In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature. Kristin Kalsem.

Abstract

Kristin Kalsem, In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, and Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2012) xiii + 238 $54.95 An unprecedented number of legal reforms 19th century England improved women's lives, reforms such crucial areas as child custody, divorce, married women's property rights, reproductive rights, domestic abuse, and lunacy laws. In her important book In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, and Literature, Kristin Kalsem focuses on the role of writers effecting these legal reforms, writers works she terms outlaw texts because they were outside the law. These works--essays, novels, autobiographies--were not official legal documents, yet they dealt with legal issues affecting women, and, Kalsem argues, were influential changing the laws. The who wrote them can be said to have been in contempt, both the courtroom sense of speaking out of turn and the gendered sense of being held contempt by the male-dominated legal system. Kalsem's book is an interdisciplinary study, bridging the disciplines of literature, law, history, and feminism ways that she hopes will be transformative (175). She does not simply look at laws, but at the participants (real and fictional) and their experiences. The moving force behind her argument derives from law and literature studies, which maintain that the outcome of legal cases is determined not so much by logical argument as by considerations of power. Consequently, as Richard Delgado observes Legal Storytelling, the dominant group society creates its own story, and narratives help to give credence to people from outgroups, people whose voice and has been suppressed (Delgado 64). And as Paul Gewirtz notes Narrative and Rhetoric Law, storytelling law is important for outsider groups, particularly racial and religious minorities and women (Gewirtz 5). In Contempt presents the stories of who bring their own experiences as into their narratives, thus providing a perspective that was missing from the patriarchal legal system and performing what might be called feminist jurisprudence. Kalsem begins by looking at the legal status of at the beginning of the century. As William Blackstone wrote 1765 his Commentaries on the Laws of England, By marriage, the and wife are one person law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband (Blackstone 1:430). Blackstone's Commentaries explains British Common which was also the basis for the American legal system. What it meant for was that once a woman married, she gave up her rights as an individual and was covered by her husband. Under coverture a woman had no independent existence. She had no access to money of her own, no right to her children, and no legal rights (she could not sign contracts, make wills, serve on juries, sue or be sued). In the first chapter, Kalsem discusses Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished Gothic novel The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria (1797), which provides a powerful critique of women's legal oppression. The Gothic novel, asserts Kalsem, is a particularly effective way of portraying the dissonant effects that marriage laws had on (21). Critics like D. A. Miller and Edward Said have maintained that the 19th century novel policed society and did not question but instead reified social institutions including the legal system (29). Kalsem, however, points out that whereas such an analysis might apply to canonical 19th century novels, it does not apply to outlaw texts, novels that explicitly or implicitly critique existing laws relating to women. Maria provides a dramatic indictment of coverture. The heroine is shown to be subject to a tyrannical actions are totally within the law: he spends all of her inherited money on drinking, gambling, and on other women; takes her child from her; and has her confined to a madhouse. …