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“The place of women in the Victorian courthouse” – Eleanor Roussel-Endicott

Edouard Rischgitz, “Divorce Court,” 1870
(© Hulton Archive)

The courtroom scene in Mrs Gaskell’s (1810-1865) first social novel, Mary Barton (1848) propels the heroine, Mary’s romantic affairs from private to public. The use of the courthouse is not a random or innocuous choice. The courtroom is very symbolic as it is very traditionally male and middle-class dominated. It is also a very public space. It is interesting to look at the place of women in the courthouse at that time to fully appreciate the second part of the novel and its feminist qualities. Scholar Laura Struve explains that a legal expert, William Best declared in 1849 that:

Having pointed out this proneness to exaggerate as a feminine weakness, it is only just to add, that, in other respects, the testimony of women is at least deserving of equal credit to that of men. In fact they are in some respects far superior witnesses; for first, they are, in general, closer observers of events than men; next, their memories, being less loaded with matters of business, are usually more tenacious; and lastly, they often possess unrivalled powers of simple and unaffected narration. (Struve: 1)

Despite their weaknesses, women should be taken as serious witnesses because they have fewer important matters on their mind. This declaration which would now be considered as completely sexist, was quite progressive at the time. Women were indeed starting to be heard in the male confinement of a courthouse. But, if best had to make this point, it means that women were not always taken seriously, not to mention working-class women such as Mary Barton. Struve explains that during the early nineteenth century, women who were in the public space most often had to do with sexual exploitation. Indeed, the domestic sphere was a place of virtue and purity and associated with women, whereas the “public sphere of men is more sexual and potentially dangerous” (Struve: 3). If a woman was in the public sphere, she could be tainted by male depravation or be considered as a fallen woman. By placing Mary, a respectable young woman, in the public space to tell her truth in order to save her lover Jem from a false accusation of murder, “Gaskell encourage[s] readers to reject a sexual, objectifying gaze and a restrictive ideology of separate spheres in order to perceive the public acts of the heroines as virtuous and necessary” (Struve: 3). The fact the novel is centred on a woman brings another subject into light that of female sexual exploitation. Women in the novel show something that male characters cannot. They have a double negative; they are poor, and they are women. They, thus suffer from both economical and sexual exploitation. This is a factor that could not be developed by other social narrative writers such as Disraeli or Engels, it could only be written by someone who experienced it as well, a woman. Indeed, feminist critic Hilary Schor explains that:

The political critique of the heroine’s plot—the novel’s understanding of the connections between social and economic exploitation, of the limitations of female autonomy—grows out of Gaskell’s own experience of suppression, and her coming to authorship in the late 1840s. (Schor: 14)

Elizabeth Gaskell’s presence can be felt all through the novel, in how the working class is described as full of humanity and gentleness, beset by the presence of grief and reliant on strong family ties. Mary Barton is Gaskell’s debut novel and was published when she was already middle-aged. It comes from years of observation and personal grief. So, publishing it, “leads, like Mary’s journey, out of the domestic world and into a public one where one’s deepest feelings are put on display for a curious crowd.” (Schor: 214). The publishing of her first novel mirrors the trial scene in Mary Barton where Mary has to confess her own feelings in front of an audience full of middle-class people ready to judge her. Bodenheimer explains that in a letter to her friend Mary Ewart in 1848, Gaskell confessed that she was “almost frightened at [her] own action in writing it” (Schor: 214). And as Schor concludes, “this book then tells two parallel stories: the difficult evolution of the woman novelist, and the “story” of the heroine across the progress of Gaskell’s work” (Schor: 5). Mary is attempting to convince the middle class through an emotional speech, that Jem is innocent just like Gaskell is trying to convince her middle-class readership that the working class is more than what is generally thought of them.

Another key element of the trial scene is that Gaskell is careful to award Mary with middle-class respectability and honesty: that Mary’s performance on the stand should not be viewed as a form of entertainment. Indeed, Nadeau explains that at that time, trials were a place of entertainment especially for the less respectable people of the lower classes. The critic takes the example of two men on the train to Liverpool who Mary overhears gossiping about the trial: ‘Ay, ay, the ladies (sweet souls) will come in shoals to hear a trial for murder, and see the murderer, and watch the judge put on his black cap.’ ‘And then go home and groan over the Spanish ladies who take delight in bull-fights––“such unfeminine creatures!”’” (MB: 274). Nadeau qualifies this sentence is “hypocritical” (45) as they are both as equally excited to see the trial as a form of entertainment. Struve says that they “see nothing improper in their own desires. The pleasure of looking-ladies want to “see” the murderer and “watch” the judge — is reserved for men, and this is why women who want to observe the trial are perceived as un-ladylike” (9). Nadeau states that “The satire in this scene indicates Gaskell’s disdain for those who would take pleasure in a courtroom drama and appears to align her with middle-class norms that believed trials should be didactic instead of titillating, a stance which involved gendered behaviours” (45). She goes on to explain that courts and trials were some of the only public spaces where women were allowed to participate but “this participation was increasingly circumscribed by an emerging code of behaviour that discouraged respectable (i.e. middle-class) women from seeking entertainment in, or even attending, trials” (45). Struve adds that at the time, “a woman’s public appearance raises questions about her sexuality, and the propriety of a woman’s presence in the courtroom was debated. While women were not banned from observing trials, they were often criticized for spending their time in such an unseemly manner” (5). Nord argues that “the heroine claims for herself a public role in order to bear witness to what is just, and in so doing struggles painfully with the sexually charged image she unwillingly creates” (155). Everything about her is scrutinised: “Her very appearance and the stories that have circulated about her place in a romantic triangle that has ended in murder” (155). The judges only care about her romantic life making her uncomfortable and even more an object of sexual desire:

