Mapping the Landscape in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination"

Abstract

In "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson coins the term "cognitive mapping" to express the need for individuals in a postmodern society to position themselves in regard to seemingly chaotic social and political structures. A cognitive map enables "a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole" (51). An individual's cognitive map can provide a reassuringly stable physical definition of self in a rapidly changing society, such as that of the twentieth century, or that of England in the eighteenth century. Joseph Addison's use of the trope of landscape and landscape gardening in his "Pleasures of the Imagination," I will argue, serves as a cognitive map of the social, political, and cultural attributes of the landed aristocracy that the primarily merchant class readers of the Spectator were attempting to acquire. The rage for landscape painting and landscape gardening was in full force during June and July of 1712, when the Spectator published Addison's essays on the sublime. As Edward Malins notes, the types of landscape gardening most favored during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century in England were closely tied to the origins of the monarchs on the throne at the time. Thus, following the Restoration of Charles II, who had spent most of his life at the French court at Versailles, the French taste for geometric parterres featuring magnificent fountains and separated by radiating walkways was in vogue throughout England (5-6). William and Mary brought with them the even more formal Dutch style of landscape gardening. Closely clipped hedges, fantastical topiary, and groves of trees planted in the quincunx layout, affording ordered prospects from any point of view, were modeled at Hampton Court for the rest of the country (14-15). Under Anne, the native Englishwoman, the finicky attention paid to the royal gardens waned, and she is said to have "parsimoniously neglected [them]" (15), though she was careful to root out the distinctly Dutch box parterres upon the death of William (Clifford 98). Landscape gardening in England was never a politically neutral pursuit, for the previous style was quickly discarded in favor of the present monarch's taste.