Romanticism, Difference and the Aesthetic

Author(s): Anne K. Mellor

Source: Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 34, No. 2, Convention Program Issue (1999), pp. 127-
141
Published by: Penn State University Press on behalf of the Pacific Ancient and Modern
Language Association (PAMLA)
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 Romanticism, Difference and the Aesthetic
Anne K. Mellor
University of California, Los Angeles

1998 Plenary Address

Over the last fifteen years, a paradigm shift has occurred in the st
of British Romanticism in England and America. Under pressure
widely diverging theoretical positions-the New Historicism and
tural Studies, Feminist Theory, Post-Colonialist and Race Theory
understanding of what constitutes British Romantic literature has b
radically altered.

Until the early 1980s, most scholars and teachers of British Roma
cism in the United States and the United Kingdom based their u
standing of this literary movement almost entirely on the works of
canonical poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and K
Using these poets' own analyses of their literary goals and strategies
describe their writing, scholars tended to define Romanticism as
ebration of the capacities of the divine creative imagination, as a
ploration of the limitations of finite human language in the face of
divinity, as a search for transcendence or a heavenly "unity of bein
a concern with the development of an autonomous self or subject
as an affirmation of the role of the poet as a political or religious le
one who could initiate a redemptive political revolution that w
realise the goals of "liberty, equality and fraternity" proclaimed by
Girondists in France.

This conception of Romanticism received its most comprehensive

summation in Meyer Abrams' magisterial Natural Supernaturalism, which
appeared in 1971. Arguing that Romanticism embodied the "spirit of
the age," Abrams identified Romanticism with the Enlightenment's com-
mitment to democracy and the rights of man. The greatest Romantic
poems, he asserted, traced the poet's "circuitous journey" from inno-
cence to experience and on to a higher innocence, a quest that begins
with the child's unconscious conviction of a primal oneness between
himself and Mother Nature. He then falls away from that communion
into an experience of alienated self-consciousness and isolation. But this
fall, like Adam's in Milton's Paradise Lost, finally proves fortunate, for it
enables the poet to learn the powers inherent in consciousness itself.

127

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128 Anne K Meilor

The poet thereby sp

a sublime transcend
to understand the
and his own mind
through his "spous
and teachers who fo
a humanist seculari
lost and regained, a
the common man, a

In the late 1970s a

manticism was cha
failed to acknowled
itself, practices mos
mock epic, Don Ju
deconstructive conce
etic forms and fig
Geoffrey Hartman
ties of Abrams' Nat
proach to English R

But in 1983, the pu

ogyposed a fundame
ods and to Abrams'
Marxism and the Ne
of English Romantic
logical commitmen
we recognize the h
writing, that we op
moted the cultural a
at a particular time.
last fifteen years of
role played by hist
especially of Cliffor
of Alan Liu's Words
of James Chandler's
the Case of Romanti

While the authors

from the "false co
poems they examine
ideological limitation
their analyses of E

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Romanticism, Difference and the Aesthetic 129

that this literary movement consisted primarily of only six poets, al

male, with the novels of Sir Walter Scott an uneasy addition to this canon.
This working assumption effectively erased from our academic and cul-
tural consciousness the fact that numerous women had written and pub-
lished in England between 1780 and 1840, that ten of the dozen most
popular novelists of the time were women, that the most respected dra-
matist was a woman (Joanna Baillie), and that the best-selling poet wa
a woman (Felicia Hemans).

In 1993, in my Romanticism and Gender, I posed the question: what

happens to our understanding of English Romanticism if we take the
works of the leading women writers of the day as the basis of our con-
struction of "Romantic era literature"? Following the lead of the con-
tributors to my collection, Romanticism and Feminism, I argued that a
very different view of the role of literature and the nature of the uni-
verse emerges from the writings of such gifted female Romantic writers
as Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, Joanna Baillie,
Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Letitia Landon and Maria
Edgeworth, to name only the best known female writers of the period.

