Wife Lover Research Articles

The crime was so perfect! So, why not another time?

To highlight an assassination by means of a plant which was not known to be toxic until now. On November 19, 2013, on the island of La Reunion, a 50-year-old man died, a death initially considered natural. Several months later, an anonymous call stirs up trouble with the victim's two young daughters. The victim's corpse was then exhumed in April 2014 and the investigators took a closer look at his wife and his wife's lover. The latter, presenting himself as a healer and a sorcerer of Malagasy origin, confesses to having prepared the poison at the request of his mistress. The wife in second marriage, would have liked to recover all the goods of the victim who had a real estate heritage estimated at 1.2 million euros. Their relationship had deteriorated when the victim had announced his intention to make a donation to his daughters during his lifetime. The anonymous call to the victim's daughters was later identified as coming from the wizard who refused to brew a second potion to eliminate the two young girls as requested by his mistress. Analyses were performed by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem high-resolution mass spectrometry. The sorcerer delivered the formula of his potion which contained in particular under its vernacular name rampart wood, subsequently identified as Agauria salicifolia. An exhaustive analysis of this shrub will lead to the detection of grayanatoxins. An identical potion seized by the gendarmes led to the detection of grayanatoxins I and III at a concentration of 24.7 and 73.8 mg/L respectively. The autopsy was realized 5 months after death. Postmortem heart concentrations were 0.11 ng/g grayanatoxin I and 0.26 ng/g grayanatoxin III. They were respectively 0.21 ng/g and 0.34 ng/g in the liver and 0.17 ng/g and 0.20 ng/g in the kidney. The author was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment at first instance confirmed by an identical sentence during the appeal trial (maximum sentence in France). There is a clear underreporting of homicides by poisoning when they are carried out by natural substances and the authors draw the attention of the scientific community to little known and poorly analyzed molecules.

A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen

Reviewed by: A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen Francesca Bua Ann C. Christensen, ed., A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), lix + 229 pp., 18 ills. Ann C. Christensen's edition of A Warning for Fair Women (1599) decidedly accomplishes its stated goal and successfully asserts the play's "many merits for students of Shakespeare as well as directors and dramaturgs" (xii). A Warning for Fair Women is a domestic tragedy based on a real Elizabethan murder trial in which George Sanders, a successful London merchant, is murdered by his wife's lover, George Browne. Christensen's edition, with its modernized spelling, thorough endnotes, and inclusion of similarly edited primary sources, will no doubt benefit students, teachers, and dramatists alike. This edition provides a wealth of accessible and contextual information in the generous front matter, including but not limited to the genre of domestic tragedy, the staging and performance aspects of the play, and the uniquely compelling aspects of A Warning that number it as a play deserving of its own place in the early modern literary canon. Underscoring her commitment to this aim, Christensen explicitly showcases the pedagogical possibilities of her edition and helpfully offers a number of relevant and topical avenues of engagement for students toward the end of the introduction (e.g., public and private; church and state; work and professional identity; place and space/setting), under which she likewise includes discussion and/or research questions for students about early modern social and domestic spheres, providing examples from the play that delve into these ideas. In her introduction, Christensen immediately delineates the play's genre as a domestic tragedy, providing a helpful review for those who may not be well versed in the nuances of genre on the early modern stage. After turning briefly to a review of the critical attention given to domestic tragedy since the 1980s, Christensen outlines what is at stake in her edition and maintains the necessity for historicizing A Warning for Fair Women: [End Page 238] When we consider the social and institutional contexts for the play's depiction of marriage, family, religion, and the law, as well as tragedy as a genre, we can better appreciate both A Warning's novelty and its participation in aesthetic and cultural traditions … because A Warning stages uneven power and affective relations within a household space that is permeable, while also dramatizing, for example, facets of the legal system and the commercial economy, it offers insights into older forms of everyday life that still concern us today. (xxii–xxiii) For Christensen, A Warning for Fair Women shows how the early modern quotidian not only is of the past but also stretches into the present. Playfully, the editor uses the play as referent to various pop culture phenomena, the O. J. Simpson trial for example, to highlight this compression of the past into the present and to help facilitate connections between the genre of early modern domestic tragedy and modern notions of domesticity. In this vein, Christensen gestures toward true crime and domestic tragedy in the introduction, but unfortunately does not meaningfully engage with these themes in relation to A Warning's commitment to spectacle. The invitation to take up Christensen's call to read "the play's engagements with the society and culture of its time on a deeper level" (xxii) and consider the ways in which these engagements apply today is especially seductive when thinking about the sustained and ever-rising popularity of true crime narratives and domesticity's central role in them. An allusion to the O. J. Simpson trial, coupled with the misleading paragraph title in the introduction, left me itching to read Christensen's thoughts on the explicit early modern/modern connection between these two highly popularized and nearly selfsame genres. The edition continues to address possible contextual lacunae in one's first encounter with an early modern, non-Shakespearean play. For example, Christensen gives a historical overview of early modern performance conventions—notably the play's dating, theater company, and authorship, as well as its structure and stagecraft...

