The thinking and framing of the social shape of power is valuably approached through an understanding of the ‘structures of imagination’ apparent in the aesthetic realm. Frederic Jameson and others have argued the significance of this realm and shown some of its effect. If narrative is as powerful a principle of ontology as theorists of narrative tell us then it follows that it may be a productive means of reconstituting the imaginative structures in question. It is in this hope that the aesthetic is explored here. The emphasis on framing and structure recalls the earlier emphasis on the agency, or efficacy, of the form, though not in any formalistic sense. The social world is categorised in certain ways, and can only be present to us as some kind of configuration of categories. These configurations are always changing, yet there are decided limits to how we see our worlds. One example, drawn from Walkowitz's recent work on sexual narratives in Victorian London, is that of melodrama. The melodramatic constructions of feminist propaganda in the 1880s were only capable of imagining women in a certain way, as a victim, exhibiting modesty, and so on. And this way was extraordinarily important over a long period. Yet it too, in the end, lost effectiveness as other aesthetic frames displaced the melodramatic, chiefly that of realism.