Introduction

The Introduction offers a theoretical overview of the topic of imprisonment and supplies an initial conspectus of major models of carceral space. It discusses the study’s relationship to Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish, elucidating key aspects of this paradigm and explaining how the book extends but also modifies Foucault’s work. The Introduction also provides an explanation of basic terminology in recent metaphor theory, distinguishing between different types of metaphor that will become relevant in the bulk of the study. Another section concentrates on literary topoi and the terminology used in the study of tropes and topoi. The final section delineates the concept of the carceral imaginary and underlines its connection to the politics of punishment as well as issues of ethics and aesthetics.

Prisons of Femininity

Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple). This is followed by a discussion of the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third section concentrates on domesticity and the body in so far as they are perceived as metaphorically confining, contrasting Susan Glaspell’s Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the woman writer; it notes how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereotype: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.

The Cancer of Punitivity

Chapter 6 raises crucial ethical and political questions about the practice of punishment by means of the prison. It discusses the central importance of power in the carceral environment and its potential for humanitarian abuse. After a reading of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ the chapter outlines G. B. Shaw’s and Karl Menninger’s metaphoric thesis of imprisonment as crime and goes on to present an analysis of punitivity in current penal policy and public polemic. The second half of the chapter turns to a delineation of the close affinities between penal punitivity and colonial oppression, analysing memoirs by Robben Island inmates and the Malawian Sam Mpasu, as well as poetry by Dennis Brutus and Jack Mapanje.

The Prison as Cage

Chapter 5 analyses recurrent cage metaphors, discussing how this trope both evokes sympathy in the image of the unhappy bird in the cage and supplies more ambivalent reactions in reference to caged wild beasts. One section of the chapter illustrates the golden cage metaphor on the example of D. H. Lawrence’s novella ‘The Captain’s Doll’. Eugene O’Neill’s Hairy Ape serves to delineate the political and social ramifications of the beast in the cage metaphor. The second half of the chapter looks to the possibility of transcending one’s state of imprisonment. It outlines tropes of transcendence in English poetry from the Renaissance to the Romantic period and uses William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) to mark an important turning point in that history.

Poeta in Vinculis I

Chapter 2 contrasts the writings of Thomas More and John Bunyan. The chapter foregrounds these authors’ strategies of imaginative and psychological coping, considering how their texts reflect the traumatic experience of incarceration in the imaginative re-enactment of their fiction. The chapter introduces a number of prison tropes besides the WORLD AS PRISON/PRISON AS WORLD metaphor, most prominently in Bunyan the SIN AS PRISON trope. A major focus of the chapter concerns the difficult relationship between fact, fiction, and allegory in the work of the two authors and their contemporaries. A final section of the chapter links Bunyan’s poetry to the tradition of late medieval and early modern prison verse.

Industry and Idleness

Chapter 7 discusses discourses about labour in the Victorian period and the comparison they draw by means of the slavery metaphor between prisons and factories. Starting out from a consideration of traditional ideas of work as punishing labour, the chapter outlines two aspects of the labour and prison analogy: (a) the status of work in the new penitentiaries, penal servitude establishments, and workhouses; and (b) perceptions of factories as nota bene prisons. Case studies include Charles Reade’s It is Never Too Late To Mend (1856) for (a) and William Godwin’s novel Fleetwood (1805), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841), and Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) for (b). The chapter traces the history of the prison-like factories to its American incarnations in the work of Melville and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Prisons as Homes and Homes as Prisons

Chapter 4 discusses the common HOME AS PRISON/PRISON AS HOME tropes. It first illustrates the paradox of the happy prison in a discussion of Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Turning to the negative trope of the home as prison, it traces its ramifications in Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. The uncanny ambivalence of metaphoric imprisonment is then illustrated in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Focusing on domesticity, the chapter next turns to the HOME AS PRISON topos and its manifestation in the MARRIAGE AS PRISON metaphor. Case studies include texts about both male and female marital incarceration: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’ and Fay Weldon’s ‘Weekend’.

Poeta in Vinculis II

Continuing the contrast between personal accounts of imprisonment and fictional elaborations of carceralities, Chapter 3 concentrates on the twentieth century and on (post)colonial contexts. The three authors discussed at length are Brendan Behan, the Irish dramatist; Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author and ecological activist; and Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet. Whereas Behan’s and Saro-Wiwa’s autobiographical texts, at least on the surface, appear to be quite reliable, i.e. factual, accounts of their imprisonment, their literary work, just like Breytenbach’s, is highly allusive, ironic, and allegorical; they model the carceral experience through distortive lenses of comedy, farce, satire, or parable. The chapter also emphasizes the use of the prison and legal criminalization as major political strategies of discrimination against (ethnic and other) minorities as well as political dissidents.

Enthralment and Bondage

Chapter 8 introduces the prison amoureuse topos featuring the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The chapter opens with a reading of Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an instance of a juxtaposition of literal and metaphorical imprisonment. The following section introduces the medieval prison amoureuse trope (Boethius, Froissart, Diego de San Pedro, Charles d’Orléans, James I), and its Renaissance repercussions in the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Lovelace. This leads on to a consideration of masochism and bondage, with Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an illustrative example. John Dryden’s play All for Love with its opposition of love and duty as bondage concludes the chapter.

Conclusions

Chapter 10 outlines the major insights gained from the preceding analyses. These are supplemented by a discussion of the results from database researches into prison metaphors documented in several tables and diagrams in the chapter and its appendix. The chapter also returns to the questions of why and how the carceral can become a source of aesthetic pleasure, sifting the uneasy relationship between sensationalism and the evocation of empathy for prisoners in literary texts. As an illustration of the aesthetic potential of the metaphoric prison one section provides an excursus on metapoetic treatments on the confining nature of verse. The coda to the volume attests to the ethical and political relevance of the carceral imaginary and its reflection of fundamental ethical issues raised by the policy of penal imprisonment.