Refocus: The Films of Delmer Daves eds. by Matthew Carter, Andrew Patrick Nelson (review)

Reviewed by: Refocus: The Films of Delmer Daves eds. by Matthew Carter, Andrew Patrick Nelson Bernard F. Dick Refocus: The Films of Delmer Daves Matthew Carter, Andrew Patrick Nelson, eds. Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 226 pages In The American Cinema (Dutton, 1968), Andrew Sarris' controversial hierarchy of directors, Delmer Daves is relegated to the "Lightly Likeable" category reserved for "talented but uneven directors with the saving grace of unpretentiousness" (171) such as Michael Curtiz, Henry Hathaway, and Mitchell Leisen. Daves should have been flattered to be numbered among the directors of Casablanca (1942), The House on 92nd St. (1945), and Easy Living (1937). Unpretentious Daves was, but not unprofound, as the ten essays in this excellent collection proves. Actually, there are eleven. The editors modestly refer to their joint article as an "Introduction," in which they make a case for Daves as an auteur with a vision that he not so much imposed on his material as allowed to come out of it. But before the editors reach that conclusion, they take us along the torturous route that led to auteurism, from Astruc's caméra-stylo, film as a form of writing, which implies a signature, to the signers themselves—directors who have given expression to narratives that they have not written but could tell in a way that the writers could not. Anyone teaching a course in Film Theory should make the "Introduction" required reading. I have yet to see a better analysis of authorship refracted through the prism of structuralism and post-structuralism. There is a rich humanity in Daves' vision seen particularly in his portrayal of indigenous peoples in Broken Arrow (1950), Bird of Paradise (1951), and Drum Beat (1954). Although, as Andrew Patrick Nelson notes in "Authorship and the Westerns of Delmer Daves," the director "spent three months living among the Hopi and Navajo" (54) after graduating from Stanford University in 1926, he made nine films between 1944 and 1949—six with a World War II background—before he attempted his first western, Broken Arrow (1950), which seemed revisionist at the time for its sympathetic treatment of native Americans within the setting of a doomed interracial romance. The western most associated with Daves is 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which Fran Pheasant-Kelly brilliantly analyzes in "Delmer Daves' 3:10 to Yuma: Aesthetics, Reception, and Cultural Significance," treating it both as a filmic text with close attention to framing, camera angles, and lighting and as a quest narrative about an impoverished farmer (Van Heflin), who, having failed to intervene during a stagecoach robbery, volunteers to deliver an outlaw (Glenn Ford) to Yuma prison both for the money and the opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his wife and sons. To set his film apart from the traditional western, Daves intertwined the pursuit of manhood with the doubling of a flawed hero and an amiable villain, who is unusually deferential toward women. Small wonder that the Library of Congress designated 3:10 to Yuma as worthy of preservation for its historical, aesthetic, and cultural significance. An equally important western is Jubal (1956), but for reasons that have more to do with its noirish overtones than its place in the western canon. Don't be put off by Matthew Carter's unwieldy title: "'This Is Where He Brought Me: 10,000 Acres of Nothing!'": The Femme Fatale and other Film Noir Tropes in Delmer Daves' Jubal. "This is the highlight of the collection. While not a noir western like Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), Jubal is an atypical variation on the eternal triangle (husband, wife, wife's lover) with a stolid but genial husband (Ernest Borgnine), his unfulfilled wife (Valerie French), and the innocent victim of her sexual aggressiveness (Glenn Ford), who kills the husband in self-defense. The film's steaminess, reflected in both the wife's vampish behavior and a ranch hand's (Rod Steiger) palpable lust for her, counterbalanced by Ford's almost puritanical rejection of her advances, reveals Daves' refusal to make anything resembling a pure western. [End Page 70] While all the essays afford valuable insights into Daves' art, one wishes the editors had commissioned a few more dealing...

