Prison Forms: Genre and Excarceral Politics in Victorian Literature
Cawkwell, Rachel
2021
Abstract
Prison Forms: Genre and Excarceral Politics in Victorian Literature focuses on popular nineteenth-century literature that engages with criminal justice topics that were timely in their era and continue unresolved in the twenty-first century. I read literary and periodical texts from the Victorian era through a lens of carceral studies scholarship to locate carceral and excarceral tendencies in the intertwined and centuries-long trajectories of prison reform and penal abolition. I center the word “excarceral” to focus on the aspects of penal abolitionist thought that works to undo prison logics and structures and to create viable alternatives, rather than the prison moratorium or decarceration strains of thought. This term also centers Peter Linebaugh’s formulation of excarceration as inspiring broad recognition of and resistance against carceral forces. In addition to contributing to the ongoing theoretical conversation over this broader time frame, this project closely examines four case studies to understand how literature contributes to the political discussions of their moments. Each chapter of this dissertation extends from a single text to examine both a genre concern and an aspect of the British penal system. I articulate how an instance of a literary genre emerges from an intersecting horizon of expectations, the generic and the political. These two exigencies together encourage or inhibit the text’s alignment with liberatory or carceral logics. The United Kingdom increasingly moved towards incarceration as its primary mode of punishment over the nineteenth century, but the four chapters of this dissertation resist the idea of a unified, inevitable progression toward reliance on carceral logics. I begin by exploring the concept of excarceration within the ballad form. Ballads about jail-breaking hero Jack Sheppard, originally written for William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1839 Jack Sheppard, propagated and normalized the potential of excarceration for readers, by shifting and spreading through the media of theater and cheap broadsides. I next move to the mid-1850s to consider the generic expectations of life stories in and beyond prisons. In Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, the novel form plays with the full range of the life story genre, from personal fantasy to recorded memoir, and I use this opportunity to examine how incarceration shapes life paths and self-conceptions. Then, I focus on the process of reentry in the realm of melodrama, through Tom Taylor’s 1863 play The Ticket-of-Leave Man. I show how the melodramatic mode’s unique relation to realism establishes real concerns about national character while failing to transcend the form’s focus on static heroes and villains. Finally, I return to the excarceral themes of the first chapter to explore the intersection between penal abolition and utopianism. I read William Morris’s theatrical and periodical work on the late 1880s alongside his 1890 novel News from Nowhere to show Morris’s consistent pairing of immediate action with an abolitionist future vision. Collectively, these case studies affirm the value of marrying generic and political analysis of texts. At a moment when the United States is engaged in national conversation around the racist history and effects of our criminal justice system, my dissertation suggests the value in looking comparatively at historical case studies to understand the way processes of expression interact with theories of punishment and freedom.Deep Blue DOI
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prison genre British abolitionist nineteenth century literature
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