When the ‘corpus juris’ meets a corpus delicti: The appearance

The ‘Paramodern’ Disruption and Enigmatic Women
Arkady Plotnitsky and Stephen Barker have written of an interrogative critique of the ‘fragment-heap’ of the paramodern textual discourse and have reminded us of the processes of parodic-postmodernism and hyper-poetics, in which the meaning, style and philosophic project of modernity are disrupted—a textual strategy which inevitably includes the law, as a subject-centered modernism built upon notions of stable, immanent meaning. Barker’s reminder that madness lies at “the very core of the paramodern disruption”[23] is the place to provide an entrée into a discussion of the Hulme-Parker case, in which the defence unsuccessfully tried to persuade the all-male jurors as to the pertinence of the insanity defence. This précis of the paramodern project fits very well with Alison Young’s investigations into the limitations of the social and legal Imaginaries in her book Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations (1996), particularly in regard to female involvement with crime. Such a critical interrogation is especially relevant in terms of a Postmodern Criminology and in dealing with a startling case of joint female homicide which, in effect, conforms to a horrific instance of thanatography (a narrative of death). Both Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker were clearly ‘textual outlaws’ in Young’s terms, and as she explores the largely unacknowledged crisis rupturing “the crimino-legal complex” /tradition [24], Young exposes the phantasm of a purely rational criminal law which “pretends a purity of disciplinary constitution untouched by issues of policy or theory (or, at most, permits them a secondary place outside the rationality of law)”.[25] This paper explores both the willed constructedness and the later deconstruction of that tradition: (i) the construction by the ‘Fathers of the Law’ such as the presiding trial judge and legal luminary Sir Francis Adams (author of a most influential textbook on criminal law in New Zealand) and (ii) the unpacking of the need for what Young has defined as an other (alter) justice by the 1991 book Parker & Hulme: A Lesbian View (Glamuzina and Laurie) and the Walsh-Jackson screenplay of Heavenly Creatures.
To that originary ‘boa-deconstructor’, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1798), ‘madness’ might have been “only the absence of reason”[26] (a comforting eighteenth-century formulation) when, in fact, there was reason aplenty in the furious ragings of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme: but it was reason of the kind stereotypically formulated by Freud for criminous women (viz., a libidinal blockage which has generated hysteria). The sense of Woman at the mercy of a half-understood compulsion/ “phrenzy” arguably dates back to Seneca’s Medea and to what might be called the Macbeth syndrome, in which the three goddesses of destiny at the centre of Macbeth’s delusional snatching for the Crown –and Lady Macbeth herself—exercise variant forms of Womanpower which some critics have blithely identified with a spirit of rampant evil. Alison Young insists that Woman has always been constructed and constituted as an enigmatic “surrogate for the originary outlaw of the community”, whose cognitive and behavioural deviance provides that “identifiable subject which presents a threat to the [law-abiding] community” and who must be sacrificially punished as “deserving violence in some way, as having brought the community’s [retributive] violence upon it through some fault or flaw of its own.”[27] This conceptualization well befits Parker and Hulme as cultural outlaws and moral deviants of the first order as does viewing them as exemplars of Marilyn French’s notion of the ‘outlaw’ feminine principle which conjures up deeply flawed beings “associated with darkness, chaos, flesh, the sinister, magic and above all, sexuality.”[28]
In attending to the legislative framing of punishment regimes Young insists that “As an event, crime is…always textual, as are the outlaws symbolically excluded from the community.”[29] By this Young means that crimes are narratively coded, creating “a sign, speaking of that which is most reverenced (as essential for the founding of the community and its criminal contract) and most reviled (signifying the flesh, the impulses, blood, disease)” as the unpresentable.[30] Certainly this is how Hulme and Parker were ‘textualized’ and narratively framed during their 1954 criminal trial: in terms of Kristeva’s subjects becoming abject (immoral, sinister, scheming and shady). Young insists that Woman has become the central enigma of a masculinist criminology, and when she writes of the invisibility of Woman in this power-discourse, of “femininity as obscurity” which must be decoded and of women being “represented as analytic opacity”[31], this provides a chilling frisson in regard to Hulme-Parker and it returns us to the Macbeth syndrome and the suggestively connotative notion of females ‘killing swine’[32] ( read here as an act of iconoclasm against a valorized but sexist male politico-legal discourse).