The Haunting: Vertigo Via Muybridge

The Haunting:Vertigo Via Muybridge Arturo Silva (bio) For Mallarmé, a poem is a pure crystal that allows to transpire an evanescent flickering. . . . Nothing really evolves in this poet's work, at least in his mature poems: Nothing takes the time to grow, nothing develops continuously. Nothing decays either, moreover; nothing truly perishes. The movement authorized in the structure is too rapid, too brief, too allusive to contain the thickness of transformative or corruptive duration. What is required is to capture a sudden modification, a transfiguration, a fulguration that abolishes in an instant the immobility of place, but also any possibility of change taking hold of things. A speed that interrupts the immutable, but also movement: a passed movement, annulled as soon as it is initiated. And thus a movement of which one could doubt whether it ever took place. —Quentin Meillassoux1 The Allegory Old San Francisco. Eadweard Muybridge, the man who murdered his wife's lover and got away with it. And he invented the movies. New San Francisco. John "Scottie" Ferguson, the man who tried to re-create his murdered lover—but she died too. What's the difference? Power and freedom; Muybridge had it, Scottie didn't. [End Page 34] Muybridge's apparatus was a simple one—a gun—and it worked. Muybridge stopped time, and then it exploded all over him. Scottie chose the whole cinematic apparatus itself, focusing on mise-en-scène and especially hair, clothes, make-up, and accessories, which is where it all went so horribly wrong. Time stopped Scottie, and when he tried to rewind it, he found himself trapped within its whorls. Introduction At the very beginning of Vertigo, the camera seems to pull back from something that is at first perceived only as a blur but is very soon revealed to be a metal bar.2 Once the camera stops, three successive actions occur that are all essentially the same; these three are then followed by another triplet of repeated actions. These are the first two "Hitchcock Motion Studies." Figures 1a and 1b, the Hitchcock Motion Study "Criminal and Cop Climb, Leap, Run" shown on the following pages, is taken from the film's opening shot. In figure 1a, a criminal reaches the top of the ladder, leaps from it, and then dashes across the roof; the same actions—climb, leap, run—are performed by the policeman, shown in figure 1b, and then again by Scottie (though in his case, only the first two movements are shown). The same is true for the film's third shot (following the flight across the roofs), and what we can call Hitchcock Motion Study 2, "Criminal and Cop Climb, Jump, Land, Flee," in which the criminal now jumps from one roof to another, lands, and then continues to flee. He is followed again by the policeman and then Scottie, both of them performing the very same movements. And what do these "motion studies" resemble but the famous work of Eadweard Muybridge? But what could Muybridge possibly have to do with Hitchcock and Vertigo? Could there be something "Muybridgean" about the film? Not at first glance, no. With only two slight instances that I know of, the name Muybridge has never before occurred in [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1a. Hitchcock Motion Study 1: Criminal Climbs, Leaps, Runs. [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1b. Hitchcock Motion Study 1: Cop Climbs, Leaps, Runs. [End Page 37] Vertigo studies—although there is one additional subtle linking of the two: the illustration on the endpapers of Patrick McGilligan's biography of Hitchcock is a Muybridge-like sequence photograph of Hitchcock in motion (fig. 2).3 While one can barely imagine the name Muybridge ever coming up during scripting sessions between Hitchcock and his scriptwriters, the prospect of something similar happening occurred to me while discussing Muybridge in a class on Pre-and Early Cinema. Going over bits of his biography, his career in San Francisco as a photographer, as well as his killing of his wife's lover, and subsequent acquittal, I briefly recalled that Scottie in Vertigo was also exonerated...

A Wife for a Life

A Wife for a Life

Adultery in the Courts: Damages for Criminal Conversation in Ireland

This paper examines the civil action known as criminal conversation or 'Crim Con'. This allowed a husband to obtain damages from his adulterous wife's lover. No similar action existed for women whose husbands engaged in adulterous relationships. The crim con action ceased to exist in England after 1857 but continued to be available -- and used -- in Ireland until the late 20th century. This paper examines the evolution of the action from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, its shifting rationale, its increasing popularity among the middle classes, and the nature and purpose of the damages awarded.

