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Dystopia, surveillance and the spaces of social control in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012)

Dystopie, surveillance et espaces du contrôle social dans The Panopticon (2012) de Jenni Fagan
Claire Wrobel

Résumés

Bien que The Panopticon (2012), de Jenni Fagan, ne se présente pas comme une dystopie classique décrivant dans le détail un état futur possible et indésirable de la société, le roman en partage certains traits, notamment en mettant en scène une protagoniste aux prises avec un système contre lequel elle entre en rébellion. L’espace dystopique par excellence semble être celui délimité par les murs du Panoptique, ici une institution pour jeunes délinquants, auquel fait pendant une île utopique, lieu d’excursion qui devient symbole d’harmonie et de liberté. Cependant, l’espace panoptique, contrairement à ce qui est affirmé dans le texte, n’est pas celui de la surveillance omniprésente et omnisciente dont le Panoptique et Big Brother sont devenus les emblèmes. À l’espace censément uniforme et quadrillé du Panoptique s’opposent un espace littéral riche en recoins et cachettes et un espace littéraire révélant une épaisseur intertextuelle mobilisant entre autres un certain nombre de motifs gothiques. Bien que le texte se réapproprie explicitement le Panoptique de Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), invention elle-même traversée par la tension entre utopie et dystopie, et fasse écho à la lecture stratégique qu’en fait Michel Foucault dans Surveiller et punir (1975), sa critique virulente de l’État-providence retrouve certaines des problématiques centrales de l’attaque menée par George Orwell contre les États totalitaires, en particulier celles liées à la mémoire et au langage. L’adoption d’une narratrice à la première personne permet à Fagan de dénoncer une surveillance qui n’est faite que de contrôle et de s’opposer à un discours institutionnel déshumanisant.

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  • 1 Utopianism may be regarded as an umbrella term that encompasses eutopias (“happy places”) and dysto (...)
  • 2 They are discussed jointly in Lyon 1994, 57-79.

1Surveillance and the utopian imagination have a long-standing relationship,1 starting with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), where citizens observe each other and the desire for secrecy warrants suspicion (Marks 2015, 42). The rise of literary dystopia after the second World War was in part a response to the experience of twentieth-century police-surveillance states (Moylan 2000, 138-139). Literature has given surveillance studies one of its dominant metaphors in the shape of George Orwell’s Big Brother, the other, coming from the field of social theory, being Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.2 Both have come to epitomize the contested notion of “surveillance society.” While their heuristic value to understand contemporary surveillance has been called into question, especially in the face of developments which include dataveillance (Clarke 1987), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), or the desire for exposure (Harcourt 2015), their cultural significance persists, as evidenced by the systematic references to Orwell in relation to state surveillance scandals such as the one triggered by Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 (Marks 2015, 2), as well as the literary rewritings of Bentham’s scheme, often mediated by Michel Foucault’s reading in Discipline and Punish (1975).

2By entitling her début novel The Panopticon, Scottish author Jenni Fagan is deliberately inscribing her text within a tradition of creative appropriations which may have started with the Panopticon staged in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, published in 1984. Since then, both the technological capabilities and public awareness of surveillance have increased exponentially, so that Fagan is also drawing on popular familiarity with the Panopticon. Fagan’s Panopticon is a youth care unit to which, in the opening pages of the novel, the protagonist, Anais Hendricks, is being taken as the primary suspect in a case of assault which has left a police officer in a coma. A fascinating case for social workers, she describes herself as a “specimen”: “Fifty-one placements, drug problems, violence, dead adopted mum, no biological links, constant offending” (Fagan 2012, 185).

3In the novel, the total surveillance for which Big Brother and the Panopticon have become bywords is prolonged inside the protagonist’s mind not just as the interiorization of surveillance but as a psychotic nightmare called “the experiment,” whose presence intensifies as the threat of being sent to a secure unit looms larger. While the title explicitly references the Panopticon, reintroducing Nineteen Eighty-Four makes it possible to highlight the dynamics of surveillance in the novel, and what the latter tells us about dystopian fantasies of total surveillance. This article first locates Fagan’s fictional world alongside Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s Big Brother within the dystopian tradition, then shows how it defeats panoptic space by introducing blind spots and hiding corners, before showing how the concept of “non-opticon” may be more apt to describe the combination of excessive control and lack of care that the Panopticon residents experience.

Between dystopia and eutopia: utopian oscillations

4The idea that “the dystopian text is the negative of Utopia” and that “[b]oth function as thought experiments” suggests a complementarity between eutopia and dystopia that underlies the analysis below (Moylan 2000, 128). Even though Nineteen Eighty-Four describes the horizon of Oceania as “the exact opposite of the stupid, hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined” (Orwell 1977, 267), and the novel is “surely one of the most unrelievedly gloomy dystopias ever concocted,” Margaret Atwood, who coined the phrase “ustopia” to describe the dialectic relationship between eutopia and dystopia, notes that “utopia is present, though minimally, in the form of an antique glass paperweight and a little woodland glade beside a stream” (Atwood 2011, 85-86). As will be apparent, Fagan’s novel too displays a tension between dystopian tendencies and the presence of a eutopian horizon.

  • 3 Bentham also designed a “chrestomathic-Panopticon” for schools (1816-1817) and developed a “constit (...)

