Carnegie Mellon
Policy & Law Review

Introduction

In literature, the relationship between law and gender reflects a deep tension between traditionally masculine-coded legal figures and feminine traits. This dynamic echoes the historical ideas that restricted women’s purpose to reside solely in the domestic realm. The nineteenth century separate spheres model claims that men belonged in the world of rational discourse, civic, and public life, while women were confined “unquestionably by the hearth and the cradle.”¹ This ideology not only structured 19th-century law but underwrites the literary imagination of legal authority. In literature, this division is present as male legal figures tend to embrace their masculine-coded features while at the same time suppressing feminine characters and qualities. Yet despite this suppression, the feminine often endures as a quiet but compelling force. Across literature such as Billy Budd, The Fall, Notes from Underground, and A Jury of Her Peers, male lawyer-like characters enforce masculine legal norms that suppress feminine-coded insight, both from others and within themselves, yet the feminine persists as the essential force that restores moral balance to the law.

The Separate Spheres and the Gendering of Legal Authority

The division of gender in the separate spheres model not only shaped gender expectations but directly influenced the formation of legal institutions and frameworks that excluded women from this type of civic participation. The “separate spheres” ideology was heavily backed by the 19th Century Cult of Domesticity, which defined “true womanhood” through four core virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.² As Barbara Welter argues in  “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” women were valued for their ability to uphold virtue in the home rather than to contribute to civic or legal life. The legal system also supported and represented this view as portrayed by the decision in the 1872 Supreme Court case Bradwell v. The State of Illinois, Myra Bradwell was denied the right to practice law despite graduating from the University of Chicago Law School. Justice Joseph Bradley famously wrote that “the paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.”³ As a result of this decision, the law was not only dominated by men in practice but also gendered in its very conception, as the legal field was stated by a judge as a space that could only be occupied by a man. They decided that “the right to practice law in the state courts a privilege or immunity of a citizen of the United States, within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Article of amendment.”⁴ Because gender discrimination was not a legally protected right at the time, this lack of protection carried over into the legal profession, where it further perpetuated this exclusion. Richard Collier explains in Men, Law and Gender that “the autonomous subject has been marked…by gendered ideas of self-sufficiency and moral independence, self-governance and liberty, each theme central to Western political culture and embodying culturally encoded (as masculine) ideas.”⁵ This quote defines the masculine-coded figure as an “autonomous subject” shaped by culturally masculine ideals such as self-governance, moral independence, and control. It highlights how Western legal and political culture idealizes individuals who are emotionally self-contained and rationally self-directing. In this context, ‘masculine-coded’ and ‘feminine-coded’ refer to cultural constructions rather than biological or essential traits, marking the ways societies assign different values to different modes of being. A seemingly successful figure in power is the individual who can represent and embrace these masculine traits, which is something we see in the intersection of law and literature.

Masculine-Coded Legal Authority in Literature

In Billy Budd, Sailor, The Fall, Notes from Underground, and A Jury of Her Peers, male characters occupy legal roles of authority. While only two are formal lawyers, all function as figures of judgment and power. Specifically in these texts, their actions as individuals are all rooted in these defined masculine-coded traits. 

Captain Vere in Billy Budd, Sailor embodies a masculine-coded figure through his self-reliance, strict discipline, and emotional restraint, traits necessary to uphold military law aboard the Bellipotent. Described as an officer who “never tolerates an infraction of discipline,” yet acts “ intrepid to the verge of temerity, though never injudiciously so,”⁶ Vere prioritizes principle and rational order over sentiment. His intellectualism and controlled demeanor position him as a figure of masculine authority, who suppresses sensitivity in favor of stability and command. Even those around him comment on his persona saying, “Vere is a noble fellow, Starry Vere. Spite the gazettes, Sir Horatio” (meaning him with the Lord title) “is at bottom scarce a better seaman or fighter. But between you and me now, don’t you think there is a queer streak of the pedantic running thro’ him? Yes, like the King’s yarn in a coil of navy-rope?”⁷ Vere represents not only military command, but a masculine identity that idealizes intelligence, abstract reasoning, and legal principle over instinct or empathy. This ideal leaves little space for emotional or moral complexity, which we see particularly in his interactions with the feminine-coded character of Billy Budd. 

