Convict Voices: Women and Prison Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

《囚犯的声音：漫长的19世纪的女性与监狱写作》调查了19世纪的监狱写作和其他可能出现囚犯声音的话语空间。随着监狱人口达到创纪录水平，研究人员和政策制定者正在寻求有关妇女犯罪的新答案。现在人们认识到，倾听囚犯的声音应在这一进程中发挥作用。在人文学科方面，监狱文学已成为许多课程的核心部分，包括涉及学生囚犯阅读小组的服务学习项目。揭示历史上早期的监狱写作形式和改革议程将为当前的刑事辩论提供新的视角，这些辩论对妇女研究、文学研究、刑事史以及学术界以外的人都很感兴趣，因为监狱改革的基础可以追溯到并延续到这一时期。我的研究目标是确定19世纪女囚犯的表达方式，并追踪监狱回忆录类型的发展，作为对犯罪主体性的霸权叙述的回应，如议会文件或科学著作。由这项研究产生的专著将这些描述定位为当代（20世纪末和21世纪）监狱著作的重要先驱，这些著作近年来已成为越来越多的学术和更广泛的公众兴趣的主题。前三章论述了从19世纪10年代到19世纪中叶，提高人们对女性囚犯状况认识的早期尝试。第一章考虑了两个非常不同的女性以及她们对刑罚辩论的干预：英国贵格会教徒伊丽莎白·弗莱和法裔秘鲁社会主义者弗洛拉·特里斯坦。本章将伊丽莎白·弗莱（Elizabeth Fry）等女性改革者视为“狱中女性”（Women in Prison）等当今慈善机构的先驱，同时批判性地分析了早期的人道主义语言，这些语言没有完全平等地看待囚犯。第二章认为，发表在处决海报上的囚犯最后的哀歌可以被解读为一种被取代的（自动）传记，促进了对女性囚犯隐藏或丢失的具体知识形式的访问和纪念。第三章分析了弗雷德里克·威廉·罗宾逊（Frederick William Robinson）在19世纪60年代以《监狱护士长》（A prison Matron）的笔名出版的、在商业上取得成功但却被严重低估的监狱叙事。本章认为，这些叙述提供了一种早期社会历史的方法，证实了非精英女性囚犯和监狱官员在文化上被边缘化的经历。接下来的两章继续讨论19世纪末和20世纪初。第四章读了两本监狱自传，苏珊·威利斯·弗莱彻的《在英国监狱的十二个月》和弗洛伦斯·梅布里克的《梅布里克夫人自己的故事：我失去的十五年》，在他们高度公开的法庭案件的背景下。尽管这两位中产阶级女性（都有美国背景）不是典型的囚犯，但本章认为，她们的叙述是独一无二的，因为她们与其他囚犯有过接触，因此成为了对非精英女性监狱经历的口述。在关于被监禁的妇女参政权论者的第五章中，我使用了档案资料，其中一些是最近才向公众开放的（比如艺术家凯蒂·格利登（Katie Gliddon） 1912年的日记和绘画，这是她在监禁期间秘密编纂的）。这一节表明，在妇女参政权论者的监狱写作中，对监禁和公民身份的关注最为迫切。最后，一篇题为“重新想象过去：在20世纪历史小说中恢复囚犯的声音”的附言将玛格丽特·阿特伍德的《别名格蕾丝》和莎拉·沃特斯的《亲和力》的阅读嵌入到关于女性监禁的更广泛的思考中，以及包括学术界在内的各种文化媒体对囚犯声音的表现和调解。

Convict Voices: Women and Prison Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century investigates nineteenth-century prison writing and other discursive spaces where convict voices could emerge. As prison populations are reaching record levels, researchers and policy-makers are seeking new answers on women's criminality. It is now recognized that listening to prisoners' voices should play a role in this process. In the humanities, prison literature has become a core part of many curricula, including service-learning projects involving student-inmate reading groups. Uncovering historically earlier forms of prison writing and reform agendas will offer new perspectives on current penal debates of interest to women's studies, literary studies, penal history and beyond the academy, since the fundamentals of prison reform date back to and continue from this period.My research objective is to identify articulations by nineteenth-century women convicts and to trace developments in the genre of prison memoirs as a response to hegemonic accounts of criminal subjectivity, such as parliamentary papers or scientific writings. The monograph resulting from this research situates these accounts as significant precursors of contemporary (late twentieth- and twenty-first-century) prison writings which have become the subject of increased academic as well as wider public interest in recent years. The first three chapters deal with early attempts to raise awareness of the condition of female prisoners from the 1810s to the mid century. Chapter 1 considers two very different women and their interventions into penal debates: the English Quaker Elizabeth Fry and the French-Peruvian Socialist Flora Tristan. This chapter identifies female reformers like Elizabeth Fry as forerunners of present-day charities such as 'Women in Prison,' while critically analyzing earlier languages of humanitarianism that stopped short of a fully egalitarian view of prisoners. Chapter 2 argues that the last lamentations by convicts published on execution broadsides can be read as a form of displaced (auto)biography, facilitating access to and commemorating the otherwise hidden or lost forms of embodied knowledge of women prisoners. Chapter 3 analyzes Frederick William Robinson's commercially successful, but critically under-recognized, prison narratives, published in the 1860s under the anonym of 'A Prison Matron.' The chapter contends that these narratives provide an early social history approach that validates the culturally marginalized experience of non-elite women-prisoners as well as prison officers. The two subsequent chapters move on to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 4 reads two prison autobiographies, Susan Willis Fletcher's Twelve Months in an English Prison and Florence Maybrick's Mrs. Maybrick's Own Story: My Fifteen Lost Years, in the context of their highly publicized court cases. Although these two middle-class women (both with an American background) were atypical prisoners, the chapter argues that their accounts are uniquely enabled by their contact with other convicts and thus become ventriloquized reports about the prison experience of non-elite women. In Chapter 5 on imprisoned suffragettes, I use archival sources, some of which have only recently been made available to the public (such as the artist Katie Gliddon's 1912 diary and drawings, secretly compiled during her incarceration). This section suggests that it was in suffragette prison writing where concerns around incarceration and citizenship emerged most urgently. Finally, a postscript entitled 'Re-imagining the Past: Recovering Convict Voices in Twentieth-Century Historical Fiction' embeds readings of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Sarah Waters's Affinity in wider considerations regarding women's imprisonment and the representation and mediation of convict voices in various cultural media, including the academy, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.