To briefly sum up my conclusions in that book, I defined what I came

to call "feminine Romanticism" as a literature grounded, not on an au-
tonomous self but on a subjectivity that was constructed primarily in
relation to other subjectivities, hence a self that was represented as fluid,
absorptive, responsive, with permeable ego boundaries. This self typi-
cally derived its identity from a larger human nexus, a family or a social
community. Taking the family as the grounding trope of social and po-
litical organization, feminine Romanticism (which included male writ-
ers such as Keats as well as female writers) opposed violent military
revolutions, especially a French-style Revolution, in favor of gradual or
evolutionary reform under the guidance of benevolent parental instruc-
tion. This model of social reform involved a commitment to an ethic of
care (as opposed to an ethic of justice based on the abstract rights of the
individual), an ethic that takes as its highest value the insuring that, in
any conflict, no one should be hurt. In this context, Nature becomes for
these writers not so much a source of divine creative inspiration as a
female friend or sister with needs and capacities, one who both pro-
vides support and requires cultivation, with whose life-giving powers
one willingly co-operates.

In this feminine Romantic ideology, moral reform both of the indi-

vidual and of the family politic is achieved, not by utopian imaginative
vision, but by the communal exercise of reason, moderation, tolerance

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 130 Anne K. Mellor

and the domestic affection

which defined the female as
in both physical and moral
ticularly Mary Wollstonecra
nal capacities and even the
finally, the ideology of femi
of linguistic expression in sp
(the sonnet, occasional vers
celebrate the quotidian, the
day life; in the domestic dra
in the novel, that genre w
vernacular a human commun
time.

Since 1993, another category

ses of English Romanticism
theory. The essays published
Culture, edited by Alan Ri
Romanticism and Colonialism
have compelled us for the fir
in which English Romantic
and religious movements o
Company's economic and p
to end the British slave trad
colonies. In 2001, when the
ings in all genres that direct
and the abolition of slaver
Debbie Lee for Pickering and
able to make some definitive
difference in Romantic writ

II

As a result of all these powerful theoretical interventions, from New

Historicism, Feminism and Post-Colonialism, those of us who teach and
do research on British Romantic literature in America and England have
a very different sense of what "Romanticism" is than that we taught
only fifteen years ago. Increasingly, we teach Romantic writing-by
women as well as men, by novelists as well as poets and dramatists and
essayists, by working-class as well as middle-class and aristocratic writ-
ers, by black African and West Indian as well as white British and Irish
writers-we teach this much larger and more varied body of writing as

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Romanticism, Difference and the Aesfthetic 131

a powerful and illuminating engagement with the great political a

social movements of the day. We rely on two new anthologies that hav
collected much of this non-canonical writing together with the tra
tional canon, the two-volume anthology titled Romanticism and Roman
tic Women Writers edited for Blackwell's by Duncan Wu and the o
volume anthology prepared for Harcourt Brace College Publishers
Richard Matlak and myself, titled British Literature 1780-1830. Our an
thology foregrounds the major social and political issues of the day
beginning with documents that lay out the major debates over the Fren
Revolution, the rights of women, the slave trade and abolitionist ca
paigns, the new science and technology, and the growth of Englan
colonial empire. Resisting the traditional definitions of Romanticism as
primarily an aesthetic category, we deliberately omitted the term R
manticism from the title of our volume. Within the anthology itself w
suggested that "Romanticism" is a term that is best paired with a term
like "Neoclassicism" and used to define a particular aesthetic positi
rather than an entire historical literary period.

After citing some specific examples of the difference that these the
retical interrogations and conceptions of difference, whether derived fr
gender or class or race, have made to our understanding of the literary
culture of the Romantic era, I wish to raise yet another theoretical que
tion. First, I shall look briefly at four of the major political and so
conflicts of the time: the French Revolution, the abolitionist campaign
against slavery, class conflict, and religion.

The first generation of the canonical Romantic poets, Blak

Wordsworth and Coleridge, initially hailed the French Revolution
the harbinger of a new era of human freedom, in which the univer
rights of the common man would at last be politically institutionalized
and the tyrannies of the ancien regime would disappear. "Bliss was it in
that dawn to be alive," enthused Wordsworth in the 1805 Prelude, pro-
claiming his initial belief that
[.. .] a spirit was abroad
Which could not be withstood, that poverty
[...] would in a little time
Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The industrious, and the lowly Child of Toil,
All institutes for ever blotted out
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp
Abolish'd, sensual state and cruel power
Whether by edict of the one or few,
And finally, as sum and crown of all,

