The Simpson Trial and the Forgotten Trauma of Lynching: A Response to Shoshana Felman

Abstract

In her provocative juxtaposition of 0. J. Simpson trial with Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Shoshana Felman argues that both trial and novella reveal a particular kind of cultural blindness. In both cases, she contends, jury's acquittal of a man accused of murdering his wife betrays a failure to see incontestable evidence of wife beating, reveals the inherent cultural invisibility of [wife's] battered face. In each case, Felman writes, the jury ... did not see domestic (Shoshana Felman, Forms of Judicial Blindness, or Evidence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions in 0. J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, Critical Inquiry 23 [Summer 1997]: 761). As Felman shows, both of these cases involve a husband who was enraged by his wife's (or ex-wife's) supposed desire for another man, who beat her severely, and who made her fear for her life before she was killed. And in both cases evidence of domestic violence was occluded