Metaphors of Confinement The Prison in Fact Fiction and Fantasy Monika Fludernik Download PDF Chapter

Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison
in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy Monika

Fludernik
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/metaphors-of-confinement-the-prison-in-fact-fiction-a
nd-fantasy-monika-fludernik/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/07/19, SPi
P R A I SE F O R M ETA PH OR S OF C ON F I N E M E N T
‘Metaphors of Confinement makes a significant contribution to current and ongoing debates

on the ethics of imprisonment, on the role of the prison in society and in the cultural
imaginary, and on the relations between law and literature from the early modern period
to the present. It is a formidable piece of scholarship, wide-ranging in the scope of its
research and innovative in its methodology; it is also passionate in its ethical and political
commitments, and subtle and learned in its readings of a rich array of fascinating texts.
Monika Fludernik’s magisterial study will make its mark as an essential point of reference
for any future discussion of prisons and prison literature.’
Professor Hal Gladfelder, University of Manchester
‘This book is the culmination of decades of work by one of the world’s top narratologists.
Fludernik takes the reader through a fascinating, enlightening, and often troubling jour-
ney through representations of literal, imagined, and metaphorical prisons in literatures in
English from the Middle Ages to the present day. Drawing eclectically from legal studies,
literary criticism, cultural and social theory, stylistics, and metaphor theory, the book
reveals the many facets of literature’s fascination with imprisonment over the centuries,
and addresses the ethical issues associated with both literary and real-world prisons. While
the book’s main contribution is to the study of metaphor, many different audiences will be
interested in it for different reasons, and all will marvel at the author’s unique combination
of towering intellect, theoretical versatility and vast scholarship. There is no doubt that this
book is destined to become a classic.’
Professor Elena Semino, Lancaster University
Metaphors of Confinement
L AW A N D L I T E R AT U R E
The Law and Literature series publishes work that connects legal ideas to literary
and cultural history, texts, and artefacts. The series encompasses a wide range of
historical periods, literary genres, legal fields and theories, and transnational subjects,
focusing on interdisciplinary books that engage with legal and literary forms,
methods, concepts, dispositions, and media. It seeks innovative studies of every kind,
including but not limited to work that examines race, ethnicity, gender, national
identity, criminal and civil law, legal institutions and actors, digital media,
intellectual property, economic markets, and corporate power, while also
foregrounding current interpretive methods in the humanities, using these
methods as dynamic tools that are themselves subject to scrutiny.
Series Editors
Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa
Simon Stern, University of Toronto
Metaphors of
Confinement
The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy
M O N I KA F LU D E R N I K
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Monika Fludernik 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931802
ISBN 978–0–19–884090–9
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To my mother, Ingeborg Böhm, with gratitude and in memory

of her love and support
Preface
This is a book about carceral metaphors and the carceral in fact and fiction. The
prisons I deal with are mainly literary and imaginary ones, but also always ‘real’,
whether the texts deal with penal institutions or metaphorical prisons that affect
their protagonists’ minds. One of the prime theses of this book is that a distinc-
tion between the real (historical and contemporary sites of incarceration and dis-
courses about imprisonment) and the imaginary (representations of these in
literature and the arts as well as metaphorical references to prisons) fails to
explain the omnipresence of the carceral in literature but also in the world.
Prisons are (perceived to be) everywhere, in language, in texts, in images, in our
minds. Our carceral imaginary operates not merely inside jails but also outside
correctional institutions in our everyday world. We are concerned with prisons
not only when we engage in the politics of security and punishment, moulding
penal confinement through legislation and the implementation of these laws; our
experience of and fantasies about confinement also pervade social and societal
arenas that have no immediate connection with crime, punishment, the police or
the law. Politically, too, the past decade has pushed the issue of imprisonment to
the front of the news, whether in relation to the USA’s unparalleled rise of the
prison population (currently at over 2.3 million (Tonry 2016)), the incidences of
torture and abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, or the finan-
cial costs of full-scale incarceration. More generally, Western culture is steeped in
images of imprisonment, and this fact shapes my essential questions. What are
the function and uses of carcerality in our societies? What are its ideological
rewards and its psychological compensations?
More specifically, this book deals with a wide variety of recurrent topoi and
images that permeate literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present. These
include, among others, tropes such as the world as prison and prison as world topoi,
the metaphor of the prison-like home or of the prison as refuge and hermitage, of
the body as prison, and of the prison amoureuse, the prison of love. This inventory,
which comprises many more culturally fossilized figurations of the carceral, dis-
plays a great variety of textual manifestations. Historically, these were able to adapt
to political and institutional developments such as the invention of the penitentiary
in the late eighteenth century. The dialectic of familiar tropes and changing condi-
tions of application constitutes another important facet of the present study. The
present book is the first comprehensive study of carceral imagery. Despite some
initial work on the container metaphor by Mark Johnson (1987), neither linguistic
metaphor theory nor literary criticism have so far systematically focused on the
pervasive prison metaphors in literary and non-literary texts.
viii Preface
Finally, the book concerns not merely our emotional ambivalences regarding
the carceral, but also the question as to how literature wrestles with the personal
experience of confinement, with its horror and with the suffering and pain that it
entails. Like texts that deal with the overcoming of trauma or of other elementary
life experiences—death, searing pain, spiritual transcendence—the literature
about imprisonment is ultimately concerned with the ineffable, with that which
almost cannot be spoken about but nevertheless has to be represented in words.
The carceral eludes easy narratability not merely on account of its affinities with
personal trauma; it additionally thwarts tellability because prison life is banal,
repetitive, and lacks eventfulness. Life behind bars seems to freeze inmates’ lives;
it converts prisonized experience into unlimited stasis or an unceasing repetition
of sameness, causing an experiential void, a feeling of non-existence, or a lack of
identity. Imprisonment displays all the characteristics of liminality, of a threshold,
but undermines the transitional quality of this chronotope by extending the time
of this borderline space into a heterotopia of exile.
The verbal articulations in writings about the prison pertain to the realm of the
aesthetic; they are subject to the rules of art. An aesthetics of horror and suffering
offers palpable freedoms of expression, but it also raises ethical questions. Is it
legitimate for art to play with the ordeals of real people languishing in detention?
Does (some) literature thrive on the sensational aura of incarceration and, like
the Gothic novel, derive a thrill from the fate of those caught in the cruel grip of
an oppressive regime or in the clutch of penal punitivity? Does literature, instead
of making political statements against the dehumanizing conditions of the c arceral,
evade its ethical responsibilities and indulge in vicarious sadism (or masochism;
or both)? And yet it seems to be the case that only in the virtual scenarios of art
are we able to perceive some moral questions from a virtual perspective, or to
sidestep our ineluctable subjection to the ideologies and political influences of
our immediate environment.
Every day we are exposed to the appellative force of penal and judicial rhetoric
(of law and order, us vs. them, crime and punishment, right and wrong, freedom
vs. terrorism, and so on). These discourses are mostly exclusionary, aggressive,
retributive, and their main recipe is that of incarceration or exile—lock them up
or shut them out. Literature predominantly opposes this ethics of punishment
and eviction by looking at individuals acting on both sides of the locked door—
depicting those who shut others in and those who have been deprived of their
freedom. At the same time, one has to acknowledge that, by translating violence,
cruelty, and suffering into the realm of the aesthetic, literature runs the risk of
idealizing social protest and political rebellion, or of legitimating their repression.
Even more worryingly, literature may be accused of aestheticizing cruelty or
suffering, thereby reifying them as consumable vicarious experiences.
Most distressingly, it could be argued that literature ends up catering to the
unsavoury desires of irresponsible sensationalism, or turns the serious issues
Preface ix
treated in the text into mere accessories of its main concerns: style, emotional
affect or the thrill of exoticism and the perverse. From this perspective, art turns
into an object of consumption that no longer performs its speculative, contempla-
tive, and critical functions. Yet prisons are also a social fact whose many real-life
manifestations will hover on the borders of our awareness. The literary text
images a prison or metaphorically invokes a carceral scenario; it foregrounds its
fictionality, veiling or marginalizing the real-life import of the politics and ethics
of penal confinement. This veiling is both its strength and its weakness. The paradox
of carceral politics as aesthetics, and of carceral aesthetics as ideology, mirrors
that of the place of prison in society. It reflects on the inherent marginality of the
prison, its status as heterotopia, as that realm in, but also outside of, society which
remains alien to that larger segment of the population who have been lucky not to
have had direct experience of it. In fact, the carceral would cease to elicit so much
fascination and produce so many fantasies if it became as generally accessible as
the life of politicians or shopkeepers. It is the prison as a secret and therefore
exotic site in the midst of familiar everyday life which fascinates us. Such secret
places also define our lives as rooted in environments with heterotopic appendages.
These heterotopic sites may then come to function as Derridean supplements and
expose the normal world as, likewise, a prison.
A note is in order here regarding the types of prisons or kinds of confinement
that will be the topic of this study. The book takes a very broad historical sweep,
discussing representative works from English literature, or rather: literatures in
English, of all genres from the Middle Ages to postcolonialism, including texts
from Irish, North American, South Asian, and African provenance. A few non-
English works are considered where appropriate. Films were excluded since there
exists already a relatively extensive literature on the prison movie (Crowther 1989;
Rafter 2000; Wilson/O’Sullivan 2004; Alber 2007; Caster 2008). As a second over-
all strategy, I have reduced the mass of literature on captivity by concentrating on
penal (including political) imprisonment, covering both pre-trial custody and
penal detention proper. My book therefore largely excludes prisons and carceral
experiences that occur outside a penal context. It does not deal with prisoners of
war, juvenile delinquents (except in one case) or victims of gulags and concentra-
tion camps. Nor does it concern itself with slavery, North American captivity nar-
ratives, or tales of Barbary Coast captivity. The focus is on the individual prisoner
in a correctional facility, not in a camp. The decision to exclude these other forms
of imprisonment was mostly pragmatic—to have taken them on board as well
would have made the already very large corpus of texts unmanageable. Nevertheless,
though not discussed extensively in the text, some of these other types of confine-
ment are alluded to where relevant. Moreover, a number of the insights offered in
this work will also be applicable to gulags or captivity narratives. On the other
hand, these more collective forms of imprisonment, with their prominent aspect
of ethnic victimization and their emphasis on forced labour, suggest that they do
x Preface
indeed fall into a separate category and should not be conflated indiscriminately
with cases of individual penal sentencing and incarceration. Despite the funda-
mental difference between individual and collective practices of social exclusion,
in practice this distinction is of course frequently undermined, as when Catholics
under Elizabeth I were accused of treason, or dissenters under Charles II incar-
cerated for failing to toe the orthodoxic line. I therefore privilege the prototype
of individual and personal incarceration, but sometimes look across this self-
imposed fence to contiguous areas of interest.
To focus my very extensive material, two decisions have been made. No total-
izing narrative is presented; the book does not attempt an overall literary history
of the English prison, although historical contextualizations and insights into
literary developments play a key role in the study. Nor will this book put forward
an overarching thesis to be illustrated exhaustively in relation to all periods
and genres of English literature. Though deeply inspired by Michel Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish (1975/1979a) and John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary
(1987) with its theories about the anticipatory depiction of the new model of
incarceration in English fiction, this book deliberately avoids a similarly teleological
approach. My study does not rely on the assumption of a major paradigm shift, a
basic discontinuity between old and new prisons as proposed by Foucault and many
studies inspired by his work. On the contrary, this book underlines the textually
observable continuities between pre-Benthamite and post-Benthamite represen-
tational practices. Indeed, I have chosen to disperse and split the Foucauldian
master narrative into a series of tropological and thematic case studies that allow
for a multiplicity of concurrent and interweaving mini-narratives. This design
enables me to accommodate overall continuities as well as local discontinuities
and to illustrate the persistence of topoi and genres through selected stretches of
time. Such a focus on the (non-)simultaneity of various developments will also
help to highlight aspects in the literary representation of incarceration that are
complementary to the Foucauldian paradigm or which, at times, even contradict
it. Most importantly, my approach demonstrates the interlacing of many topoi
and tropes across genres and historical periods.
The choice of texts analysed in this study is based on two criteria. On the one
hand, I have tried to find particularly representative examples for the topoi that
I focus on, indicating at the same time that there is a wide range of such cases
both diachronically and generically. On the other hand, the selection of texts was
motivated by default. Since representations of carcerality (though not discussions
of carceral metaphor) have been a staple of literary criticism, with key studies by
Victor Brombert (The Romantic Prison, 1975), W. B. Carnochan (Confinement
and Flight, 1977), John Bender (Imagining the Penitentiary, 1987), Dennis Massey
(Doing Time in American Prisons, 1989), Hal Gladfelder (Criminality and Narrative,
2001), Jonathan Grossman (The Art of Alibi, 2002), Sean Grass (The Self in the
Cell, 2003) and Caleb Smith (The Prison and the American Imagination, 2009),
Preface xi
my attempt has been to introduce to readers’ attention works that have so far not
attracted intensive analysis from a carceral perspective.
This explains why the book contains relatively little discussion of eighteenth-
century texts, since there exists a great number of excellent contributions to the his-
tory of crime and its literary reflection. Let me only mention the work by Ignatieff
(1978), Spierenburg (1984, 1991), Sharpe (1985), Beattie (1986), Linebaugh (1991),
Gatrell (1994), or Gaskill (2000) on eighteenth-century crime as well as the inspir-
ing critical analyses of literary treatments provided by Hollingworth (1963), Arnold
(1985), Faller (1987, 1993), or Gladfelder (2001). I have not been able to avoid
discussing Charles Dickens entirely, despite the extensive literature on Dickens
and the prison (Collins 1994 [1962]; Tambling 1986; McKnight 1993; Alber 2007;
and Alber/Lauterbach 2009—to mention just a few). At times, I have selected a
work that so far has not figured in discourses on the prison, though the carceral in
other texts by the same author has received ample critical attention. (For instance,
Caleb Smith provides an insightful discussion of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
whereas I focus on The House of the Seven Gables.) Occasionally, I return to land
marks of the literary prison when my own analysis extends and complements that
of a previous critic, as is the case for Charles Reade’s It is Never Too Late to Mend,
already given an incisive treatment by Sean Grass (2003).
Methodologically, this study utilizes a spectrum of different approaches. The
interdisciplinary nature of the monograph arose from the diverse areas of research
with which my own work has been concerned during my career. Thus, though my
major research orientation, narratology, plays a comparatively minor role in this
book, my interest and expertise in stylistics, especially metaphor theory, and Law
and Literature studies, as well as in South Asian literature, postcolonial theory
and the eighteenth century, have significantly contributed to the unique approach
practised in this study, as did the fact that my teaching covers English literature
from the thirteenth century onwards. Such a variegated methodological and his-
torical background has provided me with a very special viewpoint on the topic of
the carceral in English literature, enabling me to combine a focus on the linguistic
surface structure of my sources—the metaphors—with issues of Law and Literature.
It has also allowed me to fuse a diachronic with a systematic or theoretical per-
spective. In my arguments, as outlined in the introduction, metaphor theory,
tropology, and topics (the study of topoi), in addition to theories of ideology play
an important role in defining the cultural work of prison narratives. In the book,
rhetorical and historical analysis as well as plain close reading are pervasive;
where appropriate, I also resort to feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial the-
ory. Thematically as well as theoretically, this study is therefore designed on the
model of bricolage, that is to say, on the pattern of creative juxtaposition.
The same is true of the structure of the text itself. Since my book does not set
out a single thesis which is followed through various stages of argument in indi-
vidual chapters, the arrangement of chapters focuses on a series of tropes and on
xii Preface
the complex network of cross-references between them. The selected topoi and
metaphors are traced in their subtle and often convoluted ramifications, slyly
inscribed in the web of literary texture. My presentation picks up on individual
threads and follows them through their historical and discursive meanderings,
noting how particular strands combine with others, merge, or separate again.
Some sections of the volume are concerned with specific theoretical issues (ideol-
ogy, fictionality, metaphor theory), but all analyse individual tropes or topoi and
explore their historical development, documenting the generic diversity of prison
writing, and comparing and contrasting representations of carcerality in poetry,
fiction, and drama. The broad spectrum of genres and periods on which this
study relies makes it possible to outline a variety of developments through the
centuries and to illustrate invariance as well as diversity of motifs and forms.
The book is also an indictment of carceral heterotopias from a humanitarian
and ethical perspective; an argument pioneered by literature from its inception.
Literal carcerality invokes serious social and ethical questions. Ultimately, beyond
the linguistic and literary manifestations of carcerality, one needs to confront the
real prisons which are often monuments of suffering and injustice.
Chapter Overview
The Introduction (‘Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary’)