5Such ambivalence can already be traced in the historical Panopticon, which is not easy to place on the utopian spectrum. While the “prison-Panopticon”, which Bentham designed between 1786 and 1791, is the most famous one, he also invented a model workhouse which may be called the “pauper-Panopticon”, in 1797-8.3 When writing about the latter, the reformer was careful to specify: “This no utopia,” since for him utopias fail to adhere to the principles of cause and consequence:

In Utopias, effects are represented as produced when adequate causes have been assigned […] happiness is represented as existing without adequate means of happiness […]. Persons are represented as regulated and subsisting in a state of regulation, without anything to regulate them (UCL, Bentham MSS, UC, cvii, 58, quoted in Semple 1993, 305)

6Likewise, Bentham would not have described his prison-Panopticon as a utopia, precisely because in his prison, effects were carefully engineered through regulation. To him, Thomas More’s Utopia was a “Romance,” an “anti-rational fallacy” as it failed to account for the population’s compliance with social norms (Semple 1993, 297). This meaning of “Utopia” as an unrealistic scheme in which effects are presented but causes not explained coexists, under Bentham’s pen, with a use in which the term denotes an idea which has not been put into practice. Thus, when the reformer describes his “Pauper Management” scheme as a “Utopia” or “Romance”, he is referring to the fact that it was never built:

[…] the Romance, the Utopia, to which I had once occasion to allude. – Romance? – how should it be anything less? – I mean to an Author’s partial eyes. In proportion as a thing is excellent, when established, is it anything but romance, and theory, and speculation, till the touch of the seal or the sceptre has converted it into practice? (Bentham 2017, 377)

7Such inconsistencies may be explained by the fact that Bentham did not think of himself as a utopianist, and did not seek to theorize utopia.

8It is rather in the reception of the Panopticon by historians that terms such as “utopian” or “dystopian” have gained prominence, and here too, tensions persist. On the one hand, it has been argued that the prison-Panopticon can hardly be regarded as a thought experiment given Bentham’s life-long efforts to have it built (Dinwiddy 1989, 91-96; Semple 1992). On the other hand, for historian Robert Evans, “the Panopticon brought the prison into the realm of utopia,” in that its “construction and regulation were to determine the workings of a strange kind of model community, subject to the dictates of reason alone” (Evans 1982, 198). Like Fourier’s phalansteries or Robert Owen’s industrial community at New Lanark, Bentham’s prison was “an isolated and restricted society where the strings could be sorted out and their movements choreographed” (Evans 1982, 214). Moreover, in Evans’s reading, it was “the only prison ever to have been conceived as a possible model for the good society” (Evans 1982, 220). Even Janet Semple acknowledges that in its desire to eliminate social discord and produce individual happiness, it may be read alongside other Enlightenment utopias (Semple 1993, 300). As for the pauper-Panopticon, for John Poynter, it “grew into a Utopia,” in which “the planner ran riot” (Poynter 1969, 109). In designing it, Bentham was “the social engineer whose detailed plan [would] make paupers secure and improve their lives by turning them to industry and, therefore, create greater happiness” (Arneil 2021, 3). The chrestomathic project too has been described as a “dark utopia” (Bentham 2005, introduction, xxvi, lxvi-lxvii; my translation).

9For some, Bentham’s own presentation of his scheme displays “utopian enthusiasm,” as well as a “utopian hunger for certitude” (Lyon 1994, 63, 73). He claimed to be able to solve a significant number of social problems with one simple principle of architecture: “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffuse – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the Gordian knot of the Poor Laws not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in Architecture!” (Bentham 1843, 39) If we leave aside Bentham’s rejection of utopias as “perfect places deriving from the efforts of gods or supernatural forces,” and opt for a definition highlighting “potentially realizable projects created by humans,” then utopianism, as “social dreaming,” can include the reformer (Marks 2015, 44-45). Finally, for Brunon-Ernst, “the full scope of Bentham’s utopia” lies in the fact that “the Panopticons would one day become useless, because people would have adopted appropriate utilitarian behaviour” (Brunon-Ernst 2012, 40-41). Panopticons were only a transitory tool of social engineering meant to lay the basis for the advent of a sort of utilitarian millenarianism. Dystopian readings of the Panopticon are precisely those that fail to recognize this “anti-panoptic” horizon (Schofield 2009, 92).

10The question of whether the Panopticon best qualifies as a eutopia or dystopia remains open despite almost two centuries of debates opposing a libertarian and an authoritarian school of interpretation (Champs 2012, 64-65; Brunon-Ernst 2012, 1-2). The level of “systematic regimentation” was enough to make “Bentham the Big Brother” as “dogmatically authoritarian as most of the kind” (Semple 1993, 299). Peter Marks adds that “the sense that Bentham’s management scheme might seem dystopian to modern minds emphasizes how utopian works are open to divergent interpretations in different contexts, or by different readers in the same context” (Marks 2015, 44). Michel Foucault’s interpretation of the Panopticon as the archetype of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish – “panopticism” – has undeniably played a part in fostering dystopian readings of Bentham’s plan. Although in “The Eye of Power,” he presented the Panopticon as “at once a programme and a utopia” and as a description, “in the utopian form,” of “a general system” and “particular mechanisms which really exist,” his interpretation of Bentham’s scheme has been received as dystopian, with the Panopticon becoming the symbol of a disciplinary society which relies on the interiorization of relentless surveillance, and whose mechanisms extend well beyond the prison walls (Foucault 1980, 164). While Foucault’s account of Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish is a controversial, strategic reading, it has undeniably contributed to popularizing Bentham’s scheme, and turning it into a cultural symbol that has been creatively appropriated by authors.

  • 4 Fagan’s other two novels so far, The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) and Luckenbooth (2021), similarly foc (...)

11The dystopian streak in Fagan’s novel comes from the fact that it focuses on a marginal population that mainstream society usually prefers to ignore and lock away – juvenile delinquents, abused children, minors who have been exposed to, and themselves produce, shockingly high levels of violence.4 The relevant dimension is not so much time, opposing present and possible future states of society, as space, holding in tension central and peripheral spaces. Fagan’s The Panopticon is dystopian because it opens “in the midst of a social ‘elsewhere’ that appears to be far worse than any in the ‘real’ world” (Moylan 2000, xiii). Like dystopias, the novel is meant to be an eye-opener which “reflect[s] upon the causes of social and ecological evil as systemic” (Moylan 2000, xii).

