Liberty of the Imagination in Revolutionary America
John Trumbull’s Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts (1770), read at the “Public Commencement in New-Haven,” makes one of the earliest American arguments for the moral efficacy of aesthetic pleasure. Borrowing liberally from Henry Home, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), Trumbull declares that the “elegant entertainments of polite literature … ennoble the soul, purify the passions” and give “delicacy and refinement to our manners.” Although he laments that the fine arts are “too much undervalued by the [American] public … neglected by the youth in our seminaries of science [and] … considered as mere matters of trifling amusement,” he counters that they are in fact basic to “the common purposes of life” and necessary to the cultivation of virtue. Indeed, he insists that the experience of art and imagination functions as a kind of moral bellwether in a free society: “I appeal to all persons of judgment whether they can rise from reading a fine Poem, viewing any masterly work of Genius, or hearing a harmonious concert of Music, without feeling an openness of heart, and an elevation of mind, without being more sensible of the dignity of human nature, and despising whatever tends to debase and degrade it.” There is much to be said about these prospective scenes of aesthetic experience and their purported effects. Although Trumbull takes for granted his audience’s experience with a range of artistic forms, his “appeal” suggests that their moral significance comes as a kind of revelation—of something always implicitly known but somehow never before acknowledged. His correlation of aesthetic experience with “openness of heart,” “elevation,” and “dignity” implies that the nature of virtue is discovered as much in human feelings as in rational discourse. Yet we also hear in the corresponding threat of debasement and degradation the urgency of the present colonial conflict and the stakes of political action. Only six months after the Boston Massacre and at the outset of the crisis that would result five years later in the War for Independence, Trumbull suggests that in aesthetic experience we become “sensible” to the meaning of liberty.1
The eighteenth-century correlation of liberty and the fine arts was popularized by Longinus’s On the Sublime but reiterated by such writers as the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Richard Price. “Liberty,” writes Longinus, “produces fine Sentiments in Men of Genius, it invigorates their Hopes, excites an honourable Emulation … [it is] that copious and fertile Source of all that is beautiful and of all that is great.” Trumbull likewise asserts that an “unconquered spirit of freedom” is a necessary condition for the advancement of aesthetic culture; but his claims are also specific to the colonial world he inhabits. America is particularly susceptible to literary achievement, he argues, not only because its citizens “very much excel in the force of natural genius” but also because here education is “diffused through all ranks of people.” This invocation of the broad dissemination of learning to a freedom-loving people thus suits the essay’s dominant theme of translatio studii, the western movement of learning and the fine arts. As Trumbull traces the cyclical achievements of literature and the shifting forces of freedom from the Ancient Greece and Rome of Homer and Virgil across the early modern Britain of Shakespeare and Swift to revolutionary America’s “fair prospect” of literary fame, he describes a society whose literary ambitions are bound up in its “late struggles for liberty.” Conversely, he argues, “Polite letters at present are much on the decline in Britain,” where freedom has been debased and degraded by an oppressive Parliament. Not only are modern British writers “followers in the path of servile imitation” who “fetter the fancy with the rules of method, and damp all the ardour of aspiring invention,” but, at the same time, their “men of Genius … in contempt of the critic chains, throw off all appearance of order and connection, sport in the wildest sallies of imagination, and adopt the greatest extravagance of humour.” In other words, British writers are both too restrained and too free, both devoted to arbitrary rules and unregulated by any rule at all.2
The ideal of moderate political liberty implicit in Trumbull’s critique derives variously from British traditions of common law, natural law, and Protestant theology. Forged in the violence of seventeenth-century political struggles, “British Liberty” functioned as both a description of the nation’s constitutional and representative government and a potent ideological myth that distinguished Britons from less free and enlightened peoples. Central to its conception, however, was the notion that liberty was always bounded by and exercised within authoritative limits. It watched jealously for the abuses of tyranny and the humiliations of “servility,” but it also assumed the possibility of its own transgressions in the form of license or “extravagance.” Often opposed to the liberty of man in his natural state, British liberty was understood as a creature of society, born of essential human freedom but sustained by a necessary adjustment to the demands of political community. Not only were its limitations rooted in law and thus never arbitrary, they were also consensual, accepted as legitimate by the very persons whose freedom they circumscribed. In the wake of the American Revolution, the idea of liberty evolved into a more abstract and broadly conceived notion of self-determination whose meanings subjected all forms of hierarchy and exclusion to scrutiny. But this challenge to British liberty was soon countered in the 1780s and 1790s by a conservative return to the discourse of authority and constraint. If such an idea of liberty failed to include Africans, Indians, women, or men without property, this is because liberty was understood as a kind of property itself, granted only to individuals thought capable of consenting to its complex and often contradictory demands.3