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 132 Anne K. Melor

Should see the People having

In making their own Laws, w
To all mankind. (9.520-34)

Wordsworth's affirmation of political revolution was of course echoed

by Blake in his prophetic poem America, by Coleridge in his "France: An
Ode," and most notably among the younger writers of this period, by
Percy Shelley in his Prometheus Unbound. There, in Act III, Shelley pro-
claimed the sudden advent, with the defeat of the tyrant Jupiter, of a
radically transformed society:
[. . .] soon I looked,
And behold, thrones were kingless, and men walked
One with the other even as spirits do,

[.................................I
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself: just, gentle, wise [. . .].
(Prometheus Unbound3.4.130-32, 194-98)

Granted that as the French Revolution spiralled out of control, as the

days of the Terror raged, as Napoleon came to power, Wordsworth,
Coleridge and Shelley all reconsidered their commitment to political
revolution as a method for social reform; nonetheless, they continued to
see radical social change as both desirable and achievable, ideally un-
der the guidance of that "unacknowledged legislator of the world," the
poet.

But the great majority of the women writing during the early days of
the French Revolution, as well as during the Napoleonic campaigns that
followed, represented political revolution, warfare, and radical social
change far more negatively. They focussed, not on the heroic victories of
the French sans culottes or the British military leaders, but rather on the
innocent victims of war. Charlotte Smith's powerful poem The Emzigrants
(published in 1793) recounts in detail the sufferings of those emigrd
French clergy and the wives and daughters of French aristocrats thrown
penniless upon English shores, while at the same time asserting that
liberty cannot survive in any nation-French or British-that devotes
itself to war, that "war, wide-ravaging," which "annihilates / The hope
of cultivation" and "gives to Fiends, / The meagre, ghastly Fiends of
Want and Woe, / The blasted land" (2.75-78).

Charlotte Smith's fervent condemnation of all military solutions to

political or social conflicts is echoed again and again in the poetry of
women. Anne Bannerman's "Verses on an Illumination for a Naval Vic-

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Romanticism, Difference and the Aesthetic 133

tory" in 1800 sternly chides those who celebrate such military events
"uncultur'd savages" who "spurn" the "arts of peace," claiming t
those with genuine "humanity" would be too embarrassed to disp
their acts of violence and destruction so openly. As she concludes,
Andes' cliffs, untutor'd Murder low'rs,/ But all its keener, deadlier ar
are ours" (lines 54-55). And Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in her brilliant jer
emiad Etghteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), a progress poem that prop
esies the imminent decline and fall of British civilization and the dep
ture of the genius of liberty to America, attributes the moral decay
England to its willingness to wage war:
[. . .] fairest flowers expand but to decay;
The worm is in thy core, thy glories pass away;
Arts, arms and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;
Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring. (lines 313-16)

And in what was perhaps the best known poem written by a woman
this literary period, "Casabianca"-"The boy stood on the burn
deck"-published in 1826 but based on a true event during the Batt
the Nile in 1798, Felicia Hemans focuses entirely on the fate of the te
year-old son of the Admiral of the French fleet. Ordered by his father
remain at his post, the young Giacomo Casabianca calls again and a
to his unconscious, dying father as the flames of the burning ship ci
round him:

Upon his brow he felt their breath,

And in his waving hair,
And looked from that lone post of death,
In still, yet brave despair.

And shouted but once more aloud,

'My father! must I stay?'
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud,
The wreathing fires made way

There came a burst of thunder-sound-

The boy--oh! where was he?
-Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strew'd the sea!

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,

That well had borne their part-
But the noblest thing that perish'd there
Was that young faithful heart. (stanzas 6-7, 9-10)

With the violent breaking apart of the boy's heart, Hemans also breaks
apart any code of military obedience that needlessly sacrifices its young
to a futile gesture, to the false belief that war is a method of social pres-
ervation and regeneration.