offers a theoretical overview of the topic of imprisonment and supplies an initial
conspectus of major models of (carceral) space. It discusses the study’s relation-
ship to Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish, elucidating key aspects of this
paradigm and explaining how I extend but also modify Foucault’s work. The
introduction also introduces readers to basic terminology in recent metaphor
theory, to literary topoi, and to the concept of the carceral imaginary.
Chapter 1 (‘The Prison as World—The World as Prison: Similitudes and
Homologies’) is the first in a series of chapters modelled on a chiastic formula.
Starting with the most general and all-encompassing chiastic prison metaphor,
the chapter deals with two types of metaphors: those that liken the prison to the
(or a) world, seeing the prison as a microcosm, and those that project an inverse
scenario, in which the world is metaphorically depicted as a prison. Discussing
how prison, as a heterotopia (like hell) is conceived both as lying outside
the world and as sharing numerous structural features with it, I move to a
consideration of early modern similitudes in the ‘character’ literature of Overbury,
Dekker, Mynshul, and Fennor. In these texts, prisons are figured, among other
source domains, as ships, universities and hospitals—metaphors that underline
their structural equivalences to the world in general. Since prisons during
the Renaissance and up to the early nineteenth century were run like hotels
(thus reflecting the social stratification of society at large), the chapter goes on to
Preface xiii
illustrate how precisely prisons were perceived to mirror early modern society,
focusing on two city comedies, Eastward Ho (1605) and The City Gallant (1614).
From these early modern instances of the prison as world metaphor, I turn to
the world as prison trope. (In this book, conceptual metaphors are printed in
small caps.) I move from The Beggar’s Opera to twentieth-century literary inflec-
tions of the topos in Samuel Beckett’s prose and Edward Bond’s play Olly’s Prison.
Though prisons no longer reflect society at large (at least in terms of their social
composition), perceptions of the carceral as being symbolic of the world continue
to have extensive currency, particularly in a postcolonial context (as Chapter 6
will demonstrate).
Chapters 2 and 3 (‘Poeta in Vinculis’) are devoted to the work of authors who
have themselves been imprisoned and who have written both autobiographically
and imaginatively about incarceration. Chapter 2 concentrates on the early mod-
ern period where autobiographical documents are not only rare but also suspect
as simple reflections of personal experience. Chapter 2 contrasts Thomas More
and John Bunyan as two authors who rose to the status of martyrs and confessors
for their faith and depicted imprisonment as a test that God made them undergo.
What I particularly foreground are the strategies of imaginative and psychological
coping that these authors employ in their autobiographical work. I consider how
they reflect the emotional, traumatic experience of incarceration in the imagina-
tive re-enactment of their fiction. Despite these communalities, More and Bunyan
could not be more different in many other respects, most basically of course in
the clash between their Catholic and Protestant affiliations. The chapter introduces
a number of prison tropes besides the world as prison/prison as world meta-
phor, most prominently in Bunyan the sin as prison trope. My analysis of the
texts focuses on the attempt to deduce experiential aspects from highly allegorical
and symbolic writings that do not easily allow a factoring of the discourse into
fictional and non-fictional passages or segments. In fact, as More’s Dialogue of
Comfort against Tribulation suggests in particular, the fictional scenario is
meant to discuss personal problems, just as the imaginative re-enactment of
Christ’s predicament in Gethsemane in his De Tristitia Christi reflects the very
sentiments and arguments More was facing while in prison. In a parallel manner,
in Bunyan’s case, what appear to be authentic autobiographical accounts can be
shown to incorporate the schemas and soteriological models of religious conver-
sion narratives to such an extent that the recognition of a unique personal experi-
ence, except in rare moments, becomes quite elusive. Bunyan’s work is moreover
notable for its communitarian perspective; he sees himself as part of a persecuted
religious group. A final section of the chapter links Bunyan’s poetry to the tradition
of late medieval and early modern prison verse.
Chapter 3, continuing the contrast between personal accounts of imprison
ment and fictional elaborations of carceralities, concentrates on the twentieth
century and on (post)colonial contexts. The three authors discussed at length are
xiv Preface
Brendan Behan, the Irish dramatist; Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author and
ecological activist; and Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet. Whereas
Behan’s and Saro-Wiwa’s autobiographical texts, at least on the surface, appear to
be quite reliable, factual accounts of their imprisonment, their literary work, just
like Breytenbach’s, is highly allusive, ironic, and allegorical; it models the carceral
experience through distortive lenses of comedy, farce, satire, or parable and
clearly magnifies its fictionality. It is precisely on account of the ostensive literari-
ness of his drama that Behan has been selected over authors like Jack London or
Malcolm Braly, whose, to some extent, overly realistic representations of the prison
experience tend to reduce the fictionality of their texts to the invention of vicari-
ous protagonists and a fictive setting. Here, and in Chapter 6, I also emphasize the
use of the prison and legal criminalization as major political strategies of discrim-
ination against (ethnic and other) minorities as well as political dissidents.
Chapter 4 (‘Prisons as Homes and Homes as Prisons: From the Happy Prison
to Strangulation by Domesticity’) returns to the chiasmic figure, this time in dis-
cussing the common home as prison/prison as home tropes. Since Victor
Brombert’s classic, The Romantic Prison (1975), the topos of the prison as a refuge
and haven of safety and happiness has been a critical commonplace. The chapter
first illustrates this paradox of the happy prison in a discussion of Dickens’s Little
Dorrit. I then turn to the negative trope of the home as prison, tracing its ramifi-
cations in Dombey and Son and, more extensively, Little Dorrit and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. The uncanny ambivalence of metaphoric
imprisonment is then illustrated in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Turning to
the much more mundane issue of marriage and domesticity, I next consider the
home as prison topos in its manifestation of the marriage as prison meta-
phor. I discuss examples of both male and female marital incarceration, focus-
ing on texts by Charles Johnson (Middle Passage) and George Eliot
(Middlemarch) for male bondage, and on Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’ and
Fay Weldon’s ‘Weekend’ for women’s connubial imprisonment.
Chapter 5 (‘The Prison as Cage: Abjection and Transcendence’) provides a
counterpoint to the prison as enclosure, which was dominant in Chapter 4. It
focuses on the image of the cage, a metonymic prison lexeme. Starting with the
short story ‘The Cage’ by Bertram Chandler, my discussion moves from literal
cages and the treatment of captives as animals—an anticipation of Chapter 6—to
literary evocations of the cage. The cage metaphor captures the inherent ambiva-
lence of prison imagery in an especially clear manner. The chapter analyses
recurrent cage metaphors relating to caged animals, discussing how the metaphor
both evokes sympathy in the image of the unhappy bird in the cage as a victim
and supplies much more ambivalent scenarios in passages where the incarcerated
are compared to wild beasts. At the same time, the cage is not only a prison but
has associations with flight, since birds are prototypically kept in cages. One
section of the chapter discusses the golden cage metaphor, frequently applied to
Preface xv
marriage, and illustrates its ambivalences on the example of D. H. Lawrence’s

