ABSTRACT
Chillingly utilitarian, the man’s logic actually hyperbolizes reformist principles put forth by Montesquieu and Beccaria, and implemented by the Philadelphia Society. Susanna Rowson sets her fictional prison scene at mid-century, when all but the most well-connected debtors at Fleet Street Prison could expect cramped and filthy accommodations, extortion at the hands of profiteering jailers, and treatment as ruthless as that meted out to hardened felons. Charles Brockden Brown’s fictional prison would seem to have little in common with conditions at Walnut Street as reformers of the period described them. In fiction, the prison contended not only with a social system, but an inherited literary tradition, as well. Structurally, of course, the entire narrative comprises a string of such deferrals: a series of installments, digressions, and fragments only loosely linked to the central struggle between man and law — and by extension, between home and prison.
