Sham Marriages Research Articles

Modern Women in Dilemma: A Study of Sham Marriages in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Ghosts and Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession and Candida

This article entitled "Sham Marriages in Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House' and 'Ghosts' and Bernard Shaw's 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' and Candida'" examines the hypocritical marriages in the authors' plays investigates the failure or collapse of 19th-century marriages in Europe. The article assumes that Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and "Ghosts" and Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession" and "Candida" are pulpits for the exposition of fake marriages in the Norwegian and Victorian societies. Seen from the perspective of Marxist feminism, this article postulates that the plays of Ibsen and Shaw are profound social commentaries designed to expose the faults in the family and marriage in the nineteenth century. In the plays of both authors, one of the most difficult conflicts in the average family revolves around the issue of finance. The authors use this common source of domestic dispute as a major theme in portraying the imperfections of the typical home. The paper argues that, unlike many studies that have read Nora, Mrs. Alving, Candida, and Vivie as different characters, they can be considered as the same New Woman represented only from different perspectives in how they react to their marital dilemmas in the four plays. While the present study considers Candida and Mrs. Alving as philistines who choose to stay at home to protect marriage conventions, Nora is seen as a rebel who chooses to abandon the conventional matrimonial life to find her true identity. Be it Candida and Mrs. Alving who stay or Nora who leaves. This work holds that the decisions of all female characters, although in different forms, thwart Victorian standards and make their husbands and societies reflect deeply on the institution of marriage. Instead of seeing Candida as one who conspires against her gender and Nora as one who conspires against patriarchy in favour of her gender, the article concludes that the different decisions of the two heroines are all geared towards achieving meaningful change for their gender.

The concept of “non-standard marriages” in the theory of family law in Russia

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to classify and study the features of the types of non-standard marriages existing in Russia (de facto, sham, same-sex marriages), in order to adjust their legal regulation by the state.Design/methodology/approachThe authors of the article examined the theoretical and practical problems of state recognition and regulation of non-standard marriages not recognized by the state, and justified a new strategy of support (in the case of de facto marriages) or counteraction (in the case of sham marriages) of these social phenomena by the state and law. In the light of the negative attitude of Russian citizens to same-sex marriages, the possibility of their support in the future is justified.FindingsHaving studied three types of non-standard marriages, the authors substantiate the need for a different approach of the state to further legal regulation of these social phenomena. It is proved, that in relation to same-sex marriages, the existing non-recognition and negative attitude of the legislator and society in Russia to their legalization will last until the attitude towards sexual minorities in general, changes in Russian society. De facto marriages should be introduced into the legal field, they should be given a normative definition and outline the general legal framework of the rights of de facto spouses and their children. As for sham marriages, it is proposed to consider the lack of intention to create a family and the selfish interest to be their main features pursued by one or both spouses entering into a sham marriage.Originality/valueThe originality and value of the research is stipulated by the consideration of the legal regulation of marriage and family issues in the historical context of the development of the Russian state, as well as the evolution of ideas about morality in Russian society. The changing attitude of society towards de facto marriages, the increase in the number of unregistered married couples indicates the transformation of the moral values of young people and the need for the state to promote the legal protection of such married couples without trying to prohibit or restrict them. Existing approaches to the legal regulation of sham marriages require adjustments, including incorporating the notion of “fictitious divorce” in family legislation.

O’Connell, Lisa. The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century.

