On the 18-minute track Myth Versus Reality (The Myth-Science Approach), composer Sun Ra takes us on a kaleidoscopic musical voyage, commencing with a manifesto-like chant: “If you are not a reality, whose myth are you? If you are not a myth, whose reality are you?”. Sun Ra’s answer to this question is delivered sonically: as the recitation of the antimetabole subsides into the background, a cacophonic crash of jazz instruments and patternless noise takes over. As Sun Ra intended, its stylistic discordance echoes a greater narrative of the post-slave Black diasporic condition- a field of study centred on questions of hybridity, oppositionality, and the conflict of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’. 

With its transdiscursive nature, this relationship embodies the critical practice of Afrofuturism, of which Sun Ra served as a pioneer. Coined by Mark Dery in 1993, the aesthetic mode and philosophy projects black speculative futures derived from Afrodiasporic culture and its intersection with technology. In forging futures wherein technological advancement is synonymous with blackness, Afrofuturism critiques the monolithic view of linear progress as spearheaded by white men, progress that carries forward into a similarly white future. However, the danger with the Afrofuturist practice, argued by J. Griffith Rollefson, is a potential reification of black inferiority in its juxtaposition with ‘white’ technologies, given Afrofuturism’s very premise of the normalized disparity between blackness and a whitewashed cybernetic future (2008, p. 85). Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s anti-anti-essentialism, Rollefson introduces a theoretical framework, which, in Afrofuturist terms, involves the collapsing of loaded signifiers of whiteness and blackness, e.g. the sleek robot and Afro-Caribbean voodoo respectively, into one. With a focus on Rollefson’s framework, this essay employs various schools of thought to examine the means by which Afrofuturist music, particularly the American composer Sun Ra, conflates what the Afrodiasporic condition retains of the past- of enslavement, displacement and continued inequality- with the imagery of a whitewashed future to ultimately undermine linear Western universalism and white supremacy. The aesthetic and linguistic methodologies of Sun Ra’s 1970 album, It’s After the End of the World, serve as the primary case study in this analysis, with the aim of determining the extent to which they problematize the rigid binary of blackness versus whiteness, and in turn, that of essentialism versus anti-essentialism.

In his autoethnographic work The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois introduces the term ‘double consciousness’, foregrounding racialization in his analysis of the racialized subject’s self-formation (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2015, p. 231). The racialized subject here refers particularly to the African-American, whose identity is characterised by a dialectical conflict that produces an inward ‘twoness’ (Pittman, 2016), as Du Bois elucidates in his first chapter: “the Negro is... born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (1903, p. 22). Referencing the psycho-social divisions in “post-slavery” America, the Du Boisian conception ascribes a particular life-experience to African-Americans, not as an essential predisposition but rather with regard to socio-political circumstances of the time- in the south, Jim Crow laws, and in the north, de facto segregation, as well as the overarching racist threat across the continent. This tangible reality, in conjunction with the demands of white fantasies inscribed onto the racialized subject, produces for a “sensation” that falls short of a true self-consciousness, characterised by its persistent competition between two disparate ideals. 

Employing Du Bois’s “double consciousness”, Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic introduces the Atlantic slave trade as the foundation for the Black diasporic condition as possessing an “explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (1993, p. 15). Eschewing the absolutist approach to nationality as homogeneous, nation-state based, Gilroy favours analysing the Atlantic as a singular, complex unit that produces said internal struggle between two seemingly irreconcilable identities. In rejecting ethnic absolutism, however, Gilroy also argues against the mutual exclusivity of these two dialectical subjectivities, proposing the occupation of the space between them as an “oppositional act of political subordination” (1993, p. 1)- that is, in paradoxically thinking of the duality as one, or demonstrating the continuity between the two, the racialized identity yields power in becoming a unique hybridity as opposed to a division. 

