In Notes from Underground , the protagonist is not physically jailed, but he has withdrawn into a “underground” of spite and paralysis. He is impoverished in relationships, unable to love or be loved. His imprisonment is self-wrought but no less real. He says: “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”
Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham ( Great Expectations , 1861) is the imprisoned heiress inverted: she locks herself away in a decaying mansion, surrounded by the rotting remains of her wedding feast after being defrauded at the altar. Her wealth remains (she is not impoverished in cash), but she is emotionally and socially impoverished. The tragedy is self-inflicted yet fiendishly engineered by a con man. The Fiendish Tragedy Of An Imprisoned And Impre...