ABSTRACT
Law, literature and philosophy share many concerns. Throughout the texts studied – literary and jurisprudential – ‘human nature’ is perhaps the concept posing the greatest degree of resistance to understanding whilst at the same time forming a central plank of every hypothesis concerning the moral life. As elaborations of the more basic practical ethics ‘blueprints’ found in philosophy and jurisprudence, the novels explored here create opportunities to challenge and extend the possibilities of ethical modelling, especially with regard to perspectives unacknowledged in formal theory. In philosophy and jurisprudence, ‘human nature’ as a concept is usually ‘naturalised’ into the more overtly analytic aspects of practical ethics propositions, yet glossed with particular qualities serving the overall purposes of the particular theory being advanced. In one form or another, an additional concept is shared by the three disciplines – that of ‘the psyche’, but jurisprudence and philosophy have fought shy of paying overt recognition to this mystery, teetering as it does somewhere in the foggy regions between ‘mind’ and ‘brain’2 and, more dangerously, threatening the claims to a neutral territory built upon ‘reason’ alone. Legal science has paid scant attention to the mystery of the psyche since, pragmatically, its entire structure is built upon assumptions concerning individual mastery of the psyche. Proper containment of errant aspects of the psyche is effected by the combined efforts of doctrine – mens rea for example – and medical expertise. Yet in their turn, both medicine and science rely upon hypotheses concerning the psyche which are co-dependent upon a preconception of ‘human nature’. Thus the indeterminate core suffers not only from cultural assumptions but from circular relations, circles and assumptions which have affected the cultural construction of masculine and feminine identity.