This act of conflating two dialectical opposites, in the context of the Afrofuturist practice, will serve as the foundation for analysis in the examination of the transdisciplinary works of Sun Ra. Theorized by J. Griffith Rollefson, this analysis will draw upon the “Robot Voodoo Power” thesis, which explores Gilroy’s anti-anti-essentialism within the aesthetic and linguistic methodologies of Afrofuturism. Rollefson argues that whilst Gilroy does not comment directly on Afrofuturism, his engagement with the ways in which technologies inform discourses of black ‘soul’ anticipated the field of inquiry (2008, p. 91), particularly in his foregrounding of music as an opportunity to “break the deadlock between the two unsatisfactory positions that have dominated recent discussion of black cultural politics” (Gilroy, 1991, p. 124). Furthermore, in his chapter on black music in The Black Atlantic, Gilroy underscores the significance of slaves’ limited access to literacy, which was “often denied on pain of death” (1993, p. 74), to the critical power of black music. The expressive power of music, Gilroy posits, has grown in inverse proportion to that of language, as music served as one of the few opportunities offered as a surrogate for the other forms of individual autonomy denied by life on the plantations (1993, p. 74).

Following this line of thought, Rollefson proposes that Afrofuturism’s criticality derives from its dismantling of the binary between essentialist and anti-essentialist positions. Moving beyond double consciousness, Afrofuturism’s creative amalgamation of racial tropes instead stresses hybridity as a form of critique. While the moniker “Afrofuturism” and its study are relatively new, articulations of Afrofuturism can be traced back to the 1950s, the musical approach first propounded by Sun Ra. As an intellectual aesthetic movement, Afrofuturism examines the intersections of race, science and technology, envisaging a black posthumanism “not mired in the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity” (Weheliye, 2005, p. 297). In inscribing onto their bodies alternative identities- interplanetary alter egos, supersonic second selves- Afrofuturists renounce the idea of a universal humanity central to Western Enlightenment thought, a humanity denied of African-Americans for so long it is “no longer a dream deferred but a dream discarded” (Rollefson, 2008, p. 89). Recognising the constructed nature of both the myth of the subhuman and the myth of the superhuman, Afrofuturism harnesses its critical power by referencing, appropriating and ultimately rejecting the primitive fantasies ascribed to black bodies, instead asserting a new, otherworldly subjecthood. At the same time, these alternative identities combat a whitewashed vision of the future wherein blackness is always constructed as oppositional to technology-driven progress. What Rollefson contends in his thesis is that Afrofuturism’s critical commentary can rapidly turn into a reification of black inferiority- that is, when juxtaposed blatantly with white progress, albeit constructed, the falsehoods of black primitivism and backwardness may be reinforced (2008, p. 85). He therefore asserts the significance of eschewing both the essentialist black nativist stance and the anti-essentialism of white poststructuralist identities in the Afrofuturist practice. In aesthetic terms, this may be exemplified through a playful inversion and interweaving of racial tropes rife in 19th century music, such as capitalising on fantasies of black voodoo and magic- a supposed retention of the ‘dark continent’- and ironically juxtaposing them with science fiction as a form of ‘white magic’ (Rollefson, 2008, p. 91). And even in instances of black cultural production wherein blatant notions of ‘essence’ (of the African-American psyche) are asserted, Emmanuel Parent explains, an ontology “which furnishes the basis for a deconstruction of this latent essentialism” is paradoxically but nonetheless produced (2012, p. 482).

