LAW AND OTHERS

Law and Literature: Journeys from Her to Eternity

by Maria Aristodemou.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Pp. 316, £21.99 (pb)
ISBN 0 1987 6436 7.

ROSEMARY AUCHMUTY
School of Law, University of Westminster

 

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Though Law and Literature has a history stretching back several decades in North America, it has only recently had much impact in Britain. Maria Aristodemou taught the UK's first Law and Literature course when she was at the University of Bristol; now at Birkbeck College, she remains in the forefront of the movement in this country and internationally. Her book, '[l]ong awaited, much needed, and beautifully executed', as Peter Goodrich writes on the back cover blurb, represents state-of-the-art Law and Literature theory. Not interested simply in 'law' as depicted in 'literature', unconvinced by arguments that reading literature makes lawyers either more literate or more humane, Aristodemou recognises that law and literature have more similarities than differences, that they are both products of the same 'social, historical and cultural forces' (p.10), and that they 'sustain and reinforc[e] each other' (p.7).

 

The idea that legal texts should be read differently from other narratives, including fictional ones, is, Aristodemou explains, 'cultural rather than natural' and, furthermore, 'hierarchical, made by those with an interest in presenting their version of the truth as superior to that of other peoples' (p.4). If literature is recognised generally as open to many interpretations, law purports to provide answers which, if not certainly right, aim at least to be certain. But for Aristodemou, 'the institution called literature is [actually] another form of law-making' (p.9), with its own rules, values and prejudices. Her view is that law cannot be fully understood by reference to itself alone - that law does not have the tools to deconstruct itself - and that people educated as lawyers need other disciplines, other critical tools and other narrative possibilities to be able to examine law through the society and culture of which law and literature form intrinsic parts. Literature's value to legal scholars lies in the fact that it opens up possibilities, being on the one hand 'less reductive of the world's varied meanings than [conventional] legal texts', and on the other 'more likely than other forms of legislation to challenge existing laws and dominant values' (p.9).

 

Peter Goodrich recommends that readers start with the last chapter of the book, 'A Rebeginning' - Aristodemou's manifesto. I can see why he says this, but I think it makes more sense if you start at the real beginning, for it is in the first chapter that Aristodemou sets out her aims and her philosophy in the context of what has gone before in the Law and Literature movement. Central to her approach are that ideas of law and classic narratives of English literature are not only culturally specific but masculine. Myths and fairy tales, for example, while presented as 'truths about the human condition', can be seen as attempts by a male subject 'to define himself from other: gods, slaves, barbarians, animals and, of course, women' (p.56). Similarly with the male legal scholar, whose 'distrust of emotions as clouding clarity of judgment and his attempt to expulse [sic] them from ethical thinking is ... not divorced from his fear of woman: to attend to the particular and the emotional may lead away from the modernist and masculinist model of justice and rights, towards a model based on connectedness, towards acknowledging [woman]'s difference and her different voice' (p.15).

 

Throughout the 200-plus pages between the setting out and the summary of her project, this image of Woman ('Ariadne') weaves in and out. But Aristodemou is at pains to repudiate an essentialist notion of Woman, for her postmodern vision focuses on the range of different perspectives and alternative viewpoints which cast their critical gaze on the essentialist concepts of law. Women are not the only 'Others' of law; the narratives of English law are not only masculine but white. Aristodemou describes how, by importing Western legal concepts and institutions into the far reaches of empire, Britain was able to subjugate and control colonial peoples, 'not just in terms of the coercive role [law's] rules, courts, and penal machinery would exert, but the ideological role of making that same coercion appear natural and inevitable' (p.7). Once again, literature played a complementary role, cultivating 'a system of values that placed the white English author and reader at the centre and both literally and metaphorically "arrested" colonized groups into the role of the Other' (p.7).

 

Aristodemou's vehicles for critique are the literary texts she has selected, which range from traditional myths and fairy tales to feminist retellings of those tales, from classical drama to Shakespeare, from Emily Bronte to Toni Morrison, encompassing Camus, Marquez and Borges along the way. As this list shows, we are offered texts by women and by men, of different literary genres, from different periods and different societies. Every page contains insights (I found myself making extensive notes) which do truly illuminate our understanding of law. To take but one example, through her study of Greek and Shakespearean drama, Aristodemou demonstrates starkly how man's fear of woman is not only played out in literature, where the women are obliterated (as in the Orestaia), but forms the basis of laws which seek to control women: the laws of marriage, succession, citizenship, property. (To which one might add sexual offences, employment, equity and trusts ... is there any legal area which is exempt?)

 

Finally, in the concluding chapter so praised by Peter Goodrich, Aristodemou envisages the female lawyer, Ariadne, starting out in pursuit of justice. Here she describes the difficulties that 'Others' face when attempting to find a place for themselves in law, whose objective, rational, self-interested, competitive, authoritarian character denies accommodation to people with different experiences and viewpoints. Many readers will recognise the plight of Arisodemou's Ariadne, working within law school or legal profession; and empirical evidence certainly bears out the reality of this description of women's experiences in law today (see, for example, Clare McGlynn, The Woman Lawyer, Butterworths, 1998). Goodrich is right: this last chapter is a brilliant expose of the closed circle of the law - but so is the whole book. It's a vision of law which is as political as it is aesthetic, and it should be read by everyone with a genuine commitment to multiculturalism, inclusivity and justice.

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