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the former Parisian lawyer in The Fall, constructs his identity around a presumed moral and legal authority. His masculine-coded traits emerge in his insistence on self-control, intellectual superiority, and emotional distance. He describes his professional role as one lived “with impunity,” positioned above judgment “like those gods…brought down by machinery…to transfigure the action and give it its meaning.”⁸ Even when he describes his personal views of himself he states “recognized no equals” and believed himself “more intelligent…more sensitive and more skillful…a better lover.”⁹ Through this solipsistic point of view in both himself and the work he does, Clamence demonstrates that he does not just perform masculinity, he inflates it to the point of self-parody. He even adds that he has feminine features such as sensitivity, even though his actions and features he describes don’t represent that. His sensitivity lies in his “a better lover” statement, but we see through his suppression of the feminine that this is not true. Clamence believes that he perfectly encompasses the idea of the rational and morally independent masculine lawyer figure, but this inflated persona ultimately masks a deep fragility that we see in the suppression of the feminine code. 

Though the Underground Man in Notes from Underground is not a lawyer, he adopts a “lawyer-like” inductive reasoning process that casts himself as a self-appointed moral adjudicator. His masculinity is encoded in his obsession with reason, self-governance, moral detachment, and the superiority he feels from practicing these values. When speaking to the reader he says he is “to blame… through the laws of nature,” claiming he suffers because he is “cleverer than any of the people surrounding me,” and is so ashamed of this superiority that he “never could look people straight in the face.”¹⁰ He attributes his suffering in the Underground not to personal failure, but as self-exile due to the superiority of his own intelligence. Through his self-analysis, the Underground Man embodies a distorted version of the Western legal subject discussed by Collier; a man governed not by empathy or relationship, but by an internal logic that prefers reason and control over vulnerability and sensitivity. This ideal figure discussed previously has all the traits in which the Underground Man values and enforces upon himself and he clings to the masculine ideal of control. He says he “could not become anything…neither spiteful nor kind,” and now lives “taunting myself with the…consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously; only the fool becomes anything.”¹¹ The very making of his character and  “underground” existence is built on a rejection of emotional exposure and vulnerability, and he is stuck in this mindset based in distorted reasoning and self-governance. 

In A Jury of Her Peers, the sheriff, the county attorney, and Mr. Hale are the story’s embodiment of masculinity within the legal field, as they investigate the murder scene of Mr. Wright.  They assert their legal authority through their narrow judgment, rationality, and emotional detachment from the case. Mrs. Hale describes the Sheriff as “a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals.”¹² He represents a man in control of the situation and one who thinks he instinctively knows right from wrong. We also see these traits present in the county attorney during his interrogation with Mr. Hale when he says, “”How do you mean–queer?” As he asked it he took out a note-book and pencil.”¹³ Mrs. Hale even observes that whenever he takes out his pencil, it means more notes, and more trouble, suggesting that his method is less about understanding than about gathering isolated facts to reinforce his authority. Then when he comments on the state of the kitchen, “As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky. “Here’s a nice mess,” he said resentfully.”¹⁴ He presses on with his interrogation with a tone of command rather than inquiry and focuses on isolating facts, not context. His speech is clipped and confident, showing that there is once again this self-assured view of knowing right from wrong based on his own instincts. The sheriff, county attorney, and Mr. Hale collectively enacted a masculine-coded authority grounded in self-assurance, emotional detachment, and the belief that truth could only reside within the confines of the law they instinctively trust, practice, and enforce.

The Suppression of Feminine-Coded Characters and Traits

As these male lawyer or lawyer-like figures embrace and even celebrate the masculine codes embedded in their roles, they also begin to reveal the costs of strictly sticking to these values. Their commitment to masculine authority coincides with the suppression of feminine characters and feminine-coded qualities, through both overt acts of exclusion and control or through subtler refusals of vulnerability, sensitivity, and attentiveness in themselves and others. This dynamic opens the way for examining how that suppression operates across these literary texts.

