Carol Weisbrod uses a variety of stories to illuminate important issues in how society, through law, defines important relationships in the family. Beginning with a story most familiar to us in the opera Madame Butterfly, this book addresses such issues as marriage, divorce, parent-child relations and abuses, and nonmarital intimate contacts.

Each chapter works with fictional literature or narratives inspired by biography or myth, ranging from the Book of Esther to the stories of Kafka to memoirs of family life. Weisbrod unites the book with running commentary on Madame Butterfly and variations on that story.

These commentaries on variations on the Butterfly story wonderfully exhibit the author's argument that fiction better expresses the complexity of intimate lives than does the crude, simple language of the law. Weisbrod looks at law from the outside, using narratives to provide a perspective on the issues of law and social structure - and individual responses to law.

Butterfly, the Bride explores the relationships between the inner life and the public through an examination of what is ordinarily classified as the sphere of "private life," the world of family relationships.