In the early pages of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne observes that, when a town is founded, two institutions are needed first – a graveyard and a prison. According to Hawthorne’s Anti-Transcendentalist world view, human nature was anything but good, which meant that the first two certainties that would strike any new human settlement would be death and violation of the law. There are, of course, many kinds of prisons in the modern world. In addition to the traditional correctional facility, there are also forces at work in terms of cultural and social prejudice that keep members of different groups from reaching their own potential as autonomous, equal participants in society. There are also prisons that we build for ourselves, in terms of the fears that we have that keep us from reaching our own potential, as well as the addictions that we take up to assuage those fears – without managing to unlock the cages that those fears have constructed around us. Of the writers presented in this course, all of whom are immensely talented in the presentation of confinement, there is no peer to Franz Kafka when it comes to describing the fear, the irrationality, and the ultimate inexorability that confinement has on the human soul.
Best known for The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman may have been the most skilled writer regarding confinement who worked in the nineteenth century. Her tale of a woman who has been locked up by her husband until she simply “snaps out” of what he terms “hysteria” (yes, he is a physician), what likely would be diagnosed today as postpartum depression. He takes her to an isolated house and locks her up – not in the house, but in one room – and waits for her to cure herself. As one might imagine, the depression does not subside; rather, it becomes sheer lunacy as she sees a mysterious woman moving about inside the pattern on the wallpaper, and she makes it her mission to liberate this woman from her prison. She crawls around the room, scratching the wallpaper, until her husband finally comes and unlocks the door, only to collapse at the sight of his wife, who has made the trip around the room into a rut on the floor; at this point in time, the woman behind the wallpaper escapes. Rather than leave the room, though, the main character simply hops over her unconscious husband every time she comes to him in her circuit around the room. At the time, even though Gilman was the peer of the preeminent feminist Kate Chopin, her story shocked the reading public, bringing attention to the neglect placed on women because of bias in the medical profession (Dock 6).
Langston Hughes has more to say about the prisons that we build for ourselves, in terms of the way that biases and prejudices – and preconceived notions – imprison us. The young boy who decides to rob an older woman of her purse in his story “Thank You, M’am” is not a thug, although there are doubtless some readers who would view a young black man running off with a purse in that way. Instead, he is a poor young man who has no family (at least not one that is mentioned in the story) and no home life to speak of. He cannot even afford a new pair of shoes, which is why he decided to grab this purse. However, the woman whom he intends to rob instead drags him home with her and feeds his dinner. At the end, she even gives him $10 – enough, in those days, to buy quite a nice pair of shoes, and money that she could likely ill afford to just throw away. The prison of fear that kept this young man from asking for help is bolstered by the prison of racism that kept him poor, kept him in Harlem, and kept him in a generational cycle of poverty and crime. The writing style is simple and plain, and the lesson is clear, as all solid rhetorical arguments ultimately must be.
As winning as Hughes’ stories and poems must be, the strengths of his rhetorical arguments pale when compared with the iron logic found in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” This essay confronts both the literal and metaphorical concepts of imprisonment, bringing them to the forefront of the American consciousness in a way that few essayists have been able to throughout the history of American letters. On the literal level, Dr. King had been imprisoned for taking part in the civil disobedience campaign that was fighting the racial inequalities taking place throughout the Deep South, but in this instance, the setting was Birmingham, Alabama. The essay has little to do with the privations that would have gone along with his confinement, though; jammed into cells with other black men who had taken part in the protests, Dr. King sat, outraged, ready to show the world the nonsense that was still happening between white and black people in the former Confederate States of America – less than 50 years ago. The more important idea of imprisonment that comes from this letter, though, comes from the incarceration that racism had placed on the Christian church throughout the Deep South. The Baptist church, after all, had split between Northern and Southern lines because of the stance that the Southern churches had taken supporting slavery in the days before the American Civil War. One might expect that Dr. King would rant and rave about his own anger, but he lets the cold, clear logic of his cause speak much more loudly than any fit would have done. The Church had no business, Dr. King argued, supporting racism anywhere on the planet. There are too many passages in the Bible urging social equality; there are too many passages in the Bible exhorting believers to love one another; there are too many passages in the Bible praising the liberation that salvation brings. Too many pulpits in Southern churches were staying away from the injustice done by the white establishment against blacks, from the Jim Crow laws that made racism an everyday reality to the shameful lynchings that haunted nights from Louisiana to Georgia. Dr. King’s rhetorical appeals hammer the Scripture into its apparent servants, the white ministers of Birmingham, so loudly that there is no room for excuses, no room for objections.
The writings of Richard Rodriguez also highlight the ways that prejudice builds prisons, but he writes from the Mexican-American perspective rather than the African-American one. However, while King and Hughes evoke the wide range of injustices that have plagued their community for centuries, Rodriguez comes across as more self-serving, writing more from the perspective of the memoir than from the missive that will change the way society works. While Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez was well received, detailing his trip from “socially disadvantaged child” (Rodriguez 3) to complete assimilation into American culture, the valid point remains that the writing is mostly about him. It may well be that he suffered in moving from having a Mexican identity to an American one. He does observe that “Americans like to talk about the importance of family valuesbut America isn’t a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home” (Rodriguez 82). Because his writing rarely strays beyond his own circumstances, though, to make these sorts of social observations, it is difficult to place him on the level with some of the other writers under consideration here (London). In more modern times, there are simply too many dispossessed observers of culture who have their own personal stories to tell for these sorts of anecdotes to break through. In the era of the blog, it truly takes writing that is incisive and new to break through the public barriers against actual attention to arguments.