This approach to Afrofuturism is nowhere more evident than in the otherworldly words and sounds of Sun Ra’s multidisciplinary oeuvre. Born Herman Poole Blount in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra self-identified rather as a descendant of Saturn, transcending earth-bound racial classifications. Laying claim to Saturnine provenance would earn Ra the status of an eccentric, with obituaries after Ra’s death describing him as a “nutter” and “galactic gobbledegook” (Lock, 1999, p. 13). However, Graham Lock posits that Sun Ra never contended his Saturnine origins in a concrete sense, rather, this mythic persona belonging to the “Angel race” sought to metaphorically “initiate a discourse on Otherness” (1999, p. 62). Whilst it inevitably drew from the Afrodiasporic condition of oppositional double consciousness, this position of the Other occupied by Sun Ra was always situated outside the realm of racial essentialist thought. The otherworldly persona cultivated through the revitalization of mysticism, science and ancient mythology was never to be mired in earthliness, as Ra himself, in his own words, “never wanted to be a part of planet Earth” (qtd in Litweiler, 1990, p. 144). Such tendencies to reify notions of race are palpable throughout readings of Sun Ra’s oeuvre. Writer Amiri Baraka, despite having eschewed his Black nationalist views of jazz music since the ‘70s, depicts Sun Ra as possessing “the true self-consciousness of the Afro-American intellectual artist revolutionary”, who “knew our historic ideology and sociopolitical consciousness was our freedom” (qtd in Youngquist, 2010, p. 155). Again, this view seems to reduce Sun Ra to an extension of social circumstances, and as Nathaniel Mason contends, “locates his ideology as yearning backwards to crystallize his own identity for the future, creating a stasis of African-American identity” (2015, p. 10). Counter to this straightforward equation of “historic ideology” with liberation, Rollefson’s thesis assumes a more intricate approach which takes into account aesthetic considerations and their ideological loadedness. Central to Rollefson’s thesis is Alondra Nelson’s explication that “a race-free future smacks of a white (male) future”, renouncing the humanist stance of individual agency as the foundation for self-formation (Davies, 1991, p. 42), in that the Western notion of a universal humanity inevitably foregrounds whiteness as intrinsic to human progress and thus its future. 

The track Myth vs. Reality (The Myth-Science Approach) on Sun Ra’s 1970 live album, It’s After the End of the World, serves as a pertinent example of Rollefson’s thesis. On the 18-minute musical voyage, Sun Ra takes his audience through a sonically erratic, ear-piercing cacophony of declarative spoken word which abruptly explodes into the multiphonic sounds of jazz instruments. The hybridity of the sounds themselves conjures up a liberated vision, in which fact and fiction- those of the past and the future- are consolidated, paralleling Gilroy’s advocacy of occupying the space between the two dialectical halves of one’s identity. Moreover, by positioning “reality” and “science” as oppositional to the counterpart of “myth”, the title itself serves as an implicit questioning of rationality and the groundedness of reality (Rollefson, 2008, p. 92). It is evident here that Sun Ra eschews the totalising chronicles of history, in favour of an infinitely more complex understanding of the world “not a part of history” but “more part of mystery” (qtd in Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, 1980). Sun Ra’s episteme relinquishes earth-bound classifications, but this is not to suggest that it is entirely grounded in magic either; in the documentary, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, Sun Ra elucidates the dialectic framework from which his ideology arises whilst sat in front the White House: “You can’t have anything without a comparison. I’m sitting in front of the White House looking across the street and I don’t see the black house. See, you can’t have anything without its parallel and its opposite” (1980). With this candid metaphor, it becomes apparent that Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist practice is not confined to the realm of magic, as myth ceases to exist without its opposite- reality. In the second section of Myth vs. Reality (The Myth-Science Approach), ingeniously entitled Angelic Proclamation, saxophonist Danny Davis cordially declares: “We want to tell you about my home planet, Saturn.” This politely delivered expression of his Saturnine roots is followed by a raucous clash of percussive sounds, which then suddenly subsides, and Davis continues: “You think you are human...I came to tell you: you are citizens of the greater universe.” Here, Sun Ra and his Arkestra offer to their audience a reimagined subjectivity, a subjectivity which “disarticulates Africa from the totalising narratives of oppression that threaten to represent blackness as a burden alone” (Rollefson, 2008, p. 94). 

