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Melanie Williams, "Medico-Legal Stories of Female
Insanity - Three Nullity Suits", Feminist Legal Studies VI/1
(1998), 3-31: This paper explores three Victorian actions claiming nullity
of marriage. The three share a common theme in that all were cases of
husbands pleading nullity on the ground of insanity in their respective
wives, so vitiating the ability to consent. Yet the cases yield some evidence
of alternative explanations of each woman's behaviour - the respective metanarratives
of enforced modesty, autonomy denied, and prohibited love - which disrupt
the dominant master-narrative of organic insanity embraced
by the medical profession. The realisation that nervous or unbalanced
mental states can be 'reactive' - a response to social or environmental
conditions - rather than organic, was (as Elaine Showalter, in The Female
Malady demonstrates) prompted by the overwhelming numbers of men returning
from the Front during the First World War with 'shellshock'. Clearly, the
social conditions of marriage in Victorian England were less susceptible
to identification as the cause of a reactive condition, since they were
embedded within the normative ideological structures of society.
Nevertheless, the three cases provide evidence of the complex interaction
between two such structures - medicine and law - in sustaining this normativity.
e-mail: miw@aber.ac.uk
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