How The Apostle Gets Religion

How The Apostle Gets Religion Patton Dodd Not long ago, my eleven‐year‐old daughter stepped into our living room just as I was starting to watch The Apostle, Robert Duvall's 1997 film about a Pentecostal minister gone bad. She huffed a bit—Dad was about to watch something boring—but stuck around, then stuck around some more, her eyes glued to what was rolling forth from the screen: tent revival preaching, charismatic dancing, holy rolling worship, whooping for Jesus, and, in one moment, a bit of angry fist‐shaking at God. My daughter was fascinated. She was curious. She was, to be sure, a touch disturbed. What is this? Who are these people? What are they doing? Why are they doing that? I hushed her—not just because movie talkers are annoying, but also because the answers to those questions don't come easy. Watching Pentecostal Christians worship is a bit strange if you've never seen them do it before, and The Apostle—as I'm about to argue—plays Pentecostal worship incredibly straight. So it was not surprising when my daughter's questions were still with her the next day as we were in the car running errands. That movie you were watching yesterday? What were those people doing? Is that church? Do they think that's worshipping God? Is that worshipping God? Why do they think that's worshipping God? How can chanting “Jesus” over and over be worshipping God? Especially in the movie's first twenty minutes or so, she had seen a lot of praise jigs, a lot of pulpit stomping and shouting, and for a girl whose main exposure to church has been mild evangelical and mainline Protestant settings, well, the churches of The Apostle might as well have been from a different religion entirely. I assured her that this, too, was Christianity. This was one approach to the faith. It was, in fact, a hugely popular approach. Once upon a time, it was her dad's approach. The first time I saw The Apostle was soon after its release in October 1997. I was in college, and I dragged some friends with me to the theater—the operative word being “dragged,” since my pals were not at all inclined to see a quiet, personal film about an aged Pentecostal preacher. Gattaca was playing that month, as was Boogie Nights, and if we had to have some religion in our weekend movie, The Devil's Advocate was in theaters, too, featuring a hammy Al Pacino and a naked Charlize Theron. But I had been waiting for The Apostle for months. In my freshman year of college, I had dipped deep into the waters of Pentecostalism myself, and while I wanted to be done with my past, the past wasn't done with me. I was, in fact, rather obsessed with what had happened to me—speaking in tongues, dancing in the Holy Spirit, trying to exorcize demons. The trailers for The Apostle had delivered the impression that director and star Robert Duvall were genuinely obsessed with all this, too, and I saw in those trailers a kind of mirror, one I wanted to study. The Apostle is the story of Euliss “Sonny” Dewey, a Pentecostal Christian minister in southeastern Texas who becomes a fugitive from justice after he maims his wife's lover in a moment of drunken rage. Sonny flees town the afternoon of his crime, sinks his car in a pond, re‐baptizes himself in another pond, and emerges with a new spiritual identity and purpose. Christening himself “The Apostle E.F.,” Sonny establishes a makeshift church in Bayou Boutte, Louisiana. Sonny's new town takes to him almost immediately, and the bulk of The Apostle documents his short‐lived—but, we are meant to believe, quite genuine—ministry success among the people of Bayou Boutte during the few months it takes for the police to locate and arrest him. The Apostle is clearly a fictional film, but its overall mise en scene—its visual and auditory aesthetic from beginning to end—is a fiction/nonfiction mashup. The film's central conceit is not the idea of a fugitive minister...

The scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost paradise" of Euclides da Cunha

fortunes of late nineteenth century's imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material - rubber - with only one source: basin. And so began scramble for Amazon, a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and United States fighting with and against new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for forest's riches. In midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil's most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to farthest reaches of river, among world's most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes. The Scramble for Amazon tells story of da Cunha's terrifying journey, unfinished novel born from it, and global strife that formed backdrop for both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving migrants, and native slavery. All while, he worked on his masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy, biology, and journalism he named the Lost Paradise. Da Cunha intended his epic to unveil Amazon's explorers, spies, natives, and brutal geopolitics, but, as Susanna B. Hecht recounts, he never completed it - his wife's lover shot him dead upon his return. At once biography of an extraordinary writer, a masterly chronicle of social, political, and environmental history of Amazon, and a superb translation of remaining pieces of da Cunha's project, The Scramble for Amazon is a work of thrilling intellectual ambition.