12Moreover, Fagan’s rendering illustrates a recurrent pattern in twentieth and twenty-first century dystopias, of “an individual rebelling against an oppressive and intrusive power” (Marks 56). Indeed, the typical dystopian text, after describing the “terrible place” which is its setting, “zooms in on one of the subjects”, after which “[t]he story line […] develops around that alienated protagonist as she or he begins to […] trace the relationship between individual experience and the operation of the entire system” (Moylan 2000, 13). Anais can be read as one such “alienated protagonist,” who exposes how the Panopticon, as a centre for young delinquents, is just one mechanism among others, which include institutional police and the children’s court panel, locking them up in pre-established narratives, as the last section shall show. Being “in care” seems to mean transferring from one disciplinary institution to another. In line with Bentham’s enthusiastic presentation of the countless applications of his scheme (“[I]t will be found applicable, I think without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection” [Bentham 1843, 40]), readers are told that the institution used to be a “nuthouse.” Similarly, Mr. Jamieson, a character detained in a lunatic asylum who claims he was present on the night Anais was born, stresses the continuity between the disciplinary institutions he went through – from boarding school from the age of four to the army to the lunatic asylum: “They got me early. It’s hard when they get you so young” (246).

13Finally, in Moylan’s description, “the singular misfit finds allies and not only learns the ‘truth’ of the system but also enters collectively into outright opposition” (Moylan 2000, xiii). This pattern is apparent in the past of Anais, who has a history of organising riots. She does find allies in the other Panopticon residents but also in Angus, the only social worker who shows true empathy in the novel, and leads the final attack on the central watchtower, illustrating “the usual story of alienation and rebellion” (Moylan 2000, 181). Finally, the tone is characterized by the “renewed and focused anger” that Moylan identifies in the dystopian tradition (Moylan 2000, 181). Therefore, even though Fagan’s novel, which is not futuristic but set in contemporary Scotland, does not fit a narrow definition of dystopia as “a literary depiction of an undesirable, avoidable but conceivable future state of society” (Lyon 1994, 59), it is undeniably shaped by dystopian patterns.

  • 5 See Fludernik 2017, 7-12.

14If The Panopticon, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, focuses on one character caught in the meshes of an evil system, it differs significantly in its narratological setup. Whereas Orwell’s dystopia uses heterodiegetic narration with internal focalization, with Winston Smith as sole focalizer, in the third person (Bode 2019, 26), Fagan’s novel uses a first-person narrator, rendered highly unreliable through drug consumption and memory loss. This setup reshuffles the terms of the narratological debates of the 1980s, in which panopticism was also used to denote the omniscient narrator who puts characters under surveillance.5 Here, panopticism is no longer a metaphor based on ontological confusion (Cohn 1995, 9), but is experienced in the fictional “reality” of the characters – from below, as it were, and the use of first-person narration is probably best understood as an attempt to counter the othering of Panopticon residents by offering their perspective, rather than as a way of replicating panopticism and putting Anais under surveillance.

15Although later reworkings of the plan actually feature polygons (Brunon-Ernst 2012, 25), readers are likely to associate the Panopticon with a circular shape, which becomes a crescent in Fagan’s version, and with its characteristic central watchtower. Inside, surveillance seems to function on panoptic principles, as whoever occupies the watchtower is put in a position of omniscience: “From the watchtower it could see into every bedroom, every landing, every bathroom. Everywhere” (10). It does not matter whether the central watchtower is actually occupied: “[I]t just watches – all on its own” (67). The gaze thus functions automatically. Finally, surveillance inside the Panopticon is complemented by monitoring on the part of social services, which is how Foucault describes “the police surveillance of delinquents,” which consists in “administrative overseeing, registering and monitoring” (Fludernik 2019, 53).

16Fagan’s most significant variation, alongside architectural innovations such as the addition of two turrets, lies in the prolongation of panoptic surveillance in what the narrator calls “the experiment,” a sinister conspiracy of men in suits and wide-rimmed hats who want Anais dead. The protagonist believes they walk along the landing outside her door at night, “sending back observations to experiment headquarters” and that they occupy the watchtower (33-34, 97). The dissymmetry of the panoptic gaze is reproduced in the experiment, since “they can see in everywhere, but nobody can see them” (122). The experiment is ultimately more intrusive than surveillance from the watchtower, as the men are not bounded by walls: “they can see you anywhere you are” (122, see also 146). The watchtower offers a striking and memorable symbol that makes all-encompassing surveillance graspable, but does not contain it. The Panopticon thus constitutes a dystopian space because of the seemingly relentless surveillance which weighs on its occupants, and which finds a counterpoint in a eutopian island.

17A eutopian horizon does exist in the novel, first with the boat trip which the Panopticon residents take on a wild loch, and secondly, in Anais’s dream of escaping to Paris. The loch is a place where tenderness is possible for and between marginal teenagers: on the bus, “Isla rests her head on Tash’s shoulder, and Tash strokes her hair” (192). The landscape is idyllic: “The sky is blue outside and the countryside is green. It whizzes by and I could just drive around like this every day. Watching the green. Watching the whizz. The blues and greens are lush” (192). The anaphora, the repetitions of “blue” and “green” and the use of monosyllabic words seem to reproduce the lulling effect of the simple but grand landscape. The boat ride gives Anais the sensation of “gliding” and “flying”, and leads to an epiphanic encounter with a “pure-black swan” (195). Anais urges her boat companions to “look” at the swan, an act of aesthetic contemplation at odds with the gazes and stares they are used to, and exclaims “he’s perfect!” (195) The outdoor trip is an opportunity for her to get better self-knowledge and to contemplate an alternative life: “I never knew I liked to be outside so much. I never knew I liked lochs and views and that, but I could seriously handle living in a cottage by the side of somewhere like this” (196).

