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Abstract
In his1900 “List of Legal Novels,” John H. Wigmore included H. Rider Haggard’s Mr. Meeson’s ill (1888), a seldom read novel today but one which raises questions about the relationships between testamentary volition and its legal expression, the gendered inequities of Victorian property law, as well as the relations between law and literature. In the interests either of love or justice, the novel’s protagonist first encourages a repentant testator to have a new will tattooed onto her back, then suffers the further mortification of being offered as evidence in a trial over the will’s validity. The satire on legal procedure notwithstanding, however, Haggard never questions the tenets of women’s property laws. In fact, the courtroom debates on whether Augusta can speak as a witness or must remain a mute testament to another’s will turn on fantasies of dismemberment and mutilation. This paper will read Haggard’s novel in the context of the Will’s Act of 1837, in which the will became a written document, and assumptions about women as conveyors of property in order to chart the way Haggard uses the woman’s body to map a legal topography and qualifies assumptions about the humaneness of literature in the process.
Notes
1. John H. Wigmore, “A List of Legal Novels.” 2 The Brief 124-27 (Jan. 1900).
Marlyn Robinson, ed., Law in Popular Culture, University of Texas School of Law. 2003 . I Aug. 2006, http:// tarlton.law.utexas.edu/ lpop/etext/wigmorebrief.htm. Thanks to Marlyn Robinson for clarifying that this is the first version of the list which would be amended in 1908 and 1922 when it appeared in the Illinois Law Review [2 Illinois Law Rev. 574(1908) and 17 Law Review 26(1992)].2. John Ritchie, Neill H. Alford and Richard Effland, eds. Decedents’ Estates and Trusts: Cases and Materials (Mineola: Foundation Press, 1971), 21
.3. See Jan-Melissa Schramm, Testimony and Advocacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
for discussion of this Act and its relation to testimony.4. See Lisa Rodensky, The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
for discussion of early nineteenth-century conceptions of interiority, intentionality, and the legal problem of how to access them.5. Ronald Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
, 11.6. James Traill Christie, Concise Precedents of Wills (London: Maxwell, 1857)
, 162.7. See Thomas, supra note 5 at 11.
8. B.B. West, Wills and How Not to Make Them (London: Longman, 1893)
,130.9. George S. Allnut, The Practice of Wills and Administrations (London: John Crockford, 1860), 3
.10. Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4
.11. See West, supra note 8 at 33.
12. The standard reference for analysis of the married women’s property laws remains Lee Holcombe’s Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Laws in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983)
. See also Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) .13. Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
, xii-xiv.14. James Bradley, “Body Commodification? Class and Tattoos in Victorian Britain.” Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History, Jane Caplan, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
, 153.15. Gerald Monsman, introduction, King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard (1885; Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002)
, 11.16. “Adventure.” Oxford English Dictionary 2nd ed. 1989.
17. See Bradley, supra note 13 at 142.
18. Id.,at 137.
19. Id., at 138.
20. Christine Braunberger, “Revolting Bodies: The Monster Beauty of Tattooed Women,” 12.2 NWSA Journal 6 (2000)
. See also Carrie Dawson’s discussion of the tattoo’s role in (Australian) national identity in “The Slaughterman of Wagga Wagga: Imposture, National Identity, and the Tichborne Affair.” 21.4 Australian Literary Studies 1-13(2004).21. See Bradley, supra note 13 at 151.
22. Id., at 153. It is here that Bradley cites Stephen Riley’s reproductions of Landseer and Constable paintings in 1897. According to Riley, such elaborate designs (measuring 12 by 9 inches) required twelve sittings for a total of more than 80 hours labor and 24 guineas cost.
23. See Bradley, supra note 13 at 151.
24. A commodity’s value is also contingent on its scarcity. The more exotic an object, the less likely that many people will have it.
25. See Bradley, supra note 13 at 150.
26. Id., at 151.
27. Id., at 138. While working-class conditions or unemployment might contribute to the turn towards criminal behavior, Bradley cautions that these conditions themselves are not a fair indicator of the incidence of tattooing. That is, criminals’ tattoos were not an indicator of their class status so much as a sign that they had associated with sailors, for example, during the long journeys entailed by a sentence of transportation.
28. J. B. Atlay, Famous Trials of the Century (London: Grant Richards, 1899)
, 331. See Robinson, supra note 1.29. See Atlay, supra note 27 at 333.
30. Id., at 332.
31. See Bradley, supra note 13 at 140.
32. See Dawson, supra note 19 at 6. Here again is a place for Dawson’s work on the significance of the Tichborne trials for understanding the relationship between imposture and class-based, as well as national, identity. The difficulty in determining Tichborne’s identity accentuates anxieties not merely about creating and maintaining an individual’s persona. Rather, the trials showed that the distinctive marks of class that separated baronets from butchers, along with those that differentiated between colonialists and the colonized, were alarmingly unstable. Lord Coleridge’s work for the Tichborne family played on the anxieties of the property-holding jury members who ultimately found against the Claimant, a decision Dawson considers an investment in “a stable social order” (Id., at 3). See especially pages 2–3, 5, and 7.