Just as Sun Ra’s music projects this anti-anti-essentialist ethos, his futuristic stage persona- which drew upon mythologized visions of Judeo-Egyptian aesthetics- demonstrates transnationalism. The antiquity of Egyptian civilization, Paul Youngquist posits, offered for black radicalism an alternative to the monolithic notion of an enlightened West, the same West responsible for “chattel slavery, racism, Jim Crow and segregation” (2016, p. 43). With his Egyptian headdresses, colourful dashikis and futuristic space helmets, Sun Ra fashioned a visual identity that would look to the past- not solely of Africa, but also Ancient Egypt’s Pharaonic era- as well as the future, one purged of the equally mythical structures upholding narratives of ostensible American pluralism. 

Figure 1: It's After the End of the World album artwork

Similarly tactful is the choice of album artwork for It’s After The End of the World [Fig. 1], which depicts a segment from the center panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. On one hand, this choice is loaded with playful paradoxes: Sun Ra, blatantly renouncing all ties to Earth, chooses to feature one of the most notable portrayals of worldly pleasures as his cover art. However, a closer examination would suggest that this selection is perhaps entirely attuned to Sun Ra’s ideology. While Bosch’s triptych features earthly pleasures, in the view of art historian Wilhelm Fraegner, it is precisely their transience that produces the allegory central to the work’s messaging. He argues for the moral reading of the central panel as a playground of corruption, which represents “a utopia, a garden of divine delight before the Fall” (1951, p. 10-11). From this perspective, Sun Ra’s practice- collapsing earth-bound classifications to generate speculative futures- falls in line with Bosch’s work, which foresees the catastrophic future that will emerge from humankind’s indulgence in lust and gluttony. In the context of the larger Afrofuturist project, the visual dimension of Sun Ra, by consolidating multiple, nonsequential timelines, exercises a critical power that radically undermines the linearity and short-sightedness of whitewashed notions of progress.

Considering the limitations of rhetoric, it comes as no surprise that the critical power of Black cultural forms frequently derives from the arts, as aesthetic production possesses an embodied expressive power. With its expansive timelines and racially-coded signifiers, Afrofuturism epitomizes the way in which the relationship between socio-political conditions and Black cultural production, albeit complex and manifold, produces acute critiques of a continued inequality in the US and abroad. Particular emphasis is placed on the complex and manifold nature of Black cultural forms here, not solely in its production but also in its reception. Just as the Civil Rights Movement started to gain traction in the 1950s, Sun Ra would decide to eschew all ties to humanity and instead lay claim to extraterrestrial origin. Whether this makes Sun Ra a liberator or an escapist traitor is a question that succinctly illustrates the impossibility of prescribing a methodology to the yielding of ‘critical power’. That said, without denying the diversity of radical expression, this essay underscores the anti-anti-essentialist approach as an apposite strategy for Black cultural practices to harness critical efficacy, by serving as neither an essential, residual effect of Black history, nor a free-floating and purely aesthetic endeavor. 