18The climactic scene takes place on a eutopian island, a space which the youths can claim as their own as if they were “conquerors” and where they can recreate a sense of community, finding communion in contemplation: “We all huddle up next to each other, looking over the loch” (202, 206). A wedding ceremony is performed between Tash and Isla, “out of sight of the boys’ boat” and of anyone (201). The eutopia, or happy place, is one in which nature shelters the teenagers from intrusive gazes: “[I]t’s alright, nobody’s looking. The loch sparkles, and the trees all along it are thick and dark” (213). A different visual economy becomes possible, where watching means bearing witness to true love. In Shortie’s words: “God’s watching or, like, the clouds are watching. Me and Anais would be watching” (208). Isla, whose name is derived from “Islay”, an island in the Scottish Hebrides, appears “light and happy” and the whole crew seems rejuvenated (211).

19As the novel unfolds, the sense of community created on the island pervades the Panopticon itself. Indeed, after over two months, Anais notes: “It almost feels like home, cos of, like, Shortie, and Isla, even Angus, and the roof. It’s a long time since I’ve wanted to stay anywhere” (239). This aspect of the Panopticon complicates the picture and runs against the expectations raised by a Foucault-inspired reading. Indeed, the distinction between dystopian and eutopian spaces, and between panoptic and non-panoptic spaces, is not as clear-cut as it might at first appear.

Blind spots and secret shelters: redefining panoptic space

20In an interview entitled “The Eye of Power”, Michel Foucault locates the invention of the Panopticon within the context of a “fear [which] haunted the latter half of the eighteenth century: the fear of darkened spaces, of the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths” (Foucault 1980, 153). Panoptic aspirations aimed to:

break up the patches of darkness that blocked the light, eliminate the shadowy areas of society, demolish the unlit chambers where arbitrary, political acts, monarchical caprice, religious superstition, tyrannical and priestly plots, epidemics and the illusion of ignorance were fomented (Foucault 1980, 153).

21Foucault goes on to contrast such panoptic aspirations with the “fantasy-world of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and dungeons” to be found in the Gothic novels produced at the same period. In his reading, the “imaginary spaces” explored in the “landscapes of Ann Radcliffe’s novels”, with their “mountains and forests, caves, ruined castles and terrifyingly dark and silent convents”, are “the negative of the transparency and visibility” which projects like the Panopticon sought to establish (Foucault 1980: 154).

22Foucault’s reading of the treatment of space in the Panopticon is in keeping with Bentham’s presentation of his institution as a place in which full mastery of space can be achieved. However, because Foucault’s strategic interpretation of Bentham has been so influential on attempts to grasp with twentieth- and twenty-first-century surveillance, the latter is often perceived as all-powerful and inescapable. This is where reintroducing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the discussion is particularly helpful. Indeed, contrary to common understandings, surveillance in Oceania is far from being omnipresent and omniscient. Orwell’s novel identifies nooks and crannies which escape the gaze of Big Brother and Fagan’s novel may be placed in the continuation of this literary tradition which opposes secret spaces to panoptic aspirations. Indeed, as shall be seen below, and contrary to what Anais asserts, surveillance in The Panopticon is characterized by irregularity. Not only does Fagan’s novel stage spaces which are, to borrow from Foucault, “patches of darkness” in which privacy may be reclaimed, no matter how small they are, but it does so by drawing on texts which belong to the Gothic tradition heralded by Ann Radcliffe. Indeed, The Panopticon entertains a deep intertextual relationship with key works of the Victorian Gothic such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) or, as the final section will demonstrate, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).

23Bentham did oppose the dark and confused space of the prisons of his time to the ideal transparency of the Panopticon. Fantasies of total spatial control appear in his writing through the use of superlatives (Wrobel 2009, 115; Wrobel 2020, 421-422). While the system of transportation, in its American and Australian forms, made spatial regulation impossible, in the panoptic system, “light – the clearest and the most uninterrupted light – takes place of such darkness” (Bentham 1843, 185). Foucault’s discussion in Discipline and Punish presents panoptic space as a perfectly even grid, where surveillance is exerted homogeneously. Thus, the model of the disciplinary mechanism is “enclosed, segmented space” (Foucault 1995, 197). It operates through “separations” and “distributions,” as well as a “meticulous tactical partitioning,” projecting the “subtle segmentations” of discipline (Foucault 1995, 198-99). With its “simple, economic geometry” and “analytical arrangement of space”, the Panopticon produces “homogeneous effects of power” and leaves its inmates nowhere to hide (Foucault 1995, 202, 203).

24Bentham’s – and Foucault’s – insistence on absolute spatial control stands in sharp contrast to the unevenness of surveillance in Oceania, where, contrary to public perception, surveillance is anything but total. The very first pages of the novel show the protagonist finding a remote corner in his apartment where he can engage in an illicit activity – writing in a diary. Peter Marks’s close reading of the opening passage highlights the blind spots which the character seeks to take advantage of (Marks 2015, 71). Moreover, surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four does not apply uniformly across society. Only the elite is closely monitored, while the Proles are left unattended (Marks 2017, 70; Bode 2019, 25-26). Nevertheless, Big Brother, like the Panopticon, remains in popular discourse a symbol of total, uniform, inescapable surveillance.

