Husbands, wives, and lawyers: Gender roles and professional representation in Trollope and the Adelaide Bartlett case

College Literature, Winter 1998 by Reiter, Paula Jean

In speaking of the dynamics shared by heterosexual marriage and professional representation, I want to make clear the mutually defining and legitimizing implications they held for each other. Barristers, by modeling the attorney-client relationship along the lines of heterosexual marriage roles, helped to naturalize and legitimize those roles. Far from suggesting that the roles of "wife" and "husband" were somehow stable, a-historical, or monolithic, my reading posits that heterosexual gender roles also experienced flux and development. The cultural logic that supported silence and dependence as appropriate characteristics for wives also proposed vocal and authoritative roles for male professionals. Because these roles were based on the same set of assumptions, they could circulate endlessly in a closed system that "proved" women were "naturally" dependent and men (especially male professionals) were "naturally" authoritative.

In the second part of this article, I examine these dynamics as played out in the historical 1886 trial of Adelaide Bartlett. By thus combining law and literature, I hope to better illustrate the shared cultural assumptions evident in the law courts, fiction, and professional development. Rather than examine a single legal issue or crime, I want to suggest how law and crime are part of a larger set of cultural assumptions about gender and responsibility. As such, my approach does not assume that law is somehow immune from or prior to cultural pressures; rather it begins with the contention that law is continuous with, complicit with, and contemporary with other social projects. This approach views law and literature as intricately embedded, not sequenced, projects. In other words, literature does not merely follow or mirror legal issues. They tell one story.

The story I wish to follow here considers the roles of husbands, wives, and professionals, the rewards of authority and responsibility, and the advantages of controlling or relinquishing self-representation. Trollope's novel, Orley Farm, and the trial of Adelaide Bartlett form part of this tale and illustrate the overlapping cultural dynamics shared by law and literature.

REPRESENTING PROFESSIONAL REPRESENTATION

Would it be well that he should allow himself to feel the same interest in this case, to maintain respecting it the same personal anxiety, if he ceased to believe in it? He did ask himself this question, and he finally answered it in the affirmative... Lady Mason was his client, and all the associations of his life taught him to be true to her as such. (Trollope 1. 251)

Lady Mason is Mr. Furnival's client, and Furnival's fidelity to her during her second trial forms the centerpiece of Trollope's 1861 novel Orley Farm. During her first trial, which takes place 20 years before the opening of the novel, she was a young woman with an infant son. Her accuser, Mr. Mason of Groby Park, the eldest son of her husband by his first marriage and the presumed heir to Orley Farm, failed to produce any convincing evidence that the codicil (bequeathing Orley Farm to Lady Mason's son, Lucius) was a forgery.