Works cited
Davies, B. (1991). The Concept of Agency: A Feminist Poststructuralist Analysis. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, [online] 30, p.42. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/23164525 [Accessed 13 Mar. 2020].
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., pp.1–25.
Fraenger, W. (1951). The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation. Translated by E. Kaiser. New York: Hacker Art Books, pp.10–11.
Gilroy, P. (1991). Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a “Changing” Same. Black Music Research Journal, [online] 11(2), p.124. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/779262 [Accessed 8 Mar. 2020].
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, pp.1–74.
Itzigsohn, J. and Brown, K. (2015). SOCIOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, [online] 12(2), pp.231–248. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1742058X15000107 [Accessed 8 Mar. 2020].
Litweiler, J. (1990). The Freedom Principle : Jazz After 1958. New York: Da Capo Press, pp.143–150.
Lock, G. (1999). Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press, pp.10–65.
Mason, N. (2015). Sun Ra and John Coltrane: Critiquing Essentialism in the Discourse of Jazz through Theories of Postethnicity and Transethnicity. [MA Thesis] p.12. Available at: https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/123456789/1940/Mason%2c_N.P.G._1.pdf?sequence=1 [Accessed 12 Mar. 2020].
Parent, E. (2012). Diaspora, essentialisme et humour noir. Échos de la double conscience chez Ralph Ellison. L’Homme, [online] 203–204(3), p.482. Available at: https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_LHOM_203_0481--diaspora-essentialism-and-black-humor.htm [Accessed 12 Mar. 2020].
Pittman, J.P. (2016). Double Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [online] Stanford.edu. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-consciousness/#DoubConsSoulBlacFolk [Accessed 8 Mar. 2020].
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (1980). [online] Directed by Robert Mugge. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Esmjx8eVcE [Accessed: 12 Mar. 2020].
Rollefson, J.G. (2008). The “Robot Voodoo Power” Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-Anti-Essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith. Black Music Research Journal, [online] 28(1), pp.83–107. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25433795 [Accessed 4 Mar. 2020].
Weheliye, A.G. (2005). Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, p.297.
Youngquist, P. (2010). Cyberfiction: After the Future. [online] London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.155. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nYjGAAAAQBAJ&dq=cyberfiction+after+the+future&source=gbs_navlinks_s [Accessed 6 Mar. 2020].
Youngquist, P. (2016). A Pure Solar World : Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp.42–199.

mute arbitress of tides: the feminine sublime of charlotte turner smith's 'sonnet xliv: written in the church yard at middleton in sussex'

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].

the world’s wife: 'little red cap review' - grit, authority and all things unladylike

WORDS, WORDS WERE TRULY ALIVE ON THE TONGUE, IN THE HEAD

WARM, BEATING, FRANTIC, WINGED; MUSIC AND BLOOD

Carol Ann Duffy with Adrian Henri

Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 anthology, The World’s Wife, marks a gripping departure from the earlier status quo of male-prescribed narratives and societal expectations in fairy tales, myths and historical events. Saturated with a tinge of British social realism, Duffy tactfully imposes her critical interventions in the hackneyed homogeneity of the literary world, though she extends far beyond the linguistics of gender discourse by unashamedly setting each poem in a contemporary idiom. From illuminating the disregarded status of Lazarus’ wife, to subverting Little Red Cap’s pitifully prescribed gullibility, Duffy’s radical reinterpretations place these women in the limelight for once.

Bet Mrs. Midas never turned to gold. Renowned British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife amalgamates cultural paradoxes as she shines a light on the overshadowed women of history - women who are tender yet tenacious, lyrical yet humoristic, and above all, fall victim to prevailing patriarchal strictures yet conceive an inner tenacity to subvert it. Through archiving a personal history, Duffy eloquently - and rather cathartically - provides a ventriloquised voice to the women behind the scenes and subtly integrates memoirs of personal, yet collectively encountered experiences. Perhaps what remains the most arresting to readers in The World’s Wife is its all-too-familiar essence materialized from its lingering traces of social realism; the Lazaruses no longer exist in a biblical realm as we encounter the colloquial depiction of Mrs. Lazarus’s turbulent emotional ups-and-downs, and Little Red Cap’s folklore veneer disintegrates as we witness parts of ourselves manifest through her premature sexual awakening. These women - the girl next door, the streetwise lolita, the domestic alpha - aren’t your locally televised Jane Doe; they exist as archetypes in contemporary society, although Duffy does much more than to merely fuel these pigeonholed-identities by examining the intricacy of it all.