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 134 Anne K. Melor

When we turn to the seco

tic era, the debate concern
very in England's West Ind
proaches to this issue based
canonical male Romantic
the slave trade and to abo
Wordsworth comments v
ship with Thomas Clarkso
the slave trade

[...] had ne'er

Fasten'd on my affections, nor did now
Its unsuccessful issue much excite
My sorrow, having laid this faith to heart,
That, if France prosper'd, good Men would not long
Pay fruitless worship to humanity,
And this most rotten branch of human shame,
Object, as seem'd, of superfluous pains,
Would fall together with its parent tree. (10.219-226)

And Coleridge, in his 1796 Bristol lecture on the slave trade, while in
sisting on the evil of the trade, throws the burden of ending it onto th
consumers of its products, whom he defines as primarily female, whether
the indulged wife of the West Indian planter or the "fine Ladies an
Prostitutes" who purchase the "gold, diamonds, silks, muslins & cali
coes" of the East Indian trade. Even Blake, who in Visions ofthe Daugh-
ters ofAlbion (1793) condemns the "voice of slaves beneath the sun, and
children bought with money," equates the emancipation of the "enslav'd
daughters of Albion, in this case Oothoon, with her participation in
regime of free love that benefits men rather than women.

If we turn to the writers who addressed the evils of slavery most ef-
fectively in the period, from Thomas Clarkson and William Cowper
Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie, we see that gende
played a significant role in their respective arguments for the abolition
of slavery. The most prominent male abolitionist writers, such as
Clarkson, Cowper, William Wilberforce and Thomas Day, tended to a
tack slavery as a violation of "natural law," the argument that all me
are born equal and have certain inalienable "rights." As a man, the black
African belongs to the same species as the white European, and is en
titled to the same "liberty, equality and fraternity." As the black speak
in William Cowper's widely reprinted poem, "The Negro's Complaint
(1788), asserts,
Still in thought as free as ever,
What are England's rights, I ask,

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Romanticism, Difference and the Aesthetic 135

Me from my delights to sever,

Me to torture, me to task?

Fleecy locks and black complexion

Cannot forfeit Nature's claim. (lines 9-12)

And this is the position asserted by the recaptured West Indian slave in
Thomas Day's famous poem The Dying Negro (1773). Here, the slave
bidding farewell to his white fiancee, prefers to commit suicide rather
than return to the slave plantations of the West Indies. As he denounces
his white master,
And thou, whose impious avarice and pride
Thy God's blest symbol to my brows denied,
Forbade me or the rights of man to claim,
Or share with thee a Christian's hallowed name,
Thou too farewell!-for not beyond the grave,
Thy power extends, nor is my dust thy slave.
Go bribe thy kindred ruffians with thy gold,
But dream not nature's rights are bought and sold. (lines 58-66)
On the other hand, women writers such as Hannah More, Ann
Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams and Amelia Opie tended to condemn
slavery because it violated the domestic affections, separating mothers
from their children, husbands from their wives, and even worse, sub-
jecting black women to sexual abuse from their white masters. As Hannah
More put it in her poem, "Slavery,"
Whene'er to Afric's shores I turn my eyes,
Horrors of deepest, deadliest guilt arise;
I see, by more than fancy's mirror shown,
The burning village and the blazing town:
See the dire victim torn from social life,
The shrieking babe, the agonizing wife;
She, wretch forlorn! is dragg'd by hostile hands,
To distant tyrants sold, in distant lands!
Transmitted miseries, and successive chains,
The sole sad heritage her child obtains! (lines 95-104)

For women writers the issue of enslavement resonated at a very per-

sonal level: following the lead of Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (1792), many argued that the legal construction of
the British wife as under the "cover" or couverture of her husband meant
that she lived in a legal bondage to her husband that differed very little
from West Indian slavery. As Wollstonecraft proclaimed, "When I call
women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense" (VRWch. 12).

Carrying the arguments put forth in their writings on both the French
Revolution and slavery to the more general problem of class conflict in
society, male and female writers differed strongly both in terms of gen-

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 136 Anne K. Mellor

der and of class. The canon

vent of a classless society,
viduals would hold exactly
Shelley envisioned this utop
and nationless." Or they dre
the reign of the common ma
As Wordsworth put it at the
Prophets of Nature, we to the
A lasting inspiration, sanctifie
By reason and by truth: what
Others will love; and we may
The women writers of the
promote a more gradual, am
the whole, they accepted th
envisioned a steady evoluti
tion of social and political do
cally ends her novels with t
try with a member of the p
of an empowered middle cl
aristocracy with the energy
Anna Barbauld and Hannah
the triumph of what Isaac K
bourgeoisie, a middle class
of the true Briton as educat
moral and Christian.