The Awkward Aesthetics of Violence

The Awkward Aesthetics of Violence in Saul Bellow and Marguerite Duras Gerald David Naughton (bio) and Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton (bio) At a climactic moment of Saul Bellow's 1964 novel, Herzog, we find the titular hero finally moved to dramatic action. Moses Herzog, the cuckolded and abandoned husband, who has spent the largest part of the novel in an increasingly solipsistic spiral of epistolary narrative, finally feels ready to apply violence to the logic of his narrative. He stands at the window of his former home, ready to kill the elegant Valentine Gersbach, his wife's lover. There, Herzog witnesses a typical domestic moment, as Gersbach bathes Junie, Herzog's young daughter, before cumbersomely washing the bath. However, as his moment to act presses upon him—as the violence, which the situation seemingly demands, comes closer to expression—Herzog withdraws. Feeling a strange detachment, he examines his antique pistol, "[t]here were two bullets in the chamber....But they would stay there. Herzog clearly recognized that. ...Firing this pistol was nothing but a thought" (Bellow 2003a, 280). Here we find a moment of inaction, or rather, a pressure point at which direct violence becomes unworkable, impossible in Bellow's fictive universe: As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath, the reality of it, the tenderness of such a buffoon to a little child, his intended violence turned into theater, into something ludicrous. He was not ready to make such a complete fool of himself. (2003a, 280-81) Daniel Brudney describes this episode as mere "murder fantasy," not to be "taken seriously" (2010, 313). His analysis focuses on "Herzog's theatricality, which [Brudney takes] to be his distinctive orientation" (312). And yet, there is more to the scene than mere "theater." Theatre, indeed, remains relegated to the subjunctive. Herzog is not capable of playing his role in the easy [End Page 209] aesthetic tableau. What Bellow is introducing here is a certain metatheatricality. There is a self-awareness that to "perform" violence, like performing any well-defined role, is a matter of art or artifice. This is a profound moment of self-realization for Bellow's protagonist. He is forced to acknowledge that to seek violent revenge against the Other is to create a false aesthetic. There are two aspects to the scene which make violence impossible, or, more accurately, inarticulate. First, there is a tenderness between Gersbach and Junie, which Herzog cannot fail to notice. Second, and perhaps more revealingly, there is a certain awkwardness to the scene which Herzog, like many of Bellow's protagonists, cannot reconcile with "theatrical" violence. Indeed, the tenderness expressed by Gersbach shows a character already "misperforming" his role in the anticipated "theatre" of violence. Here, the idea of direct violence becomes overwhelmingly awkward and certainly unworkable. This creates an awkward aesthetics of violence in the text. It is this aesthetics that this essay will explore in Saul Bellow's Mr Sammler's Planet and Herzog, and Marguerite Duras' The Lover. The moment at which Herzog realizes the impossibility of murdering Gersbach is a moment that points to the limitations of literary violence in the novels of both Bellow and Duras. In Bellow, we find that the definitive moment of literary violence can be the inaesthetic moment—the moment at which actual violence must be suppressed or, rather, find more figurative forms of expression. Similarly, Duras' novella deals with violence in a linguistically awkward, broken way that seems to suppress violence rather than express it. In both Duras and Bellow, the threat of real, physical violence hovers over the narrative uncovering other, more subtle forms of violence. Rather than being performed directly, violence finds a symbolic outlet, through a strange, elusive, awkward aesthetics—an aesthetics that is discomforting, troublesome, unsatisfying, and yet revelatory of deeper layers of subjectivity. In both writers, violence can be positioned within an erotic, gendered narrative, but is always linked to the memory of collective violence. In both, direct violence is necessarily translated, transformed, or aestheticized in a way that creates awkward, jarring fissures in their narratives. This awkwardness explicitly brings these two post-Holocaust writers into dialogue with each other; it is almost as if it...

