Like Penelope's canvas: literature and the principle of equality

Abstract

Because of its content, because it highlights the immense inequality between men and women of flesh and blood, the modern or bourgeois novel educates the reader in what Martha Nussbaum calls "judgment of similar possibilities", encourages him to perceive the equal dignity of people: it is, therefore, a formidable promoter of the moral and legal value of equality. The modern novel does not limit itself to offer the public that individuals change according to circumstances, it accustoms them to thinking that they have the right to want to change: its appearance was therefore also a significant psychological factor in social mobility. After having unmasked the alibi of economic and social success as a synonym of merit and virtue and thus having called into question the imperfect affirmation of equality in the order of political relations (ending, in other words, the form of census democracy), literature presses today to free the principle of equality, universalist by essence, from another contradiction: from the decline on a small scale of individual and separate States. This is just one of the good reasons to introduce a little literature in the training of lawyers.