|
|
|
Book Review
| Elizabeth Urban Alexander, Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 301. $34.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8071-2698-5); $24.95 paper (ISBN 0-8071-3024-9).
|
| Although barely recognized nowadays, the Great Gaines Case was, as Elizabeth Urban Alexander explains, the most sensational case of the nineteenth century, not only in Louisiana but in the nation at large. The longest continuous litigation in American history (1834–1891) began when the twenty-five-year-old Myra Clark Gaines (1804?–1885) discovered that the couple who raised her were not her natural parents and that her biological father had been the millionaire Daniel Clark of New Orleans. His enormous estate was the prize in Myra's quest to prove herself Clark's legitimate daughter and heir. And what a quest it was, for the Gaines "case" was actually some three hundred cases, generating eight appeals to the Louisiana Supreme Court and seventeen to the United States Supreme Court. |
1
|
|
The litigation centered on two contested events—first, the marriage vel non of Daniel Clark and Myra's mother, the Creole beauty Zulime Carrière, and, second, Clark's alleged deathbed composition of a never-discovered holographic will naming Myra as his legitimate daughter and heir. Of special interest to legal historians is Alexander's skillful explanation of how Louisiana's Franco-Hispanic laws shaped Myra's claims. Even though not named as an heir in Clark's 1811 will, Myra would nevertheless be placed in possession of four-fifths of the estate under the civilian doctrine of "forced heirship," but only if she was his "legitimate" daughter: hence the true-life romantic tale at the heart of the litigation—the riddle of Clark's status as either Zulime's husband or merely her paramour. |
2
|
|
Besides offering a well-told tale, Alexander aspires to establish the connections between law and society, particularly between nineteenth-century literary and legal discourses. Although de rigueur for modern legal historians, establishing law-and-society connections is not easily, or often, accomplished. Alexander's stated goals are "to weave together an account of the emergence of domestic relations law, the popularity of sentimental fiction, and the transformation of judicial attitudes toward women" while narrating the saga of the Gaines litigation (xii). Alexander is more successful in the latter goal, in fashioning an understandable description of Myra's multifarious legal actions, even if she does not necessarily provide the reader with an understanding of Myra the person. This reader, for one, did not get a sense of the real Myra Clark Gaines—but maybe that is the point: perhaps she was, in the end, only the Great Gaines Case. Indeed, although Alexander portrays Gaines as a pioneering, courageous woman who broke through domestic barriers to assert herself in the male domain of the courtroom, another plausible portrait would depict her as just another fanatically litigious would-be heir in search of a fortune. |
3
|
|
As to her aim of connecting literary and legal discourses, Alexander argues not merely that romance novels helped steer the direction of family law by framing cases in the tropes and stock characters of popular literature, but that Myra, in order to gain public and judicial sympathy, consciously fitted her case to the conventions of these novels. However, while offering numerous claims about Myra's personal motives and goals in her legal and "public relations" strategies, Alexander fails to footnote the primary sources that might support these claims. Moreover, Alexander's analysis and evidence do not support her broader claims about the influence of popular romances on judicial attitudes toward women. Like other law-and-society studies that focus on a handful of cases, Alexander's book struggles to turn individual cases into cultural generalizations. Alexander claims too much for the Gaines case when she concludes—after little attention to the process of cultural transmission and jurisprudential influence—that it fueled several competing judicial attitudes toward women and contributed to a new, more paternalistic family law. Alexander's conclusion that a causal nexus linked the popular culture of domesticity and developments in family law nationwide calls for considerably more evidence than brief sketches of the political and judicial philosophies of two or three Supreme Court justices. Perhaps, however, Alexander's evidentiary problems are insoluble; for if the Gaines case was not, in fact, doctrinally influential, that would account for Alexander's difficulties in proving its importance to legal developments. A search of the clothbound and electronic indices disclosed only a few, usually brief, law-journal discussions of the Gaines case between 1850 and 1940; and their context tends to show that the case was (and is) unnoteworthy for any reason except drama and longevity. |
4
|
|
Furthermore, that some of Alexander's conclusions outpace the evidence is not a minor technicality. Like other academicians, contemporary historians seem to be rediscovering the principle of "evidentialism," which holds that one should accept something as true only if, and only insofar as, evidence supports its truth. For instance, a recent historiographical essay maintains that to be fully professional, much less persuasive, historians should take care to resist advancing modish or politically attractive conclusions on inadequate evidence; sometimes the only conclusion consistent with professional ethics is agnosticism—"we cannot know"—or the Scots verdict—"not proved, not disproved" (Daniel Feller, "Libertarians in the Attic or A Tale of Two Narratives," Reviews in American History 32 [2004]: 184). |
5
|
|
Of course, any good book raises more issues than it settles, and Alexander's book may therefore be profitably read as outlining an agenda for further research. Her mindfulness of law-and-society themes in the midst of her masterful story-telling means that scholars who read and fully assimilate her ambitious program will have new themes to develop in their own case studies. |
6
|
| James Etienne Viator
|
| Loyola University (New Orleans) |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|