Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century Sean Grass (bio) Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Jason Haslam and Julia Wright; pp. viii + 270. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005, $55.00 Can, $55.00. For those who see more critical possibilities in Victorian prison narratives than those we typically associate with Michel Foucault, Captivating Subjects will come as a welcome relief. It is not Foucault's fault, of course, that some Victorianists have reduced the complexities of Discipline and Punish (1977) to simpler worries over detective work or omniscient narration. But the fact remains that we have often neglected the prison's broader cultural and narrative significations, especially in its relation to first-person writing during the nineteenth century and textual representations of Victorian subjects. As Jason Haslam and Julia Wright remark in their introduction, they intend "to add to recent calls to recognize the social and cultural centrality—and exemplarity—of captives" to the formation of nineteenth-century national, sexual, and racial identities and, in a broader sense, to the rise of the novel (4). As they claim in their first sentence, our long preoccupation with Foucault "has tended to limit [studies of the prison] to the specific practices of institutionalized imprisonment" (3), which was only one kind of captivity present in nineteenth-century social and textual landscapes. Slavery, transportation, torture, kidnapping, and serfdom all contributed to nineteenth-century conceptions of individual and national identities that were conceived almost inevitably along economic and racial lines. Dividing eight essays into three sections devoted to imprisoned subjects, class and nation, and racial otherness in nineteenth-century captivity narratives, Haslam and Wright attempt to remedy such omissions. They succeed and in the process revise our understanding of the textual and cultural implications of nineteenth-century confinement. Six of the eight essays in Captivating Subjects address narratives written in England between 1780 and 1920, and those by Frank Lauterbach, Monika Fludernik, and Christine Marlin deal with specifically Victorian instances of captivity. As Lauterbach writes, the [End Page 364] tendency "has been to view the effect of prisons on inmates" instead of regarding the prison as primarily classificatory, "a means of social identification rather than personal subjection" (114). Like American slave narratives, Victorian prison narratives do more—or at least other—than shed documentary light on the horrors of captivity, for they reveal above all the strategies by which captive subjects accounted for experiences of convicthood that always already belonged to a larger system of cultural meaning. For Victorians, as Lauterbach and Fludernik show, prisons signified the worst elements of English society: drunkards, vagrants, swindlers, hardened ruffians, and habitual thieves. As a consequence, even when captive subjects exposed the brutalities of the prison, they did so by defining themselves against other inmates; in doing so, they drew from and reinforced contemporary notions of Victorian confinement. By showing these tendencies in specific Victorian prison narratives, Lauterbach and Fludernik argue persuasively that captivity narratives tended to harden class, ethnic, and other divisions in Victorian England. Marlin's account of prison administrator and sometime author Major Arthur Griffiths reminds us that not all Victorian writers were as hysterical as Charles Reade or as dogmatic as Charles Dickens when writing about the secrets of the Victorian prison. These three essays are exceptionally useful for a specialist in Victorian literature. But scholars of nineteenth-century British, American, and continental literatures will benefit from reading the volume in its entirety. Other chapters include John MacKay's on Russian serf narratives; Tess Chakkalakal's on The Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789); Wright's on Romantic-era Irish nationalism and political prisoners; and Jennifer Costello Brezina's on American captives of Barbary pirates during the late 1700s. These essays are generally strong—especially Brezina's, which gives an excellent account of the way that American captivity narratives forged national identity and cultural cohesion by inculcating collective fear of and antipathy toward the racial and religious others of Africa's Barbary coast. As Wright puts it, writing of Charles Hamilton Teeling's Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (1828), such captivity narratives helped to...

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