novella ‘The Captain’s Doll’. Eugene O’Neill’s Hairy Ape serves to delineate the
political and social ramifications of the beast in the cage metaphor. The second
half of the chapter looks to the possibility of transcending one’s state of imprison-
ment. It outlines tropes of transcendence in English poetry from the Renaissance
to the Romantic period and uses William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) to
mark an important turning point in that history.
Chapter 6 (‘The Cancer of Punitivity: Prisons of Slavery and Hell’) broadens
the so far predominantly literary approach to raise crucial ethical and political
questions. It discusses the central importance of power in the carceral environ
ment, namely the power that the system, including and especially warders, has
over inmates and that may lead to humanitarian abuse. After a reading of Oscar
Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ which foregrounds these issues, the chapter out-
lines G. B. Shaw’s and Karl Menninger’s theses about the criminality of imprison-
ment and goes on to present an analysis of punitivity in penal policy and public
discussions about crime. Building on Agozino (2003), who has described the
close affinities between penal punitivity and colonial oppression, I then elaborate
on the historical connection between present-day carceral abuse and disciplinary
practices current during slavery, extending historical work by C. Dayan (2007)
and others to illustrative literary analyses of this connection in a short story by
Rudyard Kipling. In my discussion of Robben Island memoirs I further elaborate
on this context in relation to the metaphors and tropes used in the analysed
texts. The chapter closes with topical and critical remarks regarding wholesale
incarceration and the inhumane treatment of political prisoners.
Chapter 7 (‘Industry and Idleness: Discipline and Punishment in the Capitalist
Prison’) turns to the nineteenth century and discusses discourses about labour in
the Victorian period and the comparison they draw by means of the slavery
metaphor between prisons and factories. Starting out from a consideration of
traditional ideas of work as punishing labour, and with the protestant work ethic
and the Victorian glorification of industry and thrift as a backdrop, two aspects of
the labour and prison analogy are outlined. First, the status of work in the new
penitentiaries, penal servitude establishments, and workhouses is scrutinized and
compared to factory work. The key text used to illustrate this alignment is Charles
Reade’s It is Never Too Late To Mend (1856). The second half of the chapter turns
to representations of factories as nota bene prisons and outlines the development
of this imagery during the nineteenth century. Starting with William Godwin’s
novel Fleetwood (1805), Elizabeth Charlotte Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841) and
Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), I trace the history of the prison-like factory to its American
incarnations at the end of the nineteenth century. My analysis includes brief
considerations of relevant passages in the poetry of Wordsworth, Hood, and
Barrett Browning. I conclude with two American texts, Melville’s ‘The Paradise of
Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The chapter
xvi Preface
stresses not only the important connection between work in prison and outside
it during the Victorian period; it also highlights the interrelation between the
market, general living standards, and prison conditions even today.
Chapter 8 (‘Enthralment and Bondage: Love as a Prison’) moves back into
the medieval and early modern periods to introduce the prison amoureuse topos
with the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The popular
love as prison trope recurs even in twentieth-century texts, where it acquires a
prominent masochistic undertone. Chapter 8 opens with a consideration of Mary
Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an instance of a juxtaposition of literal and
metaphorical imprisonment, both based on a love triangle. The following section
introduces the medieval prison amoureuse trope and its Renaissance repercussions
in the work of Shakespeare and Spenser. This leads on to a consideration of maso-
chism and bondage, with Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an
illustrative example. John Dryden’s play All for Love, his rewrite of Antony and
Cleopatra, concludes the chapter. Like Cholmondeley’s novel, Dryden’s play juxta-
poses two concepts, in this case not two types of imprisonment but two types of
love which are variously perceived as imprisoning.
Chapter 9 (‘Prisons of Femininity’) attempts to compensate for the over-repre-
sentation of texts by male authors and especially of male protagonists in previous
chapters by focusing on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in
patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprison-
ment and its reflection in one literary example, a scene in Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple. I next turn to the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah
Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third
section concentrates on domesticity and the body insofar as they are perceived as
metaphorically confining. My discussion of this aspect contrasts Susan Glaspell’s
play Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section
returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the
woman writer; I note how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of
feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereo-
type: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.
Chapter 10 (‘Conclusions: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Carcerality’) provides a
summary to the volume, outlining what I see as the major insights gained from
the analyses. These are then supplemented by a discussion of the results from my
database researches into prison metaphors. I also return to the questions of why
and how the carceral can become a source of aesthetic pleasure: how do literary
sensationalism and empathy link with one another; and what is their political
relevance in representations of the carceral? By way of coda to the volume, the
chapter returns to the fundamental ethical issues raised by the institution of
imprisonment.
* * *
Preface xvii
General readers and scholars in English studies will find something to their taste
in all chapters, but may want to skip more linguistically oriented sections such as
0.5, 5.2, or 10.2. For metaphor specialists these sections will, by contrast, be of
prime interest, and they may also find the discussion of similitudes in Section 1.2
and the many deployments of animal imagery in a variety of texts useful, particu-
larly in Chapters 5 and 6, but also in the discussion of the slavery metaphor in
Chapter 7. For critical metaphor theorists most of the book will be relevant since
the political and social uses of prison imagery are in evidence throughout the
study. Finally, for law and literature scholars, this monograph will provide a
number of innovative angles on account of its focus on language and due to its
emphasis of the cognitive domain as central for the establishment of the carceral
imaginary. As for general readers interested in prisons in literature, they may
want to only dip into the introduction (possibly too academic and theoretical),
but should find much in the other chapters that could be stimulating and rewarding.
A recommended reading strategy might be browsing for authors, periods, or
themes of interest.
Acknowledgements
I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the help and support received
from a large number of colleagues, friends, and staff in the production of the
manuscript. This book has been germinating a long time. When I moved to
Freiburg in 1993, I started to work on saints’ legends and began to read Sir Thomas
More. It was at that time that the first ideas for this study were conceived. In 1995,
I taught two courses on the basis of the material I had by then collected. Due to
administrative duties and involvement in an interdisciplinary research group on
identity and alterity, of which I became the managing director in 2000, my inter-
ests shifted from narratology to postcolonial theory and South Asian literature. I
returned to the subject of prisons by participating in an interdisciplinary project
on ‘Norm, Law and Criminalization’, funded by the German Research Foundation,
which gave me the chance to conduct preliminary studies for this book. Having
started out by focusing on prison settings and the symbolizations of carceral
space, I found that my priorities had shifted towards a more extensive commit-
ment to historical and contemporary issues of imprisonment. At the same time,
the lacuna in research regarding prison metaphors led me to concentrate more
extensively on carceral imagery rather than on settings. After delving into meta-
phor theory and composing a series of articles on carceral metaphor, I finally
started to write this book during a sabbatical semester in Oxford in the autumn of
2003 funded with my prize money from the Landesforschungspreis Baden-
Württemberg. I continued working on the project during years of extensive
managerial and administrative commitments, eventually completing it in 2015.
My first thanks go to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsge
mein schaft) for funding the project ‘Processes of Criminalization and the
Experience of Imprisonment: Spaces, Bodies, Identities, Topoi, Metaphors’
(Az. FL 283/3-1 ff., 2004–7), which enabled me to spend a sabbatical semester
(winter term 2006–7) in Oxford. It is also thanks to the German Research Foundation
(GRK 1767/1) that I was able to accept a senior fellowship at the Institut d’Études
Avancées in Paris in 2014–15, which gave me the chance to complete the study.
I am grateful to Gretty Mirdal and her équipe at the IEA for allowing me all
imaginable freedom for my research. I would also like to thank All Souls College
for awarding me a fellowship during Michaelmas term 2001 and the English
Faculty at Oxford University for hosting me during my stays in Oxford in the
winter semesters of 2003 and 2010. During the academic year 2009–10, the
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies welcomed me as an internal senior fellow.
I am particularly grateful to my companion fellows and résidents in Freiburg and
xx Acknowledgements
Paris who gave me feedback on my project. The completion of the manuscript