During the revolutionary era, liberty was celebrated, explained, and explored by Anglo-American writers in a variety of literary genres, from poetry and sermons to periodical essays and treatises of political theory. But it also found expression in works of aesthetic theory, including those ideas that informed Trumbull’s Essay. Such texts as Kames’s Elements, Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1759), Thomas Reid’s Inquiry Into the Human Mind (1764), and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) were collected in American libraries, taught in American colleges, and redacted or reviewed in American magazines because they offered authoritative discussions of pleasure, association, genius, and taste and taught a rising generation of readers about the virtues of mental gratification and the harmonious order of the imagination.4 But, as I will argue in this essay, they also offered a nuanced language for articulating and negotiating the problem of liberty. Debates about aesthetic perception cast the liberating fulfillment of mental pleasures against the dissipating slavery of bodily ones. Ideas of imagination, association, genius, and taste turn on distinctions between the autonomous, inventive, individualizing power of the creative mind and restrictions implied by logical relation, the rules of criticism, and the claims of judgment. American writers were particularly sensitive to this homology of aesthetic and political liberty and its implications for both the pleasures of the imagination and matters of national polity.5 As we shall see, in their critical engagements with aesthetic theory, and in literary texts informed by it, they aimed to delineate the difficult relationship between citizenship and subjectivity and to chart the modes of perception, imagination, and judgment that made liberty in a republic possible.6
The language of liberty is most immediately apparent in aesthetic theory’s consistent protest against arbitrary and inflexible rules. Joseph Addison introduces his widely read 1712 Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” by distinguishing sharply between “Mechanical Rules” and “the very Spirit and soul of fine Writing.” Likewise, Kames scoffs at the idea that the classical poets “were entitled to give [the] law to mankind; and that nothing now remains but blind obedience to their arbitrary will.” These writers object to what they saw as the sanctity and unthinking quality of such rules, turning instead to aesthetic ideas whose meanings were defined by experience rather than laws of another’s making. According to Blair’s Lectures, extracted in the 1783 Boston Magazine, “The rules of criticism are not formed by an induction, a priori … [or] a train of abstract reasoning independent of facts and observations.” An “Essay on Genius” in Matthew Carey’s 1789 Columbian Magazine similarly holds that “whoever is, in any degree, possessed of original powers, ought not to cramp and trammel them, by servile imitation, or the rules of mechanical criticism” (347). Throughout this period, all forms of “servility,” “slavish imitation,” and “blind,” “mechanical” pedantry are contrasted against the powerful, dynamic, and autonomous liberty of the imagination. The rejection of rules thus sweeps away the philosophical dogma of the past and, in doing so, invests the empiricism that replaces it with a language of liberty that would define eighteenth-century aesthetic theory’s most important claims.7
As with most revolutions, however, British aesthetics substitutes one form of authority for another, rejecting arbitrary rules for those derived from experience, nature, or the “universal principles” of the human mind. Addison’s project, for example, is precisely “to lay down Rules for the acquirement” of taste; and James Beattie holds that, while to “depart from a mechanical rule, may be consistent with the soundest judgment,” the “violation of an essential rule discovers want of sense.” If such writers rebuffed both Aristotelian rules and “mechanical critics,” that is, they were equally determined to avoid the kind of relativism or subjectivism that deprived society of ordered relations and let loose the unpredictable forces of passion and desire. Thus, although Kames has “taken arms to rescue modern poets from the despotism of modern critics,” he assures us that he “would not be understood to justify liberty without any reserve” or endorse an “unbounded license with relation to place and time” (416). Such “liberty” and “license,” he warns, would not only result in “faulty” art but also alienated artists and audiences. As David Hume writes, although “to check the sallies of imagination” would likewise lead to “insipid” poetry, poets must nonetheless be “confined by rules of art, discovered to the author, either by genius or observation.” In short, aesthetics, like politics, demands both liberty and its constraint.8
