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Home > ECF > Vol. 20 > Iss. 3 (2008)

 

Authors

Kathleen Lubey

Abstract

Joseph Addison envisions an infinitely renewable dynamic of pleasure between a man and his world, one in which the realms of rational discourse are extended by his ability to generate "conversations" with the beautiful objects that traverse the boundary between his exteriors and his mind. In the Spectator, Addison describes an English gentleman whose imagination orders his body and mind, offering him the energy of internal action, the calm of bodily composure, and the pleasures of feeling as though he masters his surroundings. Eliza Haywood, like Addison, associates imaginative engagement with beauty, possession, language, and excitement. But all these features, when brought to the interiors of an enamoured mind, such as Melliora in Love in Excess, create fevered delusion rather than rational exchange in Haywood’s order of things. These competing notions of imaginative activity, authored within the same decade, testify to the enormously varied tasks assigned to (or blamed on) the imagination in early eighteenth-century England. The spectrum represented by Addison’s and Haywood’s accounts poses a weighty challenge to early eighteenth-century writers seeking to "train" readers in the sphere of aesthetic pleasure. Since the vast majority of writers claim, with varying degrees of earnestness, to both entertain and instruct readers, how are they to offer enticing material while ensuring Addison’s gentlemanly aesthetic posture in readers over and above Melliora’s chaotic hallucinations? Because the imagination is embedded in the body—a "discovery" of pronounced importance during the long eighteenth century, as G.S. Rousseau has shown—literature will engage both the body and the mind while a subject performs his aesthetic work with the language offered to him. The imagination is volatile and unpredictable, Addison’s and Haywood’s scenes suggest, because excitement can vary so radically by degree in an aesthetic encounter and seems determined primarily by the individual's inclination to reason or passion. How can art and literature, those repositories of aesthetic stimulation, guarantee polite responses over and above impolite ones?