Tag Archives: carceral authority

Prison writings

Secondary literature: Rivkah Zim, “Writing Behind Bars: Literary Contexts and the Authority of Carceral Experience,”

(summary of Rivkah Zim, “Writing Behind Bars: Literary Contexts and the Authority of Carceral Experience,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72.2 (2009): 291-311)

Zim argues that, often, “carceral experience gives the writer authority, importance, and respect in the eyes of readers who may relate such experience to their understanding of the human condition,” and her essay seeks to explore how and why these texts use imprisonment to enhance the writer’s merit (291).

Zim notes that metaphorical prisons are widespread in the literature (the soul shackled to the body and by sin) but that even these metaphorical representations are linked to physical ones, as in the case of a Mass for imprisoned individuals who are locked up both by sin and by the prison itself; additionally, the Christian duty to look after those imprisoned, she says, has its roots in images of Jesus as prisoner, which links imprisonment to “another recurring theme in prison writing: the paradox of gain by loss,” since Jesus’ death was seen ultimately as spiritual victory (292).

In prison writing, this theological underpinning often resulted in texts that emphasized the value of physical imprisonment for the mind: Thomas Savile (“afflictions make us try our thoughts”) and Odet de la Noue (“Adversity is More necessary than Prosperity; and that, of all afflictions, Close-Prison is most pleasant, and most profitable”) stress that the afflictions and discomfort faced in prison help mold people morally, forcing them to reflect and meditate on their position and leading them to self-knowledge. This way of thinking aligns with the idiom “gold is tempered by fire:” the bad would reveal the good. Zim points to texts from antiquity (like saints’ lives and histories of “political worthies”) where writers show their imprisoned subjects as having superior insight; she notes this continuing in early modern traditions of being charitable to prisoners, and in Shakespeare’s plays, where the prison is a “crucible” that breeds wisdom in characters like Richard II and Lear, and imbues its characters with heroic qualities.

Zim sees Boethius’ Consolatio as a paradigmatic text from which these strategies for writing about imprisonment emerge, and from which a “politics of prison writing” that focuses on an individual’s personal experience dealing with adversity develops: the text shows its narrator using his “free mind” to overcome the misery of imprisonment and to handle the injustice of his confinement; this discussion of the power of the mind, Zim explains, is complemented by Boethius’ depiction of his “well-stocked mind” through his references to ancient literature and philosophy. As Zim also argues, though, ”it is the representation of this text as the work of a condemned prisoner that gave its message added authority” (298).

She then moves to three early modern examples of prison writing in order to extract a definition and “to consider how—and even whether—authority is linked to actual carceral experience” (298). In the first, a poem called “Giue me my scallop shell of quiet,” the link to an actual prison writer (long thought to be Raleigh) has been unsubstantiated, but Zim claims that putting it out as someone’s real experience makes it more enthralling (“a separation of authorship and authorization”) (299). She then notes that the Eikon Basilike, while ghostwritten by John Gauden, clearly meant to show a first person account of Charles as incarcerated king, “in his solitudes and sufferings,” because it would be politically expedient to show him that way; “condemned prisoners are known to pray and meditate, and the exemplary faith or spiritual fortitude that they display in such circumstances is deemed desirable and useful for others” (300).  In his third example, Ralegh’s “My boddy in the walls captive,” Zim reveals how the poem both petitions the queen while playing with sonnet form, making breaks with strict sonnet forms because he is tormented by his separation from the queen (more so than by his actual incarceration).

Zim then points out how changes in government and religion produced dissidents and thus political prisoners, leading to a wealth of prison writings from several classes and professions in society; these prison writers, she argues, could find “paradoxical advantages of adversity” like martyrdom, which could enhance posthumous reputation. Prisoners like Howard, earl of Surrey, found “literary means to render personal carceral experience authoritative,” and that writing could serve as resistance to political power by ensuring lasting reputation as a poet while also affirming the Christian body and soul’s separation from the state’s power (302). Women like Lady Jane Grey, Zim insists, were lent authority because of their imprisonments: “under such pressures even women wrote, and they had to say in these circumstances granted an authority that transcended the period’s usual gender roles and set important precedents for the personal creative writing of women who had spiritual and legal equality with male Christian souls (though not bodies) in a religious polity” (303).  

