ABSTRACT
Idealistic lawyers like Atticus Finch may believe “courts are the great levelers” (Lee 1960: 218), and this may be true of plaintiffs and defendants. However, it is difficult to apply it to judges, since they have so much power over courts and their procedures. Therefore, not only the legal skills and training, but also the personal qualities of judges may affect the quality of justice that is achieved in courts. In particular, qualities such as fairness and impartiality are considered crucial, for as Aristotle said in the “Nicomachean Ethics”, a “judge is intended to be a sort of a living embodiment of what is just” (Aristotle 1990: 45). And one of the most common iconic representations of justice is that of a blindfolded woman holding scales to symbolize that judges and courts are supposed to make balanced decisions without knowing or caring whether plaintiffs and defendants are rich or poor, powerful or weak. Moreover, in modern legal systems if judges make unfair decisions, those decisions are supposed to be reversed by higher courts and more powerful judges. Yet the media often contain stories about court rulings by or about judges that definitely seem unjust when they are measured by any standard of fairness. In the fall of 1993, for example, a federal judge sentenced a man named
Sol Wachtler to a prison term of fifteen months after he had confessed that he had harassed a former lover for months with threatening letters, conspired
to extort $200,000 from her, and made telephone calls to her in which he threatened to kidnap her daughter. The mildness of his sentence was perhaps explained by the information that Wachtler was not a typical spurned lover but the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, that he had been represented in court by a team of three excellent lawyers, and that he had been so widely respected that he had considered running for governor in 1994. When Wachtler’s lawyers claimed that his behavior was due to mental illness, a prosecutor retorted that this case was not a replay of The Exorcist. Wachtler “wasn’t possessed by an evil spirit. He wasn’t in the grip of forces beyond his control” (Schemo 1993: B1). That Judge Wachtler’s “case” is not a new but a perennial problem is
suggested by the popularity of the “magical justice” folktales that are found in many cultures. In these tales, it is assumed that even kings, queens, and emperors must be fair and compassionate when judging their subjects. If they are cruel, unjust, or wicked, they can be punished by “evil spirits” and powers acting as avengers whose “penalties [are] harsh, ranging from public humiliation to agonizing death” and eternal damnation. For even though these “tales of retribution” may seem chilling to modern readers, “they provided their own consolation, for within their ambit cruelty was always punished, and tyrants were never let off scot-free. If such justice could not be guaranteed in the mundane world, it was, at least, a certainty in the enchanted one” (Le Fanu 1986: 8-9). Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella, “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” shows how a writer, steeped in the Gothic and Romantic tradition, could apply this folktale motif in a more sophisticated literary and cultural context. In addition, Le Fanu also approaches this theme so it fuses a sacralized, “enchanted” vision of revenge with the more secular, psychological perspective that characterizes modern societies starting in the late Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Because Le Fanu’s narratives are not well known except among con-
noisseurs of ghost stories, a brief summary of his novella is helpful. In the mid-eighteenth century a Shrewsbury grocer named Lewis Pyneweck steals his wife Flora’s fortune, spoons, and earrings and otherwise mistreats her. She runs away to London with the title character, Elijah Harbottle, a corrupt and bad-tempered “hanging judge,” changes her name to Carwell, and becomes his “housekeeper.” Several years later, Pyneweck is accused of forging a bill of exchange, and Flora Pyneweck tries to persuade the Judge to be merciful to her husband. A fictional counterpart of actual hanging judges like George Jeffreys and Sir Thomas Page, Harbottle enjoys seeing defendants convicted, and he enjoys sending them to the gallows even more. However, he takes special pains to make sure he is assigned to Pyneweck’s case when he goes on circuit to Shrewsbury, so he can personally preside over the grocer’s trial and sentence him to be executed: “Did he not, as a lawyer, know that to bring a man [like Pyneweck] from his shop to the dock, the chances must be at least ninety-nine out of hundred that he is guilty? … In
hanging that fellow he could not be wrong” (Le Fanu 1993: 95). Afterwards, instead of feeling any remorse, Harbottle “laughed, and coaxed, and bullied away [Mrs. Pyneweck’s] faint upbraidings, and in a little time Lewis Pyneweck troubled her no more; and the Judge secretly chuckled over the perfectly fair removal of a bore, who might have grown little by little into something very like a tyrant” (Le Fanu 1993: 100). Nevertheless, during the month following Pyneweck’s trial and execution, the Judge is troubled by nightmares and the “blue devils” of depression until at the end of the novella he commits suicide by hanging himself. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Judge Pyncheon in The House of Seven Gables
and Gérard de Villeforte in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Christo, Harbottle is an unjust magistrate, a cunning schemer who uses his position in a judicial system to further his own nefarious interests. In each text judicial power is held by a clever but wicked man who conceals his private crimes by performing them within the legal system. Since none of the narratives suggests a political remedy-such as reforms or revolution-they all raise the issue of how justice can prevail or how revenge be attained when the legal system is itself corrupted by chicanery and-in Harbottle’s caseby cruelty as well. Hawthorne relies on a fantastic coincidence, that Judge Pyncheon should die of a stroke at an opportune moment. Dumas depends on a fantastically rich, talented, dedicated avenger, the Count of Monte Christo, who revenges himself for his own unjust imprisonment by destroying Villeforte’s life and driving him insane. Le Fanu relies on yet another, more wildly carnivalistic form of retribution: the Gothic fantastic blended with the psychological. After a Prologue mentioning several “reports” and “accounts,” the events
of Harbottle’s story begin with a ghostly appearance recounted by the tenant of a house in the Westminister section of nineteenth-century London. The tenant is reading late at night when the closet door of his bedroom opens, and
a slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the room on tip-toe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse’s, were stamped with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villainy.