Herman Melville constructs Billy Budd as a figure of idealized innocence and beauty in the story of Billy Budd, Sailor by emphasizing his striking physical features, childlike purity, and unselfconscious charm and grace. He is described as “The two ends of a gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the displayed ebony of his chest, in his ears were big hoops of gold, and a Highland bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely head…his face, lustrous with perspiration, beamed with barbaric good humor…he rollicked along, the center of a company of his shipmates.”¹⁵ These traits described are what Judith Schneck Koffler explicitly identifies as feminized in her legal reading of the novella. Koffler notes that “Billy, though a fine specimen of the genus homo, quite defies conventions of gender. Although at the age of manhood, 21, Billy is never once described as a man; as ‘Baby Budd,’ his features are childlike, his face smooth and ‘all but feminine’… In short, Billy embodies ‘the feminine in man.’”¹⁶ All together, these qualities position Billy as a figure who crosses over gender boundaries and embodies a feminized ideal within the rigidly masculine world of the Bellipotent.

Given Billy’s childlike purity and feminized innocence, Captain Vere is able to recognize almost instantly the goodness at Billy’s core when the fatal confrontation in the plot occurs. When confronted by Claggart, Billy’s stammer under stress renders him unable to defend himself verbally and he kills Claggart, a scene that Vere witnesses. Vere knows this was an involuntary act born from Billy’s inability to speak under pressure, not from malice or intent. However, his actions after this crime are his direct suppression of the feminine in this novel. He suppresses the jury’s feminine side and sentences Billy, our feminine-coded character,  to death due to his rigid interpretation of martial law. After seeing the murder be committed Captain Vere states, “Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!”¹⁷ His immediate reaction shows that he understands Billy’s essential goodness. Nonetheless, Vere acts as if there was no other choice for himself as the captain but to sentence Billy to death for his crimes. In the process of trying Billy on the ship, Captain Vere does not budge on this initial judgment of the crime. In doing so, he suppresses the feminine entirely, allowing only a rigid interpretation of martial law, guided by his masculine norms, to determine the verdict. He forms his own interpretation of the Articles of War of the Georgian code, which Vere regards to mean that striking a superior officer is a capital crime despite intention.When the panel of officers seeks an alternative to condemning Billy, whether by advocating for his pardon or proposing a formal trial on shore, Vere states, “But the court’s silence continuing, broken only at moments by brief consultations in low earnest tones, this seemed to arm him and energize him…For the compassion, how can I otherwise than share it? But, mindful of paramount obligations I strive against scruples that may tend to enervate decision.”¹⁸ Here, Vere recognizes the jury’s emotional struggle yet overrides it. He acknowledges the feminine in them, as they hold emotional vulnerability and moral sensitivity, but calls it enervating. Thus, it forces the jury toward judgment based on law, not conscience. As Koffler notes, “Patriarchy is intimately bound up with Vere’s thematic statement to his appointed judges on the drumhead court, that ‘the heart, sometimes the feminine in man, … must be here ruled out.’”¹⁹ In that moment, Vere not only condemns Billy, the embodiment of the feminine, to death, but also silences the emotional and moral impulses arising in the officers and himself. 

By contrast, Jean-Baptiste Clamence of The Fall also suppresses the feminine, mainly through his treatment of women and minimizing the traits of vulnerability, emotional connection, and moral sensitivity within himself. Clamence frequently objectifies women, reducing them to mere instruments that reinforce his sense of self-worth rather than subjects worthy of ethical regard. Addressing a woman’s unrequited love for him, he says, “A woman who used to chase after me, and in vain, had the good sense to die young…it’s a suicide! Lord, what a delightful commotion! One’s telephone rings, one’s heart overflows, and the intentionally short sentences yet heavy with implications…”²⁰ By turning her death into a source of personal satisfaction, Clamence reveals how deeply he rejects the feminine capacities for moral sensitivity and relational responsibility. His response reframes the vulnerability of a woman’s suicide as as something to exploit rather than honor, allowing him to maintain a superior, emotionally detached posture that bolsters his masculine-coded self-image. When he anticipates the reader’s criticism of his reaction to the woman’s death, he claims “That’s the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love.”²¹ This statement illustrates Clamence’s worldview, suggesting that his emotional “sincerity,” often associated with feminine-coded traits like vulnerability and moral sensitivity, becomes tainted by the ego of his legal persona through which he continually evaluates and condemns both himself and others.

