Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!”
- Date
- 1851
Meaning of “For, what other dungeon is so dark as…”
Hawthorne’s narrator turns imprisonment inward, suggesting that guilt, memory and self-judgment can confine a person more relentlessly than an external cell.
Where does it come from?
The House of the Seven Gables, Project Gutenberg #77. This is Gothic literary narration surrounding Clifford’s long history of confinement and inner suffering; the metaphor is not a clinical account of mental illness.