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Introduction

I

I have always been fascinated by the idea that the Romantic imagination can reveal things hidden to the naked eye. So when I began this study I wondered what the imagination revealed about slavery, which was not hidden in the culture but seemed to be missing from the era’s most powerful poetry. Since slavery was the great moral question of the age and Romanticism the great aesthetic development, it seemed logical to set these two movements side by side. But I soon became acutely aware of the violence in doing so. What did women forced into rooms that smelled of rape and men burned alive after frenzied revolts have to do with Romantic writers’ long hours of peaceful reflection and protected moments of rural retreat? Even when I thought of the Romantic imagination as a purely political construct, the fact that its politics were often contained in poems about Grecian urns or ruined cottages or magical lands like Xanadu made me wonder just what imagination could say about slavery. To put the Romantic imagination in close proximity to the horrifying details of slavery seemed plain wrong.

Still, the more I read from the period’s discourses on slavery in parliamentary papers, travel narratives, medical tracts, abolitionist poetry, and slave narratives, the more I began to see signs of slavery in imaginative works. This was especially true of works that had come to be thought of as direct products of the Romantic imagination because they were in some way about the imagination, works such as the Lyrical Ballads, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Lamia, “The Witch of Atlas,” and Frankenstein. How, I wondered, would someone characterize these works about imagination as being also works about slavery?

Fortunately, because other scholars were asking similar questions, a shared critical language began to emerge, with some of the most exciting work coming from Srinivas Aravamudan, Alan Bewell, Elizabeth Bohls, Laura Brown, David Dabydeen, Markman Ellis, Moira Ferguson, Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, Nigel Leask, Saree Makdisi, Javed Majeed, Timothy Morton, Felicity Nussbaum, Mary Louise Pratt, and Alan Richardson.¹ These scholars, and others like them, take their critical language from both history and current postcolonial theory, and it adeptly accounts for the various responses eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British writers had to the growing empire. These responses seem to fall into one of the following categories: complicity, resistance, or anxiety.

Felicity Nussbaum’s 1995 book Torrid Zones, for instance, tries to make “the ideological workings of empire and of Englishwomen’s complicity within it more legible.”² Complicity is also the critical lens for Alison Hickey, in a 1998 essay called “Dark Characters, Native Grounds: Wordsworth’s Imagination of Imperialism.” No matter what critical viewpoint a reader takes, says Hickey, “some sort of imperialism is implicitly ascribed” to the Wordsworthian imagination because it champions “the incorporation of otherness, the forging of unity from difference.” She goes on to say that the imagination’s prerogative is “triumph,” but triumph, in this case, always means “the appropriation” of another person or place and the “suppression of its potentially threatening aspect.”³ Likewise, Saree Makdisi, in his 1999 Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, asserts that, though Romantics criticized imperialism, they were also complicit with it (Blake, however, is the exception). They were all part of “modernization,” a sweeping, globalizing movement that collapsed difference and defined subjectivity in relation to an imperialist center.

Complicity’s flip side—resistance—is the focus of other books on empire. Elizabeth Bohls argues that women travel writers “initiated a counter-tradition of aesthetic thought” to combat the discourses of power so evident in patriarchy and empire.⁴ Srinivas Aravamudan, in a very different kind of study, coins the term “tropicalization” as a postcolonial response to eighteenth-century colonial discourse. Essentially a set of “practices of discursive revision and reversal,”⁵ tropicalization is resistant as a way of reading empire. But, says Aravamudan, “rather than reifying a voice of resistance or dissent, the act of reading makes available the differing mechanisms of agency that traverse texts, contexts, and agents themselves.”⁶

The most interesting way to view responses to empire is somewhere between the poles of complicity and resistance, in the fertile ground of anxiety and ambivalence. Though John Barrell’s 1991 book The Infections of Thomas De-Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism is probably the most potent source of British anxiety in response to colonization, it was Nigel Leask who popularized the idea in his 1992 book British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Alan Richardson, drawing on Leask, highlights the ambivalence that such anxiety produces. He puts it this way: “If the treatment of empire in Romantic-era poetry is characterized as ambivalent, however, each poem manifests ambivalence in its own manner.”⁷ Anxiety has been used, more recently, in Alan Bewell’s excellent study of Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999). One of the goals of Bewell’s book is to explore the “deepening British understanding of the scale and extent of colonial disease and mortality and the growing anxiety their insecurity aroused.”⁸

