Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines

Abstract

Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines. By Elizabeth Urban Alexander. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 301. Illustrations. $34.95.) This book is proof that the litigious nature of American society is not a modern phenomenon. According Notorious Woman's bibliography, the legal wranglings of Myra Clark Gaines account for sixteen United States Supreme Court cases, eight cases before the Louisiana Supreme Court, and eighty-eight cases at the district court level of both state and federal judicial systems. There were more: over 200 suits were filed in the Confederate courts of New Orleans during the brief year before Union occupation of the city. For fifty-seven years, from 1834 1891, Gaines and her advocates pressed her claims in state and federal courts at every level of appeal. Elizabeth Urban Alexander follows the complex and convoluted course of Gaines's saga, placing her court battles in the context of popular mores and nineteenth-century social values. Her goal is to weave together an account of the emergence of domestic relations law, the popularity of sentimental fiction, and the transformation of judicial attitudes toward women with the twists and turns of the litigation that made Gaines famous (xii). The legal cause that led this prolonged litigation was Myra Gaines's claim be the legitimate heir of wealthy New Orleans landowner Daniel Clark. Among the knotty legal questions that cried for answers were whether Gaines's mother, Zulime Carriere, had actually married Clark; whether Carriere's previous marriage had been legitimate; and whether a will that existed only through the testimony of dead witnesses could supercede a will that existed in fact. In Notorious Woman, the legal case becomes a point of departure for discussions of nineteenth-century attitudes, social customs, and judicial precedents. Among the digressions that this case leads are, for example, the power of wealthy business interests influence public decisions, the fundamental importance of property rights and titles, the fragility of business arrangements, the meaning of legitimacy and bastardy, the role of women in society, the uncertainties of marriage and divorce in the nineteenth century, and prevailing themes of popular fiction. In exploring the attempt prove Gaines's legitimacy, Alexander takes the reader down tangential paths of social history that become as entertaining as the case itself. From concise descriptions of the United States Supreme Court setting and brief sketches of each justice lengthier vignettes of Justices James Wayne and John Catron, Alexander recreates the milieu in which the cases played out and relates the justices' opinions their personal and political backgrounds and their judicial philosophies. We are treated the various meanings of bastardy through the centuries in English common law and according the Louisiana Civil Code. …