Imaginative Pleasures: Fantomina, Ideology, and Aesthetics

The Pleasures of the Imagination, taken in their full Extent, are not so gross as those of Sense, nor so refined as those of the Understanding. The last are, indeed, more preferable, because they are founded on some new Knowledge or Improvement in the Mind of Man; yet it must be confest, that those of the Imagination are as great and as transporting as the other. …

Joseph Addison, Spectator 411¹

The British version of aesthetics is a peculiarly eighteenth-century phenomenon, with the pivotal role of the imagination, and the pleasures it provides, internalized as a natural and automatic part of the mind’s primary understanding. As in Addison’s famous rendering, the imagination mediates between sense impressions and mental cognition, creating a spontaneous reaction, what might be called an imaginary relation between “sense” and “understanding” that is experienced and felt, but never quite rationally construed.² On this view, the aesthetic becomes a means of ideological production, a way of constructing individual perception through representative forms like poetry and, somewhat more dangerously, fiction. Just how the aesthetic realm enables the imaginative experience of reading, shaping the way individual readers are to understand their cultural milieu, is the concern of this essay.

Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina experiments with Addison’s emerging notions of aesthetics and the pleasures of the imagination as a selfconsciously imagined form of fiction. Its central plot is concerned with the way fictions motivate and exercise imaginative responses in the mind, playing with the sensory manifestations that produce the passions – what Addison points to as a “new Principle of Pleasure” resulting from an “Operation of the Mind” (Spectator 418, 3: 566–67). Haywood’s novella exposes the operation of an emergent kind of aesthetic pleasure, enabling the sensory domain to transcend the pleasures of the body in order to improve or ameliorate the imagination. A cultural novelty attracting a wide period readership, and a fiction that continues to prove attractive to critical attention today, Fantomina expresses a new relationship between the body and mind. It shows us fictive narrative attempting to do something different: to produce an aesthetic reading practice that engages readers in an imaginary experience privileged above rational judgment. In an expanding market of readers and publishers, Haywood crafts writing that adapts features of previous amatory and romance writing in order to create an imaginary relation of individuals to the transformative class and gender relations of the time. In Fantomina, ideology produces a form of consciousness that is enabled by the aesthetic. Arguably, the amatory form of the novella, as well as the reading practice it engenders, together produce a particular kind of imaginative thinking, or consciousness, that is separate from rational cognition, judgment, or knowledge. Through its serial form, sexual desire and passion are attached to the protagonist’s particular imagination, and the reader is thus encouraged to use his or her imagination to take pleasure in the narrative and to desire more such fictions that (re)structure feeling and perception. Fantomina imagines fictions of desire that centrally engage and (re)produce the aesthetic by linking the body to the imagination, producing a desire inspired by narrative fiction, and enabling individual desire to be reproduced through literary forms. William Warner has claimed that Haywood’s fiction generalizes the reader, but if we notice how fiction begins to work as an aesthetic practice of ideology, we may see how fiction generalizes not the reader, but rather the desire for reading.³ That is, fiction works to engender ideology in its pleasurable responses,⁴ and Fantomina in particular reveals how feeling (both sensory and emotive) precedes understanding, making the imagination just as “great and as transporting” as the understanding, as Addison suggests (Spectator 411, 3: 538).

My argument draws on previous interpretations, but offers another way to account for how desire, particularly feminine desire, operates in Haywood’s fiction,⁵ mapping changes in the development of fiction when the novel remains, at least, a suspect genre.⁶ My analysis focuses on how Fantomina engages and stimulates passionate response from readers in order to reposition the body to the mind in an experience of...