At another point in the narrative of The Fall, when a woman commits suicide by jumping off the bridge, Clamence recalls the event in a haunting confession: “I had already gone some fifty yards when I heard the sound…of a body striking the water… I felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. ‘Too late, too far…’ or something of the sort…Then, slowly under the rain, I went away. I informed no one.”²² Clamence physically reacts and acknowledges that something terrible has occurred, yet he chooses detachment and dissociation from the event.  By walking away and telling no one, Clamence suppresses the feminine and rejects emotional vulnerability and moral sensitivity in favor of self-preservation and control. His reaction to the event may have been morally wrong, but he will never admit it. Instead, he protects the masculine-coded persona he has crafted: the controlled, self-contained judge who observes but never intervenes. Recounting the event years later, he still deflects his responsibility: “What? That woman? Oh, I don’t know. Really I don’t know. The next day, and the days following, I didn’t read the papers.”²³ He cannot even entertain the possibility of remorse or concern, as his rejection of vulnerability and moral sensitivity is woven so deeply into his sense of self that he can’t conjure a reflective response. 

A similar outcome occurs in the Underground Man’s treatment of women, as he suppresses the feminine both through his actions toward the female character and through his denial of his emotional vulnerability and sensitivity. This dynamic culminates in his encounter with Liza, a young sex worker who offers him a moment of emotional connection, unlike any he has ever allowed himself. Initially caught off guard, he attempts to reassert dominance by converting his own insecurity into hostility toward her. He admits, “I was angry with myself, but, of course, it was she who would have to pay for it. A horrible spite against her suddenly surged up in my heart; I believe I could have killed her. To revenge myself on her I swore inwardly not to say a word to her all the time. ‘She is the cause of it all,’ I thought.”²⁴ He displaces self-blame onto her and turns this vulnerability into a punitive, masculine-coded assertion of control that silences her and protects his own authority. After this thought, he continuously berates and insults her, making sure to devastate her as a character and any sort of emotional openness she had entrusted to him. He says “My heart positively ached with pity for her tactless and unnecessary straightforwardness. But something hideous at once stifled all compassion in me; it even provoked me to greater venom…I positively trembled with spite, and at once burst out.”²⁵ The Underground Man punishes Liza with his words, purposefully suppressing her as a feminine character and also the feminine within himself. He knew his words would damage her, yet he said them regardless. He revolts against any vulnerability, sensitivity, and moral attentiveness in others that would make him think before he says these sorts of things and threaten his illusion of control. The results of his attack are devastating to Liza. “She turned white as a handkerchief, tried to say something, and her lips worked painfully; but she sank on a chair as though she had been felled by an axe. And all the time afterwards she listened to me with her lips parted and her eyes wide open, shuddering with awful terror. The cynicism, the cynicism of my words overwhelmed her…”²⁶ This demonstrates the deeply traumatic impact of the Underground Man’s emotional assault on Liza which leaves her physically stunned and emotionally shattered, her feminine self suppressed by his cynical words. 

Finally, in A Jury of Her Peers, the male characters represented as legal authority figures suppress the feminine through procedural blindness This text shows the most stark contrast of the two separate spheres of men and women, with the characters physically being in different areas of the house. The county attorney, sheriff, and Mr. Hale embody a legalistic, masculine-coded framework that systematically suppresses feminine forms of knowledge and moral insight through their investigation of Mr. Wright’s death. When both the Sheriff and the County Attorney begin to look for a motive, this dynamic begins to appear. They all believe Minne Foster committed the murder, but they need to find a motive. The county attorney makes an offhand remark to the sheriff, “”You’re convinced there was nothing important here?” he asked the sheriff… The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself. “Nothing here but kitchen things,” he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.”²⁷ This scene reveals how both immediately exclude or minimize the domestic and feminine sphere from serious forensic or moral consideration. By reducing the kitchen to mere “things,” he not only overlooks potential evidence but also devalues the feminine-coded world of care, routine, and emotional nuance. The county attorney openly disrespects Minnie Foster, the kitchen, and the domestic sphere by saying, “‘Dirty towels! Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?’ He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink.”²⁸ He implies her value is within her ability to keep a kitchen clean, not in other possible characteristics, denying moral agency. Not only do these male characters suppress the value of the feminine within the domestic sphere, but their blindness follows them with regard to women’s aptitude in the legal field as well. This sentiment is reinforced when Mr. Hale, who is working with the legal authorities,  jokes, “Would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?”²⁹ This reinforces the assumption that women’s perceptions lack authority or relevance in matters of law and that the concept of feminine attentiveness must be suppressed to preserve masculine legal dominance.