25The anonymous prologue – which in retrospect may well be Anais’s monologue – with which Fagan’s novel opens seems to suggest that the latter will describe the struggles of a character caught in the meshes of unrelenting surveillance: “They watch me, I know it, and I can’t find anywhere any more – where they can’t see” (1, original emphasis). Within the Panopticon itself, the occupants’ privacy is in theory drastically reduced. Even the occupants’ reflections seem trapped inside the watchtower (53). Characters complain about being “watched by that fucking thing twenty-four fucking hours a day!” (271; see also 318) Repeated references to the watchtower ensure that readers never forget about it, as when Anais remarks that “that watchtower seems bigger than ever” (250). Beyond the Panopticon, the novel registers technological innovations and developments which Orwell could not have anticipated, such as the spreading of CCTV cameras, the use of tracers, electronic tags and DNA swabs. Anais is also critical of people’s desire to be watched and to expose themselves and in turn become voyeurs on forums such as social media, in addition to the professional, state and corporate surveillance that already targets them (34).

26The text blurs the ontological difference between institutional surveillance and what may be hallucinations on Anais’s part, positing a continuity between the different surveillant instances. The gargoyle at the gate, who Anais believes “[has] been waiting to see how [her] night went”, morphs into the night nurse, who can see not only what Anais did on that night, but her whole life (160-161), and becomes an accomplice of the experiment, with whom she plays chess inside the watchtower (250). “[W]ee faces” also appear on walls at the police station and the lunatic asylum, described as “spies” and compared to “a tracer” (108, 244). For all the text’s insistence on the omnipresence of a polymorphous surveillance, however, the opening prologue is, to some extent, a red herring. More precisely, the perception of surveillance by the protagonist remains stable, but its reality and effectiveness are questionable, as is apparent in the treatment of space.

27There is tension between the Foucauldian credentials of the text and the way characters interact with their environment. Anais, who asserts her desire for privacy in the opening pages (“What I want is a hole under the ground to lie in. Or a treehouse. Somewhere nobody can see me.” [15]), does manage to escape the panoptic gaze in specific spaces, such as the “gap at the back of [her] drawer,” where she hides money and drugs (230). Space is not uniform and regular, and neither is surveillance on the part of the staff. John thus manages to keep them busy while Anais and Shortie fight. They also turn a blind eye when the children go on a punitive campaign against Brian (131-132). John even manages to lock his door and jump out of the window (132). One of the key panoptic principles – the interiorization of constant surveillance – is undermined when Anais is told that the watchtower is unoccupied unless the night-nurse is on duty (20). Also, while the Panopticon is meant to shape inmates’ behaviour by awareness of the possibility of constant surveillance, Anais warns against showing knowledge of the experiment (“Dinnae ever let them know that you know about them” [122]) which, again, is at odds with panoptic principles.

28Anais’s complaint about being “locked up twenty-four hours a day” seems exaggerated (16). She goes on a double date with Shortie in the countryside, and even manages to “[slip] off [the] radar [of the experiment]” (156). She opposes resistance to their supposed omnipotence and is “not totally broke, yet” (199). During the final riot, after Anais throws a lit bottle towards the surveillance window, tables are reversed as it is the experiment which is “exposed”: “The whole surveillance window shatters, and I see them – turning on their fucking tails – the experiment, for a fraction of a fucking second: exposed” (319).

29The efficiency of CCTV cameras and electronic tags is similarly variable. After her hearing by the children’s panel, Anais is ordered to wear an electronic tag, but manages to remove it, having no desire to be “trackable 24/7” (178). Her “prolonged terror campaign” against the police officer who bullied her includes neutralizing CCTV cameras, which she “[f]oam[s] […] with cheap-as-shit shaving foam” and “[s]pray[s] […] with fluorescent-pink paint” (116, 117). She even performs, “[c]limb[ing] up on the roof of the car and surf[ing] for the cameras,” avoiding identification by wearing a Buddha bag with holes cut out, as well as “star-shaped sunglasses” over it, thereby mocking and reversing the power balance between the watcher and the watched (117). The fact that she eventually gets caught for her various acts of vandalism during a plain police search calls into question the usefulness of technological enhancements of surveillance.

30Fagan’s Panopticon, far from being an abstract piece of architecture, or a transparent structure of iron and glass, sometimes takes the appearance of an “animated Gothic castle” (Pittin-Hedon 2017, 192), as in the first description: “We drive by a huge stone wall, up to a gateway framed by two tall pillars. On the first there’s a gargoyle […] I glance up at the other pillar, and a winged cat crouches down. / […] It’s a winged cat – with one red eye and a terrible smile” (4). The insistence on the two turrets and the tower confirms this first impression: “The Panopticon looms in a big crescent at the end of a long driveway” (5). So do the references to the statues that are seemingly alive (14). An “eerie” and “creepy” atmosphere shrouds the Panopticon when Anais returns from her double date (146). A few pages later, the building is presented as “a big looming hulk,” so big that it looks like “somewhere that a giant lives” (154-155), a comparison that brings to mind the world of fairy tales, but also the opening pages of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) with its giant helmet crashing in the courtyard.

  • 6 On the witch figure see Mc Culloch 2015, 119-122.

31The secret spaces of Fagan’s Panopticon are rife with intertextual references in which “Gothic” does not designate a place that shelters irrational, archaic practices, but suggests imaginative depth, and stands in sharp contrast with bland, “social-work-ised” space. Such is the case, for instance, when Anais pushes a forbidden door, “a wee ornate door, one of the only original things left in here,” and observes: “This place would have been nicer once, more Gothic” (11). The Gothic atmosphere (“Wind whistles along the roof of the building, and the whole place creaks.”) is actually “comforting” (28), and vampires and witches are referred to numerous times as positive alternative identities.6 The Panopticon, with its “orphaned heroine, retro prison design and Gothic accoutrements” (Shone 2013), is reminiscent of Jane Eyre. As in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, nights are interrupted by mysterious crying in a “creaky” building (221), and the heroine is immediately warned about a forbidden space, the fourth floor whose transformation into a secure unit has been halted by the presence of asbestos and which is “totally out of bounds” (15; original emphasis).

