The Wife Of Martin Guerre Analysis

The wife of Martin Guerre
Discuss the tensions between legal and moral justice in wife of Martin Guerre.

The engrossing novella entitled ‘The wife of Martin Guerre' remarks on the inadequacies of Artigues' justice system in dealing with moral dilemmas in the rural village. Lewis' interpretation of a true historical incident that occurred in 1539, questions what human values and qualities their legal and social system suppresses when formulated on behalf of the community. Characters in ‘The wife of Martin Guerre' exist without questioning the mandates of social structure, and consequently these customs that guarantee the community's protection, concomitantly damage and restrictively inhibit individuals. Lewis induces readers ultimately to query the existence of a legal which is reliant on narrowness and rigidity, when its objective is to satisfy the needs of elaborate and intricate individuals. Evidently, the legal
In his ``Rhetoric of Justice'', Aristotle differentiates between two kinds of law: the particular and the universal. The first, he says, is that which an individual community lays down for itself. The second, the universal law, is what Aristotle refers to as ``a natural and universal notion of right and wrong''. Lewis's novel portrays a community which have instituted the first type of law, but there is no adequate sense of community justice being precise and universally correct. Furthermore, Lewis highlights the nature of Artigues' oblivious justice system which innocently supposes man's law to be inextricable from God's will. Though the nature of the social and legal structure ensure the survival and prosperity of Artigues, to the detriment of