(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).