How the prison narrative reframes imprisonment in Bunyan's Grace Abounding and Richardson's Pamela

Abstract

In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), the experience of imprisonment stands central to its protagonists’ narrative. Through the act of writing, both Pamela Andrews and John Bunyan renegotiate the conditions of their captivity. This essay explores the tension between captives and the power structures that hold them and observes the ways in which subjectivity mediates this process. Specifically, it reveals the manner in which authorship creates the subjective authority needed to reformulate the condition of imprisonment, either leading to release, as is the case of Pamela, or by reframing spiritual purpose and incorporating captivity within it, as is the case for Bunyan. Within this analysis, the Saussurean concepts of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, as they are employed in Lacan’s works, will assist in the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, which will play a central role to the study of the captive’s condition.o frame the discussion of imprisonment narratives, a brief explanation is made of the manner in which Lacan’s discussion of the dichotomy of signifier and signified situates the position of absolute and objectively held ‘reality’ – the signified – in a position of inaccessibility. Any discourse concerning its nature never transcends the realm of subjective experience – the signifier. Textual evidence from both texts is employed to reveal the process through which the protagonists’ narratives manage to displace or alter their state of captivity, analysing the alternate interpretations they enact and maintain to do so. The essay concludes with the observation of the effects of both narratives: the very circumstance of imprisonment has changed through authorship of subjective experience.