Outlawing the Myth: Legouvé's Medea in Victorian England from the Lens of Feminist Literary Jurisprudence

Abstract

[eng] Feminist literary jurisprudence explores the intersection of literature, law and feminism. While the feminist legal scholarship has widely focused on Victorian fiction, the theater produced in nineteenth-century England has been largely overlooked in this field of criticism. This paper reads for the law Ernest Legouvé's Medea a Tragedy in Three Acts, in Verse (1855), a play that retells the classical Euripidean filicidal episode. In this task I hope to contribute to this scholarly area by focusing not only on Victorian theater but also on the figure of Legouvé who, despite his influence on the women question, has been virtually ignored in this literary field. The French playwright was a political activist and self-declared feminist who devoted his public life to the defense of women's rights and who strongly advocated for equalitarian laws for both sexes. The close reading of the tragedy pinpoints a wide range of legal rights in the field of family law with respect to motherhood, marriage, private property, divorce, child custody and alimony, showing that Legouvé used Medea to challenge the contemporary patriarchal legal system that governed family relationships in his time.