was significantly aided by the intellectual exchange at the IEA.
This book would not have been completed without the support of the research
group that stimulated its inception. I would like to extend my gratitude to Hans-
Joachim Gehrke, the (co-)director of the Sonderforschungsbereich 541 (‘Identities
and Alterities’) and to Hans-Helmuth Gander and Hans-Jörg Albrecht, my two
collaborators in the criminalization project. Thanks also go to my long-time dear
colleague and friend Paul Goetsch, recently deceased, for his unflagging support
and continued interest in my work. I would moreover like to thank Greta Olson
for her intellectual, moral, and emotional encouragement, friendship and sup-
port. In the context of the project ‘Processes of Criminalization’, I am grateful to
all the other members of the research group for our stimulating and lively
exchanges: Jan Alber, Martin Brandenstein, Thomas Dürr, Verena Krenberger,
and Thomas Lederer. Previous versions of individual chapters have been read and
commented on by Jan Alber, Katharina Boehm, Jean-Jacques Chardin, Margaret
Freeman, Terri Hennings, Ken Ireland, Benjamin Kohlmann, Michael McKeon,
Amit Marcus, Greta Olson, David Paroissien, and Lauren Shohet. I would like to
express my most grateful appreciation for their valuable feedback. The final ver-
sion of the manuscript was moreover meticulously studied by Eva von Contzen,
who provided insightful comments and suggestions, for which I am extremely
grateful. Help with final editing and indexing has come from Kerstin Fest. The
late Patricia Häusler-Greenfield provided numerous constructive suggestions on
phraseology, though the text as published is of course entirely my own responsi-
bility. I am as ever extremely grateful to Pat for her clear-headed and sympathetic
commentary and for the atmosphere of mutual appreciation and friendship that
has marked our collaboration. Help with phraseology has also come from Teresa
Woods and is gratefully acknowledged. Moreover, thanks are due to several gen-
erations of (former) research assistants: Hannah Blincko, Ramona Früh, Tanja
Haferkorn, Dorothee Klein, Carolin Krauße, Heidi Liedke, Lars Münzer, Caroline
Pirlet, Golnaz Shams, Andreas Wirag, and Charlotte Wolff. I am grateful for their
expert and fastidious formatting and source-checking of the manuscript at vari-
ous stages of its evolution. This book could not have been completed without the
support of my secretary Luise Lohmann, who with good grace put up with my
DOS-based NotaBene programme until I finally switched to the detested Word,
and who did not demur when faced with my many handwritten emendations,
which required extensive editing. To her I am, as always, deeply indebted. I would
also like to thank Simon Stern and Robert Spoo for including this manuscript in
their Law and Literature series and for their encouragement throughout the pub-
lication process. At Oxford University Press, I am grateful to Jacqueline Norton
and Aimée Wright for expediting the manuscript into print. My most cordial
thanks also go to Brian North, the copy editor of the book.
Parts of this monograph have appeared in articles, though the relevant sections
have been extensively revised and condensed (or, in some cases, expanded) for
Acknowledgements xxi
publication in this book. Section 0.3 of the Introduction is a shortened version of

‘Carceral Topo graphy: Spatiality, Liminality and Corporality in the Literary
Prison’, which appeared in Textual Practice 13.1 (1999: 43–77). It also incorporates
passages from ‘Metaphoric (Im)Prison(ment) and the Constitution of a Carceral
Imaginary’, Anglia 123 (2005: 1–25). Parts of Chapter 1 are based on ‘The Prison
as World—The World as Prison: Theoretical and Historical Aspects of Two
Recurrent Topoi’, Symbolism 3 (2003: 147–89). My discussion of Bunyan and of
Godwin’s Caleb Williams in Chapter 3 has been presented twice as a lecture, first
in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 14 April 2010 (as part of the Schick Lectures), and
again at the FRIAS colloquium in Freiburg on 23 June 2010. ‘The Cage Metaphor:
Extending Narratology into Corpus Studies and Opening it to the Analysis
of Imagery’, published in Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Research,
ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer (Berlin: de Gruyter 2009, 109–28), has been
adapted and expanded for parts of Sections 5.2.1–2. A more extensive version of
Section 6.4.4 was previously published in Cycnos (‘The Prison as Colonial Space’,
Cycnos 19.2 (2002): 175–90) and adapted from a book chapter (‘Caliban Revisited:
Robben Island in the Autobiographical Record’ in In the Grip of the Law: Prisons,
Trials and the Space Between, edited by Monika Fludernik and Greta Olson
(Frankfurt: Lang, 2004, 271–88)). Sections 9.2.1–2, in condensed form, appeared
in ‘Panopticisms: From Fantasy to Metaphor and Reality’, Textual Practice 31.1
(2017: 1–26). I am grateful to Taylor & Francis and the editor of Textual Practice
(https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20) for allowing me to reprint these extracts;
to Klaus Stierstorfer and Rüdiger Ahrens (for Symbolism) for their permission to
use material from my essay; to de Gruyter for permission to reuse sections of my
essays in Anglia and Heinen/Sommer; as well as to Christian Gutleben (Cycnos)
and Peter Lang Publishers for being allowed to reprint sections of my earlier
publications.
Thanks are also due to the following individuals and institutions for allowing
me to reprint illustrations and images.
Front cover: Shinji Takama, Bambus 2005 (Cologne: DuMont Kalenderverlag,
2004). I am extremely grateful to Ms Kumiko Takama, the photographer’s daughter,
for allowing me to use this photograph as a title image.
Introduction: Figure 0.1. The Hague, MMW_10F1, fol. 214v, suffrage (Bruges,
c.1490). ‘St. Margaret of Antioch emerging from the dragon & holding a cross’.
Historiated initial. Book of Hours (use of Rome). The Hague, Museum Meermanno/
House of the Book (excerpt).
Chapter 4: Figure 4.1. ‘World's smallest handcuffs’ © Jeroen van de Wynckel
(https://www.zazzle.com/239499231876568232).
Chapter 8: Figure 8.1. ‘I am a prisoner of your heart’. Design by Steff
© SHEEPWORLD AG. Am Schafhügel 1, D-92289, Ursensollen, Germany.
https://www.sheepworld.de. All rights reserved.
I am also grateful for consent to publish extracts from the following works:
Penguin Random House for Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (Chapter 3; London:
xxii Acknowledgements
Hutchinson, 1958); Bloomsbury Methuen Drama for Brendan Behan, The Quare
Fellow (1966) (Chapter 3); Bloomsbury Publishing plc Methuen Drama for
Edward Bond, Olly’s Prison (1993) © Edward Bond, 1993, Olly’s Prison, Methuen
Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (Chapter 1); Breyten Breytenbach,
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (Chapters 3 and 6; New York: Harcourt,
Brace & Co.)—permission is gratefully acknowledged to the author; The Estate of
Dennis Brutus for Dennis Brutus, A Simple Lust and Stubborn Hope (Chapters 3
and 6; London: Heinemann); Jonathan Clowes Ltd, London, on behalf of the
Estate of Doris Lessing © 1953; World rights excluding UK/Commonwealth) and
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1963, UK/Commonwealth) for Doris Lessing,
‘To Room Nineteen’ (Chapter 4); Pearson, UK for Jack Mapanje, The Chattering
Wagtails of Mikuju Prison (Chapter 3; London: Heinemann, 1993) and Skipping
Without Ropes (Chapter 3; permission to cite The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New
& Selected Poems, Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2004); and Penguin Random
House (for USA, Canada, and Philippines) for Sarah Waters, Affinity (Chapter 9;
© 1999 Sarah Waters. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC) as well as Little
Brown Book Group Ltd (for the rest of the world). The excerpt from Orientalism
by Edward W. Said, © 1978 Edward W. Said, is used by permission of Pantheon
Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved (epigraph to Section 6.4.1).
Contents
List of Figures xxvii

