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Husbands, wives, and lawyers: Gender roles and professional representation in Trollope and the Adelaide Bartlett case
College Literature, Winter 1998 by Reiter, Paula Jean
The personal and cultural costs and benefits of strategically invoking standard gender assumptions become clear when we read Trollope's fiction in conjunction with Bartlett's trial. Mason and Bartlett are clear-sighted about both their need for male representation and the loss of autonomy that it necessitates. Two guilty women escape punishment by acquiescing to a role that strips them of legal, social, economic, and political rights-the role of a wife. By doing so, they gave male juries what they desired to find. Mason's and Bartlett's defense depends upon the jury being invested in perpetuating gender divisions that view women as fundamentally different, as innately feminine, and as inescapably gentle. Once qualities such as gentleness, innocence, and passivity have been denoted as essentially "wifely" or "feminine," the constructive dimension of the representation of "wife" or "woman" is obscured and conveniently forgotten. If, on the other hand, the juries decided these women were not essentially feminine, then, in Mary Poovey's words, "It might also have become possible to think what was equally inconceivable-that one's reproductive nature did not necessarily dictate the social position of every man and woman-that, in other words, other differences might hold sway, and men and women could therefore be equal under the law, in social responsibilities and privileges, in relation to property and sexuality, and even in terms of political rights" (79). The juries avoided such issues by finding the women essentially "innocent." Arguments such as those made in the Mason and Bartlett cases draw upon and reinforce conventional divisions of rights and powers. Male juries and the professional legal men constructing these defenses benefited from protecting the status quo, which aligned enormous privileges with men.
The constructed nature of all representations (between book covers, within the walls of courtrooms, and beyond) becomes clear when reading fiction and trial transcripts together-both forms that openly acknowledge that representation is made, that they do representation, The transference of representational responsibility and the power derived from such duties from father to husband failed in the Bartlett and Mason marriages. The lies and crimes of these two women are telling: they are part of a struggle to represent their own interests. The lies told in their defenses deny their ability or desire to represent themselves by realigning the power to represent with men, and specifically with professional men. To escape punishment, Mason and Bartlett play the role of a wife as part of their legal defense, and, one suspects, as part of their rehabilitation. They buy their acquittals, but the price is embracing the very stereotypes and roles that would continue to cripple them and that would perpetuate the very conditions against which their crimes rebelled. At the same moment and with the same "evidence" used to find these women essentially innocent, the growing power and authority of the Victorian professional was confirmed as necessary. My method of reading law and literature pieces together clues to larger, often obscured, cultural dynamics, such as the shared projects of professional self-definition and the reification of gender roles within heterosexual marriage.
