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  • Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature
  • Maria Aristodemou (bio)
Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature, by Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson. Akron: The University of Akron Press, 2007. 294 pp. $24.95.

In reading, as of course in other endeavours, one is a virgin just once. So when the two words “courting” and “failure” were aligned so enticingly together in the title of this book, I unthinkingly, perhaps even unconsciously, determined (over-determined as it turned out) their meaning, linking them to a favourite text: Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. In her well-known response to the puzzle of how war may be avoided, Woolf proposes poverty, contempt, and derision as antidotes to the egotism, vanity, and megalomania that she suggests are the sources and scourges of war. This “ethics of failure”—as Jacqueline Rose later dubs it, eschewing the monothematic drive for one unique right answer1—is one that, in contrast to the loud and selfish drive for success, can be quietly seductive. If, as Woolf suggests, this “ethics of failure” may save us from the death and destruction of war, then it may be an ethics that women can choose to espouse to counter the well-known “difficulties”—to put it mildly—that legal systems have when dealing with women’s difference.

As I will suggest here, for better but also for worse, this is not the meaning or ethics that Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson has in mind in Courting Failure, her accessible exposition of the encounter between women and the law in twentieth-century law and literature. For Macpherson “courting” does not refer to tales of invitation, flirtation, and seduction between two potential lovers but rather to the encounter between women and the (literal) courts, as depicted in fiction, drama, cinema, and television in the last century. The book, the author tells us, “highlights and foregrounds women’s myriad and differently experienced encounters with the law” (p. 10), suggesting that these encounters all too often end in failure for the women: “The performance and punishment of femininity is one strand that this feminist law and literature text explores. Another equally important strand is the way in which women’s harms are misrecognized and misidentified by the law and those charged with upholding it” (p. 17).

Courting Failure is an avowedly feminist text, therefore, and the immediate question we want to pose is which of the “myriad and differently experienced” feminist theories is highlighted here? Unlike the myriad of women’s experiences with the law, the answer to this question is less clear in the book. Macpherson suggests repeatedly, sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly, that its political agenda is “to adapt to and understand a post-egalitarian feminist stance” (p. 13). Although the term “postegalitarian” is sufficiently vague and general to accommodate a variety of creeds—from superegalitarian to downright antiegalitarian—Macpherson does not explore the tensions and contradictions of the term in any detail. [End Page 400] As befits a book on cultural manifestations of women’s relationship with the law, rather than a theoretical exploration of its presuppositions, this book prefers to suggest that “post-egalitarianism” is our response to the pitfalls of liberal Anglo-American feminism while taking care not to topple over into essentialism. In this way Macpherson treads a safe course between the classic divide in feminist approaches to law but leaves the reader slightly confused as to the theoretical justification for this choice and its political repercussions.

The book tells women’s stories with and against the law by addressing (a) women’s experiences of imprisonment in texts like Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, (b) slave narratives that portray the painful commodification of African American women’s bodies, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Shirley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, (c) depictions of the good and bad mother in texts such as Sue Miller’s The Good Mother as well as real-life crimes such as Andrea Pia Yates’s murder of her five children in 2001, (d) courtroom theatre with real and fictional women appearing as offenders and defendants rather than as property...

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