List of Tables xxix
List of Abbreviations xxxi
Typographical Conventions xxxiii
Introduction: Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral
Imaginary1
0.1 Confinement and Flight: Preliminaries 5
0.2 Prison—History and Theory: Beyond Foucault 11
0.3 Spatial Symbolism and Carceral Topography 23
0.3.1 Inside/Out: The Carceral Container Metaphor 25
0.4 Topology and Tropology: Some Definitions 38
0.5 Metaphorics: Metaphor Theory and the Carceral 42
0.6 Ideology and Metaphor: The Carceral Imaginary 52
1. The Prison as World—The World as Prison: Similitudes and
Homologies60
1.1 Prisons, Worlds, and Counterworlds 60
1.2 The Prison as World: Elizabethan and Jacobean Similitudes 64
1.3 Renaissance Comedy: The ‘Old’ Prison 72
1.4 The Prison as Microcosm of General Depravity: Counterworlds
and the Shift from Prison as World to World as Prison81
1.5 The World as Prison: From More to Beckett and Bond 92
1.5.1 Metaphor into Metonymy 92
1.5.2 Carceral Allegory and the Return to Social Criticism 98
1.6 Summary 105
2. Poeta in Vinculis I: Textualizations of the Carceral Experience 109
2.1 Writing and Confinement 109
2.2 Autobiographical vs. Fictional Representations of the Carceral 112
2.3 Sir Thomas More: The World as Prison 121
2.3.1 (Auto)biographical More 121
2.3.2 Why Imprisonment Need Not be Feared:
The World as Prison Trope 128
2.3.3 A Meditation on Christ’s Sacrifice 136
2.4 Bunyan’s Carceral Metaphorics 140
2.4.1 Bunyan in Jail 140
2.4.2 Bunyan’s Carceral Poetics 146
2.4.3 Bunyan and the Prison Experience in Poetry 153
xxiv Contents
3. Poeta in Vinculis II: The Twentieth Century 171

3.1 The Perspective from Below: Brendan Behan (1923–1964) 171
3.1.1 Farce and Farts: The Quare Fellow173
3.1.2 Irish Martyr and Borstal Scout 181
3.2 Ken Saro-Wiwa: Prison Satires in a Neocolonial Setting 190
3.3 Breyten Breytenbach: Parable and the Sublimation of the Prison
Experience in Language 207
3.4 Summary 219
4. Prisons as Homes and Homes as Prisons: From the Happy Prison to
Strangulation by Domesticity 225
4.1 Binary Oppositions and their Reversals 227
4.2 Homes and Prisons 233
4.2.1 Cocooning Oneself for Life: Emily Dickinson’s Poetics
of Confinement 233
4.2.2 Dickens’s Carceral Homes: Metaphor and Psychology 243
4.3 The Home as Tomb and Gothic Fantasies of Live Burial 256
4.3.1 Hawthorne’s Home as Prison: The House of the Seven Gables258
4.4 The Shackles of Marriage: The Home as Prison 267
4.5 Domestic Dungeons: Marital Confinement in the Home 271
4.5.1 The Domestic Tragedy of Marriage 272
4.5.2 ‘To Room Nineteen’: Choking on Freedom 274
4.5.3 Insidious Patriarchy and the Working Woman: ‘Weekend’ 277
4.6. Summary 281
5. The Prison as Cage: Abjection and Transcendence 283
5.1 Prisoners as Animals 283
5.2 Metaphoric Cages in Literature 289
5.2.1 ‘Like a Bird i’th’Cage’: The Golden Cage Trope 295
5.2.2 ‘Like wild beasts in a cage’: The Prowl of the Fierce and
the Despair of the Weak 300
5.3 Prison Cages in Breytenbach and O’Neill: The Cage-Like Prison
in Literature 305
5.3.1 The Prison as Abattoir 305
5.3.2 Eugene O’Neill’s Working Man as Caged Ape 306
5.4 Soaring on the Wings of the Spirit—Fantasies of Escape or
Transcendence316
5.4.1 Caleb Williams and the Subversion of Carceral Topoi 318
5.4.2 Romantic Inflections: Poetic Dungeons of Horror
and Transcendence 326
5.4.3 The Imagination as Avenue of Escape 340
6. The Cancer of Punitivity: Prisons of Slavery and Hell 344
6.1 Crimes of Justice: Penal Hell in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ 346
6.2 From the Crime of Imprisonment to the Crime of Punishment:
Mead, Shaw, Menninger, and Wilson 352
6.3 Vindictive Justice: The Lure of Punitivity 362
Contents xxv
6.4 Colonialism as Carcerality 373

6.4.1 The Colonial Roots of Punitivity 373
6.4.2 Colonial Surveillance; or, Strickland among the Natives 375
6.4.3 Slavery and Carcerality 383
6.4.4 Colonial Imprisonment as Slavery on Robben Island 385
6.5 Real-Life Abjection in the Neocolonial Prison Archipelago 390
6.6 Summary 396
7. Industry and Idleness: Discipline and Punishment in the
Capitalist Prison 399
7.1 Work as Punishment 400
7.2 Work, Silence, and Solitude 406
7.3 The Victorian Convict Prison 414
7.4 Prison Work in British Literature: It is Never Too Late to Mend:
Work as Torture 423
7.5 The Factory as Prison in the Victorian Novel and its American
Equivalents up until Modernism 432
7.5.1 Romantic Anti-Industrialism and the Factories 432
7.5.2 Prison, Slavery, and Hell: Fleetwood as a Factory Novel 441
7.5.3 Factories, Slavery, and Prisons in the 1840s 445
7.5.4 Carceral Working Conditions: Melville and Sinclair 451
7.6 Summary 462
8. Enthralment and Bondage: Love as a Prison 466
8.1 ‘Fast Bound in Misery and Iron’: Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners469
8.2 Fettered by Love: The prison amoureuse Topos in English Literature 478
8.2.1 ‘Martyr I am and prisonere’ 480
8.2.2 Prisoners as Lovers in Renaissance Religious and Secular Verse 489
8.3 Love as Bondage: The Sadeian Tradition in English Literature 496
8.3.1 Cruel Ladies 496
8.3.2 Masochism in Literature 504
8.3.3 Angela Carter’s Poetics of Cruelty 512
8.4 Love versus Bondage: Dryden’s All for Love520
8.5 Summary 529
9. Prisons of Femininity 532
9.1 Women’s Double Confinement in the Penitentiary 533
9.2 Feminism and Queer Inflections of the Panopticon 542
9.2.1 Allegories of Femininity: Carceral Parables in Nights at the Circus542
9.2.2 Linking Criminality and Madness: Sarah Waters’s Affinity
and Fingersmith548
9.3 Domesticity and the Body 561
9.3.1 Communal Surveillance and Sexual Abuse: Maps for Lost Lovers562
9.3.2 Trifles: Domestic Confinement 567
9.4 Avenues of Escape: Transgressions into Madness 570
9.4.1 Driving You Mad: Confinement Breeds Insanity 572
xxvi Contents
9.4.2 Verging on the Insane: Female Creativity and the Prison of

Conventional Gender Roles 577
9.5 Women’s Prisons: A Summary 586
10. Conclusions: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Carcerality 592
10.1 Carceral Spaces 595
10.2 Carceral Metaphorics 597
10.2.1 The Historical Range of Carceral Metaphors 597
10.2.2 Prison is x Metaphors 606
10.2.3 The Mind in Chains: Prison-Houses of Language, Morality,
or Ideology 611
10.3 The Ambivalences of Carceral Topography and Metaphorics 620
10.4 The Aesthetics of Carcerality 625
10.4.1 Poetic Confinement 633
10.5 The Ethical Imperative: The Cultural Role of the Literary Prison
and the Politics of Incarceration 637
Appendix646
Works Cited 691

