape her and she shot him in self-defence, with the strong implication that she got away with the murder.
  • Missing Mom: Emma's mother is long dead, and she can't even remember her properly.
    "She remembered summer vacations on a small farm near Gualeguay, remembered (tried to remember) her mother [...]."
  • Non-Action Big Bad: Loewenthal is a source of all the things that happen in the short story, as the person who framed Emanuel and separated him from Emma, but he appears only once when Emma confronts him, and he barely does anything besides, well, dying.
  • Plot-Triggering Death: Emanuel's suicide by veronal prompts Emma to avenge his death, which causes her to go against Loewenthal.
  • Protagonist Journey to Villain: Emma is initially presented as an Anti-Hero, willing to murder a man to avenge her father. But as the story progresses, her motivation changes, and she eventually wants to murder Loewenthal because she blames him for her traumatic sexual encounter with the sailor.
    "Before Aaron Loewenthal, more than the urgency of avenging her father, Emma felt the urgency of punishing the outrage she had suffered because of him. She could not but kill him after this meticulous disgrace."
  • Protagonist Title: Emma Zunz is the main protagonist of the short story, and the plot follows her revenge on Loewenthal.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The main plot of the short story is Emma planning revenge on Aaron Loewenthal for framing her father into defraudation, which caused him to commit suicide six years after the event and separated him and his daughter.
  • Villain Protagonist: While Emma starts the story as a morally questionable, but well-meaning characters, her sexual encounter with a sailor fills her with anger and cynicism that ultimately prove to be a stranger motivation for her to kill Loewenthal than her father's suicide. In other words, she becomes driven by her own frustration, rather than the love she had for her father.

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