The Reemergence of the Feminine as a Moral Force

Although consistently suppressed, the feminine re-emerges in each of these texts as a quiet but decisive moral force, one that legal authority cannot fully ignore. In these novels it acts as a presence that requires the law or the characters who represent it to see the moral weight of their actions. While the law itself might not protect the feminine in these texts, it can still function as an influence. It forces the male characters who enforce or interpret the law to reconsider the actions shaped by their masculine-coded identities, and it offers the reader insight into the emotional and vulnerable aspects of justice that the law frequently ignores.

This emergence first appears in Billy Budd, Sailor, where Billy’s very presence reveals the moral weight of Vere’s decision, despite Vere’s belief that he is legally justified in sentencing him to death. This internal conflict becomes visible when “The first to encounter Captain Vere in act of leaving the compartment was the senior Lieutenant. The face he beheld…a startling revelation. That the condemned one suffered less than he who mainly had effected the condemnation was apparently indicated…”³⁰ Vere’s profound internal struggle in the decision to uphold martial law exposes how the execution of Billy, a feminine-coded entity, directly destabilizes and silently challenges his rigid, masculine-coded legalism. Billy’s suppression does not affirm Vere’s legal reasoning, it morally undermines it. This reveals the ethical struggle Vere faces where he claims his strict interpretation is absolute. This reveals the ethical fault lines beneath the very system Vere claims is absolute. Additionally, the final words of the feminine-coded character in this novel, “God bless Captain Vere,”³¹ were not words of resistance, but of forgiveness. These words carry a spiritual and moral weight that outshines the formal legal judgment. Billy’s forgiveness does not nullify the law. Instead, it forces Vere himself to confront the emotional cost and ethical insufficiency of a system that suppresses compassion in favor of order. This moment of grace, offered by a character coded as emotionally vulnerable and morally pure, casts Vere’s emotionally detached legalism into some sort of relief, as he has been morally unburdened. The feminine, though silenced in the “courtroom” at sea, thus becomes the moral weight that the novel centers upon.  

In The Fall, the unnamed woman who jumps from the bridge after Clamence refuses to act becomes a haunting figure of feminine-coded moral presence. Her suicide, while wordless and seemingly uneventful to Clamence, marks the moment when his carefully constructed identity as a morally superior and emotionally detached legal authority begins to unravel. Though he maintains the appearance of control, her death lingers as an unspoken accusation of moral failure that undercuts his claim to superiority. Years after her death, he still hears “that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased…I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where lies the bitter water of my baptism.”³² This unsettling memory of a feminine character symbolizes an unresolved guilt that clings to him despite all his efforts to forget or rationalize the event. Even his overall treatment of women more broadly reinforces this pattern of lacking accountability and moral and emotional detachment. When he discusses his past treatment of women and even other people, he says “Upon thinking of that time when I used to ask for everything without paying anything myself, when I used to mobilize so many people in my service…I don’t know how to name the odd feeling that comes over me. Isn’t it shame, perhaps?”³³ While Clamence never fully confronts the consequences of suppressing the feminine, these moments reveal how that suppression contributes directly to his self-imposed moral exile in Amsterdam. His exile is not simply a change in where he is living, but it is the inevitable result of a life spent evading vulnerability, empathy, and accountability. The moral weight of Clamence’s interactions with the feminine asserts itself through his unraveling, revealing the deeper consequences of his detachment and contributing to his symbolic fall and exile. The feminine sphere is denied any significance by Clamence himself and becomes the unshakable moral weight that Clamence cannot rationalize away.

