5 - Into the Court of Public Opinion

Summary

Though the most momentous of the d'Hautevilles' legal experiences, the four-month trial did not end their encounters with the law. Far from it; their case had become too notorious and the questions it raised about the family and the law too explosive to be settled by a single verdict. Instead the Philadelphia Court of General Sessions' emphatic vindication of Ellen ensured that the d'Hauteville case remained an important social drama with growing rhetorical and legal significance. It did so because the judges' acceptance of Ellen's story of spousal victimization and maternal care challenged the dominate legal narrative of parental conflicts over children. Rather than repeating the standard story line – invocations of the primacy of paternal authority – the verdict championed maternal preference in custody law and even suggested granting wives greater legal autonomy with marriage. As such, Barton's words used the d'Hautevilles’ tangled problems to propose a new way of telling the tales of warring parents. Then and now, as Edward M. Bruner argues, “[i]t is the perceived discrepancy between the previously accepted story and the new situation that leads us to discard or question the old narrative; and it is the perceived relevance of the new story to our own life situation that leads us to its acceptance.” The d'Hauteville verdict and Ellen's story on which it was based threatened to be just such a new narrative. As a result, it ignited a fierce public debate pitting the orthodox legal story of paternal authority in the home against the new narrative of maternal duty.