In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature by Kristin Kalsem (review)

Kristin Kalsem’s In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature seeks to uncover the ways in which Victorian women used their writing, fictional and nonfictional, to advocate for legal reform. Kalsem contributes to the growing scholarship on the nexus of women, law, and literature in the Victorian period, showing how literature entered the legal realm and became an influential part of it. This work is important in extending our understanding of legal culture to one in which the law is neither as narrow nor as sealed-off as one might think.

Kalsem builds on what has come to be called “feminist jurisprudence.” She finds the connection between law and literature in what she calls, following Robin West, “literary women,” that is, “women who made connections between law and literature, between storytelling and justice” (p. 153). In highlighting the advocacy roles that individual women adopted through their writing, Kalsem hopes to provide “evidence of women’s significant and active role in legal history,” which could serve as “precedents” for feminist legal action today (p. 174). In so doing, she invites us to think about the relationship between women’s experiences and the various ways in which they chose to write about their experiences and frame them.

Kalsem identifies certain texts as “outlaws,” by which she refers to writing that is not a part of official legal practices but that engages with the law to challenge it (p. 5). These texts and the women who wrote them are thus presented as anomalies, iconoclasts whose literary (or at least literate) acts of defiance set them apart from the normative world but always in engagement with it. This creates an interesting paradox: Kalsem presents these women and their experiences as representative of their period but at the same time anomalous to it. Taking into account the myriad forces—political, economic, social, cultural—that brought about significant legal changes over the course of the century, further research might try and explain how this anomaly came about. Such research might also address the fact that these writers seem to come from a similar class, education, and geographical location.

In Contempt’s concept of “outlaw” texts also has its drawbacks. Assigning this label to a text or its writer—rather than to an effect or a specific feature of a text—often produces a simplistic classification of texts as “patriarchal” or “outlaw,” or, in other words, as “silencing” or “subversive” (pp. 58–59). This leads to an erasure of the often contradictory portrayals of women (and men) by women (and men) and of the complicated ways in which ideology works. Similarly, Kalsem’s readings tend to essentialize textual forms: “law is an epic discourse [which] . . . is more about preservation than about change,” while “novelistic discourse and feminist jurisprudence are ideologically allied” (p. 19). This is a common feature of earlier law and literature scholarship (and ideological criticism of literature) that has since been nuanced to great effect. After all, neither literary nor legal genres are stable or ahistorical, nor do they have stable ideologies.

Indeed, In Contempt adheres to a narrow understanding of resistance, taking into account only direct attacks on the law. These attacks were, as Kalsem shows, undoubtedly important and influential. They are also definitely worthy of study, as long as other forms of resistance and subversion are not ignored or classified as “in-law” and therefore ideologically suspect. In identifying some of the legal hurdles and battles faced by Victorian women, In Contempt covers well-known ground. That the Victorian courts (and press) were patriarchal and often downright misogynist in dealings with women surely comes as no surprise. Nor does the fact that some of these women resisted this hegemonic oppression and that many of them did so through their writing. In relegating everything subversive or progressive to a realm outside the law, we risk a uniform, almost simple version of the law, whereby its only mission...