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

Furthermore, these delimitations are connected with other cultural delineations. The newcomer is typically a member of the white and heterosexual middle class, and has to go through a process of symbolic ‘feminization’ in prison that threatens his masculinity² (violent and sadistic guards, ‘homosexual’ rapes, and time in the ‘hole’ normally play an important role). Also, twentieth-century narratives typically counter the ill-treatment of this prisoner-hero by means of his escape and restore his manliness and, by extension, the phallic power of the white middle class. Such narratives do not address the situation of the actual prison population in British and American prisons. Rather, they present us with stories about the unjust victimization of ‘innocent’ members of the white and heterosexual middle class, and they additionally code colored and homosexual inmates as ‘real’ criminals who belong where they are.

The ideological underpinnings of prison narratives also closely correlate with the use of prison metaphors and similes. I treat similes and metaphors as being more or less equivalent because I am concerned with the results of the mapping process. In both cases, the recipient starts to correlate aspects of the source and the target domain and creates a complex understanding of their conjunction to generate new meaning structures. Like Fludernik (“The Prison as World,” “Metaphorics”), I discriminate between three types of prison metaphors. First, metaphors of imprisonment (PRISON IS X) that describe the prison in terms of another domain of human experience usually play an important role with regard to the rendering of the prison experience. Second, the ‘prison-as-world’ simile operates by means of a homological structure between the prison and society and accentuates that certain attitudes or societal eccentricities are reproduced in prison. Third, proper prison metaphors (X IS PRISON) project the image of the prison onto domains outside a legal or penal context and are normally used to critique a certain segment of society.

Since my analyses of prison metaphors aim at semantic significance, they contribute to my investigation of ideological underpinnings. Dickens’ mature fiction focuses on ‘negative’ metaphors of imprisonment that describe the prison as a tomb, a cage, or in terms of hell.