(III) Imagination as the Prospective Expansion

Imagination serves as the prospective expansion of the small world that Maggie occupies. Maggie’s imagination is active, “always rushing extravagantly beyond an immediate impression,” a trait that predisposes her to a “sense of privation too keen to let her taste what was offered in the transient present” (VI, II-V). Allusions to Greek and Roman mythology and the “spiritual, local presence of Roman, Saxon, and Dane… permeate the novel, vastly extending its referential world beyond the horizons of those who belong to the tiny, trading society of St Ogg’s” (Gray, 138). This extension of the “referential world” of the novel is evident in Maggie’s thoughts as she makes her way to Dunlow Common in search of the gypsies: “She crept through the bars of the gate and walked on with new spirit, though not without haunting images of Apollyon, and a highwayman with a pistol, and a blinking dwarf in yellow with a mouth from ear to ear, and other miscellaneous dangers” (I, XI). The summoning of new worlds is fueled by Maggie’s imagination, which draws a great deal of inspiration from the books she reads; books that are filled “mysterious sentences” that give “boundless scope to her imagination” (II, I). Maggie’s impulse to turn to books and “fashion the world afresh in her own thoughts” stems from her dissatisfaction as she feels that “the world outside the books was not a happy one” (III, V). This imaginative nature stands in contrast to Tom’s whose “imagination was impatient of any intermediate prospect” (I, VII). Tom adopts a sense of practicality that does not allow for such inventive measures. Although “practicality” grants Tom some advantages which he applies to the real world, it does not account for some “foreseen consequences” that require some level of imagination. When Tom decidedly reports Maggie’s “rash” act of pushing Lucy into the mud, he is met with an inquiry that threatens to expose his own faults in venturing beyond the garden. This shortcoming, or rather short-sightedness, of Tom is credited to his constricted imagination, one that was not “rapid and capacious enough” to thoroughly consider the implications of exposing Maggie (I, X). In another instance, during his schooling, Tom is shown to be in a “state as blank unimaginativeness” and is thus unable to grasp the “cause and tendency of his sufferings” (II, I). Tom’s inability to comprehend causality extends beyond his own circumstances – in much the same way, he does not conceive “how there came to be such a thing as Latin” and is unable to draw the simple connection that there existed a people for whom Latin was a medium for the expression of “the everyday affairs of life” (II, I). This is a significant differing factor in the natures of Maggie and Tom, one that ultimately establishes the parameters of their “referential world” which serves as an extension of the world they occupy. For Maggie, there is no scope to this sphere; this is what enables her to perceive a “large vision of relations” (IV, I). Tom’s world, on the other hand, is truly “imprisoned within the limits of his own nature” (VII, III).