1. Texts 691
2. Criticism 713
3. Online Sources 771
Author Index 773
Subject Index 783
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
cacciarsi sull’antico e dirupato sentiero, il quale, abbandonato com’è,
va a smarrirsi fra antiche e folte selve di larici, molti de’ quali dalla
vetustà rovesciati s’accatastano qua e là, e formano barriera quasi
insuperabile, incontrandosi per ogni dove salti di torrenti e trabalzi
perigliosissimi. E allora appunto non sembravami di essere nelle
Alpi, ma mi figurava di trovarmi, che so io, nelle selvaggie foreste del
Brasile, essendo impossibile che la mia fantasia voglia rimanersene
un istante laddove realmente si trova, e, non badando al rischio che
correva ad ogni passo di rompermi l’osso del collo, io mi sentiva
rapito dal maraviglioso aspetto di quella solitudine, e faceva in prosa
della poesia lamartiniana, da mandare in ruina, pubblicandola,
qualsiasi librajo.
Attraversato il Vallese, toccato il lago di Ginevra, volli visitarne la
deliziosa riviera, e potete immaginarvi quante sentimentali
esclamazioni m’uscirono dal labbro al mirare Vevey, e tutti i luoghi
che l’appassionata immaginazione di Rousseau fece scena al suo
celebrato romanzo amoroso; e meritarono veramente di trovare un
pittore di quella forza e delicatezza squisita di pennello, poichè
vanamente si cercherebbe un’altra contrada ove l’amore può trovare
negli aspetti di natura sì sublimi corrispondenze con tutte le sue
fantastiche fasi, sieno esse di felicità o di disperazione.
Retrocedendo, pensai poscia di rientrare in Italia varcando il gran
san Bernardo. Avrete letto in molti giornali la diabolica pittura che
fece Alessandro Dumas della salita a quella montagna; è probabile,
per poco che siate dilettanti di romanzi, che l’abbiate parimenti letta
in Cooper nel suo Carnefice di Berna. Ma l’autore dell’Antony, e il
romanziere americano, credetemelo, hanno esagerato la fatica e i
perigli di quel viaggio, per produrre un effetto straordinario, così
come in certi quadri si rafforzano le tinte, anche contro natura,
affinchè facciano più efficace mostra di sè all’esposizione di Brera.
Non voglio sostenere che, durante la cattiva stagione, nel valicare
quell’alpe non si corra pericolo d’essere sepolti sotto qualche
valanga, ma per sei o sette mesi dell’anno vi si arriva alla cima con
tutta facilità e agevolezza; e conosco io migliaja di sentieri per le valli
a noi contigue, ove l’andata è assai più disastrosa e a rompicollo che
sul gran san Bernardo, e pure sono calcate ogni dì da brigatelle di
signorine dai piedini dilicati che vi vanno a sollazzo in partite di
piacere. Ho veduto colassù, la famosa stanza dei morti, che
chiamano carnajo, e non dipenderebbe che dalla mia volontà di
farvene una descrizione bellissima d’orrore, e d’innestarvi qualche
episodio drammatico, ma v’attendo a un altro varco.
Lasciato l’ospizio, e quegli ottimi Padri, giù corsi a Saint-Remy, e la
sera era di già nella città d’Aosta. Alla mattina successiva, desto per
tempo, mi recai a visitare la torre del Lebbroso e le stupende
antichità romane. Mi parve strano che, per ammirare i resti d’un
anfiteatro, fossi costretto d’entrare dalla casa d’un contadino in un
rustico cortiletto, ove, mentre immobile contemplando un alto pezzo
d’antica muraglia rifabbricava nella mia immaginativa quel circo,
commettendone le gradinate al podio ed agli spalti, e su vi vedeva i
togati patrizii, le gemmate matrone; il popolo romoreggiante, e mi
pareva udire il ragghio de’ lioni e l’urlo delle pantere chiuse nelle
carceri, o vedere i gladiatori scannarsi fra i fischi o gli applausi degli
umanissimi spettatori, una frotta di polli e di pulcini beccava sulle
punte de’ miei stivali de’ granelli di miglio che si erano appiccicati nel
transito della villereccia cucina, e mai più s’immaginavano le
innocenti bestiuole che dovessero quel piccolo reficiamento ad
Ottaviano Augusto, ed al mio maestro di storia.
Mi lasciai alle spalle anche la città d’Aosta; e proseguiva il mio
cammino giù per la valle fiancheggiando la Dora. Lungo la strada mi
sovvien che entrato in una picciola osteria a prender fiato, in un
paesello chiamato, se pur non erro, Chambave, vi bevetti un
eccellentissimo vino moscato, il quale si spreme da grappoli che
maturano sovra apriche collinette che s’alzano ivi d’appresso; e se vi
dico io ch’era prelibatissimo, io che rare volte ho potuto mirare sino
al fondo del bicchiere per ritrovarvi la verità, me lo dovete credere.
Registrate adunque questa notizia nel vostro Memoranda, poichè
potrebbe essere di qualche peso (so quel che dico a certi miei lettori)
nel determinarvi un giorno ad intraprendere un viaggio per
contemplare i monumenti romani della città di Aosta.
Aveva fatta promessa, anzi partire da Milano, di recarmi al ritorno
dalla mia gita sul lago Maggiore; e m’era sì gradita l’aspettativa di
villeggiare colà che oramai il viaggio mi tediava, e non desiderava
che l’istante di quivi giungere fra una diletta comitiva. Ad accorciare il
cammino pensai dunque che la via più breve per me (tralasciando di
recarmi sino ad Ivrea, e di là per Biella o per Novara al lago) si era di
valicare i monti che dividono la Val d’Aosta dalla Val Sesia, e
discendere a Varallo da dove la strada per Romagnano e
Borgomanero mette capo ad Arona.
Trapassata quindi la pittoresca terra di Chatillon, lasciai le sponde
della Dora, e presi cammino su per la montagna. Fatto buon tratto di
via, e giunto a bell’altezza sul dorso del monte, me ne stava assiso
sovra un sasso a guardar giù la sottoposta valle, la quale di là si
presentava a’ miei occhi pressochè in tutta la sua estensione, e
m’immaginava di vedervi sfilare i molti eserciti che in diversi tempi vi
transitarono, calando per la stessa via ch’aveva fatta io stesso. Da
Annibale, anzi dai Celto Galli in poi, quanti guerrieri o armati di clave,
e coperti di pelli, o colla lorica e la lancia, o colla pesante armatura
del medio evo, o col fucile e gli spallini, passarono là giù per venire
in Italia! e a far che?... a farsi ammazzare la maggior parte senza
cavarne mai alcun buon costrutto. Ma io veramente allora non
pensava a ciò, altro non mi rappresentava che l’effetto pittoresco
delle variate file di quelle soldatesche sparse lungo la valle, coi
cavalli, i carri e i loro bellici strumenti. Oh! se avessi avuta l’abilità di
quel bravo marchese, che dipinse quest’anno con tanta fantasia la
rocca adamantina da cui scende il mago sull’ipogrifo a pugnare con
Bradamante, mi pare che avrei fatto un quadro di genere da fare
stordire gli amatori. Ma, che volete? io non ho potuto riuscire a far
altro mai in pittura, che degli ometti sui libri di scuola.
Mentre era là vidi salire pel sentiero, e venire alla mia volta, due bei
contadinelli, l’uno de’ quali s’aveva qualche cosa sulle spalle:
conobbi ch’erano pellegrini al pari di me. Allorchè mi furono vicini
m’alzai, per proseguire con esso loro la via. Avevano entrambi
fisonomia dolce, ma spezialmente l’un d’essi, biondo di capelli e con
occhi azzurri, mostrava una tale finezza di lineamenti, che l’avresti
detto una fanciulla travestita. Chiesi loro d’onde venissero, e dove si
recassero, e mi risposero in francese ch’erano savojardi, ch’erano
stati a Torino e si recavano a Gressoney, presso un loro parente. Ciò
ch’aveva sulle spalle l’un d’essi era una cassetta sostenuta da una
cinghia di pelle, e mi disse che vi stavano rinchiuse due marmottine,
che sono le bestiuole che ognun conosce, le quali andavano
facendo vedere per le piazze, suonando la ribeca, ch’era lo
stromento portato dall’altro, e ciò per buscarsi qualche soldo onde
campar la vita. Domandai loro che cosa avessero guadagnato, mi
risposero che in un mese ch’erano stati a Torino avevano potuto
mettere a parte quindici franchi, coi quali contavano di recarsi
nell’inverno in Francia, passando poi nella primavera a Gand nel
Belgio, ove era il loro padre col quale esercitavano il mestiere di
ramoneur.
Mi sentii toccare il cuore pensando che quel bel fanciulletto dalla
pelle sì dilicata, e con quello sguardo tanto dolce, dovesse
arrampicarsi su per le gole dei cammini ad imbrattarsi di fuliggine e
col pericolo di spezzarsi un braccio od una gamba. Invocai che
qualche pietosa padrona di casa, commossa dalla simpatica
fisonomia del bello spazzacamino, gli procacciasse modo di
guadagnarsi la vita con mezzi meno sucidi e perigliosi. Superata la
montagna, discendemmo insieme dal lato opposto a Gressoney, ove
separandoci, augurando ad essi ogni fortuna, feci diventar sedici i
loro quindici franchi.
Io passai la notte a Gressoney. Oh, se vedeste che singolare
paesetto è desso mai! giace in fondo ad una valle che ha la forma
d’imbuto, e vi sta queto, isolato da tutto il mondo, presso un
torrentello che move il suo mulino, e in cui abbevera le sue mandre.
Durante il tempo delle nevi non è possibile nè di andarvi, nè di
partirne; onde per alcuni mesi quegli abitanti vi rimangono così
separati dal resto dei viventi, come se fossero nella Groenlandia o
nella Lapponia. Se vedeste che zoccoli che portano le donne; e che
pannilani verdi e rossi dello spessore di tavole di noce, ma hanno
certe guancie pienotte e una solidità di contorni che si confanno a
meraviglia con que’ vestimenti. La pace del luogo, la prosperità degli
abitanti, mi fece spesse volte tornare col pensiero a Gressoney, e
avrei voluto in certi bruschi momenti di mia vita esservi nato, e non
aver mai superata la cerchia de’ monti che lo racchiudono: non avrei
forse potuto sentirvi egualmente le impressioni della natura e
dell’amore, fonti inesauribili di felicità nella vita?
Al dì seguente, essendo già alto il sole, abbandonai quel romito
villaggio, e ricominciai a salire la montagna opposta a quella dalla
quale vi era venuto.
Oltrepassato un altro monte discesi a Saint-Jean, altro paesello più
ameno fra quell’Alpi, e di là non mi rimaneva che a superare l’ultima
giogaia della Valdoppia per essere in Valsesia.
Non mi sentiva punto stanco, era spinto dalla brama di giungere
presto alla mia meta, ove m’attendevano piacevolezze d’ogni
genere, quindi rifocillatomi abbondantemente, concessemi un pajo
d’ore di riposo, e prese tutte quelle notizie intorno alla via che l’oste
a malincuore volle somministrarmi, attribuendo io a sola sua
cupidigia il consiglio che ripetevami di fermarmi colà quella notte e
non mi porre in via di quell’ora, che era già verso il declinare del
giorno, mi strinsi alle spalle le cinghie della valigia, e, impugnato il
mio bastone, me ne andai pel mio cammino.
Il sentiero s’arrampicava pel fianco del monte, fra boschi e cespugli:
era assai erta, anzi quasi perpendicolare la via: pur salendo con
buona lena, in poco d’ora mi trovai molto elevato dal fondo della
valle, ove vedeva rosseggiare il paesetto di Saint Jean ad un raggio
obbliquo che gl’inviava il sole dalla sommità dell’opposto monte
dietro cui stava per celarsi; e vedeva pure luccicare il torrente che
serpeggiava per la valle, ed era quell’acqua stessa che
romoreggiando balzava giù dal monte sulla costa del quale io
m’innalzava.
Mi avevano detto che la salita voleva un’ora circa; ma io non aveva
calcolato che le mie gambe non erano quelle d’un montanaro, e che
se que’ del paese v’impiegavano un’ora, io non avrei potuto a meno
di consumarvi doppio spazio di tempo. E così fu. Il sole, già tutto
nascosto dietro gli opposti dossi, mandava appena un ultimo rossore
sulle cime più elevate che mi stavano sul capo, ed io m’arrampicava
ancora su per l’erta, e sentiva che le gambe scemavano di vigore ad
ogni passo, e un’ansa affannosa mi toglieva quasi il respiro. Dopo la
salita esser vi doveva uno spianato, inoltrandomi pel quale doveva
poi giungere ai casali componenti il paesetto detto La Montà; ivi
