Divorce and the Meta-Narrative of History, (reviewing J. Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America (1997))

Recently the realm of divorce law has attracted the attention of legal historians and theorists who have realized that it provides, not a backwater, but a fertile arena in which to explore the intersections of statutory law, appellate law, trial law, social change, popular culture, gender, and the complicated behavior of individual litigants cast in the role of adversaries but formerly lovers, intimates, and family members. Perhaps in no other area of law have formal requirements and rules so differed from the lived realities of peoples’ lives. Furthermore, within these interstices appear the age-old questions: does law shape culture, does culture shape law, or are the two are one and the same? Recently, two valuable books–by Hendrik Hartog and Norma Basch–present remarkably rich and complicated narratives of the changing course of American divorce law in the nineteenth century and the multitude of ideologies that shaped it. J. Herbie DiFonzo’s Beneath the Fault Line, which appeared before the studies by Hartog and Basch, also provides a welcome history of divorce, focusing on the twentieth century