O’Connell, Lisa. <i>The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

Marriage migration from below: The assessing of ‘genuineness’ among binational couples in Australia

AbstractThis article focuses on the Australian partner visa application process, as experienced by African‐Australian couples in intimate heterosexual relationships. In Australia, similar to other Anglo‐European countries, the visa application process is an increasingly complex procedure. In order to avoid sham marriages that are entered into for the sole purpose of obtaining residency, it heavily scrutinises couples’ relationships and motives for marriage migration. This article explores marriage migration ‘from below’, by looking at how the Australian Government utilises the idea of ‘genuineness’ in order to establish the sincere character of binational relationships, and in turn, how this bureaucratic focus affects couples and their intimate relationships. I argue that the visa application process is distrusting of binational couples, which produces various outcomes: it obstructs intimacy and romance as experienced by couples; rather than fostering equality as desired by the Government, it generates a dependency among couples whereby female sponsoring spouses are ascribed more power than their foreign partners; and the non‐transparent and lengthy procedure, as a form of structural violence against binational couples, affects couples’ ontological security.

The Judiciary Power of Discretion in Sanctioning the Facilitation of Unauthorised Stay in Poland

Migration control in Poland is significantly based on internal control practices carried out by street-level bureaucrats representing both law enforcement agents and low-level judges equipped with discretionary power. Based on empirical data from 243 criminal cases of facilitating unauthorised stay in Poland, we reflected on how the mentioned actors and, in particular, criminal judges interpret the existing provisions and to what extent they study cases independently or simply follow the logic of the law enforcement. We based our analysis on two distinct forms of identified cases of ‘supporting’ irregular migration; that is, participation in sham marriages and involvement in document fraud. We conclude that judges lacking expertise in the field relatively new to them may be less prone to question the effects of the preparatory proceedings, and they are not keen to look for any answers for themselves, especially to scrutinise and refer to the European Union law or jurisprudence. In their ‘craftwork’, they face cases that seem similar to them and, thus, not deserving of special attention. Judges lack the broader knowledge and possibly also reflexive thinking in assessing migration-related criminal cases brought to the courts by border guards, who prove their effectiveness inter alia through numbers of detected facilitators, not necessarily the roles played by them. All this may lead to unnecessarily broadening the scope of control over immigrants and a failure in achieving the objectives of criminal provisions.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer Rachel Ihara BAUER, DALE M. Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 172 pp. $99.99 hardcover; $80.00 e-book. An ambitious study of four popular American women writers, Dale M. Bauer's Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels proceeds from the premise that understanding a serial author requires reading beyond a few texts in order to grasp "the entirety of an author's production" (2). This is no small task given the prodigious output of the authors under consideration: E.D.E.N. Southworth (approximately fiftytwo novels), Ann Stephens (twenty-six), Laura Jean Libbey (possibly seventy novels), and Mary Jane Holmes (thirty-nine). Such numbers boggle the mind, and the time and devotion involved in tackling all of these novels, with their convoluted plots and beset heroines, is impressive indeed. The study that results aims to make sense of this abundance of plots, in order to chart the particular themes and preoccupations of each author while also making an argument for their shared interest in narratives of female suffering (as a result of sham marriages, bad men, mistaken identities, and bouts of insanity), suffering that is provisionally resolved in abrupt conclusions (through sound marriages, restored senses, and transformed identities), before being taken up again in the next serial. Building on, yet diverging from, early studies of popular women's fiction, like Helen Papashvily's All the Happy Endings (1956), which dismissed serial plots as "simple" (xiv), and Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction (1978), which saw in these novels "'a single tale' with 'one overplot'" (xv), Bauer seeks to do justice to the rich and varied issues taken up by these authors. For instance, while critical attention to Southworth's best-known novel, The Hidden Hand (1859), might lead to an assumption that cross-dressing represents her primary challenge [End Page 308] to gender norms, Bauer sees mental breakdowns in Southworth's characters as more typical of Southworth's strategy for highlighting and confronting various societal ills. One challenge in adopting this all-encompassing approach is that it requires a command of a substantial number of novels, most of which will be unfamiliar to all but a few scholars of American literature. This means that Bauer's claims about texts and their significance rest, to a large degree, upon plot summaries. While these glosses are intended to illuminate the points being advanced, often they seem to exceed the critical purpose accorded to them, pointing to alternative interpretations and avenues of exploration. For example, Bauer frames a discussion of Southworth's novel The Fortune Seeker, or The Bridal Day (1866) as an instance of Southworth's return to the idea that "moral equilibrium between the sexes ends monomanias of all sorts, which caused the cultural and personal irresponsibility that she wanted her novels to redress" (22–23). Yet what follows, ostensibly to illustrate this point, is a summary of the adventures of the novel's heroine, Astrea, who is captured on her wedding night, is disguised as a "quadroon" and sold, is compelled to rebuff the sexual advances of her purchaser, and temporarily loses her reason, before regaining her senses when she is reunited with her husband. This plot outline, while it provides evidence of repeated themes in Southworth's oeuvre (villains preying on young women, racial disguise, mistaken identities, brain inflammation, and spouses separated and reunited), does not clearly support a reading of Southworth's fiction as primarily concerned with women's suffering and temporary insanity as social critique. This may be an issue of method as much as material. The sheer abundance of "data," along with the need to convey to the reader, in broad strokes, the outlines of the many novels under discussion, constantly threatens to overwhelm any unifying argument that seeks to bring these texts together. Bauer's aim, to do justice to the messiness and variability that characterizes these novels, individually and as a whole, is to be commended. However, in reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels, I couldn't help but wonder if there might be another way to capture the...

