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

For example, Dickens’ Little Dorrit and Christine Edzard’s two-partite 1987 film adaptation are set at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison; Dickens’ Great Expectations and David Lean’s 1946 film adaptation deal with Newgate Prison, the hulks and penal colonies; the film Wilde narrates Oscar Wilde’s time in Victorian prisons; the novella “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” and its 1964 film version are set at an English borstal; and the novel A Clockwork Orange and its 1971 film adaptation deal with a futurist British prison (including a special psychiatric unit). The American autobiography I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! and the 1932 film version present us with a chain gang in the south of the US; the novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and the film version The Shawshank Redemption are set at the so-called Shawshank State Prison, while the movie Down by Law (1986) deals with the Orleans Parish Prison; the novel Birdman of Alcatraz and its 1962 film adaptation are set at the federal penitentiaries at Leavenworth and Alcatraz; and the novel Sleepers and its 1996 film version present us with the Wilkinson Home for Boys, a reform school in New York.

This takes me to prison narratives that I have excluded from the corpus. First, the book focuses on narratives that were produced after the ‘birth’ of the ‘new’ prison system at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Second, the book restricts itself to a discussion of narratives about male prisoners. This is so because the prison population in real and fictional prisons has been and still is predominantly male. Furthermore, an analysis of female inmates and prison narratives would yield a slightly different account of the experience of imprisonment than the one given in this study. For example, women may be forced to give birth in prison, and they may be shackled during their pregnancy, “during transport to a hospital, throughout labour, and again immediately after the child is born” (Schulz 33). This is of course a humiliating component of the prison experience men do not have to go through. In contrast to prison narratives about male prisoners, which frequently reproduce traditional masculinity (or tough-guy ideals), the deconstruction of gender roles appears to be one of the most central concerns of prison narratives about imprisoned women.