Corpus Juris: Literature, Embodiment, and the Law

Session Coordinator: Nicholas Williams

Dept. of English, Indiana University

Ballantine Hall 442, Bloomington, IN 47405

nimwilli@indiana.edu

In the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault offers a memorable (and oft-cited) account of the relationship between the law and the body. He describes, in excruciating detail, the drawing and quartering of the regicide, Damiens. The passage is meant to graphically illustrate the law’s capacity for enacting violence on the physical body. But what becomes of that body, Foucault asks, when power is no longer exercised in such an overt fashion? His answer, of course, proposes various regimes of internalized discipline and the rise of biopolitics. But these are by no means the only answers to this question. Scholars in the humanities have increasingly begun to challenge and modify Foucault’s approach as they uncover and investigate points of contact between laws and bodies. Phenomenology, science, political theory, race, gender, and sexuality studies have all helped develop productive new lines of inquiry. In the spirit of building upon this critical conversation, this panel brings together papers that consider in both theoretical and historical registers a range of questions that articulate the law alongside the body. What sorts of bodies does the law enable and enact? Can the body be a site for resistance as well as compliance? What aspects of embodiment, if any, lie beyond the purview of the law? Is it productive to consider the possibility of a non- or pre-discursive body that in some way resists inscription within legal discourse? Where and how might the figure of the body stand in for the law, or where and how is the law represented as disembodied?

She Do the Police in Different Voices: Law, Publicity, and Ventriloquism in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) is principally concerned with questions about the reliability of disembodied voices. Variously associated with the voices of God, secular reason, and the law, ventriloquism functions in this novel as a trope for how privileged discourses derive their authority by virtue of their seeming distance from the body. Seldom numbered among these discourses, however, is the testimony of the narrator, Clara Wieland, whom critics have largely pronounced guilty of some of the story’s most egregious misjudgments. In contrast, this essay argues that the voice Brown’s narrator assumes constitutes a significant revision of the prevailing terms of public discourse. Clara can be read as capitalizing upon, on the one hand, an emergent popular appetite for sensational crime literature—having had her judgment repeatedly discounted by the other characters in the story, she submits her version of events as a matter of public record, banking on the likelihood that the mysterious and horrific details of her testimony will make it all the more compelling for the general reader she addresses. Clara’s epistolary narrative also tacitly rejects the strategies that the novel’s other characters use in their failed attempts to arrive at a just verdict. Rather than remove herself from situations in order to consider them abstractly, Clara reproduces for the reader her affective and intellectual responses to the events that she recounts, thereby insisting on a perspectival, interested, and embodied process of reasoning as a legitimate means for determining truth. As such, Wieland proposes an alternative model of a public sphere in which individuals can intervene without casting aside their particularity.

Jon Blandford

Indiana University

jwblandf@indiana.edu

A Liberal Inheritance: Biology, Property, and the Limits of the Possessive Individual

In antebellum America, the cultural discourse of “inheritance” made no clear distinction between economic conceptions of inherited property (entails, primogeniture, etc.) and scientific models of biological heredity. The transmission of physical (and moral) “properties” was understood through analogy with financial inheritance; at the same time, financial legacies were understood to bring with them moral and physical consequences. This discursive ambiguity, I would suggest, raises interesting questions about the nature of liberal subjectivity in the new nation. Whereas traditional Lockean liberalism insists on the inalienability of the individual body, inheritance discourse suggests that even biological traits are potentially alienable. Natural historians, for example, were fascinated with the possibility of “acquired characteristics,” physical properties taken on during a person’s life and then passed on as heritable traits. My paper argues that Elizabeth Stoddard’s 1862 novel, The Morgesons, explores precisely these concerns. Her narrative imagines the possibility of a more radical possessive individualism, one in which even biological inheritance is to some extent an alienable “property.” She does this by putting pressure on the notion of “breeding,” both in its social and agricultural sense, and by considering the extent to which individuals can manipulate and control heritable traits. Ultimately, however, Stoddard rejects the radical model, opting instead to reinscribe the bodily limits of possessive individualism.

Chad Luck

Indiana University

cluck@indiana.edu

Controlling the Student Body: D. H. Lawrence, Educational Law, and Violence Against the Individual

When considering D. H. Lawrence’s attention to the corporeal form, critics most often foreground his frank treatment of sex and his sensuous portrayal of the body. From his description of a man’s penis as a mere tool for a woman’s self-gratification in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Rupert and Birkin’s homoerotic wrestling match in Women in Love, Lawrence often presents the body as a way to rebel against the norm and express the “inner, free self.” In The Rainbow, however, the body becomes the means by which standardization is strictly enforced. Through Ursula’s experiences as a teacher, Lawrence demonstrates how Britain’s newly established educational system disciplines and punishes the bodies of its students for the express purpose of normalizing its working class citizens. In this novel, democratic education emerges not just as a prison but as a penitentiary, one that, in many ways, embodies the theories later articulated by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Foucault suggests that in the modern age the focus of punishment in culture has shifted from the body to the soul and that coercion has largely replaced punishment as way of achieving compliance, yet in The Rainbow we find both soul and body being punished. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which the “prison” of education Lawrence creates in this novel embodies and complicates Foucault’s theories on the body and punishment.

Rod C. Taylor

Indiana University

roctaylo@indiana.edu

We would prefer to present the papers in the oral delivery format, rather than in the traditional pre-circulated discussion format.