Abstract
Marco Wan’s Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction explores how Victorian bourgeois masculinity in England came under pressure with the rise of the figure of the homosexual. Wan finds representations of this figure in five select English and French novels published during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse (1883), Émile Zola’s La Terre (1887), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). All of these novels were accused of violating the obscenity laws of England. Wan analyzes the trials that ensued, focusing on two aspects of the novels’ purported “crime.” The first aspect is doctrinal: again, all five novels were accused of defying laws against obscenity. The second aspect is cultural: all five novels explored issues of gender and sexuality that Victorian society repressed. It is this second aspect of the novels’ crime that justifies the larger psychoanalytical frame of Wan’s analyses.
The first chapter of Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction focuses on the acquittal of Flaubert in the obscenity trial against Madame Bovary. Emma Bovary and the novel in general challenged entrenched notions of gender. But more significantly, Wan shows, the novel posed the idea of a radically different androgyny. This androgyny exists at the formal level. The prosecution advanced a realist reading of the novel comparing it with “lascivious” painting. The defense advanced a modernist reading of the novel comparing it with religious tracts by Massillon, Bossnet, Sainte-Beuvre, and Guillois, as well as with novels like Richardson’s Clarissa. Wan argues that the decision to insert Madame Bovary in a network of other texts so as to call attention to the novel’s style or form rather than its content ensured Flaubert’s acquittal. With an “intertextuality” argument that emphasized the radical multiplicity of the novel’s modes or forms of narrative, the defense proved that the novel was not particularly obscene. It also proved that law and literature are not epistemologically distinct as the textual mobility characteristic of Flaubert’s novel can in fact be attributed to law as well.
The discursive entanglements between law and literature are further explored in the next chapter on the acquittal of Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse (1883). Wan situates Bonnetain’s trial within the wider locus of onanism and cultural concerns about declining virility. He claims that the novel was put on trial because it chose as its topic a sexual activity that was believed to be the cause of depopulation in late nineteenth-century France: onanism or masturbation. Written in a language consistent with contemporary medical treatises, the defense argued that the novel should be viewed as a work with a scientific basis. Emphasizing the medical language informing Bonnetain’s fiction, the defense was able to equate science with naturalism and Bonnetain was acquitted. But more interestingly, Wan argues, this tactic reveals the impossibility of separating the language of naturalist fiction from that of the defense’s legal rhetoric as both drew on the purported objectivity and authority of medico-scientific discourse to justify their merit.
In his analysis of the Henry Vizetelly trial, the English publisher of Émile Zola’s novel La Terre, Wan observes that the intertextuality tactic is deployed again. The defense presented La Terre with other works to show the novel did not violate the law. This time the tactic failed. Charged under England’s first obscenity statute, the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, Vizetelly was convicted of the distribution of obscene materials. Wan argues that he was convicted because instead of focusing on the corruptive intent of the novel as required by the Act, the trial focused on the potential mimetic effect of the novel. Reading this misreading of the 1857 Act through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Wan shows that law’s reluctance to recognize its resemblance to literature caused Vizetelly to be condemned. In La Terre, every son inherits the violent temper of his father and eventually murders him. In Vizetelly’s trial, the violence repeated is that of a misinterpretation of the Obscene Publications Act, perpetrated by the law in Regina v. Hicklin (1868). The interpretative violence in the Hicklin case was re-enacted in the Vizetelly trial, and this repetition of violence coincides with the recurrence of violence in Zola’s novel. Instead of acknowledging its own violence, law condemns literature for it. This propels Wan to invoke Freud and compare repression with expurgation.
In the next chapter, Wan focuses on the trial of Oscar Wilde. According to Wan, two aspects of literature clashed in the courtroom: the prosecutor’s realism and the novelist’s aesthetic philosophy. Invoking the Labouchère Amendment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the prosecutor, Edward Carson, condemned The Picture of Dorian Gray as a sodomitical text. Advancing a realist position, Carson argued that literature could be interpreted as a window into the author’s own life and practices. The novel was thus evidence that Wilde himself was a practitioner of sodomy. Wilde responded to this charge in keeping with his aesthetic philosophy: a work of art is superior to life and is autonomous. For Wilde, his writings were artistic expressions of beautiful personalities and not reflections of his own lifestyle. According to Wan, because both Carson’s and Wilde’s arguments are firmly rooted in literature, not only did this real-life court case turn into a literary event but it also reveals how law is underpinned by literary practice.
In the final chapter Wan explores lesbianism in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. During the time of the novel’s publication, lesbianism was defined in medical terms and understood as a biological error. It was, therefore, difficult to criminalize. To address this obstacle, Magistrate Biron took recourse to the Labouchère Amendment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which prohibited “the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person” (152). This move was justified because Hall’s novel constructs lesbian relations in a hetero-normative mode. Such hetero-normative representation of the female “invert” enabled Biron to equate the deviant female with the deviant male. Thus lesbianism was converted into criminal conduct. Wan reads this move as the return of the repressed: just as the novel silences the male “invert,” law returns to silence the lesbian by recasting her in the mold of male same-sex desire.
Through a careful study of trial transcripts, Wan demonstrates how the courtroom becomes a site where different forms of gendered identities are contested in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through this contest, discursive entanglements between law and literature are revealed. But what is revealed more strikingly is the inconsistency of legal hermeneutics – sometimes law requires a novel to be studied rigorously (as in the case of Wilde), while at other times it indulges in perfunctory readings (as in the case of Hall). As long as legal hermeneutic authority is retained and normative masculinity upheld, law is ready to compromise even if its own integrity comes into question. Exposing this “masculinist” side of law through the revolutionary dimension of literature, this book makes a topical contribution to the field of law and literature.