32Anais transgresses the prohibition and pushes the small door that opens into the turret – “damp” and “dim” in true Gothic fashion (68). She follows “dusty footprints” which evoke a ghostly presence up to a “black door” (68). The spiral motif (“Round, round, round”, “The spiral gets smaller, the stairs narrower” [68]) suggests a density of space that is at odds with panoptic bareness. In yet another blow to supposedly ubiquitous surveillance, Anais manages to steal a screwdriver and enter the forbidden room on the top floor. From there, a window leads onto the roof, which will be used by the teenagers as “the only place the watchtower cannae see [them]” (264). This enclave of privacy is associated with the eutopian space of the island through Anais’s reminiscences of the wedding ceremony when on the roof: “I keep imagining Isla and Tash, petals in their hair – kissing on the island” (264). Ultimately, the only space that truly remains “out of bounds” (102) is the watchtower, which Anais will nevertheless destroy in the final riot.

33Space is also used metaphorically to dramatize the threat of total surveillance to privacy and identity through an opposition between inner and outer space, where the inner space is seen as the repository of one’s true self. This dimension is missing from the original Panopticon, as Bentham, contrary to many reformers of this time, did not aim to reform the prisoners’ souls, but sought to shape their behaviour. In Orwell’s dystopia, however, the tension between inner and outer space is very much present. As Peter Marks notes, Winston’s diary is “a textual space in which he can construct his personalized counter-history and work through suppressed memories and thoughts” (Marks 2015, 77). The novel shows Winston re-examining Julia’s assertion that “They cannot get inside you” (Orwell 1977, 166, 290). In the Ministry of Love, he tries to conceive a space which can remain inviolate, where his secrets are hidden even from himself, and where his hatred is “locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst” (Orwell 1977, 281).

34Anais finds in herself the last buttress of resistance: “They cannae have this soul. They have taken everything else and it’s the only thing left that I own” (296; original emphasis). The specificity of her situation is that she has no identity: “Fifty odd moves, three different names, born in a nuthouse to a nobody that was never seen again. […] I dinnae have an identity […]” (99; original emphasis). She was assigned a file number before she was given a name, and is cut off from anyone who might remember early childhood, so that her own memories are described as valuable possessions: “They cannae have my memories, not even the bad ones. They dinnae belong to them” (79). Should they disappear, “it’d be like [she] never existed” (78).

35The problematics linked to the spatialization of the self in the face of surveillance, and the drawing and defining of an inner self as a means of resistance, materialize in the see-through skull motif. Anais believes indeed that the experiment wants to access, read and control her mind: “[T]hey would inject me in the head – with a big needle full of shit that makes your skull see-through. Then they would put me in a box. The box would have a light switch that’d make my thoughts glow a different colour, in my see-through skull. So they could read them” (70-71, see also 106). She believes the faces sent by the experiment are “[m]ind-readers” (110), and that they could try “put[ting] an implant in [her] head” (287). To her, the unit is a place where “the experiment can come in your sleep and take things out of your brain” (161). What is at stake for her in the preservation of the integrity of her inner space is the possibility to write her own story, thereby avoiding the pre-written scripts awaiting her.

All control, no care: living inside the non-opticon

  • 7 Leblond 2022 develops a similar argument, drawing on Mirzoeff 2011. Puig de la Bellacasa, however, (...)

36Surveillance scholars seeking to highlight the nuances of surveillance stress the fact that its spectrum covers goals ranging from care (“watching over one for purposes of protection”) to control (“scrutinizing one’s behavior in order to enforce discipline”) (Monahan 2011, 497). The treatment of young delinquents as depicted in The Panopticon is clearly located at the control end of the spectrum and utterly lacking in care.7 Surveillance scholars also stress the discriminatory nature of surveillance. Generalizing references to the Panopticon or to Big Brother in public discourse obscure the extent to which surveillance applies in varying degrees and with different tools depending on social class. Thus, David Lyon, who questions the relevance of panopticism for consumer society as a whole, acknowledges that panoptic surveillance is applied to what he calls the “underclass.” In his opinion, “consumerism contributes heavily to the maintenance of social order” while “the Panopticon deals with those left out of the market”: “the minority, the new poor or the underclass, is subjective to high normative regulation” (Lyon 1994, 75). This ties in with Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon’s reading of the novel as “an exploration of subalternity,” the latter term being used “to designate unequal and iniquitous power relations between individuals and groups and underpinned by the institutional structure of the state” (Lehner 2011, 9, quoted in Pittin-Hedon 2019, 191).

37Because Anais and the other youth in care belong to the underclass, the rest of society literally does not care, turning a blind eye when abuse is perpetrated. Social invisibility may account for her fear of disappearing or shrinking to the point of vanishing. She notes that “People in care are always disappearing,” and that “Nobody finds out where they go,” (124) statements which will prove prophetic when Tash goes missing. Anais exposes general indifference to the fate of the underclass and calls for a “care” type of surveillance in her lengthy, impassioned reaction to a newspaper headline which glares at the reader in bold characters: “Nobody Could Prevent Child’s Murder” (183, original emphasis). The statement, with its sense of inevitability, is interpreted as “a fucking insult” (184). Anais believes underclass babies are abandoned by the rest of society and not granted the level of public attention given to the victims of ethnic cleansing or war abroad. However, she remarks, “it’s not different here, at home, if you’ve no money” (184). As opposed to the institutional helplessness posited by the headline, Anais stresses the importance of efficient surveillance as care, not control, and does so in visual terms: “You can stop it. You go in, and you look, with your eyes open; if they have a record of continuous bruises, or bumps, if you visit and they have chocolate smeared all over them – wipe it off. See what is underneath” (184).

