In 1757, Edmund Burke published his treatise on the Sublime’s aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, providing a benchmark against which articulations of British Romantic tradition have been evaluated. In his systematic analysis of the features that constitute the sublime and its feminised counterpart, beauty, Burke demarcates the former as a phenomenological realm of masculine empowerment. The long nineteenth century saw myriad inquiries into the discursive limits of the Sublime; consistent amongst these disparate reinterpretations is, yet again, a rhetoric concurrently designating sublimity to a masculine domain of transcendence, whilst distinguishing female expressions as “unnatural” or exclusively “beautiful”.
This masculine paradigm, however, has not been without contention, especially in recent feminist scholarship. Various alternative readings of the feminine sublime have been proposed: most notably, Anne Mellor’s ‘domestic sublime’, and Barbara Freeman’s ‘feminine sublime’, both of which John Pipkin interprets not as essentially feminine discourses of sublimity but rather extensions of what he has termed the ‘material sublime’ (1998, p. 600). Examinations of female authorship in British Romanticism have inevitably been informed by the ways in which its aesthetic possibilities have been circumscribed by the Sublime’s gendered tropes. Hence, in the following paragraphs, this feminine dimension will be examined as a simultaneous subversion and constituent of the masculinised Sublime, with Charlotte Turner Smith’s Sonnet XLIV: Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex (1789) as a point of reference:
The experience of the sublime, as elucidated by Burke, finds its basis in an epistemological relationship between the self and the other, specifically the perceiving mind and the object of perception. Traditional Romantic scholarship consistently reflects this relationship of alterity: a reception of the sublime phenomenon by a bewildered subject (Zylinska, 1998, p. 98), whose confrontation of the excesses of power serves as a point of conflict that elicits this affective response. The initial response to that which “excite[s] the ideas of pain and danger” (Burke, 1824, p. 50), by its transformation, produces a transcendence Burke describes as “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (1824, p. 50). Of particular significance is that this “excess of power” incites such threat to the perceiving mind’s stability namely because it is understood as indomitable by man (Zylinska, 1998, p. 98). The Kantian sublime, contrarily, alleges the supremacy of the subject’s reason over the incomprehensibility of the object of perception in its representation of its very inability to represent said object. It is against this masculinised, master-slave notion of “a struggle over mastery between opposing powers” (Freeman, 1995, p. 2) present in both readings that Freeman’s feminine sublime has been formulated and distinguished. In her book, The Feminine Sublime, Freeman forges an ostensibly anti-essentialist domain that offers deontological reasoning for the absence of female authorship in the Romantic canon.
In insisting the limitations of an essentialist approach to the feminine sublime that endorses a portrayal of “innate femininity” (1995, p. 9), Freeman underscores the categorical instability of her interpretation that renders it anti-essentialist. Yet, as Pipkin argues, “the dichotomy remains” in her own notions (1998, p. 599). Freeman argues that, unlike their masculine counterparts, the aesthetics of feminine sublimity possess no agenda in domesticating the object of perception, rather taking up “a position of respect in response to an incalculable otherness” (Freeman, 1995, pp. 3-11). Its key tenet, she posits, entails the maintenance of “radical uncertainty as the very condition of its possibility”- that is, the immensity of the phenomenon is signified as unrepresentable, as opposed to attempting to capture it in its totality. In contrast to Burke, Freeman’s approach suspends this neutralisation of excess, an act said to be fundamentally misogynistic in its subordination of difference in the other (Freeman, 1995).
Mellor, much to Freeman’s skepticism, proposes an essentialist argument of the ‘domestic sublime’ that centers on the innate bond shared between women writers and the natural world, “a bond that their male contemporaries have lost” (Mellor in Pipkin, 1998, p. 599). She similarly remarks the fundamental “patriarchal tyranny” (1993, p. 91) of Burke’s sublime that relies on the annihilation of difference between the self and the other; in other words, in generating feelings of obscure infiniteness, its archetypal aesthetics prompt a problematic dissolution of boundaries (Mellor, 1993, p. 86). Mellor cites Coleridge’s This Lime-tree Bower My Prison (1797) as emblematic of this erasure; Coleridge acknowledges that the speaker’s voice is ventriloquised, synthesising his imprisoned self with the separated other, Charles Lamb. In describing his emotional union with Lamb, as well as identifying their bodily oneness (“So my friend...may stand, as I have stood”), Coleridge asserts his capacity to be Lamb. It is in denying these notions of unification that Mellor forges her ‘domestic sublime’, formulating two discrete classes. The first, consisting of female authors of Gothic fiction, acknowledges the sublime as a domain of masculine empowerment, and thus equates it with “patriarchal tyranny”. Ann Radcliffe, a notable figure in the genre, echoes this sentiment in her belief that “sublime horror originates not from nature but from man” (Radcliffe in Mellor, 1993, p. 93). The second, distinguished by its Scottish, Irish or Welsh-born writers, involves the intrinsic bond between the female subject and anthropomorphized nature as “a female friend with whom they are their most intimate experiences of life”, emphasizing mutual benefit.
Traces of such aesthetic subversion are present in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnet XLIV. Published in the fifth edition of her Elegiac Sonnets (1789), Sonnet XLIV describes a tempestuous night during which the tides of the sea, itself at the mercy of the moon, encroach upon a churchyard and break up its graves. The first three quatrains contain a series of detached observations of the events that lead to the breakage of “the silent sabbath of the grave” (8). An aloof witness in the churchyard, Smith situates herself in an ambivalent position toward the sublime’s material source. It is precisely with this characterisation of ‘the self’ as an extrinsic figure neither antithetical to nor unified with ‘the other’ that the traditional rhetoric of alterity is dismantled. Furthermore, this ambivalence toward immense natural forces depicts no engagement in a struggle for mastery.