Aspectos problemáticos en torno al consentimiento en los matrimonios por conveniencia en Chile

El fenómeno de los matrimonios celebrados con fines ajenos a la institución matrimonial es ya ampliamente conocido en la sociedad civil. Se trata de matrimonios en los que falta una auténtica voluntad conyugal, y que se han denominado por la doctrina como matrimonios por conveniencia, de complacencia, blancos, entre otras calificaciones. Actualmente, esta temática se ha visto renovada por los numerosos movimientos migratorios que han dado un matiz distinto al debate, y es bajo esa perspectiva desde donde comienza el presente análisis.Este trabajo examina algunos aspectos problemáticos del tema, partiendo desde el inexistente tratamiento legal del fenómeno en Chile, culminando con lo que sería la sanción jurídica del mismo. Al efecto, la autora desarrolla algunas de sus razones en orden a considerar la inexistencia jurídica como posible sanción legal.

Legal-discursive constructions of genuine cross-border love in Belgian marriage fraud investigations

ABSTRACTIn recent years, marriage migration as a form of family reunification has become a growing policy concern for migration governance in European member states and is seen as ‘the last loophole’ in EU migration policy in the face of a supposedly large and increasing number of sham marriages through which the non-European spouse is granted a residency permit. Several European nations have therefore legislated legal-administrative measures to battle marriages of convenience by investigating cross-border marriage applications prior to celebrating or recognising the marital union. In this article, I draw on a linguistic ethnographic empirical study of legal-administrative investigations conducted by Belgian municipal authorities to determine whether cross-border marriage applications to their civil registry office are ‘genuine’ or ‘fake’. In particular, I examine how the legal framework and guidelines for investigation are bureaucratically implemented in practice in Belgian civil registry offices with a particular focus on the role of a discursively constructed notion of genuine cross-border love and a bureaucratically acceptable relationship in both policy documents and interviewing practice.

Фиктивный брак в российском семейном праве: проблемы регулирования и пути их решения

The essential features of the concept of the sham marriage are considered (registration of marriage, the expression of the will of the couple to register marriage, and the lack of intention to create a family). The analysis of the legal grounds for the emergence of marriage bona fide spouse rights in case of the invalidity of the sham marriage and the rehabilitation of the sham marriage, which are sets of legal facts, is carried out. The authors argue for the possibility of invalidating the sham marriage after the death of the spouses. There is a critical point of view on the issue of establishing administrative or criminal liability for the sham marriage if only private rights are violated. It is advisable to protect private rights violated by the sham marriage by means of private law, which allows ensuring the personal privacy. At the same time, the commission of the sham marriage can be considered as a qualifying feature of an illegal act that violates public law (violation of the procedure for admission to citizenship, acquisition of the right to state benefits, and others), or as an aggravating circumstance when imposing the appropriate punishment. In the comparative legal aspect, the system of measures to counteract the sham marriages is considered. Given that the liberalization of views on cohabitation and the possible de lege ferenda recognition of their legal force will complicate the problem of fictitious marriages, it is proposed to put the recognition of the status of spouses for cohabitees under the condition of providing evidence of the creation of a family and establishing the relevant fact in court.

