I have always considered the age of Enlightenment an age of reason. People dare to know the unknown and question authority. The pursuit of knowledge equates to the pursuit of happiness. Some may argue that it is an age of feelings. Revolutions were brewing: regimes collapsed; rights formed; economic principles emerged; men and women of letters heatedly debated. Among all the narratives for the Enlightenment, in my mind imagination hardly comes into play. Yet the semester-long seminar alters my understanding of the age: it is an age that not only epitomizes humanity’s pursuit of knowledge. It is an age of imagination, bringing both potential and perils.
Imagination can be a valuable tool for social changes, triggering actions through feelings, be it empathy or sympathy. For abolitionists and formerly enslaved people, they usually make strong arguments through imagination, eliciting their target audience’s emotions. This emotional appeal often is closely intertwined with religion. In “On the Slave Trade”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge primarily draws on the power of religion. Despite all the theoretical controversies, religion involves humanity’s imagination to exert its influence. Coleridge correlates imagination with his advocacy to achieve social impact and takes advantage of Christianity to pressure English people who believe themselves to be faithful Christians to consider justice in the slave trade.
In Part III, Chapter 1 of “Essays on the Slavery and Commerce of Human Species,” Thomas Clarkson directly laments all the pains and sufferings endured by the “unfortunate Africans” (NAR 99). Clarkson, like Coleridge, employs religion as an agent to produce effects on his intended audience. Clarkson condemns the cruelty of the slave trade in Chapter 1 by speaking in both the narrator’s inner voice and in the imaginary voice of a kidnapped African slave, creating a more active engagement of the readership. He argues that after hearing this imaginary conversation, the “generous Englishman at home” who believes in Christianity (NAR 100) will sympathize.
Intriguingly, this use of imagination hardly finds its way into the advocacy for women’s rights, where many women of letters, Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherin Talbot, will adopt a cautionary tone for the imagination. Neither of them abhors imagination, but they all strive to warn their readers about the dangers of indulging in imagination. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft correlates female delicacy, indulgence in refinement, and excessive sentiments with romantic novels. She claims that women’s faculties are weakened by the “delicacy of sentiment” (NAR 225) and “false refinement” (NAR 224), which prevents them from developing “sufficient strength of mind” (NAR 227) to strengthen their virtues and make significant progress in the application of reason and rational understanding of society. As for Talbot, she straightforwardly pinpoints that “young women, run away with by Romance” (Uphaus and Foster 229) in Allegory 2, “The Danger of Indulgence of the Imagination.” Due to their unique social status at that time, women seldom realize the dangers that are looming behind indulgence in romantic novels and other entertainments. The logic is the same as the use of tittytainment – if sentimental novels take up more time in one’s attention span, one can hardly contemplate their situations and make social movements.
Imagination can sometimes be ingeniously used to preserve freedom of speech. When confronting a powerful government, the freedom of speech at stake will be protected through a form of self-censorship. Historically, intellectuals use imagination as an alternative vent for voicing their dissenting political opinions. In The Idler, Samuel Johnson creates fictional personae to express his views on various social issues in 18th-century England. The narrator occasionally speaks in the voice of an Indian Chief to express Native American grievances. In another story, the narrator is cast as a Bohemian shepherd who overhears vulture conversations about humans. The vultures in The Idler No.22 regard humans as “friend[s]” (284) – the praise appears to be a harsh slam against warmongers and the English government, given the vulture’s traditional image and the historical context of the Seven Years’ War. No.22 has a salient anti-war theme, directly opposing the English government’s foreign policy at the time. Johnson expresses his viewpoint on the predicament and grievances of Native Americans and enslaved people in The Idler No.81 through a hypothetical speech by an Indian Chief who is witnessing an English troop marching toward Quebec. The Chief laments the passing of his native tribes’ glorious eras while abhorring the so-called civilized ways of the invaders, such as laws, traffic, and the arts. The Indian narrator further speaks about colonizers’ enslavement of “human beings of another colour” (297). The speech captures Johnson’s interpretation of how the Indians reacted to the empire’s invasion, and the author uses a detached persona to avoid stringent state censorship. William Blake similarly finds shelter for his radicalism in poetry, where he can liberate himself from the government’s political targeting.