‘And pray, may I ask, which was the favoured lover? You say you knew both these young men. Which was the favoured lover? Which did you prefer?’ And who was he, the questioner, that he should dare so lightly to ask of her heart’s secrets? That he should dare to ask her to tell, before that multitude assembled there, what woman usually whispers with blushes and tears, and many hesitations, to one ear alone? (MB: 313)

Gaskell therefore has to set up Mary as a serious, respectable witness. For instance, Mary rejects her friend’s Sally’s suggestion of dressing up for the occasion and turning the trial scene into a form of entertainment and opportunity of showing off:

‘Why, what can you wear? I know all your clothes as well as I do my own, and what is there you can wear? Not your old plaid shawl, I do hope?… ‘Oh, Sally! don’t go on talking a-that-ns; how can I think on dress at such a time? When it’s a matter of life and death to Jem?’ (MB 267)

However, though her testimony might affect the audience and might possess “unrivalled powers of simple and unaffected narration” (Best: 1) as Best puts it, Struve brings up the fact that,

The ability of women to provide important factual evidence is simply not recognized. Women may be the acknowledged authorities on the human heart, but their testimony is only perceived in its relation to feeling — there is no recognition that issues of emotion, thought, and character can carry probative value in the courtroom, that they can be facts (Struve: 16).

Likewise in the novel, Mary’s testimony does not quite satisfy the judges: “The verdict they had come to was unsatisfactory to themselves at last; neither being convinced of his innocence, nor yet quite willing to believe him guilty in the teeth of the alibi” (MB: 321).

            Moreover, scholar Krueger explains that courtroom scenes in nineteenth century fiction, “dramatize the exclusion of women’s voices from public speech through mechanisms symbolized by the law” (338). The trial scene is melodramatic, but it is intentional, it fits the purpose of highlighting the inability for women to talk at the time and the consequences they faced when they did talk especially in the conventional and patriarchal place that is a courthouse. Indeed, after her testimony, Mary collapses into a delirious illness. Krueger explains Mary’s illness by stating that “a female witness experiences the trauma of being made a public spectacle and, if she is not immediately shamed into silence, she suffers the maddening frustration caused by her authorial illegality.” (338). Struve points out that Gaskell “feel[s] compelled to defend [her] heroine’s entrance into the public sphere, these scenes of testifying indicate the powerful social stigma that is associated with a woman’s public appearance” (4). Her voice is heard, but because of the causes and possible consequences of her speech in a patriarchal world, she falls into a delirium. Through this trial scene, Mary embodies all working-class women having to navigate in a patriarchal world, resisting temptations, standing for what is right, and negotiation her way from private to public.

 

Eleanor Roussel-Endicott – Master 2 Etudes anglophones


Bibliography

  • GASKELL Elizabeth, Mary Barton. Oxford, Oxford University Press [ed. Shirley Foster], 2008.
  • BODENHEIMERB Rosemarie, “Private Grief and Public Acts in ‘Mary Barton’”, Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 9, 1981, pp. 195–216. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44371700. Accessed 9 Nov. 2020
  • KRUERGER Christine L., “Witnessing Women: Trial Testimony in Novels by Tonna, Gaskell, and Eliot” in SAGE HEINZELMAN Susan and BATSHAW WISEMAN Zipporah, Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, Duke University Press, 1994 : 337-55.
  • NADEAU Ashley, “Mary Barton’s Undoing: Affect, Architecture, and the Victorian Courthouse”, The Gaskell Journal, vol. 31, 2017, pp. 37–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/48517913. Accessed 12 Feb. 2021.
  • NORD Deborah Epstein, Walking the Victorian streets: Women, representation, and the city, Cornell University Press, 1995.
  • STRUVE Laura, “Expert Witnesses: Women and Publicity in Mary Barton and Felix Holt”, Victorian Review, 2002 : 1-24.
  • SCHOR Hilary M., Scheherezade In The Marketplace, Oxford University Press, 1992.

OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
mastersfdl (15 juillet 2022). “The place of women in the Victorian courthouse” – Eleanor Roussel-Endicott. Investigatio. Consulté le 20 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/ra84


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