Quote: “First, feminists tend to employ narrative and autobiography in feminist legal scholarship in part because the injuries which are the subject matter of a good bit of that scholarship have been so thoroughly ‘privatized’ that there is no societal understanding of their nature, their prevalence, their effects, or their history. Narrative and anecdote is one sometimes effective way to communicate both the nature and extent of these injuries: more quantitative measures quite literally “don’t tell the story.” The impulse to tell stories to try to communicate the nature of overly privatized, silenced, and hidden injuries is largely a response to felt necessity in the face of widespread ignorance and incomprehension” (West 208).
Comment: I found this idea incredibly interesting in that the very concept of not knowing something so deeming it irrelevant or unneeded is facing criticism as legal and other scholars simply try to uncover hidden truths. It made me think of when lawyers and scholars in the 1970s first had to explain that sex discrimination was a thing and, therefore, equal rights and the 14th Amendment should be applicable in those scenarios. What comes to mind for me is Fronteriro v. Richardson (1973), where female members of the US Army were not receiving certain benefits that males could, and the scenario, in general, is something that was so little seen or spoken about that the legal narrative had first to prove that this is discrimination and differentiation based on sex and that allowed for some validity in the case. If someone does not understand the situational context of a scenario so far from their own reality, it seems like common sense to invoke storytelling because what better way to learn and expand your perspectives than through a medium conducive to absorbing others’ experiences?
Question: In the following section where West states, “If people do not know what it means, what it feels like, and what it does to be slapped on the face at home by someone you once trusted to love and cherish you, then for heaven’s sake tell them”(West 210) – I found myself connecting back to some of our class work. Would something like Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, to an extent, highlight that line of legal narrativity – though devoid of actual legal institutions as they offered no recourse at the time – it still made an effort to humanize the situation and offer a glimpse into a place where usually private and kept secrete we can empathize and critique. Those who, especially during Brontë’s time, did not fit the narrative implicitly recognized by the legal community were not the subject of legal narratives. Could the connection be made or expanded upon that in Brontë’s time of critique, this idea of coverture or the upholding the ideal marriage in law while ignoring the realities translates today into what West points out as the “typicality” of the human development story that holds foundationally the men runs the professional side while women the domestic?
Your connection sounds right: the typical story is the stock story, and Bronte’s novel tells the story of a marriage falling apart instead of a story that ends with marriage (leaving the rest to be assumed, a version of the typical or stock story). You could re-read the reaction to her novel, including her comments about it in her Preface, as the reaction of someone opening that private space in ways that disrupt an idealized story about marriage, as well stories about what she, as a young, single woman, should know or talk about.