Captivity, she notes, also provokes dissidents to speak out in the defense of themselves or their cause, though these prison writings might shift in genre (for example, Thomas More’s more polemical writings incur imprisonment, but in prison, he writes a biblical meditation on the events leading up to Jesus’ arrest and annotates verses in his Psalter that dealt with his present condition). Thomas More’s prison writings are more personal, but, Zim argues, no less political: his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, while ostensibly about religious persecution in Hungary, seems actually to comment on his position in England and to function as a didactic text aimed at those closest to him for facing religious tribulation. She notes that More “cannot be identified consistently with either of his speakers,” which points to his using “dialectical forms to try out the attitudes of both his speakers in order to practice resistance: to prepare, in advance, comforting arguments against a specific kind of tribulation—his own fear of spiritual failure” (a fear echoed in Tower works comparing himself with St. Peter) (306). Moreover, putting More’s words in their original and specific prison context reveals more than just the words themselves might—his final prayer, written in the margins of his Book of Hours, is located next to woodcuts of the nativity and Christ carrying the cross, placing his poem (and himself) in an imitatio Christi tradition and contributing to a tradition of last words. More, she argues, “recognized the political value of writing that projected ideas and images of suffering humanity in contexts calculated to authorize that experience,” an advantage enhanced by the fact that a prison writing bolsters the fame of the imprisoned writer while undercutting the power of the ones doing the imprisoning (who end up fixed in the text as persecutors)   (308).

Prison writing also allows the writers to present interpretations of their past and record their current trials; they can produce something to remember them by. John Bunyan enacts another text-authorizing tactic to deal with the issue of insecure memory in recounting past life (a problem of autobiography generally): he relies on the authority of the Word of God to show how scriptural texts spurred his discovery of God and his grace; especially notably, though, is his claim that incarceration yields this deeper relation to the Bible: “those Scriptures that I saw nothing in before, are made in this place and state to shine upon me” (309). In other words, his suffering causes immense spiritual benefit; his past spiritual life becomes a way of interpreting his current circumstances. And demonstrating his spiritual growth has immediate public benefits: publishing his work as prison writing could boost his authority as a spiritual educator, the prison making him recognizable as a “particular kind of Christian” (309).

Zim concludes that it is important to consider the “artistic and fictive elements of any rhetorical performance,” even those claiming straight autobiographical fact (310). She lists a set of contrasting elements that paradoxically constitute prison writing “it is paradigmatic yet particular; constrained by convention yet capable of rising above these constraints; often literary in its strategies yet also historically and politically situated, in a particular prison under specific circumstances” (311). In other words, it is important to attend to the specific historical/political/geographical situation of any given prison text, but we can also recognize rhetorical moves and strategies anchored in prison writing as a genre or found across prison writings, and we can also recognize ways that prison writers innovate the genres on hand even when (especially when?) constrained by censorship or trying to reach an audience outside the prison. She says, finally, that in giving a “politics of prison writing” through which we might read prisoner texts, she argues for a series of practical functions, starting from late antiquity, for people writing from prison, especially those for whom power is at stake. She lists a few: defending/promoting values, bearing witness to those outside the prison in order to save reputation and/or create a memorial image, as comfort to the tried and trying writer, and overall, to “provide evidence of those responses in terms that persuade the prisoners’ associates and first readers, as well as subsequent ones, to acknowledge the authority of carceral experience” (311).

 

Prison writings

Two late medieval writings about imprisonment: George Ashby, “Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463”

Unlike the complaint against Fortune, this poem is located in a specific place, a specific time, and a specific prison, The Fleet. But it begins, as many medieval poems do, by setting the season: unlike the many medieval dream visions that first describe the flowering of spring, the Complaint portrays the onset of autumn. During this seasonal shift, the narrator is “comyttyd geynst right and reason/Into a pryson, whos name the Flete hight” (7). The poem sets itself in the Boethian tradition, of a prisoner who is unjustly punished (“Because of my draught and my bryngyng up/I have suffryd thys and other spoylyng”) (22). He notes he must bear this false accusation until “God or the juge” release him; the poem thus sets up an equivalence in the roles of God and judge that mingles together metaphorical and concrete prisons: while it was a common to conceive of the soul as imprisoned in the body, the narrator is also physically imprisoned in the Fleet. This equivalency makes his meaning here murky: will God release him from prison, or from his body—or from both?

At line 29, unlike the nameless (possibly fictional) prisoner of the Complaint Against Fortune, the narrator identifies himself: George Ashby. This supports Joanna Summers’ argument, in her book on late medieval prison autobiography, that prison writers often wrote autobiographical material in order to recuperate their reputations or promote themselves (and she specifically writes about Ashby, though I have yet to get to that chapter; I will update this entry later). In these cases, it would be important to identify yourself in order to defend yourself and/or find patrons willing to act on your behalf. Naming himself so early emphasizes that to know the speaker is important, and that he wants the narrative definitively attached to the name George Ashby (and I would say, from what I know, that to find this kind of direct naming in a medieval poem with a first person voice is fairly rare: dream visions, for example, have narrators, but they are not usually identified as specific people). Moreover, he later dates the poem, which, as the TEAMS edition of his poem notes, is “fairly unusual;” in line with naming himself in the poem, the TEAMS edition also quotes Scattergood’s suggestion that Ashby dates it as a way of “seeking to ensure that he was not forgotten” (qtd in Mooney and Arn, p. 274).

