To comfort himself and ostensibly to present his wife to the world as a strong, independent woman who lived by her own rules, Wollstonecraft’s husband wrote and then published Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” four months after her death. The brief and candid biography revealed to the world that the celebrated proselytizer of virtue and excellence had conceived two daughters out of wedlock and attempted two suicides.

From thenceforth the events in her life and her life choices would overshadow the ideas in her work. As Cora Kaplan observed, “Curiously, for an author-activist adept in many genres—a career to which many feminists have aspired—up until the last quarter-century Wollstonecraft’s life has been read much more closely than her writing, which has sometimes seemed a mere pretext for telling and retelling her personal story” (2002, 247). It is true that ever since academe has embraced the cause of feminism, Wollstonecraft’s work has received much more critical attention than it had in the past. However, it is also true that what seems to continue to interest readers about Wollstonecraft is her life more than her works. Rarely does one find a critical book or article that focuses only on her work; most critics do not separate her ideas from her life.

Unfortunately, because of Memoirs, Wollstonecraft became “an object lesson on the dangers of feminist ideas and ideals—as if a woman could not live in the world, she advocated but had no problems in the one she opposed” (Davidson 1986, 132). Reviews, poems, essays, and sermons were written to denounce her, similar to the view published in The European Magazine and London Review:

A Presbyterian theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary conceded that Rights of Woman was ingenious, but her “licentious practice renders her memory odious to every friend of virtue” (Miller 1803, 284).

In 1845, the village of Yerba Buena had a population of about 300 souls. By 1850, the rechristened San Francisco was the biggest city on the west coast of the United States. San Francisco became rich first from the Gold Rush and then from the Comstock Lode of silver in Nevada. By the 1860s, its wealth as a banking and shipping center brought sophistication in the form of grand buildings, opera, and theater. The city had passed from Cole’s “The Savage State” to “The Consummation of Empire” in a single generation.

This growth had come at a cost. The Sierra foothills had been stripped of soil by hydraulic mining, which had flooded the Sacramento Delta and the Bay with silt. The native population of the Central Valley and the Sierra had been largely destroyed. Racial tensions were growing between white settlers and Chinese immigrants. In 1868, a major earthquake destroyed much of the city, underscoring the fragility of the City by the Bay. Such racial and environmental dissonance, suppressed in the narrative of progress, would return in California Gothic.

By the 1860s, San Francisco’s young “Bohemians,” a group of writers including Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, Warren Stoddard, and for a time Mark Twain, had begun what Franklin Walker dubbed (in a 1939 book by that title) “San Francisco’s Literary Frontier.” The Bohemians, writes Ben Tarnoff, “would bring a fresh spirit to American writing, drawn from the new world being formed in the Far West” (p. 5). Chief among the Bohemians was Bret Harte, who edited The Golden Era and then The Overland Monthly, a serious publication intended to rival The Atlantic, as for a time it did. Yet Harte was not a simple booster of California and the West. He knew its dark side. As a young journalist, he had been driven out of the town of Eureka when he reported honestly on the massacre of a nearby California Indian encampment. His tales of the gold fields were not just humorous or picturesque. Some of them, if not Gothic, could be considered at least “Gothic adjacent.”

In her book Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (2010), Sarah Apetrei made an accurate and fearless criticism: “There is something slightly grating, something nigglingly unsatisfactory about the expressions used by many historians to describe the cultural interplay between women and religion” (2010, 27), and by “historians,” one may include literary critics. “But many recent scholars while recognizing the partisan agenda, are unconcerned with Wollstonecraft’s personal belief,” Lisa Plummer Crafton noted in her scholarship on the debate about the French Revolution in English literature, “American scholars, especially, and those who to Wollstonecraft via liberal feminism, place Wollstonecraft in a secular framework dominated by the language of rights” (1997, 30). As an example, she critiqued Gary Kelly’s own treatment of Wollstonecraft as a Revolutionary feminist writer (1992) in which she accuses him, with foundation, for being like “many writers on early feminists” in “explain[ing] away” religious references an assuming that “the argument is stronger without them” (30). She also noticed that especially “twentieth-century liberal feminism” has chosen to ignore Wollstonecraft’s religious beliefs. Those who have written on her treat religion as “predictable or irrational” and that it “does not ‘count’ as political” (30).