The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction, by Andrew Glazzard

Reviewed by: The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction by Andrew Glazzard Penny Fielding (bio) The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction, by Andrew Glazzard; pp. xii + 152. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £75.00, $110.00. The title of Andrew Glazzard’s book, The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction, immediately invites us into Holmesian detective mode. “You see, but you do not observe,” Holmes tells Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891), before filling in what Watson ought to have taken in (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Richard Lancelyn Green [Oxford University Press, 1993], 8). In like fashion, Glazzard draws our attention to a host of details that we may regularly perceive while reading, but do not often pause to consider. A fine early chapter on “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892) directs our attention away from the more usual consideration of Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s murderous colonial background, and onto the apparently mundane details of the family’s economic condition. Glazzard looks at the sums mentioned in Mrs. Stoner’s will and spins them into a detailed consideration of Roylott’s status as an inefficient member of the rentier class. He draws on records of the agricultural depression of the later nineteenth century and the history of rural depopulation, then expands outward into other condition of England fictions to contextualize Roylott’s attempts to secure his stepdaughter’s inheritance. Holmes, Glazzard argues, is a master of his own elaborate fictions, which may betray an underlying social motive that outweighs the nominal investigation and solution of a case. He acts to protect not only his clients but also the reputation of their social class in order that “the public have a satisfactory explanation for disturbing events” (3). The book identifies this public sphere in twenty short chapters, each covering a story or a cluster of stories, grouped into seven sections that address different aspects of social and, in the later chapters, political history: finance, class, family, sex, race, war, and secrecy. The short case studies are intriguing. One of the pleasures of reading the book is that it offers the kind of information that a scholarly edition aspires to include; at the same time, in 200 pages of expanded context, cross-referencing, and comparison it finds room for much more detail than an edition could contain. It is an ideal companion to the Holmes stories. Glazzard’s prose is crisp, elegant, and to the point, and he manages to pack in a great deal of information. Glazzard’s approach enables some useful cross-referencing between stories: in a taxonomy of exotic femininity, he notes how many of Doyle’s eroticized women come from South and Central America. We are also made aware of how often Doyle is thinking about Ireland, or the ways in which the Second Boer War recurs. The overall effect is one of reading not so much for the plot as for a story’s incidental details. Apparent plot devices spring to historical life. The sham marriage of the late story “The Adventure of the Solitary [End Page 704] Cyclist” (1903) leads to a discussion of marriage law. Minor characters are moved to center stage to good effect. Holmes’s dim view of Inspector Lestrade is passed through the lens of social class. Metropolitan Police detectives were generally working class (in contradistinction to the military officer class), recipients of a disdain that was often manifest in the newspapers. Glazzard brings in the notorious case of the Road Hill House murder, in which middle-class Constance Kent was released without charge following the accusations of the ungentlemanly Inspector Jack Whicher. A section on scandals, in Bohemia and elsewhere, covers late Victorian and Edwardian improprieties, including those of the Prince of Wales himself, and inserts Professor Moriarty’s principal henchman, Colonel Sebastian Moran, into them. Here, as Glazzard points out, Doyle’s contemporaries would have been much more attuned than today’s readers to reports of an aristocratic world “where they often encounter[ed] folly and . . . rampant criminality” (5). Pulling the focus wider...

