Ethical and Aesthetic Alerity

Slavery and the Romantic Imagination by Debbie Lee. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. 224 + xi. $19.95 paper, $55.00 cloth.

In this elegant, deeply illuminating book, Debbie Lee argues that Britain's imperial, colonial practice of slavery and British Romantic writers' theory and practice of visionary imagination are interdependent developments. More radically, she claims that the imagination theorized and practiced by these writers is fundamentally shaped by their nation's confrontation with the moral crisis of slavery. Even when not overtly representing slavery, then, these Romantic works offered and still offer ethical models for understanding, respecting, and learning from cultural and racial difference.

While this approach benefits from two decades of critical studies that have challenged the claims of visionary imagination to be autonomous from historical context, she does not argue, like some New Historicists and neo-Marxists, that these writers were blind to the deeper economic structures or the historical events that shaped their works. Instead, she argues first that this Romantic ideology is a conscious, deliberate recognition of a crisis in individual and national ethics; and second, that the imagination developed through this conscious struggle is simultaneously "autonomous" and profoundly interdependent with others' minds and feelings. She does not reject the outward, imperial "usurping" of a Wordsworthian egotistical sublime but calls up alternative models for an ethical imagination: Blake's "self-annihilation," Keats's negative capability, Shelley's imaginative love as the great secret of morals, and Coleridge's hope that we can "think ourselves in the Thoughts and Feelings of others" (32). To bring these opposing ethical stances into relationship with one another, Lee calls upon Levinas's concept of "alterity." Alterity, she points out, develops its ethical significance through Coleridge: "He opposes 'selfishness and identity' to 'otherness and alterity,' whose synthesis is 'the community of the spirit'" (36). "Unlike the term 'otherness,'" Lee writes, quoting Galen E. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, "'alterity' shifts the focus of philosophical concern away from the 'epistemic other' to the concrete 'moral other' of practices—political, cultural, linguistic, artistic, and religious'" (37). "Like Coleridge," Lee continues, "Levinas describes alterity as the self's responsibility for the other, as the self's imperative to place the other at the center of his or her own being, and as the self's desire to respect and preserve the difference of that other" (39). "Romantic alterity," then, "the philosophical underpinning of the distanced imagination, helped writers to form some of the most powerful poetic works of the period. This aspect of the Romantic imagination developed in conjunction with the entire culture's growing awareness of the alterity of Africans and slaves (who were the most discursively visible example of British otherness)." Thus, she writes, "I believe that a strand of what has been canonized as Romantic writing explores issues of alterity that are directly related to slavery" (41).

This approach allows her to overcome the schism that Joan Baum's 1995 study sought to establish between works that directly and didactically advocated abolition, such as Cowper's poems, and works that did not represent their authors' actual sympathy for abolition directly but achieved a more aesthetic and philosophic distance through a broadly humanist definition of imagination. Lee's concept of an empathetic alterity as a loss of self in the face of the other's difference serves a function similar to Helen Thomas's bridging category between abolition advocacy and Romantic imagination, the ecstatic loss of boundaries experienced in evangelical conversion narratives. Yet the dialectical and paradoxical element of difference and distance in Lee's "alterity" resists what one might term the empire-building of a specifically Christian evangelism.

After her introductory chapters, the body of Lee's book is a deceptively simple framework for her complex readings of individual works. Her three sections move both geographically and chronologically from "Hazards and Horrors in the Slave Colonies" through "Fascination and Fear in Africa" to "Facing Slavery in Britain." In the first section she analyzes Coleridge's...