Disorder in the Court

"I highly recommend Disorder in the Court . It’s a wonderful collection of essays, each covering major trials involving sexual misconduct in the second half of the 19th century. They each isolate a specific trial, always ones that were very well covered, and use the legal proceedings to provide insight into how we think about ourselves. One of the essays deals with the trials against Flaubert and Baudelaire, both in 1857. What’s remarkable about these trials is that censorship was dependent on the market. In 1857, novels were not considered terribly serious works of literature. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary , it was presumed that the audience was female, and that this female audience had more delicate and impressionable sensibilities. So because the book dealt with an adulteress, and there was no character in the book formally condemning adultery, Flaubert was called to task for not writing a morally uplifting book. The idea was that women who read novels should be coddled and uplifted by them. Fortunately for Flaubert, this made his career. The brouhaha over the trial brought him a lot of notoriety. He escaped full censorship and punishment, but he got a very stern warning. “Flaubert was called to task for not writing a morally uplifting book. The idea was that women who read novels should be coddled and uplifted by them.” By contrast, poetry was considered a much more serious business. When Baudelaire published Les Fleurs du Mal it was a harder job for the prosecutor because the audience was presumed to be men, who were thought to be made of harder stuff. They would be less swayed and influenced by the literature, even though the poems were much more profane. In fact, there were several poems from that collection which were censored for quite some time. Disorder in the Court follows some other interesting French cases, and also a wonderful case in India involving a young Hindu woman called Rukhmabai. She had been married off at a young age to a man in Mumbai, and had refused to go to her husband. Imagine the courage – she said no. He sued her, he lost. He sued her again, he won. The case became a cause célèbre in London. Fascinatingly, the lower age of consent – which was 10 in India at that point – was taken on by Indian nationalists as an aspect of their national spirit. England was seen to be overbearing, raising the age, interfering with their national affairs. Rukhmabai ended up coming to England and becoming one of the first female doctors. She was a very savvy media player, and wrote a lot of letters to the London Times . It created a huge national debate over Indian sovereignty, and whether the age of consent for dark-skinned women should be different than for English women. Even the consensus of reformers then was that white English women were somehow more delicate and less sexually precocious than women from India, and therefore their age of consent should be higher. Which takes us very nicely to The Children’s Hour ."