Ashby repeats the complaints of the unnamed prisoner in the Complaint Against Fortune that he has been abandoned by his friends, yet this complaint has little of the starkness that the latter narrator’s does. Whereas the anonymous prisoner laments the loss of friendship before accepting the grace of God, Ashby first makes it clear that, while his heart is grieved “hevyly and sore,” he believes that imprisonment serves as his “chastisement and lore,” and prays to God for “dew pacience” (32, 33, 35). Thus before he gets into the gritty details of his punishment, he frames it as an experience from which he will get devotional merit. Whereas the anonymous prisoner decides to be patient when he realizes he has no other choice, Ashby asserts early in the poem that he will wait patiently, in devotion to God, and assumes that there is some lesson to be learned from his confinement.  The tone, then, is immediately less dire than the Complaint Against Fortune, even as it relates some of the same discomforts and unpleasant realizations that prisons bring. He even, later in the poem, claims that people who suffer should “of trouble be mery and glad/Than therof be grogyn, hevy, and sad” (154), in contrast to the tone of the anonymous prisoner in the Complaint Against Fortune, which is a far cry from merry.

Ashby also expresses some more pragmatic fears than the anonymous narrator of the other poem does. For example, he fears the debt that will accrue to him as a result of paying for accommodation at the Fleet: he not only prays but says “to God I clepe, call, and cry/To help me out of det or I dy” (48-49). This hints at fears of social and financial ruin. He also seems concerned not only about being abandoned by friends generally but also about going from a position of prestige and power—in service of the king and queen—to having people “revylyng [him] with unfyttyng language” and underestimating his wit and cleverness (74). He is concerned, in other words, with being inappropriately represented while and because he is in prison, and with the change of status that imprisonment brings. We also get signs of his social role—clerk of the Office of the Signet officially, but also his reputation of having “pen and inke evyr at my syde” (68). By describing his dedication to the role (“nat  sparyng” to ride with the king and queen, “redy to accomplysshe theyre commandment,”  as Signet for them “full fourty yere”), he defends his name, and reminds his readers of an identity that he has lost (67, 70, 64). He makes sure that his readers know that, despite being imprisoned, he has an identity and role outside of the prison and that he was, moreover, exceedingly good at this role. Thomas Freeman, in his article in the Huntington Quarterly in 2009 on the rise of prison literature, argues that prisoners in the medieval and early modern period were viewed as sinners rather than social miscreants, and because everyone was a sinner, prisoners were thus not abnormal figures outside the social order. Yet this poem from the fifteenth century, in its narrator’s insistence on being associated with his social identity outside of the prison, indicates that there is a danger of losing that identity when one is known as a prisoner.

While Ashby can no longer (at least for now) act in his role as clerk for the Office of the Signet, however, he still reclaims his identity as a writer by proposing to “wryte of trouble rehersall/How hyt may be takyn in pacyence” (113-114). He ensures by this tactic that he can hold onto part of his identity from outside of the prison, though he shifts mode into a more prison-associated and appropriate mode. More specifically, he turns to the didactic mode: as the TEAMS version of this poem notes, he “takes on the role of Lady Philosophy, who tells Boethius he has forgotten who he is…a creature of God.” In other words, he refashion his identity by mobilizing a prison-writing identity authorized by previous writers in prison and by Boethius himself. This allows him to take his identity outside of the prison, that of a writer, and to give himself authority in that position by taking on a mode that has sanctioned other prison writers.

However, as the TEAMS editions also notes, the didactic thrust of this poem is somewhat undermined by the explicit at the end, which calls the prison a “sepulture,” or tomb (344). While this seems to contradict the theme and message of the poem, I would argue that there is an underlying consistency to it: the prison is both a tomb that locks people away from other social opportunities and their usual place in the social order and a place that allows for a spiritual transformation that can be made public through writing—which allows the writer to be seen and remembered even when other social identities have been stripped from them. This poem points to the prison’s status as a space and place that both threatens identity and provides new ways to bolster it; a place that undermines the social credibility of the prisoners and acts as a potential tomb while also giving them “carceral authority” as writers, where writing thought to come from the prison is seen as automatically having value because the prison “forges” a more devotional attitude (a concept that Rivkah Zim explores in her essay on early modern prison writings and writers). This poem points to the social dangers of being a prisoner, of often balancing on a ledge between being respected and remembered as a spiritual authority—of even regaining social identities through patrons outside of the prison reading one’s work—and of being entombed, lost and forgotten. Writing from prison, then, provides a crucial strategy for staying on one side of that line.

(This text is graciously provided by the TEAMS Middle English Text Series at the University of Rochester. It can be found here.)