Hidden Literacies

The Literacy Narrative

The literacy narrative dominates the later portions of the narrative, evident in Maroney’s return to the subject of moral instruction, prison education, religious conversion, and his forays into poetic verse-writing. Here, Maroney compares his Auburn prison education favorably to that at Newgate, documenting the more meaningful instruction he received under the tutelage of Rev. Jared Curtis and his Sunday school, led by theology students from a nearby seminar. [Maroney’s is the only extant prison memoir that describes firsthand the prison schools at Newgate and Auburn.] Under the tutelage of Auburn’s instructors, Maroney begins to read his Bible more deliberately and attentively. This increased Biblical literacy leaves a mark on the structure of the narrative itself, evidenced by Maroney’s frequent insertions of close reading, quotations, and scriptural exegesis. Significantly, a pattern emerges, whereby Maroney inserts lines from poems composed after episodes of attentive close reading, linking Biblical literacy to fueling other literacy acts: “A short time after this I composed the following verses while lying on my bed at night,” (29) or later, “I composed at several times, some verses, two of which I here insert” (32), or later, “[t]hat night I composed the following verses, which I cannot forbear inserting” (34).
More subversively, Maroney’s Narrative suggests that the prison’s ban on writing and on correspondence catalyzes his literacy efforts. “As in the latter Prison no paper was allowed,” Maroney writes, “I could not make notes or memorandums of my thoughts and feelings, let alone the keeping of a journal of my experience” (32). Strictly speaking, Maroney did not write poetry while in prison: he generated verse and committed lines and experiences to memory because he needed a way around Auburn’s prohibitions against writing, and needed a way to record his thoughts and feelings. Thus, while the sentiment of the poetry is mostly conventional, his foray into verse (and later, memoir) must also be recognized as a strategic resistance to Auburn’s writing ban. 
Thus, the text challenges us not to rest on a too-simple contrast between “hidden” literacy and “public” literacy. In Maroney’s Meditations, clandestine literacy practices mobilize the inmate’s public voice as prison reformist as well as his poetic efforts as exemplary convert.  Hidden copies of former inmate William Coffey’s Inside Out and smuggled newspapers are not “opposed” to the public voice of authority that Maroney seeks to claim: they authorize this voice, serve as evidence for his claims, and even inspire his acts of writing. Prohibitions against writing prompt Maroney to commit experiences to verse in order to recollect them later, and to publicize these experiences and poems in his public Narrative. Disallowed behind bars, Maroney’s literacy, both orthodox and clandestine, gives him explanatory power over the trials, monotony, pain, and struggles of his life, and a path to transform his own shame into a fantasy of public citizenship.
 

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