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

犯人的声音：《漫长的世纪女性与监狱写作》研究了19世纪世纪监狱写作和其他可能出现罪犯声音的话语空间。随着监狱人口达到创纪录的水平，研究人员和决策者正在寻求关于妇女犯罪的新答案。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。在人文学科中，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。揭示历史上早期形式的监狱写作和改革议程将为妇女研究、文学研究、刑法史和学术界以外的当前刑法辩论提供新的视角，因为监狱改革的基本原理可以追溯到这一时期，并从这一时期继续下去。我的研究目标是确定19世纪的关节-研究世纪女性罪犯的历史，并追踪监狱回忆录这一体裁的发展，以回应议会文件或科学著作等对犯罪主体性的霸权性描述。从这项研究中产生的专着将这些账户定位为当代（20世纪末和21世纪世纪）监狱著作的重要先驱，近年来，监狱著作已成为学术界和更广泛的公众兴趣的主题。前三章涉及从19世纪10年代到世纪中期提高对女囚犯状况认识的早期尝试。第一章讨论了两个截然不同的女性，她们对刑事辩论的干预：英国贵格会教徒伊丽莎白·弗莱和法国-秘鲁社会主义者植物群特里斯坦。本章将伊丽莎白·弗莱（Elizabeth Fry）等女性改革者视为当今慈善事业的先驱，如“狱中妇女”，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，死刑犯的最后哀歌可以被解读为一种替代（自动）传记的形式，促进获得和纪念女性囚犯的知识，否则隐藏或丢失的具体形式。第三章分析了弗雷德里克·威廉·罗宾逊在商业上取得成功，但在评论界却未得到充分认可的监狱叙事作品。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以及监狱官员的文化边缘化经历。接下来的两章继续讨论19世纪末和20世纪初的情况。第四章读了两本监狱自传，苏珊·威利斯弗莱彻的《在英国监狱里的十二个月》和佛罗伦萨·梅布里克的《梅布里克夫人的故事：我失去的十五年》，都是在他们高度宣传的法庭案件的背景下。虽然这两个中产阶级妇女（都有美国背景）是非典型的囚犯，本章认为，他们的帐户是独特的，使他们与其他罪犯的接触，从而成为非精英妇女的监狱经验腹语报告。在第五章中，我使用了档案资料，其中一些直到最近才向公众开放（例如艺术家凯蒂·格利登1912年的日记和绘画，在她被监禁期间秘密编辑）。这一部分表明，正是在妇女参政运动的监狱写作中，对监禁和公民身份的关注最为迫切。最后，题为“重新想象过去：在二十世纪历史小说中恢复罪犯的声音”的附言嵌入了玛格丽特·阿特伍德的《格蕾丝》和莎拉·沃茨的《亲密关系》的阅读，更广泛地考虑了妇女的监禁以及包括学院在内的各种文化媒体在二十一世纪初对罪犯声音的代表和调解。

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.