contava passare la notte, per esser pronto al mattino a discendere
pel versante opposto in Valsesia al paese di Riva, da dove avrei
potuto ancora arrivare la sera sino a Varallo.
Fatto è ch’io giunsi al margine di quel benedetto spianato, e cessai
di salire quand’erasi già quasi fatto interamente oscuro, e sdrajatomi
sull’erba, per prender fiato, mi giunse all’orecchio debolissimo il
suono de’ tocchi dell’avemmaria del paesetto di Saint-Jean. Provai
allora un po’ di pentimento di non aver voluto cedere ai consigli
dell’oste, poichè per giungere a La Montà non rimanevami da far
meno d’un’altra buon’ora di cammino, e chi sa qual cammino! Feci
però cuore a me stesso, anzi gioii meco medesimo, e mi congratulai
di trovarmi una volta nella condizione di tanti viaggiatori, le cui
avventure aveva lette con sì vivo trasporto di curiosità. Che di meglio
infatti per un giovine di venticinque anni, di testa romantica (così si
suol dire), che ha costume la sera di passeggiare le strade ben
illuminate e lastricate della capitale, vedersi solo fra le tenebre,
errante pei boschi alla sommità delle Alpi, colla probabilità di
scontrarsi nel genio delle ghiacciaje che sotto forma d’un orso
venisse a divorarlo, senz’altra speranza di vendetta che di far urlare
quell’animale nelle sue rupi un mese intero, per le punture che gli
avrebbe cagionate entro le sue viscere il cervello, intingolo
indigeribile formato col deposito d’ogni specie d’idee letterarie,
metafisiche, poetiche e legali?
Questo pensiero m’aveva fatto sorridere tra me stesso,
avanzandomi per l’incerta traccia del sentiero, quando ad un tratto
vedo un chiarore che subito scompare, e appena ebbi campo di
rivolgere la testa ch’udii rumoreggiare il tuono. Fermandomi a
guardare indietro, scôrsi nubi nerissime che s’erano avanzate alle
mie spalle, e che, venendo da verso la valle di Saint-Jean, andavano
nascondendo sul mio capo la volta del cielo. Che gusto m’avessi lo
lascio immaginare a voi. Io camminava in una pianura, che, per
quanto poteva rilevare, era come una vasta prateria, sparsa qua e là
d’alberi radi. Tratto tratto però mi sentiva sotto i piedi il nudo
macigno. Facendosi sempre più dense le tenebre, io non iscorgeva il
sentiero che al bagliore dei lampi che si succedevano quasi
incessantemente. Cominciarono i soffj del vento, e il tuono
echeggiava arrotolandosi fra quelle teste di montagne. Vi dico da
vero che principiai a non aver più nessun piacere di trovarmi in
quell’ignota solitudine con un tempo spaventoso di quella fatta.
Sperava, ad ogni passo che m’inoltrava, di trovarmi nel desiderato
paese di La Montà, o di scorgere almeno qualche lumicino che
annunziasse una capanna, fosse stata anche l’abitazione delle
streghe, dei briganti, o dei falsi monetarj: ma non vedeva niente,
altro che la corona delle rupi che circondavano quel piano, che si
mostravano più nere ancora del nerissimo cielo. Un romore, uno
scroscio grandissimo accompagnato da un sibilo spaventoso di
vento, veniva avanzandosi precipitoso, e vedeva al chiarore dei
lampi le chiome degli alberi flettersi ed alzarsi rapidissimamente. Ad
un tratto fui inondato dalla pioggia, e, quasi al tempo stesso, ciò che
mi diede più paura, fu di sentire che i miei piedi diguazzavano
nell’acqua sino alla caviglia, per cui credetti d’essere entrato
inavvertentemente in qualche stagno o fondo paludoso. Di sentiero
non eravi più insegna. Rimasi un momento immobile, e mi credetti
perduto: ma al luccicare della saetta, avendo veduto che il terreno a
man manca si rialzava, mossi i passi da quella parte, e infatti in due
o tre minuti mi sentii fuori del guado, e compresi che andava
ascendendo. — Meno male (dissi fra me), il pericolo d’affogarmi
sembra passato. — Ma la pioggia e il vento incalzavano con tal
violenza, ch’io dovetti appoggiarmi ad una pianta per sostenermi in
piedi. — La scena è più teatrale che in un ballo di Viganò (diceva in
me stesso), ma minaccia d’andare troppo in lungo, e se dovessi
starmene qui tutta notte sotto questo diluvio coll’aquilone che spira,
mi prendo tale un malanno che non rientro mai più in velocifero da
porta Tanaglia. —
Mentre io era colà in una posizione così critica, guardando
attentamente ad ogni gettata di luce intorno a me, mi venne veduto,
non molto all’insù dal posto ove mi trovava, un piccolo edificio
coperto di paglia, un tugurio. Mi sentii rinascere, e tosto mi diressi a
quella volta. Pervenutovi, m’accorsi ch’era una capannetta deserta,
uno di que’ casolari ove alloggiano i pastori quando conducono alle
alpi le mandre, e che partendo abbandonano. Alla porta s’ascendeva
per alcuni gradini; ne mancava l’imposta e dentro appariva vuoto ed
oscuro. Salii tosto quella scomposta scaletta, e giunto al limitare
tastando col bastone, e sentendo che il pavimento era più basso,
prima di discendervi per entro vi feci rimbombare la mia voce,
porgendo l’orecchio, per udire se mai cosa alcuna vi si rimovesse,
poichè v’era pericolo vi fosse rifuggita qualche fiera.
Non udendo alito balzai giù dalla porta nell’interno, e m’accorsi con
mio sommo contento che v’era sull’impalcato un bel letto di foglie.
Staccai dalle spalle la mia valigia, mi tolsi l’abito tutto molle
d’addosso, mi soffregai per asciugarmi alla meglio, ringraziai la
provvidenza, e me le raccomandai: indi stesi tutta la mia
stanchissima persona su quelle foglie, che mi sembrarono uno strato
di morbide piume, e provai quel sentimento di felicità, che
m’immagino debba sorgere in cuore a chi afferra il lido campando
dal naufragio.
Descrivervi quali pensieri mi passassero per la mente sarebbe
impossibile cosa: quello ch’è certo si è che m’addormentai pensando
a chi pensava a me, e che forse vaneggiava amorosamente alle
melodie d’una gaja serenata, senza pur dubitare ove diavolo mai si
trovasse il suo Trovatore. E tanto più che l’ultima sera nel darmi
l’addio di partenza, conoscendo l’indole mia arrischiata, m’aveva
fatta calda preghiera, di non espormi a inutili perigli, e di non mettere
a repentaglio una vita troppo cara. — Che belle paroline, eh? — Ma,
e chi non le ha udite all’età di venticinque anni? — Pure, onde
gustarle completamente, bisogna credersi esseri privilegiati, e tale io
mi riputava allora in buona fede: onde ricordava quell’affettuosa
espressione coll’accompagnamento d’una voce commossa, d’uno
sguardo pieno di soavità e di sentimento, vedeva quelle forme
gentili, quella bianca mano che mi salutava ancora dal balcone, e
tutto ciò mi mandava un miele per le vene, mi faceva più beato d’un
re, benchè perduto là sull’alpi tutto solo, e sdrajato sovra aride foglie
in un deserto tugurio; e credo che gli spiriti ilari che si esalavano da
me, mi servissero di riparo contro l’influenza funerea che stagnava
sotto quella volta.
Non so quanto dormissi, ma mi svegliai che fitta era ancora
l’oscurità, però cessati i lampi, i tuoni, il vento e la pioggia. Stirai le
membra, e mi sentii assalito da un brivido di freddo; volendo
addormentarmi di nuovo, allungai un braccio per internarlo nelle
foglie, onde averne calore, e nel così fare urtai in qualche cosa, che
toccando sentii essere una valigia. Mi pareva d’aver collocata la mia
dall’altra parte, e subito mossi l’altro braccio per accertarmene, e
infatti sento che la mia valigia è colà! — «Gran Dio! due valigie! qui
v’è alcun altro; dissi tra me, traendo a stento per la sorpresa il
respiro. Ma tosto mi animo, e grido: — Ohe! ohe! chi c’è qui. —
Nessuna risposta: mi rialzo, porgo attentissimo l’orecchio, non odo
fiato, non odo respiro, era un silenzio profondo, non interrotto che
dal cader lento delle goccie che stillavano dalla paglia del tetto. Mi
metto a frugare a tentoni per le foglie, allungando anche i piedi, e
urto con questi in due altri piedi, che sembravano rivestiti di grosse
scarpe. Li premo con forza, ma non ne segue alcun effetto. Mi do a
cercare colle mani e sento un braccio rivestito di panno — lo scuoto
— niente — Che affare è questo? — dissi tra me preso da spavento,
e diressi la mano ove doveva essere il volto, e l’abbassai —
misericordia! — le mie dita s’inforcano nelle caverne delle ossa
nasali d’un teschio umano, che si scompone a pezzetti —
misericordia! — chi m’avesse fatto un salasso non ne avrebbe
cavata goccia di sangue: rimasi più morto che vivo.
Ebbi appena il vigore di balzar fuori di là lasciando nel casolare,
abito, valigia e berretto, e non trassi il respiro che vedendomi all’aria
aperta. Sedetti sui scalini della capanna, col capo in mano, lasciando
si calmasse la terribile palpitazione di cuore che mi aveva assalito.
Alzai poscia gli occhi al cielo: era sereno e stellato: da levante
veniva un venticello foriero dell’aurora; il suo fiato per me fu un
balsamo, e più di tutto alcune voci che udii, e mi sembravano di
persone che fossero sul sentiero da me percorso la sera. Mi posi a
gridare chiamando; mi fu risposto; io continuai a gridare e sentii
ch’alcuni uomini venivano alla volta. Quando li vidi da vicino, narrai
loro la mia trista ventura, ed essi tosto, tratta l’esca, il ferro e la pietra
focaja, accesero una piccola lucerna, ch’un d’essi trasse da una
bisaccia che recava ad armacollo; e ravvisai in essi tre cacciatori da
camosci.
Penetrammo tutti insieme in quella capanna, e si vide, pressochè
tutto coperto dalle foglie, un uomo, dirò meglio uno scheletro,
rivestito d’abiti militari. Mi dissero che doveva essere qualche
sgraziato disertore sorpreso là su da un male violento, il quale
trattosi in quella capanna vi morì senza soccorsi: avvenimento
accaduto, almeno da due mesi in addietro.
Ritrovata la valigia di lui fu slacciata e vi si rinvennero per entro
alcuni pochi oggetti di vestimento, e un portafoglio. Questo pure
venne aperto, e vi si vide una carta d’iscrizione militare su cui
leggemmo — Gaudenzio D...., d’anni ventinove, nativo di, ecc. —
con tutti gli altri consueti connotati personali che lo indicavano per un
giovine ch’essere doveva d’assai bello aspetto. Nel portafoglio vi
erano pure due lettere, ed una picciola busta di seta verde da cui
levammo una cartolina, la quale era circondata per più giri da un sol
capello biondo, le cui estremità erano rattenute da un po’ di cera.
Una di queste lettere era suggellata e mancava d’indirizzo. L’altra
portava nella direzione il nome del soldato colla mansione a
Saluzzo; questa, essendo aperta, noi la spiegammo e vedemmo
essere del curato del suo paese che gli scriveva in nome di sua
madre. Vi si parlava di nozze di persone conoscenti, e della
spedizione che veniva fatta a lui d’una picciola somma di danaro:
non vi si leggeva altro, nè trovammo cosa alcuna di più, che ci
potesse rischiarare intorno a quell’individuo ed al funesto suo
destino.
Uno di que’ cacciatori, il più attempato, disse ch’egli era fratello del
sindaco di Saint-Jean, e che avrebbe dato avvertimento onde que’
resti umani venissero sepolti, e fosse partecipata notizia del fatto
all’autorità superiore.
Io rimasi compreso da tanta pietà per quell’infelice, e al tempo
stesso da tale orrore e ribrezzo d’aver avuto un simile compagno di
letto, che non aveva quasi più vigore da riprendere i miei arnesi.
Alla fin fine ajutato da que’ cacciatori mi rivestii, e mi rimisi,
accompagnato da loro, in viaggio; ma quello scheletro mi opprimeva
l’immaginazione, mi disperava. Mano mano però che si spandeva la
luce mattinale, si andava scemando anche lo squallore della mia
mente, e veniva a poco a poco riconoscendo me stesso. Quando
alfine m’affacciai dal vertice del monte all’ampia vallata, e vidi le
nebbie candide e natanti volare in fuga innanzi al sole che mi
sorgeva luminoso di fronte, ogni mia tristezza si dissipò, ed altro non
mi parve quel caso che una romanzesca ventura.
FINE.
INDICE
Milano nell’anno 305 dell’era pag. 1