My last example is the differing role that religion plays in Romantic

era writing. In their youth, the canonical poets tended to reject the estab
lished church as an instrument of social oppression. In its place the
tended to promote an allegiance to the divine creative imagination
the agent of both spiritual wisdom and personal salvation. Often, as
the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge, they saw the imagination either
as the presence of God within man or as a window to the pantheist
"One Life within us and abroad."

The women writers of this period, however, tended to identify strong

with established religious churches, whether the Church of England or
the established sects of the Old or New Dissent. To date, feminist scho
ars have tended to condemn this religious allegiance as a psycholog
cally crippling adherence to a patriarchal system, one which in ma
cases either silenced or distorted the writings of these women into
affirmation of the doctrine of the separate spheres which confined wom

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Romanticism, Difference and the Aesthetic 137

to hearth and home. But this seems to me to be a radical misunderstand-

ing of the role religion played in Romantic era women's writing.

Female writers such as Hannah More, Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie

and even Mary Wollstonecraft consciously aligned themselves with a
tradition of female Christian preachers and prophets who based their
right to speak in public on the authority of the Bible itself. Seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century female preachers frequently cited the prophe
Joel who described a time of special blessing as one in which "the son
and daughters shall prophesy" (Joel 2:28) and reminded their listeners
that even St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, had acknowledged that
in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free,
there is neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28). Identifying themselves a
the voice of Christian virtue, answerable to no merely mortal male, these
female evangelical preachers had by 1780 established both a social prac-
tice and a literary precedent for a woman to speak publically on both
religious and political issues. They had achieved the right to comment
on the rectitude or unrighteousness of the government, the military, the
professions of law and medicine, and especially of commerce, and to
condemn in the name of the highest authority-God or Scripture-the
sins of the males who surrounded them. Encouraged by John Wesley
the Methodists, and the Dissenting academies, women preachers grew
in number and influence throughout the early nineteenth century.

Just as the canonical male Romantic poets claimed divine authority

or "poetic genius" as the inspiration and origin of their writing, so fe-
male poets often claimed divine authority, grounded in a revisionist read-
ing of Holy Scripture, for their verse. They frequently defined them-
selves as the mouthpiece or vessel of the "Divine Word." Again and again,
they insisted that they spoke on behalf of virtue, a virtue they consis-
tently gendered as female, a virtue that in a Christian nation must gov-
ern both the private and the public sphere, thus taking precedence over
all merely expedient considerations of government policy or commer-
cial advancement.

As the voices of virtue, these women writers laid claim to the highe
cultural authority: they alone could best educate the future leaders
England, advise the nation on the morally correct policies and methods
of governance, and embody the soul of the new British nation then
the making. My point here is simple: because women writers defin
themselves as virtuous Christians, openly allied to an established churc
they could claim a dominant political role as the arbiters of moral
and justice. They undertook a campaign to reform the manners or mor

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 138 Anne K. Mellor

als of England during the ea

more sober, industrious, thr
reer of Hannah More demon
chant attacks on the libertin
racy, England could no long
gant, and amoral as George
More made the reign of Que
what we now call Victorianism-inevitable.

III

When we take into account the entire literary culture produce

England between 1780 and 1840, novels as well as poems, slave na
tives as well as dramatic plays, essays and journalism as well as childr
books, travel writings, and sermons, what we traditionally thought
as "English Romanticism"-the writings of six canonical poets who con
demned the restraints of Enlightenment rationality and celebrated t
overflow of powerful feeling and the unique creations of the liberat
imagination-these writings now seem somewhat marginal. "Rom
cism" can no longer be understood as a reaction against Enlightenmen
Neoclassicism, nor can Victorianism be seen as a reaction against
manticism. What is now blindingly clear is the ideological, rheto
and generic continuity that extends from eighteenth-century Enligh
ment or Neoclassical thought and literary practice, through the bulk
the writing in England between 1780 and 1830, to the greatest litera
works of the Victorian period. A commitment to rationality, to the
tues of domesticity and the familial affections, and to the preservat
of social cohesion and community are as much the hallmarks of
Austen's fiction, Walter Scott's writings, and Hannah More's pro
oeuvre as they are of Dr. Johnson's or George Eliot's works. In term
genre, we can now see that it is the novel rather than poetry that alr
by 1800 dominated the literary stage, that novel which originated in w
Terry Eagleton has called a "feminised discourse," and which has
tinued to the present day to function as the primary voice of a gene
public consciousness.