38Rather than a Panopticon, it seems that Anais and the other residents are trapped inside a “non-opticon,” a phrase coined by C. Fred Alford to express the contrast between Foucault’s account of prisons in Discipline and Punish and what he actually saw in a maximum-security state prison in Maryland – where there was none of the categorization, work or timetable described by Foucault (Alford 2000, 131). In the same study, Alford points out that while for Foucault, the institution for juvenile offenders at Mettray functioned on panoptic principles, Jean Genet, who was institutionalized there, described it as “children’s hell,” not because of excessive watching but for the opposite reason. As Alford comments, “[p]erhaps not being watched is even worse than being watched, so terrible that the insult of perpetual surveillance is itself a fictional defence against something worse, invisibility before god and man” (132-133). As a reviewer puts it, “They [the Panopticon residents in Fagan’s novel] are constantly supervised, and yet, in the most important way, they remain witheringly unseen” (Charles 2014). In this context, the experiment may be read as an attempt to “glamorize a heartless institutional system that chews up kids in quite ordinary ways” (Charles 2014), and paranoia may indeed well be a “self-cure for insignificance” (Adam Phillip, Side Effects, 2007, quoted in Nellis 2009, 197). In a brief flash of lucidity, Anais, who defines herself as “a nobody from nowhere” (31) or “a total fucking no-mark” (251), suddenly asks herself: “What if there was no experiment? What if my life was so worthless that it was of absolutely no importance to anyone?” (233)

39Fagan’s novel illustrates the Foucauldian thesis about the juridical power that produces, rather than represses, the delinquent. The idea that there is no escape out of the institutional system for Anais is clearly spelled out by the chairwoman of the children’s panel, who has a court order ready to send her to a secure unit until she is eighteen, without review, if she is tried for “one single offence more” (175). She believes that Anais is a criminal at heart and that nothing will keep her off that path, a point which she makes no less than four times over three pages, asserting for instance: “It is my opinion, Miss Hendricks, that you are going to reoffend. Once you have done so, you will go into a secure unit. And when you get released from there, you will offend again and you will go on – to spend your adult life in prison, which is exactly where you belong” (176). At the end of the novel, Anais is to be sent to John Kay’s, a prison with a secure unit located away from public inspection, on an island which seems to be the counterpoint of the eutopian island evoked above, “an island they dinnae tell the public about because they dinnae want press, or vigilantes, turning up” (317). Her true nature is thus supposedly contained in her criminal record, taking precedence over the teenager and her potentialities. As Anais sums up for herself, “Your mind is made-up, and I’ve got absolutely fuck-all to say” (175).

40This sense of doom is conveyed by a rewriting of the motif from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). After a nightmare in which “a spider with a steel web” has got hold of her head and is “ready tae spin [her] body further in,” Anais feels that the “veil” separating her from “the other side” is “getting thinner” (268). She then evokes the “patterns over [her] walls,” described as “Victorian swirls with delicate bars across them” (268-269). Like the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, Anais feels she is being called to join that other side by a female figure trapped behind a pattern that looks like bars: “Tash and Isla are in there – wrapped in each other’s arms. Isla reaches out from the wall. She wants me to know that this pain is good, that I have to feel it” (269; original emphasis). The “strangled heads” and “bulbous eyes” in Gilman’s story (Gilman 1996, 101) may have provided inspiration for Anais’s idea that the experiment would like to “see [her] hang [herself] in a secure unit. One knot. One neck. Vertebrae. Snapped” (Fagan 2013, 115). In addition to the institutional script that threatens to entrap her, Anais is aware of the possibility she may have inherited her mother’s schizophrenia, and, like Gilman’s narrator, she feels imprisoned by medical discourse. Only the words of Mr. Jamieson, who tells her “They dinnae own you” (248) and relates how he saw her mother escape, will set her free, suggesting she may have inherited her mother’s ability to run away instead.

41Within this institutional context, the choice of terminology is revealing. Control over language is central in the dystopian misfit’s struggle against hegemonic power (Moylan 2000, 148-149). Here, institutional language glosses over the dehumanizing treatment that the children receive through euphemistic phrases which Anais seeks to explode. Angus’s notes, which he lets Anais read, include a passage that reveals the importance of how the residents of the Panopticon are designated. On the one hand, institutional language suggests phrases such as “Cared-for Young People,” “Young Offenders in Holistic Rehabilitation” and “Children in Residential Care” (219). The final choice – “Clients” – is immediately questioned as inappropriate since, in a girl’s words, “Clients have the right to respond” (220). By contrast, residents refer to themselves as “Inmates,” as they believe they are “in training for the ‘proper jail’ (their words)” (220). Angus confirms that “up to seventy per cent of residents leaving care do end up either in prison, or prostitution, mentally ill or dead” (220). Some, like Anais, use the term “Lifers”, a choice which according to Angus shows they can only imagine their future as “continued institutionalisation after childhood (220; original emphasis).

42Control over language is closely linked to memory, as it makes the uncovering of “alternative truths of the past” possible (Moylan 2000, 149). The erasure and rewriting of the past conducted on a social level in Nineteen Eighty-Four is dramatized on the individual level through Anais. Her visit to the Monk in the Warrender Institute may be compared to the kind of “suppressed and subterranean memory that is forward-looking in its enabling force, liberating in its deconstruction of the official story and its reaffirmation of alternative ways of knowing and living in the world” for the “dystopian protagonist” (Moylan 2000, 149-150). Her quest is precisely one in which she seeks to uncover her origins. Having no idea how she was brought into this world, she entertains fantasies that the experiment grew her in a petri dish and plays the “birthday game” in which she invents all sorts of life beginnings for herself. Getting in touch with fragments of her past enables her to escape the ready-made script that social institutions try to impose on her. In her final bid for freedom – or escape fantasy, as readers cannot be sure Anais has actually managed to escape – London constitutes a welcome space of anonymity in which she can re-create her identity: “I am Frances Jones from Paris. I am not a face on a missing-person poster, I am not a number or a statistic in a file. / I have no-one watching me” (323). The possibility of an open-ended story defeats the closure of the institutional narrative that has sought to entrap her.