The final couplet witnesses an abrupt transition from the speaker’s passive voice to an intimate immediacy. Deploying the first-person, the speaker’s attention shifts inward to their own somber concerns:
Smith, ridden with envy, recognises that death is the sole means by which one can circumvent the torment that nature’s forces hold the power to inflict. This is illuminated by the penultimate couplet:
While their remains “whiten in the frequent wave” (10), the recently exhumed dead no longer face the oppression of “life’s long storm” (13). Jacqueline Labbe argues that the ‘I’ employed here indicates no fixed gender identity; while the speaker’s femininity is implied through allusions, it is not concretely “anchored in the text” (2003, p. 102). Labbe’s argument for the unstable ‘I’ converges with the alleged anti-essentialism of Freeman’s reading, in which she suspends the notion of an “ultimate feminine identity” (Freeman, 1995, p. 5) that could be deployed as grounds for inherent sexual differences. However, in adopting this intimacy, Smith cryptically relativizes the terrors of nature to the trials of quotidian life, thus, as Pipkin explains, maintaining the rebuked self-other dialectic (1998, p. 613). An alternative outlook, however, suggests a correspondence with Mellor’s ‘domestic sublime’. To support her thesis, Mellor discusses Thomas Weiskel’s notion of the ‘negative’ sublime, where the natural force’s excess in metonymic meaning elicits a “loss of...consciousness-of-self” (Weiskel in Mellor, 1993, p. 97). In contrast, Mellor’s ‘domestic sublime’ entails no “emptying of self-awareness” (1993, p. 97), allying itself with Smith’s self-conscious metaphor of natural forces for life’s mundanities.
The sublimity of the moon, indifferently feminine, emerges from its capacity for invisible, unrepresentable destruction given its characterisation as “a mute arbitress” (1). This feminisation of the oxymoronically “mute” authority subverts traditional depictions of an ominous patriarchal power, yet simultaneously contradicts Freeman’s ostensible anti-essentialism. At the same time, it does not serve to fulfill Mellor’s thesis either; while feminised, the natural force fails to incite any trace of “love, reverence” (Mellor, 1993, p. 97) in its perceiver. As argued by Pipkin, Smith’s experience of the sublime does not forge a “mutual relationship” (Mellor, 1993, p. 97), but rather one of solitude (1998, p. 610).
While certain implications of Sonnet XLIV certainly do reflect the ideas of Freeman and Mellor, the prospect of pigeonholing necessitates an examination of alternative propositions. Pipkin, noting that neither Freeman nor Mellor’s theses truly account for Smith’s ambivalence, asserts that their approaches to the sublime serve as renditions as opposed to discrete discourses. He adamantly posits that both readings function as subsets of the ‘material sublime’, itself a long-standing constituent of the Sublime tradition. Pipkin argues that the ‘material sublime’ involves a transformative turn away from the feeling of terror, but unlike the transcendental, it is specifically accompanied by a simultaneous turn toward the material source of that same terror (1998, pp. 600-601). In the context of female Romantic authorship, Pipkin cites the ‘material sublime’ as an aesthetic strategy that metamorphoses fear into “commiseration or identification” with the material source, producing a moment of self-realization (1998, p. 601). Sonnet XLIV is cited as employing this strategy. With the speaker’s attention aimed at the material forces that incite this terror, that then shifts inward with the narrative ‘I’ in the final couplet, a moment of personal contemplation is induced. Instead of horror, Smith’s speaker is instead imbued with envy towards the dead in their escape from the tyranny of the day-to-day, alluding to the mundane hindrances faced by women during the time. Yet, with his adamance, Pipkin seems to overlook the myriad ways the aesthetics of the ‘material sublime’ converge with those of Freeman and Mellor’s theses; those same qualities of Sonnet XLIV he interprets as categorically material simultaneously echo ideas of the notions which he deems fallible in their essentialism.
The plethora of revisionist readings of Burke’s Sublime makes for a convoluted network of overlapping yet contradictory notions on the aesthetics that constitute a ‘feminine’ domain of sublimity. Of these innumerable theses, those of Freeman, Mellor and Pipkin have been scrutinized with Smith’s Sonnet XLIV as a controlled point of reference, to account for the feminine sublime’s unfixed status. While subversive to the gendered tropes of the Sublime discourse, its compliance with those same frameworks that give rise to this gendering, namely the self-other dichotomy, illuminates its inevitable reliance on that which it seeks to annihilate. This is not to say that with interdependence comes fallibility, but rather it underscores the limits of revisionist accounts of Romantic literature, considering the fluidity of the ‘original’ notion of the Sublime itself. At their core, the three vague criteria, like the sonnet onto which they are applied, resist categorisation and instead occupy a liminal territory neither congruent nor entirely discrete to Burke’s Sublime.
Works cited
Burke, E. (1824). A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. A. Robertson & Company, p.50.
Freeman, B.C. (1997). The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction. Berkeley, California: University Of California Press.
Labbe, J.M. (2003). Charlotte Smith : Romanticism, poetry and the culture of gender. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p.102.
Mellor, A.K. (1993). Domesticating the Sublime. In: Romanticism and Gender. Brighton: Psychology Press, pp.85–96.
Pipkin, J.G. (1998). The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, [online] 38(4), pp.597–616. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/451089 [Accessed 4 Dec. 2019].
Zylinska, J. (1998). The feminine sublime: Between aesthetics and ethics. Women: A Cultural Review, [online] 9(1), p.98. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09574049808578336 [Accessed 1 Dec. 2019].
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