Death Sentences: Corneille's Prison Monologues

Abstract

This article explores Corneille's ‘prison monologues’ – soliloquies uttered by imprisoned characters contemplating their own forthcoming execution. Unable to engage materially with the world, Corneille's prisoners are effectively reduced to voices; although objectively powerless, they are subjectively able to wield language as a tool to engage with and symbolically triumph over death. Refusing to condemn the potential fallibility or illegitimacy of the legal power that has condemned them, prisoners like the eponymous tragicomic hero of Clitandre and Clindor in L’Illusion comique devise creative, poetic accounts to justify and explain their imprisonment on a symbolic level, in an attempt to reconcile themselves to – or even to transcend – the degraded reality of their current situation and their upcoming fate. Corneille's prison monologues dramatize the tension between the prisoners’ abstract trust in justice and their physical, embodied experience of imprisonment, thus unearthing a new side to these early Cornelian heroes.