Eric H. Reiter, Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870–1950 (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019)

It is a great pleasure to review Eric Reiter’s Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870–1950. In this prize-winning book, Reiter examines a transition and transformation in the framing of emotional harm in Quebec law over an eighty-year period ending in the mid-20th century. Based on a careful examination grounded in the records of civil cases brought to address allegations of harm caused by various kinds of emotionally-charged indignities, Reiter describes a transition – embedded in legal rules and the framing of arguments – that gradually shifted to conceptualize these kinds of claims through a lens of violated rights.

The civil law was receptive to the idea that an injury for which someone was at fault deserved compensation, a difference from the common law. Chapters one and eight analyze the shifting scholarly arguments about these kinds of harms, assessing the complex weaving of threads of French and German legal thought into Quebec law – itself evolving – along with moments in which Canadian common law supplied influence. Reiter’s skill in analyzing legal texts in French and German to assess – in English, obviously – the impact on Quebec law is very impressive.

Chapters 2 through 7 describe the
law’s recognition – through the narratives told in court, legal documents, and a multitude of other accounts – of moral injuries. By describing cases in deep, sensitive detail, Reiter shows emotions as legal objects, narrated, examined, and evaluated through litigation. He carefully treats the distinction between the emotions people actually felt and the way these were interpreted – even crafted – by lawyers, judges and others so as to align with and sometimes challenge social and legal norms. Chapters take up specific emotions, including dishonour (including familial dishonour), shame arising from intrusions on one’s body, betrayal from love gone wrong, bereavement and death-related vulnerability, and the emotions raised by acts of discrimination. Reiter is acutely attentive to the gender and class dimensions of these issues and deftly handles the complexities of racial discrimination in a period in which the wrong, though acutely felt, was often difficult to push into legal frames.

There is a vividness to Reiter’s book, a strong sense of place and milieu, as, for example, in this passage: “Auguste Lebeau’s hotel, in the very shadow of Montreal’s Abbattoirs de l’est, was where the butchers gathered, at least when they didn’t walk an extra block to cheer on their favourites in the horse races at Delorimier Park. By 1892, there were only one or two houses besides the hotel at that isolated northern end of Frontenac Street – the stockyard smell ensured growth would be slow. Lebeau’s hotel was a draw, however, even if we assume he was no longer allowing illegal gambling on the premises, for which he had been fined ten dollars in police court in 1884.” (198–99) The stage is set for Lebeau’s wife, Justine Leblanc, to begin an affair with one of the butchers, with ensuing legal complexities.

Wounded Feelings will open new lines of inquiry about the cross-pollination among legal cultures and about the translation of normative concepts – and feelings – into legal ones. In the background are Quebec’s – and especially Montreal’s – shifting social and technological worlds, with train accidents causing deaths and injuries, cars being used to abduct two young missionaries, and televisions being employed to get viewers to harass someone by calling him on the telephone to “‘cheer him up.’” “Privacy, in particular,” Reiter remarks, “was an early site for rights language.” (304) It is likely not coincidental that American writers beginning in the late 19th century were using rights language to work through the legal implications of the transgressions of privacy made possible through these technologies.

In scholarly terms, Eric Reiter’s Wounded Feelings will be a landmark in its field. It is an exemplary piece of historical craft, and it is a delight to read. It deserves to be recommended in the highest terms.

Lyndsay Campbell

University of Calgary

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v90.0018.