SOURCE: Shulman, Robert. “The Artist in the Slammer: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Prison of Their Times.” Modern Language Studies 14, no. 1 (1984): 79-88.

In the following essay, Shulman explores the theme of society as a prison in American literature, with special focus on the repression of creativity and artists. Shulman argues that authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe expressed in their writings a sense that even outside of a physical prison, the artist was confined by a particularly American drive toward conformity and sameness.

Prisoners live in enclosed places. They want to get out but if they are in for a long time they work out ways of surviving. They also work out ways of defying the authorities and, if they cannot escape, they at least work out ways of communicating so as to escape detection. In these respects they share common ground with Hawthorne, Melville...