And to cite just one more of several who have observed the anti-Christian climate of the Postmodern Age:

It is not that the biographers and academics have failed to address Wollstonecraft’s beliefs, doubts, doctrines, and religious practices; indeed, all of them have had much to say on this topic; however, most of them summarily replicate Godwin’s comments on Wollstonecraft and her religion, without considering what Wollstonecraft conveyed about her beliefs throughout her works and letters. Many of them have been too quick to suppose that once Wollstonecraft had become truly “enlightened,” she had very little need for Christianity as if those that subscribed and subscribe to religious faith, respectively, were and are only ignorant, superstitious, and narrow-minded.

Ecogothic is based on the knowledge that human activity has changed the planet’s climate and biosphere and that the extinction of human and much animal life is likely, if not inevitable. Ecogothic thus looks backward and forward: forward to an apocalypse, backward to what we have done—and the knowledge that we have repressed or ignored.

The ecological disaster, the accelerating Sixth Extinction, is a global concern and not particular to California’s magic island. But novels and films about global collapse slot easily into the rich tradition of the California apocalypse, and especially the destruction of Los Angeles, or what Mike Davis has called (in the title of his 1998 book) the “ecology of fear.” Los Angeles has been destroyed more than any other city, even more than Tokyo, by earthquake, alien invasion, zombies, plague, and every other imaginable means. But increasingly, the agency of destruction does not have to be imagined but merely observed. As we contemplate the end of our familiar world, we also re-evaluate our received notions of natural history, as embodied in institutions like museums and zoos, and we reconsider California’s long tradition of nature writing and celebration of its unique landscape.

This chapter will examine two novels of the near future that imagine the disaster that awaits: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015). In contrast, Lydia Millet’s Ecogothic trilogy, How the Dead Dream (2008), Ghost Lights (2011), and Magnificence (2012), is set in the present and is a meditation on how humanity’s destructive relationship with the animal world has brought us to this point.

The prescient Octavia Butler (1947–2006) understood before most novelists that climate change would crash infrastructure and civil order and send populations fleeing as refugees. Los Angeles, always fragile, perched on an edge between a desert interior and undrinkable salt water, dependent on stretched arteries bringing water from distant sources, would be an early victim of a hotter and dryer world. The teen-age protagonist of Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, remembers a rain shower in which the delighted child played—a wonder seldom repeated. Now, in a time of endless drought and social collapse, ordinary people live in barricaded communities and venture out into the chaos in armed groups.

Educated in the enervating style recommended by the writers on whom I have been ani-madverting; and not having a chance, from their subordinate state in society, to recover their lost ground, is it surprising that women every where appear a defect in nature? Is it surprising, when we consider what a determinate effect an early association of ideas has on the character, that they neglect their understandings, and turn all their attention to their persons?

The great advantages which naturally result from storing the mind with knowledge, are obvious from the following considerations. The association of our ideas is either habitual or instantaneous; and the latter mode seems rather to depend on the original temperature of the mind than on the will. When the ideas, and matters of fact, are once taken in, they lie by for use, till some fortuitous circumstance makes the information dart into the mind with illustrative force, that has been received at very different periods of our lives. Like the lightning’s flash are many recollections; one idea assimilating and explaining another, with astonishing rapidity. I do not now allude to that quick perception of truth, which is so intuitive that it baffles research, and makes us at a loss to determine whether it is reminiscence or ratiocination, lost sight of in its celerity, that opens the dark cloud. Over those instantaneous associations we have little power; for when the mind is once enlarged by excursive flights, or profound reflection, the raw materials will, in some degree, arrange themselves. The understanding, it is true, may keep us from going out of drawing when we groupour thoughts, or transcribe from the imagination the warm sketches of fancy; but the animal spirits, the individual character, give the colouring. Over this subtile electric fluid, how little power do we possess, and over it how little power can reason obtain! These fine intractable spirits appear to be the essence of genius, and beaming in its eagle eye, produce in the most eminent degree the happy energy of associating thoughts that surprise, delight, and instruct. These are the glowing minds that concentrate pictures for their fellow-creatures; forcing them to view with interest the objects reflected from the impassioned imagination, which they passed over in nature.

