Strategically positioned venetian blinds on the central watchtower prevent the prisoners from observing the guards, while allowing the prison officers an unobstructed view of the prisoners. The idea behind this arrangement was to inculcate compliance, self-surveillance and self-control in the inmates by subjecting them to the fiction of permanent surveillance.

8. See Mark Seltzer’s Henry James and the Art of Power (1984), John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988), and the debate between Dorrit Cohn (“Optics” and “Reply”), Seltzer (“The Graphic”) and Bender (“Making”) in New Literary History. See Hale (“Punishment”) for the link between filmic narratives and the Panopticon, and Grass for the connection between first-person narration and Victorian prisons.