Trials and traumas in twentieth-century American drama.

Abstract

This study addresses the conflictual relationship between trials and traumas in twentiethcentury American drama. By drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that includes mainly legal scholarships, political studies, trauma studies, sociology, history, and literary studies as well as adapting Felman‘s concept of legal trauma, I argue that Miller‘s The Crucible, Berrigan‘s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, and Smith‘s Twilight: Los Angles 1992 serve as lucid expositions and critical appraisal of the justice system‘s traumatic failure. The three chapters of this study move through such conception by exploring instances in which the justice system would resort to violence, blindness and silence in its process to resolve, respectively, three legal crises or traumas. I begin with a discussion of the roots of the legacy of Salem witch trials‘ legal trauma and its reappearance in the modern Communist witchhunts. I then argue that the reluctance of the law institutions to situate the trauma of the Vietnam War within an effective and comprehensible legal language features a case of traumatic legal failure. I conclude by discussing how the process of institutionalizing racism and dismissing a whole community‘s collective traumatic memory registers indeed the justice system‘s striking, inexplicable legal drama and trauma.