The Awkward Aesthetics of Violence in Saul Bellow and Marguerite Duras

The Awkward Aesthetics of Violence in Saul Bellow and Marguerite Duras Gerald David Naughton (bio) and Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton (bio) At a climactic moment of Saul Bellow's 1964 novel, Herzog, we find the titular hero finally moved to dramatic action. Moses Herzog, the cuckolded and abandoned husband, who has spent the largest part of the novel in an increasingly solipsistic spiral of epistolary narrative, finally feels ready to apply violence to the logic of his narrative. He stands at the window of his former home, ready to kill the elegant Valentine Gersbach, his wife's lover. There, Herzog witnesses a typical domestic moment, as Gersbach bathes Junie, Herzog's young daughter, before cumbersomely washing the bath. However, as his moment to act presses upon him—as the violence, which the situation seemingly demands, comes closer to expression—Herzog withdraws. Feeling a strange detachment, he examines his antique pistol, "[t]here were two bullets in the chamber....But they would stay there. Herzog clearly recognized that. ...Firing this pistol was nothing but a thought" (Bellow 2003a, 280). Here we find a moment of inaction, or rather, a pressure point at which direct violence becomes unworkable, impossible in Bellow's fictive universe: As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath, the reality of it, the tenderness of such a buffoon to a little child, his intended violence turned into theater, into something ludicrous. He was not ready to make such a complete fool of himself. (2003a, 280-81) Daniel Brudney describes this episode as mere "murder fantasy," not to be "taken seriously" (2010, 313). His analysis focuses on "Herzog's theatricality, which [Brudney takes] to be his distinctive orientation" (312). And yet, there is more to the scene than mere "theater." Theatre, indeed, remains relegated to the subjunctive. Herzog is not capable of playing his role in the easy [End Page 209] aesthetic tableau. What Bellow is introducing here is a certain metatheatricality. There is a self-awareness that to "perform" violence, like performing any well-defined role, is a matter of art or artifice. This is a profound moment of self-realization for Bellow's protagonist. He is forced to acknowledge that to seek violent revenge against the Other is to create a false aesthetic. There are two aspects to the scene which make violence impossible, or, more accurately, inarticulate. First, there is a tenderness between Gersbach and Junie, which Herzog cannot fail to notice. Second, and perhaps more revealingly, there is a certain awkwardness to the scene which Herzog, like many of Bellow's protagonists, cannot reconcile with "theatrical" violence. Indeed, the tenderness expressed by Gersbach shows a character already "misperforming" his role in the anticipated "theatre" of violence. Here, the idea of direct violence becomes overwhelmingly awkward and certainly unworkable. This creates an awkward aesthetics of violence in the text. It is this aesthetics that this essay will explore in Saul Bellow's Mr Sammler's Planet and Herzog, and Marguerite Duras' The Lover. The moment at which Herzog realizes the impossibility of murdering Gersbach is a moment that points to the limitations of literary violence in the novels of both Bellow and Duras. In Bellow, we find that the definitive moment of literary violence can be the inaesthetic moment—the moment at which actual violence must be suppressed or, rather, find more figurative forms of expression. Similarly, Duras' novella deals with violence in a linguistically awkward, broken way that seems to suppress violence rather than express it. In both Duras and Bellow, the threat of real, physical violence hovers over the narrative uncovering other, more subtle forms of violence. Rather than being performed directly, violence finds a symbolic outlet, through a strange, elusive, awkward aesthetics—an aesthetics that is discomforting, troublesome, unsatisfying, and yet revelatory of deeper layers of subjectivity. In both writers, violence can be positioned within an erotic, gendered narrative, but is always linked to the memory of collective violence. In both, direct violence is necessarily translated, transformed, or aestheticized in a way that creates awkward, jarring fissures in their narratives. This awkwardness explicitly brings these two post-Holocaust writers into dialogue with each other; it is almost as if it...

The Unwritten Law of Executive Justice: Pardoning Patricide in Reconstruction-era New York

Reconstruction was an uncertain time in New York City, the nation's foremost metropolis, riddled with political corruption and rocked by popular protest. Stabilizing efforts took numerous forms, including the brutal suppression of workers' rallies and the prosecution of municipal politicians and officials. Public faith in the criminal justice system and its capacity to prosecute and punish criminals had also reached a low ebb by the 1870s, prompting the state government to investigate the district attorney's office in New York County and its court system. In the words of a veteran member of the city's criminal bar, the “deplorable uncertainty” of punishment was making “a mockery of justice.” A Columbia University medico-legal expert agreed, claiming that murder, “if not yet cultivated as one of the fine arts … [was] a matter of daily occurrence.” High-profile trials in the wake of the Civil War tested public and professional criticism of jury independence, particularly jurors' disinclination to find killers guilty of murder, compounded by defense attorneys' growing use of “moral” and “emotional insanity” defenses. Every time apparently sane killers, such as William McFarland (tried and acquitted on grounds of “temporary insanity” in 1870 for the murder of his former wife's lover) escaped conviction on the basis of questionable insanity defenses, newspapers announced “the insanity dodge,” and medico-legal experts squabbled over the growing problem of “feigned insanity.” Occasionally Manhattan's murderers did face the gallows, especially the poor and friendless, as the execution of William Foster in March 1873 confirmed, but it seemed that well-financed and well-defended murderers, like Edward Stokes, murderer of financier Jim Fisk, could exploit the technicalities of the law if the vagaries of medicine failed to secure acquittals. A justice system of this sorry character had little hope of deterring would-be murderers, theNew York Timesdespaired: “MURDER AND HANGING-Examples Wanted-Strangle All Our Murderers Together.”

