Introduction
The Feminine Sublime
If we had a keen vision and a feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
(George Eliot, Middlemarch )
The Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. . . . A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.
(Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera )
She listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children were in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting; she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight traced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
(Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse )
Woman is not to be related to any simple designatable being, subject, or entity. Nor is the whole group (called) women. One woman + one
woman + one woman will never add up to some generic entity: woman. (The/a) woman refers to what cannot be defined, enumerated, formulated or formalized. Woman is a common noun for which no identity can be defined. (The/a) woman does not obey the principle of self-identity, however the variable x for self is defined. She is identified with every x variable, not in any specific way. Presupposed is an excess of all identification to/of self. But this excess is no-thing: it is vacancy of form, gap in form, the return to another edge where she re-touches herself with the help of—nothing. Lips of the same form—but of a form that is never simply defined—ripple outwards as they touch and send one another on a course that is never fixed into a single configuration.
(Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman )
To hear the roar that lies within silence, and write it; inhabit a border (not a waste) land in which boundaries overlap and differences of race, class, sexuality, and geography collide; see waves of light breaking upon the beach as a movement in which otherness appears; or define "woman" not as a shared fantasy of sexual identity, but in a way that contests any notion of essence, feminine or otherwise: across different trajectories Eliot, Anzaldúa, Woolf, and Irigaray articulate crucial aspects of the feminine sublime, for each makes explicit the female subject's encounter with and response to an alterity that exceeds, limits, and defines her.[1] The central tenet of this book is that the feminine sublime is neither a rhetorical mode nor an aesthetic category but a domain of experience that resists categorization, in which the subject enters into relation with an otherness—social, aesthetic, political, ethical, erotic—that is excessive and unrepresentable.[2] The feminine sublime is not a discursive strategy, technique, or literary style the female writer invents, but rather a crisis in relation to language and representation that a certain subject undergoes.[3] As such it is the site both of women's affective experiences and their encounters with the gendered mechanisms of power from the mid-eighteenth century (when the theory of the sublime first came to prominence) to the present, for it responds specifically to the diverse cultural configurations of women's oppression, passion, and resistance.
From Longinus' day until ours writers have viewed the sublime as a more or less explicit mode of domination. The vast majority of theorists conceptualize it as a struggle for mastery between opposing powers, as the self's attempt to appropriate and contain whatever would exceed, and thereby undermine, it. Within the tradition of romantic aesthetics that
sees the sublime as the elevation of the self over an object or experience that threatens it, the sublime becomes a strategy of appropriation. For Kant, its most authoritative and influential theorist, the sublime moment entails the elevation of reason over an order of experience that cannot be represented. Typically, the sublime involves a moment of blockage followed by one of heightened lucidity in which reason resists the blocking source by representing its very inability to represent the sublime "object"; it thereby achieves supremacy over an excess that resists its powers.[4] Thus, the central moment of the sublime marks the self's newly enhanced sense of identity; a will to power drives its style, a mode that establishes and maintains the self's domination over its objects of rapture. I certainly do not wish to domesticate the sublime by defusing its profound and important connections to the realms of power, conflict, and agency, or suggest that the feminine sublime is merely another, more intense version of the beautiful; yet rather than represent the object of rapture as a way of incorporating it, as the traditional sublime of domination does, the feminine sublime does not attempt to master its objects of rapture. It is my conviction that another account of the sublime lies hidden within and is repressed by metaphysical theories of sublimity, and that the story of this other sublime has yet to be written. The central purpose of this book is to begin to tell that story.
