Modern Imagination of Imprisonment

face of a prisoner

Literary scholars have associated the rise of the novel with the development of penitentiaries.^ Recent literary studies have traced sensibility and the imagination of imprisonment from the eighteenth century through to the present.^ ^ A review of a book on the Romantic prison in French literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries observed:

One could not have imagined, in advance, that the prison image was so ubiquitous and so adaptable to so many moods.^

A study of prisoner memoirs and novels found:

many prisoners and nonprisoners exhibit powerful positive associations to incarceration. … prison is viewed as a refuge from the prosaic, as a mother who provides and protects, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, and a catalyst of intense friendship.^

Hedonic adaptation to circumstances is a well-documented psychological effect.^ ^ That prisoners can be happy isn’t surprising. Nonetheless, imprisonment endures as public, coercive punishment as least in part because of consistent public understanding that imprisonment is punitive.

Obscurement of punitiveness in literary imagination of imprisonment and in public discussion of imprisonment is mainly a communicative effect. Prometheus’s continual complaining of suffering in imprisonment in the fifth-century Athenian Prometheus Bound is difficult to endure and isn’t typical of prisoners. Prometheus Bound is a literary means to advance understanding of prisoners’ real, human suffering.

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