From Anger to Jealousy: Explaining Domestic Homicide in Antebellum America

This essay argues that in the sensational 1859 trial of Daniel Sickles for the murder of his wife's lover, Philip Barton Key, jealousy appeared, for the first time, as a normative masculine emotion and as instinct—as, moreover, integral to marital love and as a legitimate explanation for domestic violence. Although Sickles' lawyers presented their client's jealous rage as thoroughly understandable—indeed, inevitable—their narrative represented a break with legal precedent, with case after case of domestic homicide in which jealousy was either absent or was present only to be condemned as a vicious passion. Instead, through the first few decades of the nineteenth century, anger, not jealousy, routinely appeared as the principal cause of troubled relations between husbands and wives. In articulating the legal pre-history of the Sickles trial this essay discloses that jealousy, purportedly innate within men, was absent: earlier cases reveal that in fact jealousy was not a shared property of men and hardly ever a motive of domestic homicide. Cases prior to Sickles are also bereft of romantic love and of apotheosized domestic life, twinned ideals that formed an integral part of the emergence of jealousy as inevitable and excusable in Daniel Sickles' trial.

Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg, and: Peripheral: Emerson, 1847

Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg, and: Peripheral: Emerson, 1847 Susan Blackwell Ramsey (bio) Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg For years they floated in adjacent jars, two heads on a dusty storage shelf,abandoned in a back room of the palace: Mary Hamilton and Charles Mons. [End Page 136] We want to make things last. Salt, sugar, sun will work, and tannin from chestnut bark, and brainsspread on the skins that toted them, and sometimes words. But new two hundred years ago- these "spirits of wine." (Fermenting's nature, but distilling's art.) Not all steam is water,just as not all passion's love. Boil wine, catch what evaporates, trap that alcohol and it preserves whatever you drop in, the head of your wife's lover, for example-Peter ordered his queen to display it on her mantle- or your mistress, killed for infanticide. They say Great Peter kissed the dead head's lips. The bodies sinned, the heads were saved. Don't bedistracted by stories of Joaquin Murrieta glaring in a jar in California. Though he was gunned down by someone named Love, his problems were political, not erotic.He really should remind you of Evita, beautifully embalmed, better than Lenin, then passed around, hot political potato, hidden in attics, propped like a doll behinda movie screen for weeks, deaths unfurling behind her like a red scarf from Isadora's car. And even if Jeremy Bentham's head was found once in a luggage locker in Aberdeen,once in the front quadrangle being used as a football by medical students, he died [End Page 137] a natural death and landed in that cabinet, stuffed, propped, dressed, through his own will,wax head on his shoulders, catastrophe in the drawer, still convinced Utility was his goal. The uses the dead are put to by the living. Peter saved one for hatred, one for love,and they outlasted hatred, love, and Peter to become flip sides of Death's two-headed coin. Heads win. Maybe the story isn't the heads but Peter, unstoppablemonster consuming youth, a Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth he built himself. Finally Catherine freed them. After decades she found them, observed how well their youth and beautywere preserved, and had them buried, though no one says whether bottled or free to stop being beautiful. Peripheral: Emerson, 1847 His life seemed full of isolated details, some interesting enough,but without connections one to another or to a larger coherence. -Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire Bill says I'm right, he learned it in the service- night vision is different. You have to train your eyes to one side of what you want to see. It works for faint stars, too. Orion's testicles [End Page 138] blink on, blink off, like the neon martini over some rundown bar. Let focus go, and the secrets moving through the long blades of grass change from point to wave, to pattern, plot. To draw a chair, draw the spaces between the legs. Paint only shadows-your brain supplies the face. The bodies were gone by the time they found Pompeii, but ash shaped casts around what once was there, as peripheral people may define the shape of someone otherwise too big to see. (Andrew Wyeth painted his father as a hill.)So don't focus on this house where turnpike meets Great Country Road. Try glancing east where gawkers watch Alcott hammer that summerhouseEmerson's kindness commissioned-nine posts, not from need but for the Muses, and nearly more nails than lumber,or focus on this coach delivering Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, four foot two,traveling with her coffin, wearing her shroud, whose letters shaped his brain. Or come out back and climb up on this branch with me. Right now apples are Emerson's passion. We'll peer between leaves the way pinhole and paper let you watch eclipse and not go blind. His boy's been buried these five years. In March he pruned every tree to let in light-the rule [End Page 139] is to trim everything that grows up or in and a third of everything that's left. Lace...