Apart from the instrumental value of imagination, the process of imagining intrinsically reflects power dynamics, which includes a subject who is imagining and an object which is imagined. The act of imagination itself automatically weakens the agency of the object being imagined while being portrayed in literature, even though the impact on the object in real life is difficult to pinpoint. The gender narrative will further magnify the issue in discussion. In Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room”, Celia is imagined to be “haughty” (Swift 637) and always “sweet and cleanly” (Swift 18). Strephon imagines her to be a “goddess” (Swift 19), who later finds out Celia’s “dirty smock” (Swift 11), combs “filled up with dirt” (Swift 21), the “sour unsavory streams” exhaled from her flower, her “stinking toes” (Swift 105), and “greasy stench” (Swift 107). Swift invokes a series of unpleasant and smelly images to demonstrate the filthiness behind the men’s false illusions of women. One of the most intriguing parts of the poem is about the denial of objectifying women in imagination, whatever Swift’s intent was. He rejects male illusions and fantasies constructed for the other sex and tears things down that correspondingly bring shackles upon women. Swift also uses Strephon’s fear to indicate the ridiculous ignorance of men’s peculiar notion of womanhood in general.
For slave narratives, the literary effects of the technique of imagination differ. The use of imagination implicitly places the object of imagination in a relatively passive position in Clarkson’s works. The Chapter 3 account reinforces the object’s passiveness. The narrator uses a straightforward analogy of an “oven” to describe how crowded the ship was and how miserable the conditions were in the middle passage (NAR 101). While this attempt to pique readers’ imaginations may result in empathy, it also takes away the agency and individuality of the imagined object.
In contrast to Clarkson’s use of imagination, Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, despite some exaggeration and fictional descriptions, emphasizes the uniqueness of a typically anonymous African slave mass in the abolitionist writings. The idea of self-made men served as a model for the later slave narrative, characterized by a large amount of literature devoted to travel, self-improvement, and spiritual awakening stories. Equiano’s determination ultimately won him freedom.
As a humanities student, using imagination is extremely helpful in contextualizing certain historical events. While reading the texts from Norton Anthology, due to the age of the pieces selected, readers need to rely on their imagination and have a picture of what the situation was like in the French and American Revolutions, or why the historical debates on genders and slavery exist. In retrospect, some arguments may be incredibly flawed and ridiculous, but we cannot hold a condescending eye towards the argumentation made by people we think are wrong. Historical limitations exist not only for the people in the past but also present. Hundreds of years later, what will the people from that generation think about our present behavior? The relation between the present and the past can be fluid – the reading I made throughout the semester opened up my vision and ability to imagine myself in their position – think what they are thinking and understand them.
Despite all the benefits and potentials mentioned above, imagination, very often, may give rise to perils adversely affecting society and individuals. It does have limits, such as that people may find it challenging to relate through imagination. By raising the issue of the sincerity of the British people’s sympathy in parallel sentences in “On the Slave Trade,” Coleridge highlights the limitations of imagination. He draws a stark contrast between the “refined sorrows” that British women experience while reading books and drinking tea that has been “sweetened with human blood” (NAR 117). The comparison and the actual circumstance in Britain at the time are illustrative examples of the limits of sympathy and imagination. Ladies’ sorrows are as real as how they can react to the enslavement of slaves, because in both instances, they only express their condescending sympathies, not heartfelt empathies. They found it difficult to understand the pain and suffering of slaves because of their privilege in class and the enormous gap in status and identity.
Another peril of imagination lies in its possibility to evolve into fancies and illusions, which may lead to a form of excessiveness impairing the development of character and virtues for people. According to Wollstonecraft, romantic literature, including novels and other sentimental works, is frequently infused with a romantic imagination, resulting in elegance, “soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste”. Wollstonecraft considers them to be “weakness” and “inferior to human virtue” (NAR 225). She does not reject imagination or beauty in general, but rather the social indoctrination of the so-called women’s gender character, which is based on a social construct derived from male conceptions of womanhood. Wollstonecraft clearly contends that women must cultivate the virtues and talents of human beings and stand up to men as equals to gain respect. Being irrational and obsessed with notions of delicacy, refinement, or elegancy that men invent to justify women’s “slavish dependence” (NAR 224) will not help women achieve their goals. Wollstonecraft emphasizes the importance of an “orderly train of virtues” in women’s education (NAR 221) to promote her advocacy.
Imagination can always have both potential and peril to society and individuals. Imagination can serve as a powerful tool to generate social impact, changes in politics, and advocacy, through which the reflections on power dynamics between individuals with different identities and preserve freedom of speech. However, it may also induce people to idealize situations and twist their understanding of reality. The fictional novel of Oroonoko by Aphra Behn in Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave serves as another prototype for constructing a token figure, who comes from a traditionally inferior background to fit the imagination of a particular group of privileged readers. Oroonoko fails to present himself as a round character under such a context, automatically becoming the object being imagined and thus fails to present himself as a round character. Misplaced imagination can obstruct people from finding the root cause of the issues at hand, and curb the development of analytical consideration of situations and events. After realizing the benefits and harms of the imagination, readers or any group of targeted audience will be more cautious about its power and use - me included.