Such rhetoric was certainly at the heart of the moral question of pleasure. A 1775 Royal American Magazine essay, “On Pleasure,” for example, warns that, while “it is essential to human nature to be delighted,” yet “there should be boundaries fixed beyond which limits [we] should never venture.” Likewise, the 1789 American Moral and Sentimental Magazine holds that pleasure, in its “boundless fields of licentiousness,” exercises an “extravagant dominion” over both men and states. In countless texts of the period, pleasure either confirmed one’s essential liberty or led to some form of moral or physical enslavement. Its effects, however, typically depended on whether such pleasure derived from the body or the mind. Addison first gives this distinction significance when, by calling taste a “Faculty of the Soul,” he sharply distinguishes mental pleasures from the “Criminal” pleasures of “Vice or Folly.” Blair clarifies what is implicit in Addison’s claim when he notes that the pleasures of the mind can deter one from those of the body: “He who is so happy as to have acquired a relish for these, has always at hand an innocent and irreproachable amusement for his leisure hours, to save him from the danger of many a pernicious passion.” Thus, jeremiads against sensual pleasure, rather than rejecting aesthetics, helped to construct the rhetorical foundation that gave the pleasures of the imagination so much moral authority. In the words of the 1797 Philadelphia Minerva, it is because the “gratifications of sense reside in the lowest regions of our nature” that the pleasures of the mind may be said to “belong to the highest powers and best affections of the soul.”9
With such assumptions in mind, American critics often figure aesthetic pleasure as a powerful form of liberty. As the 1806 Literary Tablet declares, “buoyant on the wings of imagination, [one] travels the unbounded regions of space…. [H]ere the mind is not fettered by systematic rules—here the fancy may rove free, and unconfined.” But the theory behind such paeans to aesthetic experience is equally grounded in ideas of liberty. In one of the earliest uses of the phrase “liberty of the imagination,” Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) argues that impressions made by sensual perceptions create “faint images” in the mind called “ideas.” Such ideas, when sufficiently vivid, can later be called up by the memory in the same order in which the impressions occurred; but the mind’s ability “to transpose and change its ideas,” to reorder and recombine them at will, is owing to the “liberty of the imagination.” As Hume argues, in creating ideas from impressions, the imagining subject becomes free both from the order in which the impressions originally occurred and from the ordered logic of nature. But this also means that one need neither possess nor even perceive an object to enjoy it. In this way, liberty of the imagination describes a heightened form of independence and possibility, making all the world’s pleasures available to anyone capable of enjoying them and carrying one from the material limitations of objective reality into the elaborate potential of the creative mind.10
For most writers, such liberty is never wholly unregulated because the ideas that produce pleasure or pain are connected by the logic of “association.” According to Kames, associative “trains” of ideas are subject to inalterable principles of reason (of cause and effect, contiguity, resemblance, hierarchy, etc.). But he also argues that we retain the freedom to engage with the order of ideas presented to our imaginations as we please and to acknowledge stricter or looser associations, depending on our will, our “present tone of mind,” or the strength of our “discerning faculty.” For Kames, then, the logic of association yields a sense of self-affirmation. Because “we are framed by nature to relish order and connexion,” he argues, the objective order of the world ratifies the spontaneous impulses of the imagination. Yet, for some critics, association also raises the specter of mental error and the possibility of corrupted imaginations. An 1802 New England Quarterly essay warns that “an early false association of ideas” can lead to “absurd antipathies” and even “moral insanities.” Likewise, Charles Brockden Brown’s 1807 Literary Magazine reprints a popular passage from Reid’s Enquiry, which cautions that the corruption of one’s associations might produce “an affection for deformed objects,” such as a “depraved taste” for “cinders or chalk.” For these authors, it is paradoxically the freedom of the imagination to pursue such a vast range of ideas that makes everyone, to greater or lesser degrees, what Brown called “the slave of accidental associations.” In naming the very logic—or illogic—of imagination and taste, that is, association defined an idea of aesthetic liberty whose potential for failure was, like political liberty, imbedded in the source of its efficacy.11