Sham Marriage and Privilege

United States v. Fomichev, 899 F.3d 766 (9th Cir. 2018), discusses the effect that a sham marriage has on marital privileges. The court draws a line between the spousal immunity (or spousal witness) privilege and the marital communications privilege.

§5.31 Spousal Testimonial Privilege

This article addresses the spousal testimonial privilege. It discusses the rationale and history of the privilege as well as its current requirements. The privilege allows a spouse to refuse to testify against the other spouse in a criminal proceeding, but does not allow a criminal defendant to block the testimony by his or her spouse if the testifying spouse chooses to waive the privilege. The privilege requires a lawful marriage and does not apply to sham marriages.

‘Beauty and the beast’: Everyday bordering and ‘sham marriage’ discourse

This paper examines discourses of ‘sham marriage’ as a technology of everyday bordering in the UK. We argue that everyday bordering needs to be seen as a growing hegemonic political project of belonging experienced in complex ways as differently situated individuals negotiate proliferating internal and external borders. We explore how the process of marriage registration, especially when it concerns citizens of ex-Empire states marrying British or EEA citizens, has been transformed, under evolving UK Immigration Acts, from a celebration into a security interrogation. The discourses and practices associated with ‘sham marriage’ have become important elements in bordering control, which has become a major technology of managing diversity and discourses on diversity, in the UK. ‘Sham marriage’ discourses can adversely affect the lives of families, neighbours, friends, employers and others across time and transnational space. In order to understand the complexities of everyday bordering, we developed a situated, intersectional analysis capturing the situated gazes and border imaginaries of lawmakers, registrars, church officials, targeted couples and examining spectacular ‘sham marriage’ media stories that incorporate diverse citizens into border-guarding roles focused on the intimate lives of others.

Tratamiento legal de las tradicionales uniones de hecho y tercer género

Introducción: en nuestros días, analizar el fundamento legal de las tan frecuentes uniones de hecho, el origen de este tipo de prácticas y sus consecuencias para el ordenamiento jurídico supone profundizar en un ámbito algo desconocido si tenemos presente que nos encontramos en una época de posible crisis en la familia tradicional. Metodología:por tal razón, investigaremos cómo la ausencia de los presupuestos básicos, especialmente la capacidad jurídica o conubium, incidía en las relaciones extramaritales y cuál fue, en suma, la razón de ser de las prohibiciones al llamado desde la Roma clásica como iustum matrimonium frente al matrimonio legítimo. Resultados: defenderemos seis criterios para agrupar el gran número de uniones extramatrimoniales que se sucedieron, destacando: el concubinato, el contubernio, la homosexualidad, el matrimonio incestuoso, simulado o entre ausentes, las uniones con sujetos que carecían de capacidad física, el adulterio o la prostitución. Conclusiones: se concluye con una breve mención a la inflencia ideológica de los emperadores, el cristianismo y lanormativa sobre relaciones intersexuales y tercer género, aprobada recientemente en Europa.

