Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens ...

By means of these metaphors, which highlight the inmates’ agony, Dickens condemns the prison system as such. Twentieth-century narratives, on the other hand, only critique discipline-based institutions but argue in favor of rehabilitative penal styles. More specifically, they describe the former by using ‘negative’ metaphors and the latter through positive ones that invite us to see the prison as a womb, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, a catalyst of intense friendship, or as an ‘academy.’ Furthermore, prison narratives of the twentieth century suggest that society needs such reformative prisons for colored and homosexual inmates, while members of the white and heterosexual middle class do not belong there.

Finally, since this study deals with the ways in which novels and films narrate the prison, I also address similarities, differences, and continuities between filmic and novelistic narration. With regard to the depiction of crucial features of the experience of imprisonment, the book wishes to gain an understanding of the possibilities of the media novel and film. Furthermore, Dickens’ mature fiction anticipates prison narratives of the twentieth century in a wide variety of ways. First, Dickens’ panoramic visions in the authorial novels³ Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities foreshadow prison films of the twentieth century. Both Dickens’ novels and twentieth-century prison films correlate with a third-person perspective, extremely detailed descriptions of prison settings, and various attempts to simulate the inmates’ internal states through external details. Second, the embedded first-person confessions, letters and diaries in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities as well as the pseudo-autobiography Great Expectations, written immediately after A Tale of Two Cities, anticipate the increasingly narrower and internal visions of first-person prison novels in the twentieth century.

Since this study discusses prison novels and films, it makes sense to provide definitions of the prison novel and the prison film before moving on to a more specific account of the corpus. According to W.B. Carnochan, “literature of the prison includes, on the one hand, fictions written about prison experience and, on the other, writing of every sort by inmates” (“Literature” 431).