For Kames, the association of ideas implied two distinct, even antithetical types of imagining subjects: the man of genius, whose “wit” entertains “a great flow of ideas,” and the man of taste, whose “accurate judgment” ignores all “slighter relations.” Genius and taste were thus often understood as paired categories signaling a dichotomy of aesthetic liberty and constraint. Whereas genius was defined as the capacity to produce excellent or original works of art, taste meant the ability to discern and take pleasure in such excellence. If genius implied the unfettered exercise of the individual imagination and a tendency toward excess and error, taste implied the ordered universality of the mind and the corrective function of judgment. For these reasons, some critics understood genius and taste as complementary powers realized best in combination. According to Gerard, genius “needs the assistance of taste, to guide and moderate its exertions,” and taste “serves as a check on mere fancy; it interposes judgment, either approving or condemning; and rejects many things which unassisted genius would have allowed.” But for other critics, the distinction between genius and taste produced specifically politicized claims about their relative merits. For example, Joseph Dennie’s 1801 Port-Folio extract from John Blair Linn’s poem, “The Powers of Genius,” entitled “taste and genius distinguished,” argues that “Taste is confin’d to rules, it moves in chains, / Genius those fetters and those rules disdains.” Thus, on the one hand, the greatest philosophical challenge that freedom-loving, rule-breaking genius faced in its comparison with taste was to demonstrate that it obeyed some law, even if it were a law of its own. The fact that it was liberated, rare, and original made it difficult to conceive how its processes could be predictable and virtuous or how its artistic achievements could finally speak a common language, appeal widely, and discern truth as well as beauty. Taste, on the other hand, faced the opposite dilemma. It sought both to define the pleasures of individual perceivers and provide universal principles of pleasure without becoming what Blair calls an imposer of “unnatural shackles and bonds.”12
One way theorists sought to address the latter problem was to define taste as an autonomous faculty of the imagination, energized in its receptivity to objects and free from the constraints of reason, interest, particularity, and passion. Hutcheson argues that taste is an “internal sense,” through which pleasure in beautiful objects or virtuous acts arises just as it does in the external sense from which it is metaphorically derived: immediately, necessarily, and without “Knowledge of Principles, Proportions, Causes, or of the Usefulness of the Object.” Although some writers, like Burke and Gerard, question whether taste is a distinct faculty of the mind or a combination of emotional or cognitive responses, most view it as a formidable, independent, even disinterested power. Archibald Alison has such a power in mind when he describes the sensibility by which one responds to objects with pleasure as “freedom of the imagination,” which because it involves the free play of association is not unlike Hume’s “liberty of the imagination.” For the imagination to function “in its fullest perfection,” Alison insists, it must be “at liberty” or not preoccupied with any contrary or inhospitable feelings. Given this relative autonomy, taste was widely believed to provide a range of public and private benefits that fostered moderate liberty. It improved morals and manners, facilitated sympathy and social harmony, controlled passions, inhibited luxury, consoled misfortune, encouraged learning, exercised the mind, and even heightened pleasure for its own sake. To enjoy the highest pleasures of taste was akin to bridging the unbridgeable gaps between the sensible and the intellectual and between the individual and the sociopolitical. To cultivate a refined taste through education, practice, and criticism was synonymous with becoming more fully and ideally human.13
As this brief summary suggests, aesthetic theory consistently expressed liberty’s ineluctable contradictions by giving emotionally palpable form to its extension and limitation. But liberty of the imagination plays more than a merely instrumental or expressive role in American politics, and its metaphors are never reducible to political discourse. If it represents fundamental oppositional but mutually constitutive forces in revolutionary culture, these forces are also discernable in many of that culture’s literary texts.14 Elsewhere I have argued that tensions between freedom and constraint inherent in idealist and materialist theories of the imagination help to explain the formal qualities and thematic concerns of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels and that the dialectical opposition of genius and taste gives rise to a highly politicized valorization of the imagination in Federalist-era literary criticism.15 But the text that perhaps most succinctly exemplifies this rhetorical phenomenon is Phillis Wheatley’s lyric, “On Imagination” (1773), whose primary aim is to enact the conflicts at the heart of aesthetic and political liberty. Wheatley’s legal status as a slave renders her poem a poignant representation of the aesthetic freedom that was not hers politically: the capacity to navigate what in “On Recollection” (1773) she calls “the unbounded regions of the mind.” Yet it also discovers in the language of aesthetic theory a means of representing liberty’s acute arcs and unsteady rhythms, voicing the timbre of its invitations and injunctions and thereby registering Trumbull’s sense of dignity and debasement in its personal immediacy and historical particularity.16
Invoking the idea of imagination in terms of the authority of monarchy and the deferential address of an admiring royal subject, the first lines of the poem are deceptively obsequious:
THY various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck’d with pomp by thee!
