ABSTRACT
In a sense, all fantasy is imaginative experience liberated, in that it surpasses the bounds of empirical reality. While the experience of a change of scale becomes an illuminating one for Maria, it only serves to emphasize more clearly the vices of Miss Brown and Mr Hater. Arrietty finds the experience of meeting her long-lost cousin not joyful, as she had anticipated, but deeply disturbing. Fogle points out that if true merging of subject and object occurs, self-consciousness is lost, so that the experience is ultimately unverifiable and undescribable. Moreover, the experience develops from heightened sense perception of the primary world to a sense of union with other parts of objective reality. Penelope Farmer is primarily interested in the imaginative experience itself. The awareness of the special qualities of certain places in the primary world is thus linked with the historical awareness as the principal liberation of experience in the whole sequence of novels.
