| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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For instance, in women-in-prison (WIP) films, female prisoners like Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) in Caged (1949) use the prison as a cultural space to subvert, and break out of, traditional gender roles. At the end of the film, Marie is unsuited to domestic life, symbolically throws her wedding ring away, and, accompanied by joyful jazz music, emerges from the prison door to become a self-determined and happy crook.
Surprisingly, even the many WIP films of the 1970s that shade off into sexploitation movies like Caged Heat (1974) question traditional gender roles by constructing a type of a female masculinity. With regard to such films, Judith Halberstam notes that “the scenes of rebellious women in prison films always allow for the possibility of an overt feminist message that involves both a critique of male-dominated society and some notion of female community” (201). Similarly, prison autobiographies by women—such as the anonymous Female Convict (1934) or Edna O’Brien’s So I Went to Prison (1938)—foreground community feeling among women and view imprisonment as the logical outcome of exploitation by men. Since WIP narratives focus on the exploitation of women by the patriarchal system or construct the prison as a counter-site that allows women to deconstruct traditional gender roles, they require a different analytical framework and call for a separate study (rather than a single section or an afterthought in a book about male prisoners).
What is new about the present study? While earlier studies of prison narratives focus on the dialectical relationship between physical incarceration and mental flight,6 more recent work concentrates on ideological questions from the perspective of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), and addresses the alleged importance of Jeremy Bentham’s plans for a Panopticon (1791).7 These newer studies link narrative structures (like authorial narration, first-person narratives or neutral filmic narration) to structural attributes of the penitentiary and/or the idea of panoptic vision.8 Thus, certain narratives are considered to be conservative and autocratic because their formal features are argued to reproduce the prison. And, by extension, these structures are supposed to infiltrate us with a pro-prison ideology.