Butterfly, the Bride: Essays on Law, Narrative, and the Family

Chapter 4. The Family

Chapter Four The Family But his wife's family (the word has a more important application there than here) held a solemn conference. John Luther Long, "Madame Butterfly" The family was so important in Japan that marriages were understood as a contract between families rather than between individuals. The House "consisted of all living lineal ascendants and descendants in a particular family, with the oldest male member commonly in the position ofHead ofthe House."l Postmortem divorce derives from this idea, since "marriage is a relationship with the family ofthe deceased which continues after death."2 The House was formally abolished in the 1948 civil code, although we are told that the idea continued to be significant) In short, the Japanese legal system both before and after the modernization of1898 took the house as thefundamental unit ofsociety . Thus, Yogo Watenabe writes, "Before World War II, the primary unit in Japanese society was the family rather than the individual."4 The family as it appears in Madame Butterfly-a family that finally expels her, not for her marriage but for her apostasy-is the strong extended family we, in the west, take as the family of the past. As to the past, we often acknowledge both the strength of the family5 and the complexity of its sanctioning system. This tends to be concealed as to the present, first, by our current emphasis on families as having solely affective functions and, second, by our emphasis on the state regulation of the family. But families may be more complex than we imagine, having their own internal regulatory systems and their own internal divisions. The common idea that the family is only regulated by state law is examined through a consideration ofKafka's Letter to His Father. The letter suggests the existence ofa number of interacting legal regimes within the family (state law, religious-social law, father law, individual conscience). These are 73 74 BUTTERFLY, THE BRIDE considered through the psychological law ideas of the Russo-Polish theorist Leon Petrazycki. This conception ofthe strength offamily is somewhat strange to the modern audience, as is the idea offamily discipline sometimes associated with it. Under the Japanese structure, one could be expelled from the house for marriage without consent. Expulsion from the family is the invocation ofthe conventional sanction ofexpulsion or exclusion as applied to a government unit that is not, however, official. The idea ofthe coercive violence ofofficial law has a parallel, then, in the sanctioning systems ofunofficial law. This idea-that there is a governing unit represented by the familyrequires some investigation, ifonly to raise the question: on what basis does the family govern? What are the laws offamily life? There are different ways to look at the family, assuming for the moment that we agree on a preliminary definition of the unit. For example, one might consider the family as a single authority, a private government comparable to the integrated state or the hierarchical church, ruling the individuals within the family. One might focus on the family as a unit that other larger authorities seek to control.6 Or one might in effect combine these approaches and discuss the family as a social field, one that is, like society itself, a place of intersecting legal orders, in some sense an entity that other units attempt to control, in some sense a unit attempting to control other units, whether these are individuals or groups. This chapter uses the third approach. Family Governance Edmund Wilson, whose assessment of Franz Kafka's work was not particularly enthusiastic, described him this way: Franz Kafka was the delicate son of a self-made Jewish merchant in the wholesale-women's-wear business in Prague, a vigorous and practical man, who inspired him with fear and respect, and gave him a life-long inferiority complex. The son was a pure intellectual, who derived from the rabbinical tradition of the mother's side of the family; but he yielded to the insistence of the father and, though at times reduced to thoughts of suicide, he took his place in the dry goods warehouse. His real interest had always been writing , which represented for him not merely an art but also somehow a pursuit of righteousness-he said he regarded it as a form of prayer-and he finally got himself a job in a workers' accident- THE FAMILY 75 insurance office, which left him his afternoons free. He...