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

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Captivating Subjects is a collection of articles that examine
captivity—broadly defined—in a variety of 19th-century narratives,
most of them autobiographical.

In an attempt to revise Foucault’s project in which the prison is the
locus of captivity, Haslam and Wright situate the birth of the prison in
the context of slavery and serfdom, and include articles not only on
prison narratives but on the slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano and on
Russian serf narratives. While these chapters do not mesh perfectly with
the prison narratives, and their inclusion seems somewhat forced (Tess
Chakkalakal’s argument that Equiano’s evasions of genre can be read
as a resistance to confinement is somewhat tenuous), such limitations
are outweighed by the excellent chapters that constitute the bulk of the
book. These include Haslam’s article on Lady Constance Lytton, Frank
Lauterbach’s chapter on the ways in which prisons delimit class
identity, and Monka Fludernik’s article on the use of sentimental
rhetoric in Victorian prison narratives.

Haslam’s chapter is the only one in the volume to seriously consider
gender, which is unfortunate, as his argument that prisons were
instrumental in maintaining and constructing both gender and class norms
is highly compelling. Lauterbach takes the analysis of class and the
prison further, showing how the Victorian prison was associated with a
social and economic underclass, and how this association was complicated
by the narratives of “gentlemen convicts.”

In addition to class, one of the major themes that unifies this
collection is the relationship between captivity, citizenship, and
nationhood. While there is clearly more work to be done in this area,
Captivating Subjects provides rich ground and intriguing questions that
ought to guide such work.