Thy wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.
By suggesting the grandeur of court, the disciplining “order” of monarchy, and the absolute submission of the subaltern, Wheatley celebrates the “potent” ability of the imagination to command the rational self. The “various” range of its “works” and the brightness of their “forms” describe not only the infinite diversity of sensible impressions and the elaborate trains of associations that await the perceiver but also the abundant artistic output of genius. The speaker’s relation to such subjectivity and creativity, however, is complicated by both the assertiveness of her expression and the fact that it is a form of self-submission, more an affirmation of her autonomy than of her subservience. In the next quatrain, then, she demands of the muses “my attempts befriend” and “triumph in my song,” thereby claiming both authorship of the poem and authority over its subject. Yet this gesture too is qualified by her description of the act of imagination as both an expansive articulation of self and a loss of individuality:
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov’d object strikes her wandr’ing eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.
In replacing imagination with the less conceptual and reliable “Fancy,” the speaker maintains the poem’s third-person address but trades the commanding power of the former for the liberating potential of the latter to rove spontaneously and erratically through trains of associations.17 The ambiguous status of such imagining is fully realized in its phenomenology of sensuous perception, as the forceful striking of the eye by “some lov’d object” initiates an internal struggle between subjective desire and objective sensation whose outcome is the voluptuous double metaphor of the “silken fetters” of a “soft captivity.” As the fetters of aesthetic captivity “bind” and “involve” the mind, they adorn and caress as much as they enslave, leaving the speaking subject quite as “deck’d with pomp” as the queen of imagination herself.18
If the metaphor of soft captivity hints at Wheatley’s privileged status as a literate and internationally famous slave, it also resonates with the ironic structure of the poem as a whole and thus deserves further attention. Like the “silken reins” of mild government she celebrates in “To the Right Honourable Earl of Dartmouth” (1773), it appears to invoke a conventional ideal of British liberty, a symbol of comity between the beneficent rule of monarchs and the willing consent of free subjects. But the tension implicit in the phrase is perhaps even more complex. Wheatley appears to have borrowed it from Addison’s 1713 play, Cato, A Tragedy, according to Kenneth Silverman the most quoted Whig literary work in America at the time, an edition of which appeared in Boston in 1767. In a key line from the play, Portius, the more moderate of Cato’s sons, offers his wilder brother Marcus cautionary advice about the irresistible power of romantic love: “the Strong, the Brave, the Virtuous, and the Wise / Sink in the soft Captivity together.” At the time of this warning, Cato and his sons are threatened with capture and retaliation by Caesar, and thus the “soft Captivity” of love, when not “well tim’d,” is not only an explicit threat to a warrior’s mental readiness and martial virtue but may also lead to actual physical captivity. Yet because Cato rejects imprisonment as a craven option—he commits suicide instead—soft captivity actually threatens an ultimate self-undoing, both emotionally and physically. Wheatley’s use of the phrase, then, suggests the enormous political stakes of figuring liberty of the imagination so stoically and brazenly in terms of its antithesis. It realizes the aesthetic “wandr’ing” of a slave as continuous with capture, oppression, and the imminent prospect of death.19