This feminizing of evil trope, when linked to the terrors of a paramodern textualism, remind us of the force of Jeremy Bentham’s point, in Martin Kayman’s words, that “in the law at least, the indeterminacy of language serves only the interests of those in a position to interpret it”[33]—and, I would insist, those in a position to enforce that interpretation, who historically have been men. But let us not lose sight of the configuration—or tropology—of the criminal femme and of her criminality which returns us to Alison Young’s contention that criminal women are monsters in the Westocentric social imaginary—that femininity “is constructed as a paradox, or perhaps an aporia”, a collapse of meaning , which explains why criminology “seeks to keep at bay the fluidity of Woman.”[34] Young insists that the Freudian vision of woman as an hysteric was premised on a Lombrosian stereotype of female nature as labile and unstable so that “Woman, the eternal dark continent of Western culture, is the blind spot of criminological theory”.[35] The privileging of rationality as a ‘male’ attribute has underpinned all claims to a Scientia Iuris (legal science), such that women “have traditionally been defined as suspended between matter (the body, nature, animality) and reason”, leading to the “constantly re-enacted incompatibility of Woman and Reason” which has linked to a prevailing ideology of biologism (making masculine biology normative in the crimino-legal complex and its doctrines of mens rea and criminal responsibility/liability).[36] It is my claim that Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme suffered from these debilitating and limiting definitions of ‘agency’ during their arraignment and trial in August 1954 even though, ironically, they were ham-fistedly miscast as fully rational, calculating killers. Young has alighted on the potency of a string of bio-psychological theories for girl delinquents, all of which are premised on the notion of women as exceptions to masculine law. The base assumption which the Parker-Hulme deviant outbreak challenged is that authentic femininity entails conformity to social and legal rules—a conformism grounded in the putative biological and heteronormative telos of the female. If this is accepted, it becomes easier to understand why defences of provocation in, say, rape and murder are configured in terms of core doctrines of ‘male’ behaviour—assumptions that “often operate to mitigate guilt or exculpate a male offender”, permitting outbreaks of male anger provoked by the behaviour of women, which Young has quite properly defined as “the representation of masculine (hetero)sexual desire in criminal law.”[37] The upshot of such heavily masculinized (gender-inflected) conceptions is classical criminologists’ “conception of Woman [as] a ‘(mis)conception’” and an image of criminology “as a discursive community founded upon the textual exchange of women among men”[38], which is as embracing a description of the trial of Parker and Hulme as one is likely to find. The congruent—if unvoiced—assumption is that female deviancy exhibits a far greater pathology than male infractions, leading to “disquieting discriminations in the treatment of male and female offenders.”[39] As Young so eloquently reminds us, the ‘sexed’/gendered body is always “split by the regime of sexual difference” so that the feminine body “is always that which interrupts, which breaks through the smooth surface of the neutral mask of the masculine.”[40] This is the place to heed the reminder of Peter Goodrich and David Gray Carlson that the advent of postmodernity has signalled the “collapse of the concept and practice of any singular or sovereign jurisprudence” and that “Behind the mask of reason, the unconscious plays the role of law and emotion determines both judicial judgment and the subject’s deeds.”[41] There is simply no better case to demonstrate the residuary truth of these claims than that explored in Heavenly Creatures. The use of psychoanalysis to reconstruct the positive imaginary—or fantasmatic structure—of Western law lies well beyond my competence, but one can readily concede the pertinency of gaps, slips and condensations in the legal record as constituting potent expressions of a textual unconscious, “of an unwritten history of legal affections and repressions as they motivate both judgment and law”[42] which often-times generates a theatre of legalized cruelty. Peter Goodrich has noted that “the literary critic engaged with law must read the literature of law through the evidence of its absence, through its repetitions and through the failures which indicate the return of that which is repressed in law”[43], and this well defines my project in this paper, especially as Goodrich writes of the tradition of legality representing “a peculiar fiction of institutional truth.”[44]
This is the point to be reminded that Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie have maintained that the Parker-Hulme case did much cognitive damage in New Zealand: their relationship “was seen as perverse because of negative social attitudes towards lesbians, and in turn the case helped to construct a new myth of lesbianism in New Zealand, connecting lesbians with murder and insanity.” [45]