Telling Stories in Athenian Law

when students first encounter Athenian law, it seems quite different from what they know as our own law; and when they begin to read scholar ship on the subject, especially Anglo-American scholarship of the last two decades, they will probably find some discussion of the so-called of Athenian law. Scholars these days don't write books that try to make Athe nian law more familiar, like Robert Bonner 's fine little introduction, Lawyers and Litigants in Ancient Athens, published three-quarters of a century ago. New approaches have taken over, approaches that, although healthy and stimulat ing in many ways, tend to exaggerate the otherness of Athenian law. This is not so much because historians present a false picture of Athenian law, as be cause they misrepresent aspects of our own legal system, relying on a tradi tional, idealistic view of it that is increasingly being challenged by certain branches of contemporary legal studies. When we take a more realistic look at our own system, however, Athenian law may not appear so different. One of the new approaches to understanding our own law is to look at storytelling. Storytelling has been the subject of serious academic study for almost a century now, but it has drawn the attention of legal scholars only in recent decades, as part of the broader field of Law and Literature. Classi cists too have studied storytelling, as well as newer approaches such as narratology and performance studies. But storytelling in Athenian law has not received much attention, so today I would like to take a couple of stories from Athenian legal cases and try to show how the study of storytelling in law can shed light on these cases and on Athenian law more generally. I'll begin with a story familiar to many of you, from Lysias 1, On the Mur der of Eratosthenes (this is the case of the man who kills his wife's lover). A

Uncontrollable frenzy and a unique temporary insanity plea.

On a bright, sunny April 1859 afternoon in Washington, D.C., a brutal murder occurred in Lafayette Park, directly across from the White House. Ironically, a close friend of President James Buchanan shot and killed his wife's lover. Daniel E. Sickles, a cuckolded U.S. Congressman, attacked and killed Philip Barton Key, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Key was one of the eleven children of Francis Scott Key, the author of the poem that became The Star Spangled Banner. At the trial, Sickles' seven lawyers presented an insanity plea claiming that an "uncontrollable frenzy" created a 'brainstorm" resulting in temporary insanity. In addition, the defense argued that the "unwritten law" provided immunity to a husband who avenged his honor. Only lay witnesses testified as to Sickles' intense emotional outrage. There was no expert medical witness to support the insanity plea. Prosecutors maintained that the killing was a premeditated murder, or at the very least manslaughter.

The Social Dimensions of Galdos' Theater

G ALDOS' FAME as a novelist has obscured his great contribution to the Spanish stage. An appraisal of his works based on his novels is both unfortunate and inaccurate. Throughout the entire corpus of his work, Gald6s traced the changing economic and political situation in Spain. He put history at the center of his humanism and directed attention to the social relationships that resulted from the interplay of history, economics and politics in contemporary Spain. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his plays. Gald6s dramatized such contemporary social predicaments as intolerance, backwardness, reactionary resistance to change, hypocrisy, and intransigence. His plays were often political statements with national implications because he sought to expose the false myths that underlay the entire Spanish social structure. Realidad, Gald6s' first professional produced play, provides a striking example of the author's attempt to introduce a modem consciousness-a new social dimension-to the Spanish stage. He completely reversed the traditional concept of honor when Orozco, the betrayed husband, forgave his wife's lover, Federico Viera. It is difficult to overestimate the effect of Realidad on the Spanish audiences accustomed to plays that still stressed the importance of revenge and the dictates of an absolute code of honor.

The Duels in Mann and Turgenev

ADMIRATION is too mild a word to describe Mann's attitude toAs ward the Russian novel of the nineteenth century. Reverence comes closer to the mark. His essays on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky show with what care he studied the Slavic masters. In this note, I shall consider the practical use to which he puts one of Turgenev's inventions in his own fiction. Faced with a problem in the resolution of the plot of The Magic lMountain similar to one found in Fathers and Sons, Mann solved it in a manner containing so many detailed resemblances to Turgenev's solution as to suggest clearly that he used the Russian author as his model. The fact that there are duels with pistols at climactic moments in both books is not the point. There is a duel, for example, in Tolstoy's W[ar and Peace between Pierre Bezuhov and his first wife's lover Dolohov which bears not the least resemblance to either Turgenev's or Mann's duel. The duel in Tolstoy originates in passion, but the clashes in Fathers and Sons and The Magic Mountain are caused primarily by lifferences in ideas and temperament. It is true that the abstract reasons for the duel are somewhat disguised by Turgenev in deference to nineteenth-century notions of realism, while in Mann they stand forth bare and unadorned. The thin disguise which the fundamental conflict between the nihilist Bazarov and the romantic Uncle Pavel takes in Fath-