Behind the Veil: Women in Court

Abstract

This is the reflection of Esther Lyon, heroine of George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866), just before she rises to make an unpremeditated and decisive intervention as character witness on behalf of the accused Felix in his trial for manslaughter. The episode is an example of a scene recurrent in the nineteenth-century novel, where a female character makes a sensational appearance in the witness-box or dock, and decisively influences the outcome of the trial. There are several features common to the representations of this scene. The court is a masculine institution in which the female presence is anomalous; the entrance into visibility by the woman in the court, usually marked by unveiling, creates a sensation; the court remains in a state of unusual excitement throughout her testimony; the evidence she adduces is emotional rather than factual; the particular relation of femininity and truth is canvassed; the female intervention has a decisive influence on the final outcome. The episode is a traumatic personal experience for the heroine, and is also perceived as redefining relations in the community.

If it was the jury who were to be acted on, she argued to herself, there might have been an impression made on their feeling which would determine their verdict. Was it not constantly said and seen that juries pronounced Guilty or Not Guilty from sympathy for or against the accused? She was too inexperienced to check her own argument by thoroughly representing to herself the course of things: how the counsel for the prosecution would reply, and how the judge would sum up, with the object of cooling down sympathy into deliberation. What she had painfully pressing on her inward vision was, that the trial was coming to an end and that the voice of right and truth had not been strong enough. (George Eliot, Felix Holt, ch. 46)