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GRASS, SEAN. The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner. (New York: Routledge, 2003). xi + 291 pp. $90.00.
Scan Grass sets off his account of the "Victorian prison novel" against a Foucauldian analysis in which narrative strategies for the representation of consciousness are made to align perfectly with a panoptic model. In Grass 's summation, the Foucauldian perspective envisions a thoroughly chastened subject, exhaustively monitored by omniscient narration and free indirect discourse, a hapless pawn in a world in which "individuals...have no genuine selfhood or identity that is free from the power of society's many prisons" (6). Grass hastens through this "totalizing power" model and deals even more summarily with D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (seemingly the model's prime exponent in Grass's view). A fuller engagement would have given Grass more to work with when developing his own argument, but he does put this mock-up to productive use. First, noting that Bentham's Panopticon was never built in England, Grass questions the explanatory value of an argument that identifies fictional analogues for an architectural model that was not in fact part of the prison system. Next he turns to various mid-nineteenth-century writings by prison officials who purported to reproduce "prisoners' testimonials written 'in their own words'" (34), and he finds that this offer to tell someone else's story in the first person has readily specifiable analogues in the novel, even in omniscient narratives, which abound in first-person "letters, diaries, autobiographies, and confessions of Victorian fiction's imprisoned selves" (11). Finally, Grass points to an explicit link between prison literature and novel-writing, observing that around the middle third of the nineteenth century, prisons became increasingly private, solitary, and shielded from public view, and so novelists who invented stories about crime and punishment were increasingly reliant on the prison officials' writings. During that period. Grass...