Aeschylus: Suppliant Women ed. by Anthony J. Bowen

Reviewed by: Aeschylus: Suppliant Womened. by Anthony J. Bowen Marsh McCall Anthony J. Bowen (ed.). Aeschylus: Suppliant Women. Aris & Phillips Classical Texts. Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2013. Pp. 374. $34.00 (pb.). ISBN 978-1-90834-334-5. The Aris & Phillips volumes on Greek tragedy have steadily become more and more authoritative. Bowen’s contribution, on a play of massive difficulty both in text and interpretation, is in the top echelon. His philology is tremendous: the text (in which Bowen prints eighteen of his own conjectures or emendations) and apparatus (fuller than A. H. Sommerstein’s Loeb [Cambridge, Mass., and London 2009] but less so than H. Friis Johansen and E. W. Whittle, Aeschylus: The Suppliants[Copenhagen 1980] or M. L. West’s Teubner [Stuttgart 1992]) everywhere displays Bowen’s rigor; the translation, designed—sometimes quite severely and entirely in prose—for textual accuracy, does not read as easily as Sommerstein’s (perhaps quite intentionally). The commentary (220 close pages) is, of course, not nearly as huge as that of Friis Johansen and Whittle, but for almost all serious students and scholars of Greek tragedy it is much nearer to the ideal level of thoroughness. Along with a great deal more in the forty-page introduction, Bowen argues tellingly against Sommerstein that Suppliant Women, not Aegyptii, is indeed [End Page 138]the opening play of the tetralogy. On the date, Bowen meticulously reviews the famous P. Oxy. 2256.3, which, when it was published in 1952, moved Suppliant Womenfrom as early as the 490s to probably the 460s, plausibly 463; Bowen finds the evidence of the papyrus inconclusive for a precise date. Equally meticulous searching for the play’s date through structure, contemporary events, language, and dramatic technique leads Bowen to the mild assertion that all the factors “give good reason to date the Danaid tetralogy not long before Oresteia”(21). The introduction goes on to offer extremely helpful and incisive sections on the play’s form, people, staging, costumes, and props. Another fine section tackles what can be guessed about the second and third plays, with such suggestive perceptions as “Whisper of marriage at the end of Supplicesis followed by sham marriage at the end of Aegyptii;for closure [in Danaides]there must be good marriage” (30). The only dissonant part of this masterful introduction arises in the sections on meter, which are densely written and scarcely accessible even to fairly advanced students. This is a real pity because in the commentary all the lyrics are introduced with clear metrical charts and supplementary explanations. More broadly, throughout the commentary each section and subsection of the play receives a lucid paragraph, or more, of dramatic and thematic introduction. Then virtually every verse is examined, above all for philological and linguistic explication. However, within the commentary Bowen begins almost all of his entries with a lemma from the translation. The commentary lemmata and the words of the translation should, of course, correspond exactly. For all of his carefulness, Bowen (or someone) has neglected to make this happen: just in the opening 425 verses, there are 16 instances in which the translation and the lemma are notprecisely the same. Then there are two larger concerns, the first about Bowen’s allegiance to the current orthodoxy that the playwright of Prometheus Boundwas not Aeschylus. Throughout the commentary, in all the instances when he gives play-by-play statistics for “elsewhere in Aeschylus,” he only extremely rarely includes PB. The authorship of PBis not, however, a settled matter, and there are many scholars who believe that it and its trilogy are magnificent creations of Aeschylus. Bowen’s Aeschylean statistics, always interesting and relevant, would be even more so with PBregularly included. Secondly, Bowen also accepts another current orthodoxy, that at the end of Suppliant WomenArgive soldiers join with the Danaids in the glorious final lyrics on marriage and thereby form a third choral group in the play, together with the Danaids and the Egyptian soldiers. In fact, Bowen favors the continuing use of three choruses in Aegyptiiand Danaides;in Aegyptii;indeed, there might well be a double use of one of the choruses: “The third chorus...

Five Phases of Brokered International Marriages in South Korea: A Complexity Perspective

The paper examines the evolution in international commercial marriage migration from Southeast Asia to South Korea from a Complexity Theory (CT) framework, originally from natural sciences but vastly entering the field of social sciences. CT stresses the non-linear nature of complex systems that are composed of a large number of individual components operating within a conditioned boundary whose interactions lead emergent properties in an unpredictable way. The study is based on the author’s fieldwork interviews and participatory observations of marriage migrants, government officers, and social workers in South Korea in 2010-2013, which establishes five phases of brokered marriages, namely, (1) Outsourcing Brides (mid 1980s-), (2) Emerging Anti-Trafficking Norms (early 2000s-), (3) Institutionalizing Multiculturalism (2006- ), (4) Regulating Brokers (2008-), and 5) Sham Marriages and Emerging Nationalism (2010-). She explains the key elements of marriage migration as a complex adaptive system such as feedback loops, adaptation, emergence, self-organisation and agency, and suggests persistent observation and CT as an alternative methodology to study migration.

