The self in the cell: Narrating the Victorian prisoner

Scholars have long depended upon Michael Foucault's discussion of the Panopticon, with its surveillant model of penal discipline, to shape their considerations of the novel and the prison. The Victorian novel---laden with omniscient narrators, criminal classes, and critiques of social power---has been closely allied with this vision. But the real Victorian prison was based upon a model of separate confinement, self-reflection, and self-narrated guilt that has other implications. Many of the greatest Victorian prison novels, from Little Dorrit to His Natural Life and It is Never Too Late to Mend, bear little resemblance to Foucault's vision. Instead they reflect a system of imprisonment that includes separate confinement, transportation, and disciplinary strategies with explicit (rather than metaphoric) narrative concerns Demonstrating the space that narrative---particularly autobiography---occupies within this historical prison, I offer a new understanding of prison novels' recurrent phenomena, especially their constant return to a submerged, psychological, yet essential first-person account of imprisonment.; In this constant return, prison novels raise crucial questions of narrative authority, psychological exposition, and the private self. Because reforming the prisoner depended heavily upon producing guilt---a new understanding of one's past life and its meaning---the separate prison required prisoners to express their past wickedness in autobiographies. The prison chaplain "read" and "interpreted" these to discover their hidden meanings, since convicts could not be trusted to tell true stories. Asking its agents to invent this "true" account of the psychological self in the cell, the prison authorized the construction of representations that could claim to present psychological "truth." Prison novels recreate this narrative dynamic, their authors finding in the prison's narrative logic a justification for making psychological exposition part of the prisoner's narrative truth. Indeed, escaping the prison often means reclaiming the power to narrate one's life, one's guilt, and one's experience of the cell. Recreating an imprisonment that places the convict's private truth within a story told by a reforming, narrating other, prison novelists like Dickens, Collins, Reade, Marcus Clarke, and Charlotte Bronte presage the rules for psychological storytelling that Freud articulated at the turn of the century.