| dc.description.abstract | Participants in the critical enterprise of “Law and Literature” tend to center their
arguments on the question of literature’s utility to the study and practice of law. I focus
instead on the reciprocal corollary: how can an understanding of law influence a critical
reading of literature? Taking cues from discussions in Renaissance studies of law and
literature and drawing on my own legal training, I assert that transatlantic literary studies
provides both a conceptual framework for positing a reciprocal relationship between law
and literature and, in nineteenth century Scottish and American depictions of property
and criminal law, a crucial test case for this exploration by uncovering new “legal
fictions” within these texts.
I begin my first chapter by situating my work within recent critical work in Law
and Literature. While most scholarship in the “law in literature” subcategory since James
Boyd White’s influential 1973 text The Legal Imagination has focused on how (and if)
literary studies can help current and future legal practitioners through what Maria
Aristodemou calls “instrumental” and “humanistic” mechanisms, recent work,
particularly by a dedicated group of interdisciplinary scholars in Renaissance studies, has
focused on the law’s benefit to literary studies in this field. I explore the critical
mechanisms employed by these scholars as well as by scholars in nineteenth century
literary studies such as Ian Ward. I then turn to transatlantic literary studies, arguing that
the approaches outlined by Susan Manning, Joselyn Almeida, and others provide a
framework that can give nineteenth-century literary studies a similar framework to that
proposed by Aristodemou: an “instrumental” method of giving greater precision to
discussions of how historical institutions and hierarchies are depicted in nineteenth
century literature, and a “humanistic” method of extending beyond historicist approaches
to see beyond the often artificial demarcations of literary period and genre by finding
commonalities that transcend disciplinary and historical borders. I conclude this
introduction by identifying the legal and literary parameters of my project in the legal-political
tensions of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Scotland and America.
My second chapter focuses on property law and the question of inheritance,
reading Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and The Bride of Lammermoor alongside Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to demonstrate how the narratives play with
two dueling theories of inheritance law – meritocratic and feudal – and how those dueling
legal theories impact the events of the tales themselves. After outlining tensions between
older but still prevalent ideas of feudal succession and newer but admittedly flawed in
execution notions of meritocratic land transfer, I explore how Scott’s and Hawthorne’s
narratives demonstrate the inability of their characters to reconcile these notions. Both
Rob Roy and The House of the Seven Gables seem to demonstrate the triumph of
deserving but legally alienated protagonists over their titled foes; both novels, however,
end with the reconciliation of all parties through ostensibly love-based weddings that
perform the legal function of uniting competing land claims, thus providing a
suspiciously easy resolution to the legal conflict at the heart of both stories. While
reconciliation makes the legal controversies at the heart of these stories ultimately
irrelevant, the legal nihilism of The Bride of Lammermoor takes the opposite tactic,
demonstrating both the individual shortcomings of the Ashton and Ravenswood families
and the systemic failure of Scottish property law’s feudalism to achieve equitable
outcomes.
I next turn to the question of insanity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
and James Hogg’s “Strange Letter of a Lunatic,” arguing that both narratives complicate
the legal definition of insanity by showing gaps between the legislative formulation and
actual application to their fictional defendants. After developing the different viewpoints
towards criminal culpability articulated by the American (but based on English law) and
Scottish versions of the insanity defense, I turn first to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s
narrator, I argue, deliberately develops a narrative that takes him outside the protections
of the insanity defense, insisting on his own culpability despite – or perhaps because of –
the implications for his own punishment. Meanwhile, Hogg’s narrative, both in its
original draft form for Blackwood’s and its published version in Fraser’s, paints a
different picture of a narrator who avoids criminal punishment but finds himself confined
in asylum custody.
These two areas of inheritance and insanity collide in my exploration of Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frank Norris’s
McTeague, where I illustrate the relationship between the urban demographics and
zoning laws of both the real and fictional versions of London and San Francisco and the
title characters’ mentally ill but probably not legally insane murderers. After
demonstrating Stevenson’s and Norris’s link between psychology and the complex
amalgamations of their fictional cityscapes, I demonstrate how these cityscapes also
allow them to sidestep rather than embrace mental illness as an excuse for their
murderous protagonists’ crimes, indicting the institutions at the center of their texts as
equally divided and flawed. | en |