The prisons that Frank O’Connor raved against were in his native country of Ireland, which has struggled against the hegemony of Great Britain since time immemorial. While O’Connor did fight for the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence and later protested the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 – to the point that the new Irish government imprisoned him from 1922 to 1923 – the prisons that O’Connor describes are not simply political. His biography of the Irish revolutionary hero Michael Collins, entitled The Big Fellow, remains one of the standards about the leader’s life, as well as that phase of the strife between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. However, many of his most successful renditions involve short stories detailing scenarios taken from O’Connor’s own childhood and younger life. Many of his stories detail poor Irish families in the early twentieth century, foundering along without a true paternal figure in the home, either because of literal absence or because of abusive behaviors stemming from alcoholism, and the conditions in these sorts of prisons that he describes are execrable. In addition to his short fiction, his memoir An Only Child describes the prisons in which the poor Irish had to subsist, but in such a way as to leave meaning behind for the reader. An understandable question at this point would be to wonder why the writings of O’Connor receive such praise, when the writings of Rodriguez are panned for having many of the same elements, including an intensely personal focus in much of the writing. To give a solid example of this difference requires a look at two Anti-Transcendentalists – the previously mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne and the man who dedicated Moby-Dick to him, Herman Melville. The Scarlet Letter rightly skewers the mores of Puritan America, focusing on the needless hypocrisy and personal intrusion that life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony forced on all of its residents. However, a story that could have been told in approximately 80 pages is weighted down by just as many (if not more) pages of commentary on the story. Instead of letting his story make its point for the reader, Hawthorne continually falls into the trap of explaining why Roger Chillingworth is such a dread fear to Arthur Dimmesdale, and why that fear is simply ridiculous given the truths of human nature. The only preaching that Melville does comes from his characters – the Cook and Father Mapple deliver sermons, but the narrator Ishmael never does. Instead, it is left for the reader to watch the unraveling of Captain Ahab to see the depths to which human nature can fall, instead of bludgeoning the reader with explanations for old Roger Chillingworth. Quality writing comes from showing – not explaining, and O’Connor’s works show in a way that lingers far longer in the brain than the petulance that winds its way through Rodriguez’s writings.
All of this, of course, leaves us with a consideration of Franz Kafka. While the young boy from “Thank You, M’am” might well linger in our hearts, the curious cases of Joseph K. and Gregor Samsa, on the other hand, ring within our minds long after we have put the stories down and moved on to the next stimulus that demands our attention. The prison that Kafka envisions is not one defined by racial prejudice or socioeconomic station. It is not made of concrete and metal, although traditional correctional facilities do appear in his writings. It is not the simple application of the law. Rather, it is the simple fact of existence in human society – an institution that works its tentacles around all of us in ways that we do not understand until it is far too late, and the potential that we might have had as youngsters gradually fades through no fault of our own, until suddenly the existential knife falls and we are left on the side of the road, just as dead as Joseph K. Kafka’s conundrums are as inventive as they are inexplicable – the notion that one could awaken one morning as a “dung-beetle,” through the simple force of the expectations of the world, is a suffocation that could await us all, depending on the turns of fate. Kafka rightly realizes that prisons are larger than prejudices, because they affect us all in different ways. Because few others have recognized the universality of confinement, they have not seen it – nor addressed it – as effectively as Kafka has.
Of course, just because Kafka correctly identified the sense of confinement that life in the human plane means that those who follow Kafka write as effectively. The writings of Michael Chabon and Gary Shteyngart are two bodies of work that come to mind when pondering successful expressions of the confinement that modern society foists on its residents. However, just as those who followed King Solomon with their own versions of The Book of Ecclesiastes were nearly as effective in repeating his sentiments, the visceral horror that comes from the sheer lack of information about one’s fate in life makes Kafka’s stories into houses of horrors but start to sound almost campy when other efforts to write to the same themes end up in literal horror fiction – or “emo” fiction that just hates life in general. Kafka’s strengths come from having to sit in the existential echo chamber with his characters, wondering if we will share their fates.
Works Cited
Blackmore, Jonathan. “The Influence of Franz Kafka on American Jurisprudence.”
http://works.bepress.com/jonathan_blackmore/1. Web.
Crotty, Patrick. The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry. London: Penguin Classics, 2010.
Dock, Julie Bates. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the History of
its Publication and Reception. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Print.
Hughes, Langston. “Thank You, M’am.”
http://www.americanliterature.com/Hughes/SS/ThankYouMam.html. Web.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. Web.
London, Scott. “A View from the Melting Pot: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez.”
The Sun, August 1997. Hungerhttp://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/rodriguez.html. Web.
O’Connor, Frank. My Father’s Son. Belfast: Black Staff Press, 1968. Print.
Rodriguez, Richard. The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.
New York: Turtleback, 1990. Print.