Perhaps the best summary of the range of responses that Romantic writers had to empire is found in the introduction to Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson’s 1998 collection of essays Romanticism and Colonialism. “Although nineteenth-century colonialism is a thing of the past,” they write, “imperialism is often said to persist in the sense of the continuing global ambitions of Western capitalism. This raises the vexed question of the relationship between culture and imperialism and the complicity of English literature in the imperialist project…. Nevertheless, writing of the Romantic period cannot simply be seen as univocal in support of that domination: the contributors to this volume investigate some of the ways in which it articulates resistance to, and/or anxiety about, cultural imperialism, even as it also, in other areas, remains complicit with it” (my emphasis).⁹

Although these critical terms have produced some excellent scholarship toward our understanding of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, I began to wonder if there was yet another way to view the relationship between literature and empire, one that seriously considers how the creative act differs from the imperial act, how imagination is distinguished from colonization. Might writers have had another response, besides complicity, resistance, and anxiety/ambivalence, to empire and, particularly, to the institution of slavery? Since the legacies of both slavery and the Romantic imagination are still very much with us today, this is a question that deserves careful thought. It was at this time that I spent a summer with poets and fiction writers talking about creative activity. Not surprisingly, among present-day poets, the Romantic concept of the imagination is alive and well; many of them conceive of creative writing in Romantic terms, often quoting Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge. But, for them, imagination is not a critical term. It is a process, a name for the act of creating poetry. It emphatically is not the self-centered, politically evasive or combative activity that literary critics sometimes portray it as. What imagination actually produces is a decentered self with extremely weak ego boundaries, and it involves—above all else—a denunciation of self in order to understand with compassion the artistic subject. For those who use it to create, imagination is essentially about empathy. It struck me that this idea is at the heart of the Romantic imagination, from Blake’s notion of “self-annihilation” to Keats’s claim that the poet has “no self.”

This book, then, is an attempt to account for empathy in the Romantics’ theory of imagination and in literary works that are about both imagination and slavery. This is not to say that the products of the Romantic imagination simply obliterated the power differential between self and other in the name of empathy, but that writers forged the Romantic imagination, in large part, because of their continued attempts to write creatively about the complex and glaringly unequal relationships between Africans and Britons.

II

Interpreting Romanticism in light of slavery has not exactly been a popular subject in the history of literary criticism, and one reason for its absence seems to lie in the problem of how middle-class, mostly American and British scholars make sense of this frightening, gruesome, and ultimately depressing legacy in Romantic studies.¹⁰ Still, there is a small body of literature on the subject. The two earliest book-length studies appeared in 1942: Eva Beatrice Dykes’s The Negro in English Romantic Thought and Wylie Sypher’s Guinea’s Captive Kings.¹¹ Both of these works comprehensively cite example after example of slavery in both Romantic and abolitionist poetry, but being products of mid-twentieth-century literary criticism, there is no attempt to explain underlying theoretical similarities or differences between the Romantic and abolitionist movements. More than fifty years passed before Joan Baum published Mind Forg’d Manacles in 1994.¹² Baum considers the abolitionist movement through major Romantic figures of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. But Baum, like earlier critics, offers no theoretical explanation of the interaction between the poetry and politics of the day.

The first step toward political analysis appears with Patrick J. Keane’s Coleridge’s Submerged Politics in 1994.¹³ Taking his lead from arguments made famous in Romantic criticism by Jerome J. McGann and Marjorie Levinson, Keane analyzes Coleridge’s marginal notes to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and then locates Coleridge’s radical politics, especially on the issue of slavery, in the subtext of “The Ancient Mariner.” Keane explicitly rejects Coleridge’s claim that the poem is a work of “pure imagination,” arguing instead that it “may reenact, consciously or unconsciously, the rapidly shifting political events in England.”¹⁴ While Keane does recreate the politics of slavery behind the images in the poem, he never explains precisely how “The Ancient Mariner” reenacts radical politics.

