https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.096
From Statute to Household: Legal Consciousness and Domestic Authority in Mother Mary Comes to Me
UDBA FATIMA
Undergraduate Student, Department of English
Aligarh Muslim University, India
Abstract: Law is sometimes recognized through judgments and institutional procedures, yet its effects are most deeply experienced in everyday life through authority, discipline, and access to rights. Literary narratives play an important role in illustrating these lived dimensions of law by connecting legal structures to ordinary experience and cultural memory. This paper examines Mother Mary Comes to Me as a literary text that represents gendered encounters with law and authority beyond formal legal institutions. Although the memoir is a personal account of Arundhati Roy’s relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, it also revisits the life of a woman whose resistance to gender-biased inheritance laws marked a significant moment in Indian legal history. Rather than approaching the text as a legal record or feminist manifesto, this paper reads it as a literary space through which law is experienced and negotiated.
The paper argues that the memoir represents the Travancore Christian Succession Act not only as a courtroom issue but as a lived structure of authority operating through family relations, property, discipline, and social custom. Mary Roy emerges as a figure through whom the effects of law become visible in everyday acts of resistance within domestic and social institutions. Using qualitative textual analysis and narrative approaches to law, the paper shows how literary memoir humanizes legal experience and expands the understanding of justice beyond formal institutions.
Keywords: Travancore Christian Succession Act, Mary Roy, Legal Consciousness, Memoir, Gender and Law
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