The Legal System and Moral Ambiguity in Early 20th Century American Literature

Through a close literary reading and analysis of three stories (Billy Budd, Sailor, Noon Wine, and “A Jury of Her Peers”) I examine each author’s approach to exploring moral ambiguity in violent crime and the fictional representation of the American legal system. Looking for patterns of similarity (and of difference) in the exploration of guilt and innocence between each text, I come to a conclusion about how these authors utilized moral ambiguity as a central theme in order to respond to injustices in the American legal system at the time. While the law often arranges to come to a clear and unambiguous verdict, literature often humanizes and leans toward emphasizing the gray areas shaping human character and action. I first compare and contrast how each author sought justice in fiction. Then I gather research on the American legal system in the early 20th century, as well as any actual crimes that the texts were based off of, looking at how each author responded to injustices in the legal system. Such injustices include wrongful convictions, corruption in the legal process, and lack of nuance in the system. Lastly, I come to the conclusion that not only did writers want to find justice in fiction when the could not find it in real life, they also tried to achieve in fiction what they thought the legal system itself was designed to produce: an accurate account of “truth,” despite the challenges of conflicting evidence or moral ambiguity.Liberal Art