Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment

Prisons and criminals, on first glance, seem to hold little that we might mistake for the desirable or attractive. Why then do both of these supposedly dreaded subjects hold such a curious attraction in the fables of our society? Martha Grace Duncan draws on her expertise in psychoanalysis, law, and literature to explore the curious paradox of our attraction to the supposedly detestable. Written in three parts, her book focuses on the affection she finds criminals possessing toward prison, the admiration law-abiding citizens have for criminal characters, and the metaphors of filth and slime used to separate the criminal from the upright and lawful. Singling out examples from literature and relying on Freudian psychology, Duncan succeeds in making the dualities more apparent and the metaphors pronounced. This is an intriguing study of the conceptual relationships between crime and punishment that illustrates the conceptual fluidity at play in the black-and-white world of the law.