Wheatley’s understanding of the reflexivity of aesthetic experience, however, also draws her away from the destructive impossibility of Cato’s dilemma toward a more dialectical apprehension of her political status. Insofar as aesthetic pleasure enables unfettered liberty of imagination, it might be read as a dangerous form of self-authorizing individualism, especially for a slave. But since Wheatley’s poem emphasizes the imagination’s authoritative role as the “ruler” of her “subject-passions,” it functions as precisely the kind of Cato-like bracketing of selfhood demanded by elite republican ideals of disinterestedness. As such, her soft captivity also echoes the mode of political submission John Quincy Adams calls “soft compulsion,” which Jay Fliegelman describes as oratorical persuasion that “manipulated the passionate springs of human motivation in such a way as to avoid violating human freedom.”20 Wheatley’s metaphor thus signals both radical protest and republican consensus, registering her anomalous legal status at the margins of American culture and her rightful place in its very center.21
Accordingly, the poem on imagination enacts its powers as it describes them, limning in vigorous neoclassical diction what her imagined citizenship might look like. Indeed, Wheatley defines poetic power in such emphatically spatial and kinetic terms that, as the perception of objects becomes a “mental train” of images, her soft captivity is realized as unfettered mobility:
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.
Such star-roving hyperbolizes both liberty of the imagination and the physical freedom Wheatley lacks as a slave. Just as the “pinions” of the imagination are a technology of the mind whose use implies the autonomous agency of the perceiving subject, her “mental optics”—an allusion to Newton’s invention of the reflecting telescope a hundred years earlier—invoke precisely the same inventive powers of imagination Wheatley attributes to Harvard students in her poem “To the University of Cambridge in New England” (1773). This exalted mobility and vision realize in the poem’s speaker the highest forms of aesthetic perception, imagination, and judgment. To “grasp the mighty whole” is to take the comprehensive view of an object that most aesthetic philosophers held as necessary to disinterested judgments of taste. To perceive “new worlds [that] amaze th’ unbounded soul” is to employ the creative powers of association free from the constraints of objective reality. Such refined and robust powers thus allow her to transcend all natural and political obstacles, even slavery itself: “Though Winter frowns to Fancy’s raptur’d eyes / The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise; / The frozen deeps may break their iron bands.”22
At this moment in the poem, the contrary impulses of liberty and constraint seem to have reached an ideal balance. The benign despotism of the autonomous imagination enacts the speaker’s sovereignty “o’er the realms of thought” and confirm her in the very agency to which she submits. But as Wheatley’s poetic subject travels in her imagination, and the distance between her political and aesthetic liberty increases, their strained homology finally becomes untenable, at which point she removes herself abruptly from the world she has created:
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.
