Slavery and the Romantic Imagination.
Dabundo, Laura
By Debbie Lee. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002. ISBN 0-8122-3636-X. Pp. xii + 296. $55.00.
Generally speaking, I think, British Romanticists have been content
to dispatch concerns with chattel slavery and the slave trade to their
American colleagues, who then had the difficult task of reconciling such
political interests with the aesthetic issues of transcendentalism and
literary and cultural influences from England. However, it appears that
this is actually a parochial, even myopic, approach and that the focal
point in nineteenth-century studies on both sides of the Atlantic must
be the very taxing challenges of transatlantic slavery. Here is a book
to demonstrate why.
Slavery and the Romantic Imagination is a richly illustrated
historical and literary study, solidly researched in terms of both the
prevailing journalism and literature of the period and the most current
of our literary and historical criticism. (Indeed, the book possesses a
very comprehensive bibliography of its subject, which surely must be
exhaustive.) Thus, it is wen situated to present a visual and verbal
reading of what author Debbie Lee, general editor with Peter Kitson of
the eight-volume Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the
British Romantic Period, terms "the great aesthetic
development" of Romanticism against "the great moral question
of the day"--namely, slavery (1). As a matter of fact, she further
notes that "they share exact dates" when she demonstrates that
Quakers inaugurated abolitionism simultaneously with the earliest
stirrings of proto-Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and that
the Emancipation Act of 1833 took effect in the 1840s, contemporaneous
with the Second Reform Act and Wordsworth's death in 1850.
What Lee pursues, then, with respect to aesthetic understanding and
representation is a concept she identifies as the "distanced
imagination" informed by the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, in particular, with traces of Jacques Derrida and other
theorists, and premised on "alterity," an ethical and intimate
relationship and an equation of selfhood and otherness. Discussed first
by Coleridge, these ideas resonate with Keats's famous notion of
Negative Capability, in which the ego is expunged when face to face with
the radical other (28-43). Lee next proceeds to contextualize and
examine texts by six of the canonical Romantic writers (Coleridge,
Blake, Keats, the Shelleys, and Wordsworth) for allusions, themes, and
confrontations involving the Middle Passage and slavery in the British
Caribbean colonies as well as the African homeland. In so doing, she
presents some highly persuasive and unexpected insights into otherwise
familiar and predictable texts, at the same time as she opens up much
less well-known but often best-selling literature of the age, ranging
from Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa to
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. The
juxtaposition of Romantic poetry and prose, or in Blake's case
engravings, with the words and images of travel literature, abolitionist
writings, Parliamentary speeches, and other nearly forgotten but very
illuminating resources is startling and rewarding. How many know that
jigsaw puzzles originated at this rime? Lee pairs that observation with
the early-nineteenth-century interest in maps, particularly of the
"Dark Continent" of Africa, which she then impressively makes
manifest as the "fusion of African interiority with British
psychological landscape" (158). From there Lee proceeds to open up
in entirely new ways Wordsworth's depiction of little Hartley
Coleridge playing with maps and charts in "Intimations of
Immortality," the Keatsian explorer and discoverer in "On
First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and finally
"Shelley's witch of Atlas [who] becomes witch of the
atlas" (167). Similarly, Lee demonstrates meticulously how The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner is replete with references to yellow fever, which
so threatened and frequently decimated white Caribbean colonists. As she
writes, "Coleridge captures sharply the ruination of the universe
that the slave trade instigated. His mariner finds disease and thus
nightmarish deformation everywhere" (62).
Lee's reading of Frankenstein is especially provocative. She
notes that, "if the British were monsters, their monstrosity
centered on the consumption of sugar" (177); then, byway of the
sugar plantations in the Caribbean worked by slaves, she analyzes the
food and appetite concerns of the novel, which render the characters
cannibals, slaves, and monsters. The pattern traced by Lee reveals a
heretofore unacknowledged agenda in this widely known novel. I could
summarize other fertile and convincing findings of this rich study, but
to do so ultimately would disserve the hard-won arguments that sustain
the convictions this book yields. I leave it to future readers to glean
the harvest here.
This closely reasoned critique makes abundantly evident that
"slaves were the very people who gave Britons their definition of
freedom" (223). Consequently, I predict that Slavery and the
Romantic Imagination will long be a work to be reckoned with in Romantic
studies, for Lee has penetrated the surface of this literature to reveal
what may well be its haunting and haunted radical other--the experience
of African slavery in the Western hemisphere, clearly now brought to the
fore as a prime factor in the minds of writers most concerned with the
power of the imagination. This is the image in the mirror, perhaps, and
we are indebted to Lee for having illuminated it so ably.
Laura Dabundo
Kennesaw State University
