Privacy and Impertinence: Talking about Servants in Austen

With a few exceptions Austen does not give servants a distinctive character. Though she may acknowledge the material fact of the labour they do, she rarely brings them forward as individuals. It is noticeable that modern re-writings of Austen's novels often prioritise filling this fictional void. Given the fascinating perspective this offers, it seems pertinent to ask why Austen herself did not do it. This is partly a political question, which also takes us into the social issue of trust and what was appropriate to share in a community. The issue may appear to centre on manners, and has generally been viewed so by critics; but I argue that underlying the manners are ideas about privacy and confidentiality which relate to the way these issues were unfolding in the law—and still are, on both sides of the Atlantic

Superego, special juries and a split law: eighteenth century adultery trials viewed through Zizek's lens

Over the course of several books, Zizek develops a psychoanalytical account of the symbiosis between the public law and the individual subject’s own acquiescence. It is of course a non-formalist theory, suggesting that formal law alone does not achieve social order. This article applies an element of the theory empirically to a historical question: to the question of how the behaviour of juries in a particular type of 18th-century adultery trial managed to be both the object of contemporary controversy and an expression of normative values. The social ambivalence signalled by that doubleness opens surprisingly well to Zizek’s theory that the power of law is divided between its own public form and the subjects’ expression of superego. The theory of the split law, the hidden supplement outside the system, clarifies the historically-specific example. However, the historical example also illuminates the theory: it suggests how the space for this supplement also exists within the system, which can incorporate and make use of it.</p

‘... You'll be made a slave in your turn; you'll be told also that it is right that you should be so, and we shall see what you think of this justice’: Libido, Retribution and Moderation in The Island of Slaves

The Island of Slaves. Comedy of two acts, 1761. This is little more than a literal translation of L'Isle des Esclaves of M. Marivaux. It has not made its appearance in print, yet had at least as much merit as many of the petites pieces which we see frequently performed on the stage. It was acted one night only, for the benefit of Mrs Clive, and was the occasion of an epistolary dispute, in print, between her and Mr Shuter, whose benefit happened to fall on the same night. Biographia Dramatica, or a Companion to the Playhouse, 1764.1 When it was Catherine Clive's turn to choose the evening's programme and take the box-office profits at Drury Lane Theatre in March 1761, this popular comic actress decided to air a new afterpiece, The Island of Slaves, a translation of Marivaux's L'Isle des Esclaves of 1725. Actors often used their benefit night to showcase their own particular talents. Clearly this plot attracted Clive because there is a central role for her trademark character, the feisty, plot-stirring maidservant. From 1758 to 1761, for instance, she played arch and resourceful maids in The Intriguing Chambermaid, Amphitryon, The Confederacy and High Life below Stairs.2 However, this afterpiece featured a more politically serious version of the role. It is set on a fantasy island where a law inverts the status of those who are marooned there, giving slaves the ownership of their masters and the judicial task of confronting them with the truth of their exploitative behaviour. Thus it literally interrogates the master and slave relationship through this revelatory, reformatory process. The fascination with the island as a place of transformation clearly has timeless, Shakespearian theatrical resonances; but Marivaux's play also relates to the ethics of service and slavery in French society of the early Enlightenment. It was written for the exiled Comédiens Italiens at the Palais Royal, to be embroidered freely with song and business; and though only a light, short comedy it successfully raises debate on a long-standing issue, working through to undermining national legitimation of slave ownership by suggesting that if there were more understanding of it as a relationship with a person, it would not be tolerated. This is remarkably enlightened, given the fact that, for another century, much of the world treated slavery as acceptable. It is intriguing to consider whether the play's potential for political bite was preserved and appreciated in the English version of 1761. The comment from the Companion to the Playhouse quoted above, claims that the translation followed the original literally; but that it had little impact, disappearing after one performance. However, the compilers seem aware that the play's disappearance was not necessarily a judgement on its quality. Furthermore, the manuscript which survives is the one read by the Examiner of Plays, John Larpent, under the terms of clauses III and IV of the 1737 Stage Licensing Acts and the legible marks of the cuts that he required have significance. This article ultimately aims to arrive at an understanding of why Clive's choice might have failed to fulfil the hopes she might have justifiably had for it. I will come to that in section iii. Firstly, I want to consider what the play stood for in Paris in 1725, whilst bringing out that the play's relation to France's policies also gave it relevance to England's

The children will be "subject to the infamy of their deluded and unfortunate mother": rhetoric of the courtroom, a gothic fantasy and a plain letter to the Lord Chancellor

This article discusses an example of the mutual influence of law, culture and politics, within the modes of the gothic and the sublime. In the context of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English laws of adultery and of child custody, suppression of the woman's interest was technically justified by the existence of certain formal requirements, or certain presumptions; the resulting environment corresponded to a key trope of the "gothic" novel. That suggests the closeness of the link between such laws, some of which really originated in gothic law, and the development of the literary gothic, generically fascinated by ancestry and fraught with anxiety about the family, sexuality, and power. The core of the argument is an analysis of two texts which relate to a specific example, the rhetoric of the "criminal conversation" adultery action. Charlotte Dacre's notorious novel of 1806, Zofloya, or the Moor, can be read as a reaction, which takes its rhetoric of social damage to a catastrophic extreme. The public letter of crim con "victim" Caroline Norton on the Infant and Child Custody Bill of 1839 attempts the opposite, to reconcile the law's atavism with enlightened ethics and to imagine a sublime resolution without catastrophe.</p

The Silent Woman in the “Criminal Conversation” Trial and her Displaced Defences: “A Letter Always Reaches its Destination”

In the 18th-19th-century ‘criminal conversation’ legal action, a spouse could sue his wife’s lover for economic compensation. The wife was not party to the action, even though she was implicitly ‘on trial’. This article argues that the absence of the wife’s perspective permitted the court to manipulate her image conservatively and enabled English Marriage Law to evade enlightenment pressure for reform. The counter-pressure she may have exerted is deflected elsewhere. This article shows that women’s private defences could infiltrate the public imagination obliquely, if not the legal process directly, using as examples three very different letters: a purloined love letter from an adulterous wife, a fictional letter of frank testimony from Wollstonecraft’s Maria, and a forensic analysis under a masculine pseudonym from an indignant ‘victim’