The speaker’s sudden expulsion from the “pleasing views” of imagination performs the conventional gesture of self-effacement that marks many of the period’s poems of sensibility. In the context of Wheatley’s slavery, however, the denial of aesthetic liberty produces a more profoundly unsettling effect. The cold north wind—not of objective reality but racial tyranny—reminds the speaker of her enslavement by refusing her poetic aspiration, restricting her liberty, and calling her back from her now-illicit roving. If the violence of this subjugation parallels the bold self-realization it checks, her “reluctant” act of leaving and her departing salute to “delight” and the “rising fire” of imagination give full measure to the injustice of her oppression. Such a moment suggests the very reverse of “soft compulsion”: not internalized consent but cruel coercion.23
The sudden ceasing of Wheatley’s song creates the pathos of the poem whose peripeteia juxtaposes the liberating power of imagination against the aching discipline of its constraint. But it is precisely through this pathos that the poem makes its political argument. For the speaker’s removal from the “pleasing views” of imagination she has herself created functions simultaneously as punishment and remonstration. It emphasizes the fact of her having already traveled the “realms of thought” of her own free will. As she withdraws rhetorically, her absence and the resulting poetic artifact implicitly pronounce an identity between the capacity for aesthetic judgment and political equality, in this way anticipating Thomas Jefferson’s summary rejection of Wheatley’s poetry and African intelligence in Notes on the State of Virginia.24 Wheatley calls her lay “unequal” not because her political status renders her unequal to the demands of imagination but because her capacity for aesthetic self-submission claims the rights of political self-determination that her enslavement denies. Such reflexive rhetoric thus gives “On Imagination” a resonance that locates aesthetic theory within the contested sociopolitical context of eighteenth-century race slavery without ever becoming reducible to that context.25 Conversely, Wheatley’s poem apprehends the problem of political liberty in terms of the processes of aesthetic perception without rendering it a mere exercise in philosophical didacticism. By deploying a theoretical vocabulary that foregrounds liberty of the imagination and the politics of aesthetic subjectivity, its most emotionally compelling, structurally significant, and formally complex moments—an ambivalent relation of power, a liberating gesture of self-expansion, and a tragic capitulation—stage dramatic conflicts in which the language of aspiration and agency confronts the forces of law and power.26
In this way, “On Imagination” offers itself as a representation of liberty, an affirmation of its importance, and a figuration of its complex truth. Like the imported, reprinted, and redacted aesthetic theory that informs it, its language of liberty of the imagination appeals to the social identities and deeply held beliefs of revolutionary Americans. Like Trumbull’s Essay, its rhetoric of self-determination implicitly puts the claims of imagination in the service of a politics of colonial resistance, even as it articulates its allegiance to a British cultural heritage. But as a “fine Poem”—as a work of art—it also aims to provoke in its readers morally illuminating feelings of aesthetic pleasure. In Trumbull’s words, it invites readers to feel liberty’s dignity or to be jealous of its debasement or perhaps to feel something of both—the ironies of liberty inherent in the sensible perception of aesthetic objects and the pleasures of the imagination.
NOTES
1. John Trumbull, Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts (New Haven, 1770), 3–5.
Studies of Trumbull pay scant, even derogatory attention to the Essay. See Alexander Cowie, John Trumbull: Connecticut Wit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 59; and Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 45. For a reading that emphasizes the Essay as an instance in the “transformation of public discourse,” see Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1999), 288–91.
2. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. William Smith (London, 1739), 103–4. Trumbull, Essay, 5, 12, 11. On the eighteenth-century British discourse of “liberty and the arts,” see Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
3. My account of political liberty in late eighteenth-century America is indebted to an extensive historiography. Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood both describe conceptions of liberty during the colonial crisis in opposition to the “power” of the monarchy and Parliament. See Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 55–93; and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1972), 18–28. Michael Kammen and Eric Foner emphasize the changing meaning of liberty from the mid eighteenth century through the Revolution and the 1780s, including its shifting limitations and exclusions. See Michael Kammen, Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 8–52; and Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), 3–68.
4. On the popularity of aesthetic treatises in eighteenth-century America, see David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 262–93; and Janice G. Schimmelman, A Checklist of European Treatises on Art and Aesthetics Available in American Through 1815 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983).
5. I use the term homology, rather than that of analogy or metaphor, to suggest a relation between aesthetics and politics based on their shared origins in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century moral philosophy. For an example, see Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), which begins its account of the modern political state with a discussion of the imagination and the processes of association.
6. Paul Guyer writes that “the central idea to emerge in eighteenth-century aesthetics is the idea of the freedom of the imagination, and it is the attraction of this idea that provided much of the impetus behind the explosion of aesthetic theory in the period.” See Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25.
7. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 503. Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002), xiv. “On Criticism and Genius,” Boston Magazine, December 1783, 57. “Essay on Genius,” Columbian Magazine, or Monthly Miscellany, September 1789, 347. Monroe Beardsley describes the British tradition of empirical aesthetics as an attempt to “free criticism itself from its own shackles of unexamined, or insufficiently examined, aesthetic theory.” See Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 167. But Walter Jackson Bate notes that early British followers of the French rationalists, like Charles Gildon, believed that the French writers were not blindly following classical rules but using reason to interpret them. See Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Harper, 1946), 32.
8. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 529. James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976), 187. Kames, Elements, 416. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 231. As M. H. Abrams makes clear, the appeal of mechanistic rhetoric in theories of imagination persisted throughout the eighteenth-century, largely in otherwise empirical conceptions of association psychology but even through Coleridge’s articulation of the “mechanical fancy.” See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 156–70.
9. “On Pleasure,” Royal American Magazine, March 1775, 184. “Thoughts on Pleasure,” American Moral and Sentimental Magazine, December 1797, 406. Addison, The Spectator, 538–39. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres, ed. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 8. “Pleasures, Sensual and Spiritual,” Philadelphia Minerva, August 1797, 2.
10. “On the Imagination,” Literary Tablet, June 11, 1806, 78–79. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 1969), 57.
11. Kames, Elements, 3–4. “The Necessity of Regulating the Association of Ideas in Young Minds,” New England Quarterly Magazine, July 1802, 119. Thomas Reid, “On Taste,” Literary Magazine, February 1807, 143. Charles Brockden Brown, “On the Standard of Taste,” Literary Magazine, October 1806, 294. For a comprehensive discussion of the association of ideas, see Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England (The Hague: Mouton, 1970).
12. Kames, Elements, 3. Alexander Gerard, Essay on Taste (London: A. Millar, A. Kincaid, and J. Bell, 1759), 166–67. Blair, Lectures, 22. John Blair Linn, The Port-Folio, January 24, 1801, 31.
13. Blair, Lectures, 22. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 25. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Hartford, 1821), 19, 20.
14. Jay Fliegelman describes an “inner dynamic of energy and its containment” in late eighteenth-century American writing. See Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 103.
15. See Edward Cahill, “An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy: Charles Brockden Brown’s Aesthetic State,” Early American Literature 36, no. 1 (2001): 31–70, and “Federalist Criticism and the Fate of Genius,” American Literature, 76, no. 4 (2004): 687–717.
16. Phillis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 62.
17. For most of the eighteenth century, imagination and fancy were used either interchangeably or with only the slight difference that fancy was somewhat freer and less reliable and comprehensive than imagination. Addison himself used the two terms “promiscuously.” On the history of the distinction, see James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 172–83.
18. Wheatley, Collected Works, 65.
19. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763–1789 (New York: Crowell, 1976), 82; Joseph Addison, Cato, a Tragedy (London, 1733), 53.
20. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 37. Fliegelman notes that the phrase derives from Adams’s translation of Marcus Manilius, a first-century Roman didactic poet. See John Quincy Adams, The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1874), 3:442.
21. Peter Coviello sees a similar implication in Wheatley’s “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” whose rhetoric of “the love of freedom” he calls “a defense of the black citizen’s very capacity for virtuous republican citizenship.” See Peter Coviello, “Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America,” Early American Literature 37, no. 3 (2002): 445.
22. Wheatley, Collected Works, 66. Perhaps such emphatic tropes of self-expression even allegorize the volume’s publication itself, Wheatley’s entrance into the public sphere of the London book trade, or her emancipation in the same year Poems on Various Subjects was published. For a useful discussion of Wheatley’s public career, see Frank Shuffelton, “On Her Own Footing: Phillis Wheatley in Freedom,” in Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage, 175–89 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001).
23. Wheatley, Collected Works, 67, 68.
24. Jefferson calls Wheatley’ poetry “beneath the dignity of criticism” and faults her for her insufficient aesthetic power, insisting that Africans express themselves with “the senses only, not the imagination.” In the same paragraph, however, he criticizes Ignatius Sancho, the self-educated African intellectual and author of Letters (1782), for indulging in excessive aesthetic liberty: “His imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a trace of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky.” Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (New York: Norton, 1982), 140.
25. For a discussion of Wheatley, slavery, and the aesthetics of imitation, see Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 179–95.
26. Julie Ellison argues that the sign of “resistance” in Wheatley’s poem is her refusal to use the language of sentiment to “testify to her own victimization.” See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 115. But, in my reading, Wheatley uses the language of aesthetic subjectivity to make a specific argument about the meaning of liberty from the perspective of slavery.