“The Marshalseas of the Mind”: Ideological and Emotional Prisons in Dickens’s Little Dorrit

This article explores the theme of imprisonment in Charles Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit (1855–1857) by combining semiotic analysis with cultural, sociological, and psychological perspectives. Drawing on James Phelan’s rhetorical theory of character, René Girard’s mimetic theory, and Jules de Gaultier’s notion of bovarism, it reads the Marshalsea debtors’ prison and other narrative sites of confinement represented in the novel as metaphors for a condition of ideological and emotional alienation rooted in capitalist greed, conformism, puritan ethos, and utilitarianism. On a socio-psychological level, this article investigates how William Dorrit, Arthur Clennam and Mrs. Clennam internalize sociocultural disharmonies (Marroni 2010) that result in self-deception, alienation, madness, religious fanaticism, and emotional paralysis. On a semiotic level, it analyses how Dickens represented his characters’ imagination, self-perception, and affective conditions through images of captivity.