SOURCE: Brombert, Victor. “Introduction: The Prison Dream.” In The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition, pp. 3-17. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.

In the following essay, Brombert suggests reasons for the historical connection between authors and imprisonment. He finds the precursors for the nineteenth-century fascination with prison imagery in both eighteenth-century Gothic literature and the dramatic fall of the Bastille, which reverberated throughout Europe.

The prisoner is a great dreamer.

—Dostoevsky

… this eternal image of the cell, always recurring in the poets' songs …

—Albert Béguin

Prison haunts our civilization. Object of fear, it is also a subject of poetic reverie. The prison wish does exist. The image of immurement is essentially ambivalent in the Western tradition. Prison walls confine the “culprit,” victimize the innocent, affirm the power of society.¹ But they also, it would seem, protect poetic meditation and religious fervor. The prisoner's cell and the monastic cell look...