I must be allowed to explain myself.

“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners,” Wollstonecraft pronounced in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world” (83; ch. 3). By “them,” of course, she meant “women.” Wollstonecraft was aware of the time in which she lived; it was a time for and of revolution. The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776; and then, with the aid of France, America won its independence from Britain. A mere 13 years and 10 days later (July 14, 1789), revolutionary insurgents stormed the Bastille, thus proving that the populace could and would overthrow the monarchy and the ancient régime. Wollstonecraft and many of the great thinkers of her generation assumed that both revolutions held promise that countries, including Britain, could someday become utopias where all people were equal and no person would go without the necessities of life, including freedom and the opportunity to pursue happiness, a basic right endowed by the Creator, or so said Thomas Jefferson.

It is in that aurora that Wollstonecraft optimistically believed that surely the Estates General was composed of the most “enlarged minds” (ROW vi; Dedication) of the world and would grant equal education, vocation, and legal rights to women in the new republic. She must have assumed that Britain, in its own disquiet about possible insurrection by oppressed groups, would follow suit. Ever since the French invaded England in 1066 and then established common law and its ideas of coverture, married women—and then by extension, all women—were declared legally as nonentities. By British law, women were understood to be subsumed by the men in their lives and “covered” by them, ostensibly to protect them and also to relegate them to a state of male possession. Supposedly the idea of coverture derives from 1 Cor. 11, where Paul says, “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” Then the letter warns that if men pray and prophecy with their head covered, they shame their heads, meaning that they shame the Head, namely Christ. As for women, if they pray and prophecy without a head covering, they dishonor their head.

Introduction: The Development of Law and Television

This chapter describes the burgeoning research area of law and television. I deliberately call law and television a research ‘area’ rather than a ‘field’ because it is not clear whether law and television is a field in its own right. More aptly, it is part of law and popular culture, which is a known, defined, interdisciplinary field. Popular culture refers to popular products manufactured for popular consumption: those forms of culture that are well liked by many people, are widely shared and are often used in everyday life. Popular culture includes TV shows, but it also includes films, novels, music and video games. When we think about television, we see that it changes over time, has a commercial nature, is class-, gender- and age-coded, varies in importance and popularity to different people in different regions and can be a source of escapism or fun. Any particular television show, whether watched on network television or streamed from a subscription service on a personal device, can have more than one meaning. The larger field of law and popular culture studies the nexus between popular products and law and argues that law can be understood as popular culture and popular culture as law. It is an interdisciplinary relationship where popular culture and law continuously meet and renegotiate one another. Law and television, as an area under the umbrella of law and popular culture, studies the relationship of law as culture and culture as law as manifested in the specific area of television.

In the early days of law and popular culture the term ‘popular’ was used to distinguish between ‘categories’ of culture. In the 1980s, popular culture was often defined in contrast to other types of culture, such as high or national culture. A number of scholars played an important part in the development of law and popular culture. In 1986 Anthony Chase noted the failure of legal scholars to recognise and embrace the images of law and lawyers in popular culture as legitimate subjects of scholarly study. Stewart Macaulay gave a noteworthy presidential address on ‘Images of Law in Everyday Life’ at the 1986 Law and Society Association conference a nd Lawrence Friedman wrote an influential article in the 1989 Yale Law Journal.

History matters, and for the dominant white supremacist, history is dangerous because it reveals the depravity of racism and exactly how saturated white culture is with racism. In 2022, the US Republican Party began a public assault on US history that they deemed too critical of the actions of white people. White supremacists are demanding, and being accommodated by Republicans, that no teachers (from kindergarten to graduate school) be allowed to talk about history that portrays the horrific behaviour of their ancestors.