I try, in the pages that follow, to make explicit the crucial yet unexamined role gender plays in the articulation of the theory of the sublime and to explore some of the ways that fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime." In chapters concerned with Longinus, Burke, and Kant I show that the theory of the sublime not only describes the subject's encounters with excess but also defines the ways in which excess may or may not be conceptualized. The sublime is a theoretical discourse, with its unique history, canon, and conventions, about the subject's diverse responses to that which occurs at the very limits of symbolization. One main contention of the book is that the canonical theories that seem merely to explain the sublime also evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that, almost without exception, is gendered as feminine.[5] Through readings of the texts that form the canon of the sublime—Longinus' Peri Hypsous (On the sublime), Burke's Enquiry , Kant's third Critique —I argue that, at the level of theme, its principal theorists are able to represent the sublime only through recourse
to metaphors of sexual difference and, equally significant, that the structure of the sublime depends upon (and results from) a preexisting construction of "the feminine." What appears to be a theory of how excess works actually functions to keep it at bay. Therefore we must address the ideology at stake in traditional theories of the sublime, as well as in some of its more recent critics.[6] I argue for a reading of the sublime as an allegory of the construction of the patriarchal (but not necessarily male) subject, a self that maintains its borders by subordinating difference and by appropriating rather than identifying with that which presents itself as other.[7] My principal concerns are to demonstrate that the discourse of the sublime has typically functioned not to explicate but to neutralize excess and, as I examine fictions that represent our encounters with it, to explore other ways of envisioning and writing the sublime.
The notion of spectatorship as the site of sublime experience is one of the principal strategies through which such a neutralization occurs. Joseph Addison's "Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination," from The Spectator papers of June 21 through July 3, 1712 (Nos. 409, 411–21), emphasizes sublime experience as that of the spectator of an overwhelming event, landscape, or text, and thereby suggests a principal avenue of inquiry that Burke and Kant were to explore more thoroughly. Why, he asks, do we "take delight in being terrified or dejected by a Description, when we find so much Uneasiness in the Fear or Grief which we receive from any other Occasion?"[8] Addison explains that such pleasures depend upon a comparison between our own state of safety and the danger or terror we contemplate:
When we look on such hideous Objects, we are not a little pleased to think we are in no Danger of them. We consider them at the same time, as Dreadful and Harmless; so that the more frightful Appearance they make, the greater is the Pleasure we receive from the sense of our own Safety. . . . In the like manner, when we read of Torments, Wounds, Deaths, and the like dismal Accidents, our Pleasure does not flow so properly from the Grief which such melancholy Descriptions give us, as from the secret Comparison which we make between our selves and the Person who suffers.[9]
One of the purposes of this study is to argue that the distinguishing features of the sublime unsettle the very notion of spectatorship upon which Addison and subsequent theorists rely. Although Addison, Burke, and
Kant regularly posit a subject who observes pain or terror without partaking of or being directly affected by it, the very hallmark of sublime experience is an identification between auditor and orator or between reader and text in which, as Longinus was the first to observe, "we come to believe that we have created what we have only heard" (7.2).[10] Such a moment, in which the subject, whether in thought or in fact, merges with that which she perceives distinguishes sublime discourse from language that, in Longinus' words, is merely "persuasive and pleasant" (1.4). We will explore the nuances and complexities of the Longinian sublime in chapter one. For the moment, it is important to emphasize that the very nature of the sublime—its ability to blur distinctions between observer and observed, reader and text, or spectator and event—undercuts the claim upon which its theorists rely to explain and defuse its peculiar force. The internal contradiction so central to the history of the sublime is that its theorists regularly claim for the spectator a state of detachment that, were it to exist, would nullify the very features of rapture, merger, and identification that characterize and define the sublime, for the sublime event is precisely one in which what happens to "the other" also happens to the subject who perceives it.
By retaining the category of "women's fiction," with its apparent endorsement of feminine, generic, and authorial identities, I do not wish to reinscribe the formulations of either femininity or the sublime that are the object of critique. The notion of a women's fiction with its own tradition and specificity functions as a necessary descriptive and sociological category and has profound importance for feminist theory and practice, but the use of preexisting or universal concepts of feminine identity, writing, or authorship would force us to equate the sublime with the presentable and thereby sustain precisely that notion of the sublime I would resist. For this reason I do not put forward a concept of the sublime that might be equated with "the feminine": to do so would be to suggest that the feminine is presentable and, hence, not sublime. The notion of a "feminine sublime" does not refer to a particular representation of either femininity or sublimity, which would domesticate sublime excess through a conceptual elaboration of its very incommensurability. Rather than a transhistorical or essential category, I employ the notion of "women's fiction" to underscore the categorical instability of a socially constructed body of writing that bears the traces of women's shared history of oppression. Theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Julia
Kristeva frequently introduce works by male writers (Céline, Genet, Joyce, Lautréamont, Mallarmé) to exemplify the semiotic practice of an écriture féminine ; I examine novels written by women because the uniqueness and commonality of women's oppression inflect their articulation of sublimity.[11] Whether a man could write, or indeed has written, a version of the feminine sublime is not a possibility this study explores or denies. My wish is not to reconcile but to heighten the paradox that lets the feminine sublime displace the categories underlying it, and to underscore the necessity for a double practice that revises the theories it would critique.
