Imprisonment and entrapment in Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens)
...valletto is found again by his sinister cell mate, but manages to escape again. Yet these two characters, both with their prison taint, both linked, cannot escape each other, for it is soon Cavalletto who is hunting down Rigaud, on the instructions of his patron, Mr Clennam. Cavalletto’s position of sitting in prison, on the floor, an ankle in each hand, is repeated on each of their meetings; in the guesthouse where Rigaud finds him, and in Clennam’s cell, Cavalletto having found Rigaud. Cavalletto has re-built his life, found employment and housing, and made friends with the residents of Bleeding Heart Yard, and yet he is still not free. Cavalletto is imprisoned by Rigaud, somehow forced into this small, contained, submissive posture by him, somehow made back into the obedient slave, and no walls, no violence and no words are needed to achieve this. The prison taint they share binds them, and cannot be undone; Cavalletto cannot be released. Following his first visit to Mr Dorrit and his family, Arthur Clennam is locked into the prison, having not withdrawn by the last bell. Clennam, not wanting to disturb his young friend Amy Dorrit, withdraws to a rented room in the prison on a makeshift bed created for him, and passes the night within the Marshalsea. Clennam is not a prisoner, he is free to leave the next morning, and yet he becomes, in the night, almost morbidly fixated with the prison (he speculates on how the dead are treated in the prison, whether coffins are kept in reserve, whether a man might be arrested for debt after his death), with the anxieties he might feel were he a prisoner. For example, he speculates on how a prisoner might go about escaping, following this up in detail; how the prisoner might then escape onto a housetop, down stairs, through a yard, and get lost in the crowd. He follows the journey of the prisoner as if picturing himself making his own escape, the aim of which is to be lost. He is bothered by the “sense of being locked up” , and clearly feels very much like a prisoner that night. All this has a portentous aspect, as Clennam is later arrested for debt and held in the Marshalsea. Clannam is destined to be a prisoner; he must be in order to escape, and gain his own release with Little Dorrit, to lose his own past and begin anew. Prisons do not just control by holding people in; characters in Little Dorrit can feel equally trapped by being locked out of them. After visiting Mr Clennam at his home late one night with Maggy, Amy Dorrit, or Little Dorrit, is locked out of the Marshalsea. She makes her way to the gates, having no-where else to go, and peers through the railings, referring to it as “home” , and kissing the bars. Little Dorrit suffers in being locked out of the prison. Yet when she kisses the bars, she does not kiss for love of the prison, but for love of her father, who is within, and without her. To Little Dorrit, the Marshalsea that night represents her father, and it is being locked away from him which troubles her. This is evident later, when on the Dorrit’s travels around Italy, newly wealthy, Little Dorrit is devastated by being forced to step down in her role caring for her father, and is shut out by him. She feels trapped in Italy and longs for England and familiarity. Her father, in the same way, although wanting to be independent, cannot shed his prison so easily, and eventually breaks down, imagining himself still in the Marshalsea, and needing his daughter again, calling for her. Little Dorrit needs to be needed by her father, and this is her prison, a tie which can only be undone by his death, and a feeling which she then displaces onto Arthur Clennam. Prisons are not all concrete walls and iron bars; there are actual physical prisons in Little Dorrit which seem to be nothing of the sort. Not all creatures, however, can be held in by doors and locks. Tattycorum is imprisoned by the Meagles’ in a very literal sense, but wholly in the spirit of charity and goodwill. As Mr Meagles gives his account to Mr Clennam after his daughter’s maid, Tattycorum, goes missing, he says she “broke out violently one night” , not describing her physical departure, but her loss of temper which eventually results in her leaving. “The bolts and bars of the old Bastille couldn’t keep her” , says Mr Meagles. Following Tattycorum’s heated outburst and threat to le...