Teachers have been instructed by state boards and legislatures to teach fairly by presenting both sides of the Holocaust. So that even though Hitler directed the mass extinction of millions, you must also explain how he did some good things too. White supremacists claim this will make white children feel bad about themselves and sad, so they must be protected. The white supremacists’ attempts to silence Black history centres white feelings over the recognition of the torture and death of Black people. The reality is that teaching critical history undermines the external arguments that justify racism.

While this book is not about Critical Race Theory, it explores Black African and Black US history. The figures in this chapter have been described by journalists, critics, and academics, in their time and current literature, as liberal heroes who saw Black people as human and tried to help them. Nevertheless, these heroes harbour racist ideas. The history of Black African objects in the US shows how historical attitudes towards Black Africans have changed little since the beginning of England’s colonisation of the US. It is necessary to provide a complex examination of white supremacist sentiments that permeate the work of white scholars, collectors, and critics when they address Black African objects.

Looking through the letters and writings of prominent collectors, who were praised as racial liberals, it becomes evident that most people involved in the fields of aesthetics and fine art were firm in their beliefs of white superiority. There are differences in the reasons for white superiority.

V. S. Naipaul’s travels to Trinidad and India led him to create a narrative ‘I’ for his race-class-ethnic-gender-time specific experience of travel writing. Due to his travel writing experiments, Naipaul got interested in the point of view technique and the resultant fiction of the 1960s produced a narrative emphasis on the protagonists’ limitations in knowing the world. Naipaul had protected his writer self from public scrutiny through the use of boyish narrators (adults writing from the point of view of their younger selves) in his social comedies of the 1950s. His travel writing of the early 1960s created a narrator who voiced his insecurities and anxieties with reference to an issue or geographical area but also hid his constant need for social and financial support. Naipaul the narrator could be under the critical eye while Naipaul the person retreated from the public space. Naipaul’s writings of the 1960s, more generally, are dominated by a schizoid personality as he watches himself construct various narrators who are sometimes only observers, sometimes participants and most times participants and observers to their own drama of life.

Though it is often thought that Naipaul did not write about Trinidad after the first four books, Naipaul, in fact, began to write about Trinidad from his own experiences in the 1960s and the 1970s. The differences are manifold: while the fiction of his 1950s books was based upon his father’s transference of material and techniques, he now came to write directly from his own experience. This is not to say that the material used by him for his 1950s writings were not his experience, but to emphasise that those experiences were his while ensconced in his father’s care. A second difference is that just as he produced a difference between his narrator and writer personae, he now created the landscape of a fictional Caribbean island, that was like Trinidad yet not exactly so, whether it was as an unnamed island in the short story ‘The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book,’ the island in the novella ‘A Flag on the Island’ or the island of Isabella in The Mimic Men. This marks a growth in Naipaul’s oeuvre as he felt distanced enough from his raw experiences to write about Trinidad as a fictional landscape (Poynting 1985, p. 775). He was no longer transforming reality into art but artfully crafting a distance between his experience and his writing.

Jean Baudrillard ‘concludes that the arts and the media are so utterly co-opted by capitalism that not only is “reform” impossible but also all efforts at dialectical conversion to progressive, liberating purposes’. In the twenty-first century in the US, Black culture is a billion-dollar commodity, yet Black people remain in a liminal position in society. With disproportionately large numbers in prison and poverty, Black billionaires’ individual success has not trickled down to the masses. Despite Black culture being commodified by white people and celebrated in limited ways, having Black skin in the US remains dangerous, making one vulnerable to verbal and physical attacks and lynching. The disjunction between Black African and US cultures continues in the twenty-first century.