In Notes from Underground, the Underground Man’s encounter with Liza ultimately carries deep moral weight because of what her presence reveals and forces him to confront. Liza embodies the vulnerability, sensitivity, and attentiveness he has spent his life denying and has never truly received from another person. When she visits him after his earlier monologue on humiliation and degradation, her silent willingness to listen and forgive unsettles him. “I was so accustomed to think and imagine everything from books…I could not all at once take in this strange circumstance…Liza, insulted and crushed by me, understood a great deal more than I imagined. She understood from all this what a woman understands first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I was myself unhappy.” ³⁴ Her presence is not powerful in a legal or authoritarian sense, but Liza holds moral and emotional insight that the Underground Man, for all his reasoning, lacks. In recognizing his unhappiness, Liza delivers the moral judgment he cannot pass on himself, exposing the flaws of his worldview that excludes emotional vulnerability and relational insight. His brutal rejection of her, followed by his immediate shame, becomes one of the few moments in the text when he cannot hide behind his obsessive reasoning. This moral exposure becomes unavoidable when his rejection of Liza triggers a physical response he can’t rationalize away: “At this point there was a revulsion in my heart too. Then she suddenly rushed to me, threw her arms round me, and burst into tears…’They won’t let me… I can’t be good!’ I managed to articulate; then I went to the sofa, fell on it face downwards, and sobbed on it for a quarter of an hour in genuine hysterics.”³⁵ In this moment, Liza as the feminine becomes a silent moral reckoning, confronting him with the emotional cost of his detachment. She does not do anything explicit or enact revenge on the Underground Man; her feminine presence is enough for him to question his rigid ideals based on reason and self-governance. She leaves a lasting imprint on his psyche that carries into his exile into the Underground. His exile is not simply intellectual, it is the consequence of a failed struggle to suppress the very feminine-coded qualities that continue to demand his attention and that he cannot neutralize with his rigid masculine-coded reasoning. 

In A Jury of Her Peers, the feminine presence emerges as the clearest source of moral insight, precisely because it is rooted in traits that the male legal authorities ignore. The male characters dismiss the kitchen as an area in which evidence could exist for a motive because it is a feminine sphere and nothing more than an unkempt kitchen. However, while the men are not only figuratively but literally in different spheres, the bedroom versus the kitchen. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters begin to piece together the emotional and psychological realities of Minnie Foster’s life and the motive behind her killing her husband. Through their shared, quiet observations of domestic disarray in the kitchen, an unfinished and oddly stitched piece of quilting, and the corpse of a pet bird, they come to understand the motive behind the crime. When they find the bird, the motive materializes, “’She liked the bird,’ said Martha Hale, low and slowly. ‘She was going to bury it in that pretty box…If there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still.’”³⁶ They find a life of emotional suppression, loneliness, and psychological abuse that adds moral weight to the current murder case. What the male legal figures overlook, the women see. This discovery of abuse also lends moral weight to the law as it functioned during this time period. In the early 1900s, unless Minnie Foster’s act could be proven as an act of self-defense, she would almost certainly have been convicted of manslaughter. However, we see that Minnie suffered constant abuse even if she wasn’t in imminent danger when she killed her husband, which is now known as battered woman syndrome. The defense of battered woman syndrome was “a theory developed in the 1970s that is now associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and is sometimes used in court cases as mitigation in homicide cases where a battered woman kills her abuser.”³⁷ This legal concept did not exist at the time Glaspell wrote A Jury of Her Peers. By giving insight into this predicament, we see how the feminine in the text discovering this motive shows that the law itself needed to be morally evaluated. By the end, the women choose not to report what they’ve discovered, quietly carrying out their own form of justice, one that legal procedure would not have accounted for. Their choice reveals that the feminine-coded qualities of moral sensitivity, attentiveness to human needs, and relational insight may be the only forces capable of delivering moral clarity where the law cannot during this time.

Conclusion

By examining the characters in Billy Budd, Sailor, The Fall, Notes from Underground, and A Jury of Her Peers, these texts reveal that legal and law-like figures embrace their masculine-coded traits, while at the same time suppressing the feminine in themselves and others. Despite facing this suppression, the feminine emerges in these texts as a vital moral weight to these characters’ actions and often highlights the shortcomings of the law as it existed during the periods in which these works were written. Whether it’s the hanging of the innocent Budd by Vere, Clamence’s haunting guilt over his lack of action regarding the woman jumper, the Underground Man’s emotional unraveling due to Liza, or Minnie Foster’s silent justice derived from the feminine sphere, the feminine introduces a moral element that the masculine-coded figures fail to recognize on their own. These moments do not reject legality but insist that correct action and justice may need to include relational insight, moral sensitivity, vulnerability, and attentiveness to human needs. In this way, the feminine in literature becomes not only a counterbalance to the masculine-coded legal authority but an avenue in which the moral framework of the law, and those who represent it, can be better understood and evaluated.

Notes