In Defiance of the Law: From Anne Hutchinson to Toni Morrison

ISBN-13: 9780820451152 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 229 str.

Marisa Anne Pagnattaro

Opis

Nearly every law mediates between the desire for individual liberty and the perceived necessity for maintaining social order. Literature is a powerful tool to explore jurisprudential issues and to look critically at the American legal system. This book analyzes works in American literature to consider the tension between the desire for social control as evidenced by the law and the effect on individuals as depicted in art. The concept of justice is considered in each work in which female characters act according to their own code, which is at odds with civil law. As revealed by the examination of Anne Hutchinson and the trials against two American Indian women in Catharine Maria Sedgwick s Hope Leslie, Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted laws on an as-needed basis to thwart political dissension and to subdue the threat of the Pequot Indians. Moreover, federal and state law was used to entrench slavery and to deny African Americans rights enjoyed by other American citizens. The effects of such laws are considered in connection with slave women who violate the law in Harriet Beecher Stowe s Uncle Tom s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Sherley Anne Williams s Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison s Beloved. In each context, women acted according to a core sense of beliefs and values, despite man-made rules of law. Their acts of civil disobedience make a powerful statement about the importance of defying unjust laws and remind readers of the social and legal change that has occurred in the past and of the necessity to look critically at current law."

O autorze

The Author: Marisa Anne Pagnattaro holds a J.D. from New York Law School and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia. Formerly a litigation attorney with a large Atlanta law firm, she currently teaches business law at the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. She has published literary articles on Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, and Andrea Dworkin. She has published legal articles on employment law.