The Diaspora’s appropriation of Black Africa is a problem, especially given the power differences between Black USians and Black Africans. A mainstream example of this type of appropriation is Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade, Black Is King and the viral Black Panther (2018) film. Beyonce draws on several different cultures in Lemonade and portrays the spooky aspect of Black African spiritual culture. Black Panther smashes many visual elements from many Black African cultures to produce a utopic land sealed off from colonialism. Unfortunately, Black Africa is still affected by the violent colonial project and the pillaging of its art and history.

Appropriation

‘Cultural appropriation may be seen when culture is appropriated for commercial gain within the global capitalist system […]. It is a concern of ownership and the status of historical African material that becomes distorted when such material is included.’ Many readers will be familiar with the phenomenon of white people’s appropriation of Black aesthetics.

V. S. Naipaul and the Caribbean

I hope that through this analyses I have achieved the aims that I set out in my introduction. Naipaul began writing using his early childhood exposure to the East Indian culture in Trinidad as a basis for writing about the Caribbean. When he embarked on his travel writing, he explored ‘areas of darkness’ that were related to his limited knowledge about his own complex heritage: ‘The land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was doing my writing. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books’ (‘Two Worlds’ 2001e: 2003, p. 190). As he expanded his horizons, so did he expand the history of Trinidad. No idea or event in Trinidad escaped his scrutiny—it included an exploration of Trinidad’s pre-Columbian past, its ‘discovery’ and plantation history in The Loss of El Dorado, his childhood in post-indentureship Trinidad in ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ and Reading and Writing, the 1946 Trinidad general election in The Mystic Masseur; the 1950 Trinidad general election in The Suffrage of Elvira; the preparations for Independence in The Middle Passage; the first elections in Trinidad post its independence in 1966 in The Mimic Men; the Black Power Movement in ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ and Guerrillas; the installation of the first non-PNM government in 1987 and the 1990 coup in A Way in the World. He further explored various aspects of his East Indian heritage in the Forewords to The Loss of El Dorado and The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories, and once again in A Writer’s People. Perhaps Trinidadians could fault him for not commenting directly or obliquely on the first East Indian-dominated UNC government in 1995. However, this move away from Trinidadian politics was accompanied by a focus on what his own life had to offer the next generation. Eight out of 12 novels that Naipaul wrote, namely, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, A Flag on the Island, In A Free State, and Guerrillas, are based in Trinidad.

Introduction: Legal Archaeology – Methodology or Metaphor?

This chapter explores the intersection of the disciplines of law and archaeology, through the lens of the methodology of legal archaeology. Law and archaeology both involve physical and intellectual activity, and connections between law and archaeology can arise in different ways. Archaeologists need to follow law and regulations for managing archaeological sites, including how they carry out excavations and in relation to what they find. For example, there are laws which regulate the finding of artefacts classed as treasure, certain historical sites are protected by the law and a licence is needed for the excavation of human remains. Materials or objects excavated during an archaeological dig might give insights about the law at a particular time or tell us something about historical relationships between people and the law. Much like other ‘law and’ movements, there are different ways in which we could depict the various interactions between law and archaeology. We might examine ‘law as archaeology’, whereby law is analysed using what would usually be an archaeological approach, or ‘archaeology as law’, where archaeological research is conducted according to approaches that are more familiar to law researchers. We can also consider ‘law of archaeology’, exploring how archaeology is subject to legal regulation, or ‘law in archaeology’, investigating what an archaeological finding can tell us about law, or perhaps ‘archaeology of law’, which could involve analysis of law inspired by archaeological techniques.

This chapter is not concerned with all the possible ways in which the disciplines of law and archaeology interact but is primarily focused on exploring the methodology of legal archaeology, to consider whether we can learn more about its scope by looking to the discipline of archaeology itself, rather than simply using archaeology-related terminology as a metaphor. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to outline the current understandings of legal archaeology alongside an examination of aspects of what archaeologists do, in order to highlight the extent to which the discipline of archaeology has synergies with legal archaeology. The purpose of this analysis is to enable us to consider the use of the archaeology language within this approach and help us to realise legal archaeology as an established and recognisable socio-legal methodology, rather than simply as a metaphor or as something that is absorbed into the canon of legal history.