Law and Justice in Wilkie Collins’s Novels

• Main Authors: Lan, Wen-lin, 藍文玲
• Other Authors: Chiou, Yen-bin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/tgcmv8

博士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 107 === 　　Being trained in Lincoln’s Inn but never putting his learning in practice, Wilkie Collins portrays the problematic relationship between the law and individual life in many of his well-known novels. His novels are usually classified into the “scandalous” genre of sensation fiction, which often includes criminal plots to stimulate readers’ “sensation” and reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century. Also including criminal intrigues or behaviors though, Collins’s novels go further: his novels expose how some crimes are wrapped in legality and how the individuals with a legally underprivileged status tend to commit crimes. Distinct from the Victorian belief and perhaps the novelist’s own belief, the law intends to maintain social order, but the order is not necessarily related to truth or justice. While the innocent or the good cannot depend on the legal guarantee of truth and justice anymore, Collins’s novels still end in happy or hopeful endings most of the time. A new imagination about justice stems from such happy or hopeful endings: when the law loses its teleological association with truth and justice, human beings have to search for the possibility of justice through their responses to the injustice happening in the relationship between the law and individual lives. 　　To unfold the foundation and functioning of the law through the juridical defects represented in Wilkie Collins’s novels, this dissertation refers to not only some juridical literature in the nineteenth century but also the studies of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The law’s broken teleological association with truth and justice is exactly Agamben’s discovery when he investigates the legally problematic instances, like concentration camps and the state of exception, in human history. According to Agamben, the legally problematic instances do not stand for eerie perversion, but the ubiquitous situation of government. If so, the injustice due to juridical defects in Collins’s novels would be generally felt once a human being encounters the law, and human responses to the injustice are endeavors to disclose a possibility of justice.