"You may cut off my existence, but you cannot disturb my serenity."(273)

This section will focus on the imprisonment of Caleb Williams and the mental adjustments he makes to deal with the solitary confinement in which he finds himself after his first attempt at escape fails.

In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes:

The live burial that is a favorite conventual punishment in Gothic novels derives much of its horror not from the buried person's loss of outside activities (that would be the horror of dead burial), but from the continuation of a parallel activity that is suddenly redundant. (20)

The extent to which this Gothic convention comes into play increases directly with Caleb's level of transgression. When he is first put into prison, he says,

I was thrust into a day-room, in which all the persons then under confinement for felony were assembled, to the number of eleven. (262)

While he is secluded from the "outside activities" concerning Falkland and the pursuit of justice therein, Caleb is still able to interact with other prisoners and maintain a life not completely consumed by his punishment. It is after his first attempt at escape, however, that the extent of his live burial is maximized: he is put into solitary confinement and "cut off, for ever from all that existence has to bestow--from all the high hopes I had so often conceived--from all the future excellence my soul so much delighted to imagine,--to spend a few weeks in a miserable prison, and then to perish by the hand of the public executioner" (268).

It is Caleb's response to his captivity, his "parallel activities" which fall outside of Sedgwick's characterization of live burial. He describes his thoughts in the dungeon:

By degrees I quitted my own story, and employed myself in imaginary adventures. I figured to myself every situation which I could be placed, and conceived the conduct to be observed in each. Thus scenes of insult and danger, of tenderness and oppression, became familiar to me. In fancy I often passed the awful hour of dissolving nature. In some of my reveries I boiled with impetuous indignation, and in others patiently collected the whole force of my mind for some encounter. I cultivated the powers of oratory suited to these different states, and improved more in eloquence in the solitude of my dungeon, than perhaps I should have done in the busiest and most crowded scenes. (272)

It is, then, Caleb's mind which frees him from the live burial imposed by society. After spending some time in the solitary confinement, he trains himself to function underneath those confines, a feat of human mental capacity and certainly an optimistic outlook on the response to such captivity.