Copyright by Petert Bishop Caster 2004
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Copyright by Petert Bishop Caster 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Peter Bishop Caster Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE LANGUAGE OF THE PRISON HOUSE: INCARCERATION, RACE, AND MASCULINITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY U.S. LITERATURE Committee: Evan Carton, Supervisor Phil Barrish Barbara Harlow Martin Kevorkian David Oshinsky THE LANGUAGE OF THE PRISON HOUSE: INCARCERATION, RACE, AND MASCULINITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY U.S. LITERATURE by Peter Bishop Caster, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2004 ACKNOWLEDG MENTS The committee supervising this dissertation proved invaluable in their diligent reading and careful comments, and I thank Evan Carton, Barbara Harlow, Phil Barrish, Martin Kevorkian, and David Oshinsky for their tireless efforts. As the primary advisor, Carton in particular read early, unpolished work and helped shape its development. Many others have provided useful feedback on early drafts of chapters, and I thank Warwick Wadlington, Jill Dolan, Julie Sievers, Douglas Taylor, Timothy Buckner, Zac hary Dobbins, Richard Schechner, and the staff and anonymous reviewers for both The Faulkner Journal and The Drama Review . Versions of Chapter Two and Chapter Five, respectively, appeared in those journals, and I am grateful for permission to reprint that material here. The Austin, Texas playwright Ken Webster provided extensive personal background for his writing of Jury Duty as well as a draft of the unpublished manuscript. Much of the material in this dissertation appeared in early draft form at numer ous conferences, including the USC English Conference in Drama, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the American Studies Association. There is the tremendous debt I owe those imprisoned, so man y for so little. I thank the activists, researchers, administrators, staff, lawyers, and teachers who work to improve prison practices, policies, and living conditions. I would also like to recognize the state and federal governments, lobbyists, politica l action committees, popular media, private companies building and managing prisons, and voters and those who fail to vote. It is due to a combination of our efforts that the prison system has become what it is. I am grateful to the students of my Englis h 314L classes in 2001 and 2002, as they provided fresh and valuable viewpoints on the representation of imprisonment in U.S. literature in excellent class discussions and writing. Numerous friends in Austin, Texas, Corvallis, Oregon, and Sacramento, Davis, Oakland, Bishop, and San Francisco, California proved extremely generous, providing time for conversation regarding this project and homes in which to write it from 1999 to 2004. I thank the owners and employees of Spellbinder Books in Bishop, Californ ia, in whose café I researched and wrote much of Chapter Four. My appreciation goes out to all of the strangers across the country with who I discussed this project in its various stages. Whether in restaurants, bars, hair salons, or grocery stores, on b usses or planes, standing in line or making small talk at a nightclub, I am continually impressed by the willingness of people to value thoughtful discussion and ask insightful questions. Most of all, I thank my parents, John and Angi Caster, who provided emotional and financial support throughout my education and offered the best models for joining personal and professional commitments. iv THE LANGUAGE OF THE PRISON HOUSE: INCARCERATION, RACE, AND MASCULINITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY U.S. LITERATURE Publicati on No. _______________ Peter Bishop Caster, Ph.D The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisor: Evan Carton The history of the U.S. is inseparable from its practices of imprisonment. The centrality of incarceration is evident in books, films, and performances situated in tension between imaginative and historical discourses: William Faulkner’s novels Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Go Down, Moses (1942); Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979); Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998), Norman Jewison’s The Hurricane (1999), and Liz Garbus, Wilbert Rideau, and John Stack’s The Farm: Angola, USA (1998); Ken Webster’s Jury Duty (1999) and a 1999 protest, “Live from Death Row.” These represe ntations of imprisonment provide the means to identify a carceral identity, as imprisonment has become a matter of cultural difference similar to other indices such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Raced practices of imprisonment have contributed to the equation of black