Exemplifying the personal and political significance of each narrative, Duffy’s Little Red Cap acts as both an intimate anecdote and an ideologically-loaded reinterpretation of the Brothers Grimm’s classic folktale from 1905. As a universally integral narrative in our childhoods, a politicized Little Red Cap (1905) substantiates the current patriarchal status-quo, riddled with man-made norms of femininity and a fueled image of hypermasculinity - because who better to depict girlhood than two old cisgender men seeking to avert their stereotypical narrative from being politicized? The reappropriation of this original folklore, being Duffy’s own mouthpiece, is imbued with a personal reminiscence of a dramatic yet nonchalant transition to womanhood - her first relationship at age 16, with Liverpudlian poet Adrien Henri, 23 years her senior. This begging to believed - girlhood - is implicitly validated through Duffy’s subversion of the prescribed roles for Little Red Cap and the wolf. Substantiating this is an underlying tone of tenacity prevalent throughout the entirety of the poem, as Duffy assumes an intentionally subordinate voice, ironically capitalising on this thetic norm of frail femininity in order to dismantle the norm itself. This acute awareness of the events to come is intricately conveyed through Duffy’s linguistic devices:

It was there that I first clapped my eyes on the wolf                  6

In line 6, Duffy implicitly reinforces the antipodal roles assigned to her and Henri; her assumption of concealed authority is linguistically exemplified through “clapped” - sonorous and plosive, the auditory element of the verb alludes to a physical acquisition of the wolf’s [Henri] attention. Not solely is Red Cap’s [Duffy] predatorial character self-prescribed, but the puppeteer of this ostensibly spontaneous series of events is Red Cap herself. Here, Duffy goes beyond exploring the intricate narratives of the “women behind the scenes” - she is the woman behind the scenes, the puppeteer whose delicate wordplay delivers a carefully curated show.

Red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears.                      9
He had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!                              10

Here, Duffy deliberately employs a tone reminiscent of our childhood bedtime stories - wide-eyed, guileless, repetitious. However, once placed into context, these unelaborated descriptions of the wolf are unanticipatedly rife with wit - perhaps even patronization. And of course it’s political - to recast the folklore in a way that engenders a shift in the power dynamic, especially to assign authority to Red Cap, given her ostensibly subordinate status, is to hum a tender tune to put the patriarchy to sleep.

But we should be reminded that this is not merely Duffy’s mouthpiece. The full-force immersion into a self-initiated departure from childhood holds a contemporary truth - the ritualistic tendencies of budding young girls, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, to inhabit a invigorating vision of manmade sexual attractivity - because what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Note ‘manmade’ - this wide-eyed desire is not an inherent trait, but more so a performative act constructed through ideological forces, lest we forget the coercive forces of heteronormativity and commodity domination in our age. Little Red Cap is a ventriloquised narrative for us all; perhaps not a rumination about “childhood’s end”, or a nostalgic longing for the relinquished naivete of girlhood, but a climactic engrossment into the whirlwind we hastily label ‘adolescence’:

Are the uttered thoughts of trees, that a greying wolf                  34
Howls the same song at the moon, year in, year out                      35
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe             36


To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon               37
To see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf                          38
As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw                       39
The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones                  40
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up                   41
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone            42

Beyond a mere narrative, Little Red Cap culminates in an implicit personal victory; however, this feminized “instinct” to possess a hypersexualised exterior is one that, contrary to Duffy’s account of a consequential ‘triumph’, does not always bear fruit.

Perhaps we should not label this a ‘triumph’, but an ostensibly celebratory wave-goodbye to the dewy-eyed fawn, the prey, that has now metamorphosed into a doe, the protector. Little Red Cap’s final stanzas (lines 36-37) emanate a quality of adultish complacency - not solely does a linguistic approach allude to the humdrum cyclicality of adulthood, but the ballad-like, full rhyming of this dramatic monologue pinpoints the solemn adieu to the initial stanzas’ unpremeditated, buoyant half-rhymes. The rambly demeanor is replaced with a desensitization to what we once saw as vivid stimuli; the yearning to truly feel is fruitless, as Red Cap’s futile axe-thrusts fail to harness any sense of vitality. Nonetheless, this futility is overturned by Duffy’s own axe-thrust - one that hits a little too close to home.

Perhaps what keeps us going are these fleeting moments whence this vitality unanticipatedly resurfaces. The axe spontaneously plunges into life and a rustle of leaves reveals the dewy-eyed fawn chastely emerging from behind the vast foliage once again.