| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Prison narratives spread certain images of prisons and their inmates and these pictures always correlate with a certain type of ideology in the sense of James H. Kavanagh. Kavanagh argues that an ideology “has the function of producing an obvious ‘reality’ that social subjects can assume and accept, precisely as if it had not been socially produced and did not need to be ‘known’ at all” (311). Dickens’ mature fiction participates in a philanthropic discourse that constructs prisoners as the innocent victims of an evil society. Dickens represents the prison as an instrument of a fundamentally unjust society which is to be blamed for the existence of criminals. Twentieth-century novels and films, on the other hand, usually legitimate the prison as a social institution by arguing that irreclaimably depraved criminals exist and need to be punished. They participate in a conservative discourse of pro-prison propaganda that presents the prison as a societal necessity.
My investigation of the ideological underpinnings of prison narratives naturally also comprises an analysis of the ways in which novels and films narrate the prison experience. Since fictional prison narratives always transform and distort the actual prison experience, I pay particular attention to the ways in which novels and films depart from the experiential realities of prison life. In a second step, I interpret these narrations (or ‘misrepresentations’) against the foil of historical and criminological analyses of the prison experience in British and American prisons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
While Dickens narrates the prison experience in terms of the unjust suffering of many idealized and sympathetic inmates, prison novels and films of the twentieth century tend to focus on one newcomer who is sent to prison because he committed a trivial crime and then suffers under a brutal system. And while they represent the fate of this ‘unique’ character as being terrible and unjust, the attitude toward the mass of ordinary prisoners is complicit with the common view that ‘real’ criminals have to be imprisoned. Prison narratives of the twentieth century only invite us to sympathize with the quasi-innocent prisoner-hero but do not allow us to empathize with the ‘deviant’ rest of the prison population and thus implicitly sanction the existence of prisons.