Un Episodio dell’assedio del Barbarossa 18
I Guelfi dell’Imagna o il Castello di
Clanezzo 39
Edemondo ed Adelasia o la Torre di
Gombito 87
La Biscia Amorosa 121
Campo di Battaglia sul Duomo di Milano 161
Avventure in un Viaggio per la Valdoppia 183
La presente Edizione è sotto la tutela delle Leggi.

NOTE:
1. Poco lungi dal luogo ov’è la chiesa di S. Giorgio in Palazzo.
2. Alla Maddalena al Cerchio.
3. In vicinanza di porta Vercellina che aprivasi ove ora è situata santa

Maria alla Porta.
4. Il nostro paese era anticamente tutto sparso di laghi, che il tempo e

l’opera dell’uomo asciugarono. Il lago Gerundio stendevasi nelle
vicinanze del sito ove vi ha presentemente Cassano; il lago Eghezzone
era tra Lodi e Crema, e serbasi ancora memoria dell’isola Fulcheria, che
esisteva in quel lago.
5. Nella contrada di tal nome ove fu eretta a quella santa una chiesa, sul
luogo appunto ove i primi cristiani avevano celato il suo corpo.
6. Lungo la corsia de’ Servi, dove fu eretta poi la chiesa di s. Paolo.
7. Stava ove trovasi ora s. Vittore al teatro.
8. Ne serbò il nome l’attuale Verzaro.
9. Sorgeva sulla via romana presso al luogo in cui a’ nostri giorni fu

costruito il teatro Carcano.
10. Era al Carrobbio.
11. Quelle che trovansi tuttavia avanti la chiesa di s. Lorenzo.
12. Renza, od Orientale ch’era al Leone presso s. Babila.
13. A s. Giovanni alle Quattro Faccie.
14. Alla Zecca vecchia.
15. Nell’anno 539.

16. Salì alla cattedra arcivescovile nell’anno 863 e morì nel 881.
17. Ne serba il nome il Palazzo che sorge in quella località.
18. Personaggio storico. Vedi il Corio.
19. Avevasi sospetto, e il fatto lo accertò che il conte Guido Biandrate

tradisse i Milanesi favorendo l’imperatore Federigo, di cui passò poscia
nel campo. Crediamo però che nessuno avesse pensato a lui nella
giornata del 20 aprile 1814.
20. Nel 26 marzo 1162.
21. Era il mese di marzo dell’anno 1373.
22. I fedeli lo riedificarono poscia più vasto e magnifico.
23. È desunta da una cronaca latina di quella Valle al capo ove si legge: Die
XX martii fuit interfectus Bertramus Dalmasanus dominus Clanetii super
pontem de Clanetio per homines Guelphos Vallis Himaniæ, etc.
Nel secolo seguente i valligiani della Brembilla continuarono a
commettere sui vicini paesi le più crudeli rappresaglie. Stanco il veneto
governo (di cui divenne poi suddita tutta la terra bergamasca) delle loro
sfrenate scelleratezze, faceva imprigionare diciotto capi, ordinava che
fossero smantellati tutti i villaggi della Brembilla, ed il sole del giorno
settimo dell’anno 1443 più non illuminava di quella popolosa vallata che
le immense ruine.
24. Ora de’ Moroni.
25. Quel bosco, contiguo al sobborgo detto degli Ortolani, era il solito
convegno dei duellanti dell’epoca. Il convento che dava nome al bosco,
esiste tuttavia, e venne ai nostri giorni da privata beneficenza cangiato
provvisoriamente in ospitale di donne, che s’intitola delle Fate-bene-
sorelle, a similitudine di quello per gli uomini assistito dai Regolari di san
Giovanni di Dio.
26. Vale a dire due ore prima dell’avemaria della sera, essendo allora ignota
la partizione della giornata secondo il sistema francese or fatto
universale.
27. L’unita incisione che rappresenta la battaglia di Landriano, è tratta dal

quadro del valente Sala, rapito sì immaturamente all’onore dell’arte.
Esiste tal dipinto presso i conti Cicogna, uno de’ cui antenati prese parte
a quella battaglia, ed è il guerriero rappresentato in atto di parlar col De
Leyva.
Nota del Trascrittore
Ortografia e punteggiatura originali sono state

mantenute, correggendo senza annotazione minimi
errori tipografici.
Copertina creata dal trascrittore e posta nel pubblico
dominio.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RACCONTI
STORICI - NUOVO VOLUME ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright
in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and without
paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General
Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to
abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using
and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

Metaphors of Confinement The Prison in Fact Fiction and Fantasy Monika Fludernik Download PDF Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Metaphors of Confinement The Prison in Fact Fiction and Fantasy Monika Fludernik Download PDF Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison

in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy Monika

‘Metaphors of Confinement makes a significant contribution to current and ongoing debates

To my mother, Ingeborg Böhm, with gratitude and in memory

The Introduction (‘Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary’)

marriage, and illustrates its ambivalences on the example of D. H. Lawrence’s

Paris who gave me feedback on my project. The completion of the manuscript

publica­tion in this book. Section 0.3 of the Intro­duction is a shortened version of

List of Figures xxvii

3. Poeta in Vinculis II: The Twentieth Century 171

6.4 Colonialism as Carcerality 373

9.4.2 Verging on the Insane: Female Creativity and the Prison of

Works Cited 691

Milano nell’anno 305 dell’era pag. 1

La presente Edizione è sotto la tutela delle Leggi.

1. Poco lungi dal luogo ov’è la chiesa di S. Giorgio in Palazzo.

2. Alla Maddalena al Cerchio.

3. In vicinanza di porta Vercellina che aprivasi ove ora è situata santa

4. Il nostro paese era anticamente tutto sparso di laghi, che il tempo e

6. Lungo la corsia de’ Servi, dove fu eretta poi la chiesa di s. Paolo.

7. Stava ove trovasi ora s. Vittore al teatro.

8. Ne serbò il nome l’attuale Verzaro.

9. Sorgeva sulla via romana presso al luogo in cui a’ nostri giorni fu

10. Era al Carrobbio.

11. Quelle che trovansi tuttavia avanti la chiesa di s. Lorenzo.

12. Renza, od Orientale ch’era al Leone presso s. Babila.

13. A s. Giovanni alle Quattro Faccie.

14. Alla Zecca vecchia.

15. Nell’anno 539.

17. Ne serba il nome il Palazzo che sorge in quella località.

18. Personaggio storico. Vedi il Corio.

19. Avevasi sospetto, e il fatto lo accertò che il conte Guido Biandrate

20. Nel 26 marzo 1162.

21. Era il mese di marzo dell’anno 1373.

22. I fedeli lo riedificarono poscia più vasto e magnifico.

24. Ora de’ Moroni.

27. L’unita incisione che rappresenta la battaglia di Landriano, è tratta dal

Ortografia e punteggiatura originali sono state

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

You might also like

publication in this book. Section 0.3 of the Introduction is a shortened version of

List of Figures xxvii

3. Poeta in Vinculis II: The Twentieth Century 171

6.4 Colonialism as Carcerality 373

Works Cited 691