We can now best understand British literary "Romanticism," I thi

as a cultural dialoguebetween competing public discourses-some
mitted to a visionary ideology of radical social change and personal t
scendence, others committed to the liberation and triumph of work
class consciousness, still others sustaining an aristocratic and Fre
inflected libertinism, the majority committed to the growth and po

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Romanticism, Difference and the Aesthetic 139

cal control of a bourgeois domestic ideology and Christian morality.

of this intense and complex literary dialogue, a dialogue that ac
engaged all the burning issues that still vex us-the enduring que
of how to protect the rights of men and of women, how to amelior
class conflict, how to maintain both prosperity and peace, how t
tain meaningful community-out of this dialogue comes whatev
shall in the future mean by "Romanticism." I suspect that we will c
tinue to use the term "Romanticism" to describe this much larg
more complex body of writing, if only because at the heart of almo
the writing of this historical period lies an implicit engagement
romance, specifically with the romance of progress or at the very lea
process, the belief that the lives of men and women will change and
be improved. Pope's maxim in his Essay on Man (1733-34)-"What
Is, Is Right." (1:294)-is a motto that no Romantic writer I have
would endorse. On the contrary, woven into the shared Romanticism
the writers publishing in England between 1780 and 1840 is the con
tion that it is the unique responsibility of the writer to educate his o
readers to see that whatever is, is not yet good enough.

IV

During the last decade, in our effort to make the writings of wo

working-class men, and African slaves available to our student
integral to our definitions of literary "Romanticism," we have consci
or unconsciously bracketed the question of "aesthetic value." We
Mary Prince's History of/Maary Prince (1831) because it is the first
narrative written by a woman and hence of great historical and pol
significance rather than because we wish to claim that it is a "lit
masterpiece." Let me be very clear on this point. I think Prince's au
ography is a piece of exceptionally powerful writing, one produc
her collaboration with the abolitionist Sarah Strickland. But the
lished claims that have been made for the importance of Prince's na
tive, and for why we should teach it, have not to date rested on its
thetic value, but rather on its social and political significance or its
toric truth.

By bracketting, or simply ignoring, the question of aesthetic val

whether or not a given literary text is "beautiful," "well written,"
"good" as another text already in the canon, we-as scholars of l
ture-may have undercut the very rationale for our existence: wh
we now teach that historians could not teach as well? Our collective
failure to answer that question may in part be responsible for the dire

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 140 Anne K. Mellor

straits our graduate

large no longer und
ity to write well (if

I think we need to
formulated at the outset of the Romantic era by Kant as
"Zweckmissigkeit ohne Zweck"-"purposefulness without purpose"-
to ask whether literary texts can in any sense rise above the "purposes"
of the cultural ideologies in which they are situated, to determine whether
the Romantic concept of the "transcendental" remains meaningful. Such
questions can and will occupy us for years to come. Here I can only
suggest that Romantic era writing both emerges out of and at the same
time rises above its historical moment. This body of writing both articu-
lates questions and provides tentative answers to the human dilemmas
that still confront us-dilemmas concerning the meaning and purposes
of life itself, the role of the writer as "the unacknowledged legislator of
the world," the nature and viability of love as the basis of human com-
munity, and the ways in which a recognition of the "rights of man" and
the "rights of woman" can be reconciled with the "domestic affections,"
to use the terms in which Romantic era writers struggled with these
issues.

In order to reclaim the "aesthetic" as a transcendenta

the purposes of defining what we might now call a work of
we must go beyond traditional identifications of the aesth
tic form alone. Rather we must recuperate a concept of th
an aspect of the ethical, as the fusion of content and form
mously insisted, the beautiful and the good finally interse
Romantic era the concept of "inner beauty" was first form
Plumptre in her novel Something New, in 1801. Perhap
the lead of this Romantic writer and once again argue f
day that literary achievement or "aesthetic value" can
measured in terms of an artistic work's success in articula
torically persuasive way the author's concept of the "idea

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