Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature

Chapter Four. Staging the Scene: Women, Drama, and the Law

Chapter Four Staging the Scene Women, Drama, and the Law The juridical field is the site of a competition for monopoly of the right to determine the law. Within this field there occurs a confrontation among actors possessing a technical competence which is inevitably social and which consists essentially in the socially recognized capacity to interpret a corpus of texts sanctifying a correct or legitimized vision of the social world.1 Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the word “actor” here is not accidental: it highlights the ways in which law courts and the stage have much in common and how each individual plays a role. It is in relation to the staging of guilt or innocence that the connection between these arenas becomes clearest. For example, drama foregrounds the constructed nature of power relations through such factors as lighting, stagecraft , and dialogue. Whether largely “realist” or experimental, theater interrogates the (not so hidden) gender roles that determine how one’s daily performances are received. It is no surprise, then, that playwrights are attracted to the courtroom—whether metaphorical or “real”—as a setting for their plays, and that law and literature critics explore how women’s guilt and innocence are staged. The connections between the sites are clear. First, they contain multiple narratives. The contestatory nature of the courtroom and the theater are thus linked, although, as Steven Connor points out, “whereas in the theatre a script is turned into a performance, in the courtroom, a performance is turned into a script.”2 Second, the performance of roles is foregrounded—and adjudicated—in both arenas. 149 150 Courting Failure It is worth returning to a quotation from Kim Lane Scheppele: “Those whose stories are believed have the power to create fact; those whose stories are not believed live in a legally sanctioned ‘reality’ that does not match their perceptions.”3 Third, in both cases there are (more or less) prepared scripts from which one should not stray. And finally, there are at least two levels of audience. In courtrooms, the jury, lawyers, and judge act as one audience, while the spectators (including reporters) occupy a second position. In plays about the courtroom, a third “actual” audience is also included. This level of mediation and distance is integral to how meaning is constructed. Such connections are hardly new: Jeremy Bentham envisioned his panopticon as a theater in the late eighteenth century, and his “postscript ” to The Panopticon Letters explicitly references theatrical conventions .4 It is particularly with the staging of women’s guilt or innocence that this chapter concerns itself, not least because of the way that the display of traditional femininity is seen as a performance itself. In Judith Butler’s words, gender is “a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.”5 Thus, while I acknowledge throughout this book that the term “women” may be seen as a convenient fiction that elides differences, it is still the case that twentieth-century dramatists evoke the figure of “woman ” in order to explore her gendered experience of the law. In three of the plays analyzed below, historical (white) women were the plays’ dramatic analogues, though only in one—Blood Relations—is the connection so clear that it would be more complicated (though not impossible) to stage a cross-ethnic production. A number of twentieth-century plays evoke “unruly” or outlaw women and overtly stage their guilt or innocence within the space of a real or a metaphorical courtroom setting. In dramatic texts, as I articulated in the introduction, women as subjects of courtroom dialogue and debate become translated into objects on display, and their voices become contained or controlled by narratives to which they have only limited access. Indeed, as Judith Resnik argues, “Women literally lacked juridical voice. Until quite recently, women were the Staging the Scene 151 objects of the discussion, as property, as victims, as defendants, but not the authors, the speakers, the witnesses, the lawyers, the judges, or the jurors.”6 This partial or occluded voice preoccupied feminist critics and playwrights for most of the last century, and representative plays that engage with this idea include Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal , Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations, and Sarah Daniels’s Masterpieces. Thus, in this chapter I explore what Jennifer Wood describes as “usurpatory ventriloquism”—the authority...