Sham Marriages and Proper Plots: Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews

This essay explores Henry Fielding's development of the marriage plot in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Surveying theatrical echoes in these works, which are particularly apparent in their marriage plots, I make the case that Fielding's first two novels are clearly indebted to his former career as a dramatist in the London stage of the late 1720s and early 1730s. I argue that, in writing Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Fielding was responding to Samuel Richardson's Pamela in a way that corresponded to how his plays were reactions to other popular theatrical entertainments of his time. This complicates the conventional critical view that it was Richardson's first novel, with its outstanding popularity, which drove Fielding to propose a radically opposite model for fiction writing.

Overcoming obstacles through hidden nuptial paths: Foreign Muslim purported spouses marrying in Italy

Adopting the viewpoint suggested by "Hidden Islam", this article offers a glimpse of some tortuous (partly) concealed nuptial paths followed by foreign Muslim intended spouses (regularly or irregularly) settled in Italy, and ponders whether Muslim spouses are rather ‘invisible’ to or ‘unseen’ by academia and state authorities. Moving away from Orientalist and ‘exceptionalist’ theories, the present essay touches on relevant socio-legal phenomena that remain largely a blind spot in previous publications. Relying upon field-collected data and focusing on the manners in which Muslim alien purported spouses overcome religious and legal obstacles when contracting (sharīʿah-compliant) marriages with civil effects on Italian soil, the proposed analysis discloses legal paradoxes and unveils manifold hidden strategies. Facing a dichotomic implementation of the right to marry, Italian Muslim communities and Muslim majority countries’ diplomatic premises may be impelled to creatively interpret state provisions, Islamic laws and Muslim norms. Strategically manoeuvring across diverse state legal systems and unveiling disguised loopholes; non- European Muslim purported spouses can thus be regarded as validly married in compliance with Italian laws. Additionally, Muslim majority countries’ laws intended to impede interreligious nuptial unions, as well as domestic European state provisions aimed to tackle polygamous and sham marriages, can be skilfully managed selectively registering a (civil and/or sharīʿah-compliant) nuptial union in diverse legal systems.

Thomas Hardy and the Law: Legal Presences in Hardy’s Life and Fiction by William A. Davis, and: Knowledge and Survival in the Novels of Thomas Hardy by Jane Mattisson (review)

