Bodies, Beliefs, and Bondage: Individual Experience and the Exposure of British Institutional Violence in Romantic Literature

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between Romantic literature and the contradictions of Britain’s imperial culture, in which ideals of liberty and human rights coexisted with the realities of transatlantic slavery and colonial domination. It argues that slavery remained a significant presence within Romantic writing, shaping not only explicitly abolitionist texts but also broader literary engagements with race, identity, and exclusion. Through an analysis of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), William Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy’ (1789), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), this essay explores how individual experience becomes a means of interrogating the social institutions and ideologies that sustain inequality. Equiano’s autobiographical testimony exposes the brutality of enslavement while revealing the tensions involved in seeking recognition within Christian and imperial frameworks. Blake’s poem challenges racialised religious hierarchies yet also reveals the complexities of resistance shaped by colonial ideology. Shelley’s Gothic representation of the Creature extends these concerns beyond literal slavery, examining how societies construct and exclude the Other. Ultimately, these texts demonstrate that Romantic literature’s critiques of oppression are often ambivalent: shaped by the very systems they seek to challenge, yet powerful in exposing their contradictions and moral failures.