Imagining the Self and Other: Women Narrate Prison Life across Cultures
Imagining the Self and Other: Women Narrate Prison Life across Cultures
This chapter describes the effects of incarceration in two very different penal contexts: a community-based prison for women in California and a maximum-security facility for women in Hungary. Based on years of conducting creative writing classes in these prisons, the authors of this chapter trace the imprint the environments left on inmates' imaginations. On the one hand, they explore how the institutional scripts available to the U.S. inmates centered on the individual—usually through narratives of addiction and pathology. Their stories focused on the emergence of new selves freed from old pathologies and ways of being. This focus then led the women to rely exclusively on the “I” in their writing and to represent their experiences in purely personal terms. On the other hand, the authors show how the Hungarian inmates rejected references to the self. The authors conclude about the cultural differences—the relation between guilt and redemption—in these women's worldviews.
Keywords: California, Hungary, incarceration, self, creative writing, narratives, pathology, cultural differences, guilt, redemption
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.