MLRy 99.4, 2004 1041 most compellingly in the chapter on Arnold in love, which provides a fascinating discussion of the relationship between Arnold's sexuality, poetics, and metaphysical pessimism. The extended attention given to Arnold's demystification of romantic love, and his antipathy to sexual desire and hostility towards women, is powerfully argued with reference to Freud. Although this is Arnold at his less attractive and arguably most misogynistic, in Grob's study it is turned into the most interesting aspect of Arnold's pessimism, revolving around his anxieties about the inauthenticity of speech and his related conception of poetic writing. The modernism that drives Arnold's intellectual courage, for Grob, sets him apart and above his contemporary poets while also (perhaps ironically) providing us with the reason for placing him centrally within the Victorian poetic canon. University of Glasgow Alison Chapman Thomas Hardy and theLaw: Legal Presences in Hardy's Life and Fiction. By William A. Davis. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 199 pp. ?32- ISBN 0-87413-798-5. Knowledge and Survival in theNovels of Thomas Hardy. By Jane Mattisson. (Lund Studies in English) Lund: Lund University. 2002. 423 pp. SEK310. ISBN 91974 -0230-3. William A. Davis's careful study of Hardy and the law is the most comprehensive that has appeared on its subject, and is unlikely to be quickly supplanted. With its detailed account of the changing legislative situation of women, and its analysis of some of the most important cases, it is also a book likely to be of use to anyone writing on gender, marriage, and the law in Victorian England. Davis avoids the pitfalls of many works on literature written by legal scholars, in which texts are treated as cases illustrating (or often, deforming) legal principals. His approach is to assume that Hardy was interested in the detail of the law (as his attendances at court suggest), and to look forlegal contexts and in particular well-known cases (like the Dilke divorce trials and the Clithero abduction case of 1891) which inform particular contexts in the novels and stories?and it is remarkable, in this account, just how pervasive the law is in the novels. Davis begins with Hardy's work as a magistrate and juror on the Assizes, and a survey of Hardy's many legal acquaintances; he then moves on to discuss legal is? sues in the novels, ending with a chapter considering more abstractly the evolution of Hardy's relationship to the law. The topic which dominates the book is marriage; or more generally the question of the legal status of relationships; and it makes for a doleful catalogue: rape, seduction, cruelty, desertion, divorce, wife-selling, sham marriage, forcible restraint. Davis does an excellent job of, for example, bringing an understanding of the law of rape in the Victorian period to bear on the notoriously difficult question of Tess's rape or seduction, arguing that Hardy clearly suggests rape before recoding the events, afterthe firstedition, as a seduction (and suggesting a temporal transition from one to the other). Similarly, the discussion of evolving Victorian attitudes as revealed by cases of wife abduction and forcible restraint informs Davis's understanding of the radicalism of Phillotson's release of Sue in Jude the Obscure. Hardy's sympathy with his woman characters, and his determination to rethink marriage (and divorce) within a more libertarian framework, is a keynote of the book, and here he is placed in repeated opposition to his friend, the conservative judge Sir Francis Jeune. It is only in the last chapter that Davis allows himself a little latitude to consider more abstract issues of justice. He suggests that Hardy's attitude to the law evolves 1042 Reviews away from seeing it as providing the possibility of justice, as well as externally con? ceived plot mechanisms. In the later novels humans operate most freely outside the flawed and often oppressive system of law, which can be manipulated by those with power; and there is often the suggestion that the law must be reformed. If there is a limitation to the book, it is that it does not push these ideas very far...

The Jew of Seville

Before he was twenty years old, Louisiana-born Victor Sjour expatriated himself to Paris, where his acclaimed dramas would appear alongside those of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. Sjour's mother was a free woman of color and his father was Haitian. Sjour grew up a free Creole of color in antebellum New Orleans, but was deeply affected by the alienation and discrimination he encountered as a person of mixed descent. Sjour's inventive transposition of the discrimination of mid-nineteenth-century America to other historical incidents of racial persecution was a device in his fiction and drama, creating a provocative and political metaphor for those whose lives blur the lines of racial and religious identity. Now, for the first time, two of Sjour's plays, Jew of Seville and Fortune-Teller, have been translated from the French for contemporary audiences.The Jew of a five-act verse drama first performed in 1844, is the story of Jacob Eliacin, a Jew, during the Spanish Inquisition. Eliacin had been humiliated and beaten by the uncle of his Christian lover, Bianca. The couple had fled to Greece, where Bianca had died in childbirth. Eliacin, who amassed great wealth, had assumed the name Digarias, and had raised daughter Ins a Christian. Twenty years later, as the play opens, Digarias is now a prominent member of the court at Seville, where Ins encounters and is seduced by Don Juan in a sham marriage. When he discovers Don Juan's treachery Digarias demands that the nobleman marry his daughter. But a self-serving Moor reveals the truth of Digarias' identity to Don Juan, who then publicly refuses to marry a Jew's daughter. After this humiliation, Digarias retreats to plot revenge which will have dire consequences for Ins.With a stirring verse translation by Norman R. Shapiro and a thoroughly engaging introduction by M. Lynn Weiss, Jew of Seville is an important and provocative addition to the non-English writings of American-born authors, a historical drama that highlights the discrimination not only of Sjour's time but of ours as well.