masculinity with criminality in the cultural imagination, a practice resisted in texts that evoke a plural, social identity. Faulkner’s v fiction demonstrates a shift in responsibility for criminality between 1931 and 1942, from the individual to the social, and challenges the degree to which lynching informed Southern execution practices. Soul on Ice and The Executioner’s Song bracket a transformation in the carceral identity from raced and politicized to an ahistorical, race -less phenomenon, a change apparent in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association as well. The wholesale expansion of imprisonment in the U.S. in the last quarter of the twentieth century figures prominently for films set in prison, and the films ma ke claims to the real in a manner that affects actual prisoners . The concluding performances challenge the isolation of the carceral identity and foster dialogue between those in and out of prison, returning prisoners to history. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue: Imprisonment and the Cultural Imagination 1 Chapter One: Imprisonment in U.S. History and Literary Studies 23 Prison history as national history 32 Imprisonment and literary study 46 Chapter summaries 71 Chapter Two: Literary Execution: Faulkner’s Changing Sense of Crime and Punishment from Sanctuary and Light in August to Go Down, Moses 80 “this modern trend” of crime — and psychoanalysis 98 Invoking Jefferson’s “corporate limit” 112 Conclusion 126 Chapter Three: Cleaver’s Soul to Mailer’s Song: Subjects in History and Diminishing Possibilities Between Two Prison Narratives 129 Correctional history between Soul and Song 134 “You’re crazy” – Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Eldridge Cleaver 154 “the deepening schizophrenia of America” — Poirier on Mailer’s obsession 168 Conclusion 194 Chapter Four: Real, Imagination, and Telling the Difference: Prison Films from Realistic Fiction to Based on a True Story to Documentary 200 “documentary realism” and the “heightened realism of the film’s style” 222 Based on a true story—with invented characters and fictionalized events 235 “This is no dream or nothing made up, this is for real” 258 “Not all black people are murderers,” “a prejudicial justice system isn't news” 274 Conclusion 280 Chapter Five: Staging Prisons and the Performance of History 285 “Live from Death Row” and Jury Duty 288 Audiences as social bodies and “one minute later is history” 306 Conclusion 315 Notes 332 Works Cited 383 Vita 403 vii PROLOGUE Imprisonment and the Cultural Imagination [T]he weig ht of past narratives and characterizations of the prisoner work as social forces in shaping the depiction and motives of the prisoner of the present and hence force the issues of race and gender. Because the public has a memory of the discourses concerning prisoners, however ephemeral, all new constructions of the prisoner begin with past characterizations as a base. —John M. Sloop, The Cultural Prison The study of i ncarceration as it is represented and practiced in the twentieth century United States gained clarity for me the summer of 2001, when a particular incident illustrated how the imagination of prisons overwrite s their actuality. On a Sunday afternoon, I took a break from working on an early draft of this project and scrolled through the channel s of Time Warner Cable. Turner Network Television (TNT) featured The Shawshank Redemption (1994), a well -known Acad emy Award Best Picture nominee in which Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman play long-term convicts whose friendship redeems both of them. At th e same time, The Discovery Channel screened the documentary “Maximum Security Prisons” —or rather it was scheduled, but there seemed to be some problem with the cable signal, and Discovery displayed only a blank monitor. That blankness contrasted sharply w ith The Shawshank Redemption, where actors played convicts on screen, the characters sitting in a theater watching a Rita Hayworth film. When Andy Dufresne (Robbins) leav es the theater, he is attacked , brutally beaten, and presumably raped by a group refe rred to as “The Sisters.” On the Discovery Channel, “Maximum Security Prisons” ended 1 and “Supermax” began its account of a high security facility, but the signal remained blocked and the screen dark. Back on TNT, in The Shawshank Redemption, Andy tries to get funding from the warden to buy new books for the prison library. Too much could be made of whatever technological glitch made “Maximum Security Pris ons” unwatchable that afternoon—though Martin Luther King III cites a similar experience he had earli er the same year, one he recounts in his keynote address at a national conference of prison administrators ( ACA 2001 2). Discovery’s program is even one of the two