In the same vein as Keane, but in a much more wide-ranging study, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1996), H. L. Malchow traces the image of slavery in popular culture and gothic literature, concluding that the gothic was a kind of language that articulated the anxieties Europe had about the cultures they were exploiting. “Both the gothic novel and racist discourse manipulate deeply buried anxieties,” writes Malchow; both take up “fear of contamination, both present the threatened destruction of the simple and pure by the poisonously exotic, by anarchic forces of passion and appetite, carnal lust and blood lust.”¹⁵ Malchow’s book offers a dynamic treatment of the gothic novel, moving from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But his focus is popular culture, not the Romantic imagination. The two other recent books on the subject of Romanticism and slavery are Helen Thomas’s Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (2000) and Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (2000). Thomas perceptively explores the written material of the period, examining the complex intersection between those writing slave narratives, travel texts, Romantic poems, and radical political treatises. Wood, like Thomas, explains the abolitionist movement using historical sources, but with a focus on visual arts. He examines a large variety of such sources, ranging from trite propaganda engravings to J. M. W. Turner’s grand landscapes.¹⁶

For a specific inquiry into the Romantic imagination’s relationship to slavery, the most helpful recent book is Adam Lively’s Masks: Blackness, Race, and the Imagination.¹⁷ In his chapter “Race and the Sentimental Imagination,” Lively catalogs numerous depictions of the African, the Moor, and the slave in sentimental novels and poetry. As Lively sees it, sentimental feeling for the slave fell under the wider concern of middle-class interest in any kind of victim, from poor street urchins, to abandoned women, to mistreated prisoners. Yet, ironically, the sentimental movement, according to Lively, was devoted to refining the sensibilities of the white liberal middle class—a trend Lively sees in contemporary Britain and America. This results in a view of the imagination as hopelessly sentimental but not empathetic.

Still, Adam Lively’s point is well taken. Against such an ignoble system as slavery and the imperialism that followed African exploration, how are we to address the literature of early-nineteenth-century white middle-class Britons with all we now know about the effects of this history? How can we do anything but submit to a rhetoric of blame or, at the very least, a cautious examination of the possible ruptures in these necessarily complicit British texts? There is, after all, ample evidence in Romantic texts to characterize the writers as being complicit with empire or anxious about its effects on others, and even more to suggest they sought to question the workings of empire, including slavery and the racial prejudices that have lingered long after its demise. Blake is a prime example. In “A Song of Liberty” that concludes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Blake dramatically declares: “Empire is no more!” Yet this same “Song of Liberty” contains some shockingly racist stereotypes that Blake must have known were crucial to the extension of empire: a call to the Jew to “leave counting gold!” and to the African to alter his facial characteristics: “O African! black African (go. winged thought widen his forehead).”¹⁸

Though such discrepancies sear nearly every poem, this is not surprising, at least according to Toni Morrison, in her stunning explanation of the African presence in the American literary imagination. In Playing in the Dark (1992), Morrison argues that blackness permeates the literary imagination in America, even in works where we least expect to find it. A writer’s response to African presence may be “encoded, or explicit,” she says, but in any case it “complicate[s] texts, sometimes contradicting them entirely.” The African presence “serve[s] the text by further problematizing its matter with resonances and luminations.” Linguistic responses, most intriguingly, “provide paradox, ambiguity; they strategize omissions, repetitions, disruptions, polarities, reifications, violence. In other words, they give the text a deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly present to us.”¹⁹ The African presence, likewise, shaped the British Romantic imagination. Because slavery was such an intimate part of the imagination, writers produced works so distinct that an entire literary period formed around them.

In the broadest sense, this book asks: what is the relationship between the artist and the most hideous crimes of his or her era? In dealing with the Romantic period, the question has to be: what is the relationship between the nation’s greatest artists and the epic violence of slavery, described so astutely by Coleridge in 1808 as “the wildest physical sufferings” combined with “the most atrocious moral depravity” (SWF, 1:218). The answer is varied, at best, but one of the things Romantic works chronicle is the death of Romantic illusions in the face of slavery. In fact, many of these writers suggest that the enormous violations of their era can only be met with absurdly small acts of recompense, such as the blessing of water snakes in “The Ancient Mariner.” Yet key Romantic works like “The Ancient Mariner,” Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Lamia, “The Witch of Atlas,” Frankenstein, and Lyrical Ballads, which seem impossible to lay aside even after we have finished reading them, also deliver something larger: an inquiry into the nature of empathy.