Bunyan’s ‘Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners’ (1666) is one of the prison books that seem to deny or heroically ignore their settings, enacting a personal liberty that would oppose the self to the constraints of society. Certainly, Bunyan’s book centers above all on his interior life: he is counseled by elders, he interprets his dreams, he explicates scripture, he debates the devil over his salvation, he narrates his extravagant anxiety as he begins to preach in public. That the spiritual autobiography was a wildly popular publication genre is our first clue that ‘Grace Abounding’ is a social as well as a personal work. We should also consider in a fresh way one of the basic assumptions of structural thought: that language does not necessarily liberate its speakers, nor do they necessarily want to be liberated.
My suggestion is simple: the kinds of discourse in Bunyan’s autobiography were also the staples of godly conversation between Bunyan and the fellow Baptists imprisoned with him in the 1660s. Like Nelson Mandela and his co-trialists on Robben Island, the Baptists would have gathered in the prison’s common space to fortify their convictions and to distinguish themselves from other dissenting groups. Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ showcases the same sorts of spiritual conversation between Christian and his companions, progressing in sophistication and understanding as the journey approaches its salvific end. Bunyan wrote as a preacher and gifted storyteller to participate in his community’s living social world, which its confinement only fostered and magnified.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 