Proceso actual

This fatal breach of honor is then linked to a wild beast of the forest prowling for prey, and each of these words suggest clear contrasts to the idea of a hunt, another strictly codified and honorable mode of killing. In British tradition90_,

from deer and boar hunting and then fox hunting after that, each possible object, subject and action are precisely defined and given its own special term. In the example of fox hunting, by this time replacing deer hunting abroad and also on the rise in North America, the action of “hunting” itself gets broken down:

90

Comparison to British hunting tradition is most directly relevant since we’re talking about British justice, but highly codified traditions of hunt had long histories through much of Europe by this time.

hunters “cast”, “draw” and “head” as their “hounds” (never “dogs”) “feather”, then finally “open” to give “tongue” to a “line”, trying not to “blank”, “heel” or “riot” meanwhile.91 _{On the receiving end of all this code and ritual is the fox,}

who is not prey, but “quarry”. Unless this quarry has luck, it will be driven to “covert” and ultimately “accounted for”, a privilege-driven euphemism for ripped apart by dogs. In the trial, the words “beast”, “prowl” and “prey” are merely used as quoted, not explained, so perhaps one shouldn’t overplay this comparison to a hunt. But three particular differences between the two deserve mention. First, precise terminology specific to a highly codified activity like the hunt creates its own conceptual territory that rules out substitute words: the “quarry” in a hunt is never “prey”, and the rich vocabulary of ways a huntsman can hunt do not include “prowl”. Given the previous discussion of honor, call the huntsman a “beast” and you have a duel on your hands.

Second, the relation between “wild”, “beast”, “forest”, “prowl” and “prey” on one hand, and membership in society on the other, is both mutually exclusive and starkly hierarchical. The very existence of the court, never mind Cutan’s death sentence, demonstrated that society stood in control and judgment of the beast. The two sides are also asymmetrical, with one side richly described through various trades among jurors, a complex court system, classes of

building, multiple languages, unique personalities with their own names and so

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See Ridley (1990), and Cannon (2002). For an anthropological view of fox hunting as ritual in England, see Howe (1981). For parallel terms used for hunting other kinds of game, see Cox (1928).

on. The other side is singular, “the wild beasts of the forest”. The plural on “beasts” only makes them generic when preceded by the article, “the”, which stresses that they’re all the same, that they must all be “guarded against” with the same set of precautions. This opposition, of course, resonates with a notion of progress that motivated the overseas journey and then settlement, with all its prejudices about what civilization entailed, what had to be done or changed to achieve it, and what the vision excluded. Settlement brought order and law to wildness, created contingently safe, productive space out of forests, and tamed the beast. Conversely, any member of society convicted of turning into beast got his membership revoked.92

Third, just as the duel was a practice of privileged classes, so the vocabulary of a proper hunt would reproduce a sense of class since the hunt was historically a class based activity. If that vocabulary was not itself used in the trial, I have suggested that awareness of it would have helped give the feral metaphors leveled at Cutan the oppositional force they had. It would be simplistic to say that even an implied opposition to hunting was about class protectionism, that it reproduced a ruling class in any simple sense. The noble classes among which the hunt first emerged as a distinguishing sport are not the same classes one

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It is tempting to imagine this implied boundary between society’s inside and outside as a kind of markedness relation, specifically in a semiotic sense that Waugh (1982) distinguishes from the

phonological approach first proposed by Trubetskoy and Jakobson. As with markedness relations, the term defined as “other” (in our case the beast) becomes internally undifferentiated: there is only one kind of beast, but many kinds of membership in society. Markedness relations are also hierarchical, and as Waugh points out, linguistic markedness does not exist in a social, political or conceptual vacuum, but in a world where all these elements resonate with and reinforce each other. For a general discussion of markedness in linguistics, see Battistella (1990). On semiotic and social ramifications of linguistic markedness, see Waugh (1982).

finds centuries later in a different country, where both the structure of rule and the emerging exigencies that needed ruling were different. Even in Britain, hunting eventually came to include many rungs below the royalty and

aristocracy where it began, so dynamism of the acting subject would have to be accounted for in any case. On the other hand, if the specific identity of class structure and how it got shaped by new exigencies and players makes the reproduction of a specific class a complicated matter on the frontier of Upper Canada, perhaps the hunt and the duel resonate with a sense of class more abstractly. As Howe (1981:296) argues for the case of fox hunting in Britain, support for the sport among various classes, even those who could not directly participate but who could at least “agree” to have the chase run over their land, suggests at least a grudging consensus about class itself, much the way people across the social hierarchy might be persuaded to believe in a monarchy. In this view, what got reproduced in Roe’s words, as also in acquittals for the duel, was at the very least a sense that not all people, as measured by their current

situations, are actually equal.