Conclusion

43Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon is a novel that repeatedly thwarts readers’ expectations and calls on them to make readjustments. While readers familiar with Bentham’s model prison may have expected the novel to unfold in a carceral environment, the institution is actually a former lunatic asylum turned into a youth care unit. Moreover, some of the basic mechanisms of panoptic surveillance are missing, as well as its ultimate aim, which was to turn inmates into productive members of society. The persisting influence of Discipline and Punish may have led one to expect a Foucault-inspired treatment of space, but some of the textual assertions to that effect are undermined by the gothicization of the Panopticon, a process which is reinforced by intertextual references to authors such as Charlotte Brontë or Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Fagan’s novel thus opposes figurative and textual density to panoptic bareness. Finally, contrary to what the title suggests, there is not a single Panopticon but actually two: the building and the “imaginary surveillance scenario of total exposure to ‘them’” (Fludernik 2019, 59). With its focus on the “experiment,” Fagan also defeats the expectations of readers anticipating a novel featuring the modern-day surveillance that the Panopticon has now become associated with. CCTV cameras and electronic tags remain secondary background elements.

44Surveillance in the novel is closely linked to Anais’s status as a youth in care, thereby providing an indictment of social democratic welfare, in an environment where surveillance is not science fiction anymore but has actually become banal. If there is Orwellianism in the novel, it lies in “the well-meaning Orwellianism of the modern welfare state” (Shone 2013). By focusing on the victims of a dysfunctional welfare system, Fagan’s text connects with the post-WWII tradition identified by Moylan, which is not limited to totalitarian states, but takes on a more broadly conceived “modern state apparatus” as “a primary engine of alienation and suffering” (Moylan 2000, xii).

45Setting aside the title’s invitation to look for Bentham or Foucault in the text and reading it alongside George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four makes it possible to bring to light the assertion of an inner space, which acts as the repository of one’s true self, identity and memories – and finally of the potentiality to define one’s identity outside pre-established narratives. One of the scariest aspects of Oceania, in addition to the surveillance exerted on members of the Outer Party and the brutal violence which picks up when surveillance fails, is the constant rewriting of the past. The question of the relation to the past is played out on an individual scale in Anais’s story through an immersion into a character’s world, accessed through the first-person narration. Surveillance, in its negative aspects, has been mostly explored in dystopian texts, and Fagan’s work, in its reshuffling of the traditional cards, offers a stimulating development in the relation between surveillance, literature and dystopia.

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Notes

1 Utopianism may be regarded as an umbrella term that encompasses eutopias (“happy places”) and dystopias (“bad places”) or as “the imaginative projection, positive or negative, of a society that is substantially different from the one in which the author lives” (Marks 2015, 4; Claeys and Sargent 1999, 1).

2 They are discussed jointly in Lyon 1994, 57-79.

3 Bentham also designed a “chrestomathic-Panopticon” for schools (1816-1817) and developed a “constitutional-Panopticon” (Brunon-Ernst 2012, 19-21).

4 Fagan’s other two novels so far, The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) and Luckenbooth (2021), similarly focus on marginal characters and/or spaces in texts which display a speculative or in the latter case marvellous element. The Sunlight Pilgrims is set in 2020, a very near future at the time of its publication, and centres on a small group of characters trying to prepare for the apocalypse in a caravan park in the North of Scotland, as the melting of the ice cap threatens to freeze the world to death. Luckenbooth takes places in a tenement building located in a dark alley in Edinburgh. The novel covers the stories of the different residents who live in the building over a century, and who are all affected by the curse placed by the devil’s daughter on the structure.

5 See Fludernik 2017, 7-12.

6 On the witch figure see Mc Culloch 2015, 119-122.

7 Leblond 2022 develops a similar argument, drawing on Mirzoeff 2011. Puig de la Bellacasa, however, warns against adopting a univocal, innocent definition of “care” and reminds us that the work of care “can be done within and for worlds that we might find objectionable” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 6). As a phenomenon with strong affective-political dimensions, care calls for contextualized analysis.

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Claire Wrobel, « Dystopia, surveillance and the spaces of social control in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012) »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 32 | 2022, mis en ligne le 30 novembre 2022, consulté le 15 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/13152 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.13152

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Auteur

Claire Wrobel

Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas (VALE, Sorbonne Université)

Claire Wrobel is Senior Lecturer at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University and a member of VALE (Sorbonne Université). Her research focuses on the Anglo-American novel, with a particular interest in law and literature, surveillance, and rewritings of the Gothic canon. Recent publications include “At the Crossroads of Law and Literature: On the Role of Fiction in Jeremy Bentham’s Penal Theory” (Law and Literature, 32:2, 2020), “Negotiating Dataveillance in the Near Future: Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias” (Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 43.2, 2021) and “Penal Theory and Practice as Plot Matrix” (Narrative and Law, ed. M. Fludernik and F. Schäfer, Nomos/Ergon, 2022). Her monograph entitled Roman noir, réforme et surveillance en Angleterre (1764-1842) was published with Classiques Garnier in 2022. She has edited a special issue of the Revue d’Etudes Benthamiennes on literature and panopticism (22, 2022) and co-edited a volume entitled Law, Surveillance and the Humanities (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2023).

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