33. H. Rider Haggard, Mr. Meeson’s Will, Pastime Ser. 16 (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1888)
, 104.34. “Deserve” in this sense means legal entitlement. Meeson can leave his property to whomever he chooses, but the feeling that Eustace should inherit, that thereby “justice” would be better served, derives, first, from the importance of property as a means of preserving familial identities. Second is the feeling that property rights entail responsibilities. Eustace himself should not be made to suffer for having defended Augusta, goes the argument, while Mr. Meeson should not abuse his position in order to inflict this sort of gratuitous financial pain.
35. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)
, 169.36. See Haggard, supra note 33 at 108.
37. The tattoo makes it as difficult to separate the weapon from the tool as it is to differentiate between the pain and the reward of work because the tattooist uses his tool (the bone) on the human body (Scarry’s “sentient surface”). The artist’s creative pain, his effort to render the as yet only conceptualized tattoo, tends towards the imaginative end of the spectrum, whereas the work of the subject-as-surface falls nearer pure pain. See Scarry, supra note 35 at 173.
38. Id., at 14 “[A]t particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief—when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation—the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’” Emphasis mine.
39. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One trans. Catherine Porter with Caroline Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 180
. Irigary argues, first, that a commodity achieves value by entering the market, by submitting itself to “specularization.” Augusta does just this when she is forced to exhibit the tattoo and when her photograph is published in the newspaper. More to the point, however, is Irigaray’s second contention here, that “the commodity is disinvested of its body and reclothed in a form that makes it suitable for exchange among men.” Augusta transforms from a working author, an earner, who upsets the homo-social economy into the legal form of Meeson’s will, who is not only suitable for exchange but actually part of the system that legitimates how such exchanges proceed.40. Id., at 187. “Her value-invested form amounts to what man inscribes in and on its matter: that is, her body.”
41. See Haggard, supra note 33 at 183.
42. Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Narrative, Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 206-207
.43. Id., at 207.
44. “Testament.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.
45. See Irigaray, supra note 39 at 180-81.
46. Conscience is not the only possible motivator, however. An additional motive, one considered at length during the trial, is the too-close relationship between love and self-love. The island is not set up as the site of the novel’s most significant conflict, and Augusta’s fear of dying there is offset by the island’s resources and her own ingenuity. It is on the island, however, that she begins to think of Eustace as someone whom she could love (See Haggard, supra note 33 at 107), notwithstanding that they have only met twice. The first time in Meeson’s office is marked off in two ways: it stresses their mutual physical attraction as well as Augusta’s financial straits, exacerbated no less by her having entered into a bad contract with her employer. Augusta might be read as making a gamble here. Her independence as a single woman, legally able to enter contracts, has not served her well. She would gain security and indeed the return of some of her own labor—the profits of her best-selling book that contributed to Meeson’s fortune —if she could guarantee Eustace’s wealth and marry him. If she damages the physical beauty that at this point is her chief asset, however, she risks losing both.
47. See Cover, supra note 42 at 207.
48. Id., at 222. The only way Augusta can be considered a martyr, then, is in terms of her colonial experience. Like Robinson Crusoe (whose story she tells the small son of New Zealand’s governor who has been stranded with her), she finds herself on terra incognita and must make a new world in the image of the one she’s left behind. Her sacrifice (of her skin and its symbolic adjuncts) is the danger she undergoes in order to spread English laws and hence Englishness. Even this risk is minimized, however, by the island’s utopic qualities and her own resourcefulness. Once these dangers are cast aside, her acceptance of pain must be understood as the “work” of transmitting property.
49. See Haggard, supra note 33 at 170.
50. Id., at 163.
51. Id., at 202.
52. Id., at 204.
53. Id., at 205.
54. Id., at 205.
55. For the “world maintaining” or “imperial” function of law, see Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 97 Harvard Law Review 13(1983)
. See especially his comments on the connotations of “imperialism” in note 36 at 13.56. See Cover, supra note 42 at 210.
57. See Haggard, supra note 33 at 175, 180.
58. It is true that at this point in the story Augusta and Eustace are not married, but they are engaged, and this fact alone is used by the Defense to discredit her motives. The novel itself is also written and set just five years after passage of the married women’s property act of 1882, which extended the rights to separate property to more married women, but importantly continued to limit women’s testamentary abilities; that is, the law continued to discourage the association of women’s property rights with women’s will.
59. See Wigmore, supra note 1 at 124.
60. Id., at 124.
61. Dieter Polloczek, Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
, vi–viii and xviii. See also his comments on the interpretive emphases within Law and Literature as a field, 13–14. For a history of Law and Literature, especially of the terms in which each discipline has come to define itself and its goals, see Julie Stone Peters, “Law, Literature and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an Interdisciplinary Illusion,” 120 PMLA 442–453 (2005).62. See Wigmore, supra note 1 at 125.
63. The classic treatment of this distinction is Virginia Woolf’s 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” The Captain’s Deathbed and Other Essays (New York: Harvest, 1950), 94–119. See also “Modern Fiction,” The Common Reader (New York: Harvest, 1953), 150–158.
64. H.G. Wells, whose The Time Machine
appeared in 1895, is commonly given as the inventor of the genre.