Justice & Law Quote by Margaret Anderson

The line lands like a sly correction to the mythology of the rebel artist. Anderson refuses the flattering script of heroic defiance; she claims something more destabilizing: ignorance, not martyrdom. "I defied nothing at all" punctures the romantic pose where censorship conveniently turns an editor into a freedom fighter. Her version is both funnier and sharper: the law wasn’t an enemy she squared up to, it was background noise she didn’t even register.

That’s the subtextual flex. By insisting she "didn't know it existed", Anderson implies the law is less a moral authority than an administrative trap - a set of rules that only becomes visible when it wants to discipline you. The real indictment arrives in the next sentence: it "didn't occur to me that anyone would want to curb my inspiration". The naïveté is strategic. She casts censorship as the truly aberrant behavior, something so petty and anxious it wouldn’t naturally enter an artist’s mind. Inspiration, in her framing, is presumptively free; repression is the weird, intrusive counter-impulse.

Context gives it teeth. As the editor of The Little Review, Anderson helped publish modernists when modernism was still a legal problem - most famously the obscenity prosecution over serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The quote reads like post-trial clarity: the state doesn’t just regulate conduct, it retroactively rewrites creative intention as provocation. Anderson resists that rewrite. She won’t let the authorities gift her a narrative of "defiance" that centers their power. She keeps the center where she thinks it belongs: with the work, and the audacity of making it.