In describing a feminine sublime I also take issue with many critical responses to twentieth-century women's fiction. For the issues foregrounded by the sublime—the construction and destruction of borders (be they aesthetic, political, or psychic), the permutations of identity formation and deformation, and the question of how such limits may or may not be represented—are extraordinarily important elements in women's fiction of this period, and these are precisely the elements critics tend to pass over without engagement or comment. Quite simply, critics often view the female protagonist either as exclusively passive, as society's victim, or as an accomplice of the economy that excludes her. Without minimizing the extent and importance of women's oppression, I argue that a too exclusive focus on women's victimization may lead us to misread the orders of discourse through which women exert agency, even as they confront its limits. Faced with Edna Pontellier's encounters with the ocean during Kate Chopin's The Awakening , Lily Bart's final speculation with the narcotic chloral in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth , Sasha Jensen's apparently eager assent to sex with a man she detests in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight , or Sethe Suggs's murder of her daughter in Toni Morrison's Beloved, critics frequently condemn the heroine's self-indulgence or blame the society that victimizes her. But if we look at such novels in terms of the sublime, we can raise complex questions about the nature and exertion of agency and understand these protagonists somewhat differently: as subjects who exert will, even at the cost of self-destruction, and thus not merely as victims who are acted upon.
My choice of novels reflects the canon of theoretical writing on the sublime represented by Longinus, Burke, and Kant, for these are not only the theorists who define the very terms in which the sublime has been thought, they are also the authors to whom contemporary critics and
theorists of the sublime most frequently respond. I discuss The Awakening , The House of Mirth , Frankenstein , Good Morning, Midnight , and Beloved because they represent differing articulations of the feminine sublime and because, consciously or not, they minutely respond to the arguments, metaphors, and ideological underpinnings at stake in the sublime's most definitive theorists.
I do not wish to suggest that many other novels could not provide valuable insights about the sublime in women's fiction. The works we examine offer particularly insightful critiques of traditional theorizations of the sublime as they suggest alternatives to it but do not fill the rubric of the feminine sublime. By focusing upon twentieth-century women fiction, we take up only one aspect of women's literary tradition and inheritance among the periods, perspectives, and literary genres of the feminine sublime. Since a primary aim of this book is to demonstrate the dominant ideology of misogyny that haunts canonical theories of the sublime and to suggest another mode of envisioning it, I have chosen novels whose structure, characters, and themes make explicit the blind spots within the history of the sublime's theorization. These works disclose a conjunction between apparently dissimilar domains, the theory of the sublime and the genre of the novel, and thereby allow a more complete understanding of each. Each novelist seeks language adequate to the task of representing something of the unstable and discontinuous relation between self, world, and other—the capacity to hear and make audible Eliot's roar of sound, or Woolf's waves of light.
Our focus on the genre of the novel rather than on poetry, drama, or autobiography as the primary vehicle for the investigation of the feminine sublime ought not to imply that the study of other genres would yield few insights. While the novel's very diversity and open-endedness is perhaps its most noteworthy feature, frustrating any totalizing claims about its essential or defining features, the genre has a profound affinity with the theory of the sublime and therefore represents a particularly appropriate medium for investigation of this topic.
It is no accident that the rise of the novel occurs at the same time that the sublime comes to the fore in eighteenth-century aesthetics, for both depend upon—or perhaps help to construct—a distinctly modern subject. A new conception of the individual, one who, as Thomas Weiskel observes, experiences "an incurable ambivalence about authority," and a correlative concern with the extremity and variety of personal experi-
ence, can be seen as a fundamental factor in the rise of both discursive modes.[12] The novel and the sublime both emphasize the primacy of the individual and appeal to individual experience as the ultimate arbiter of reality; share a concern with the process through which, at least since the eighteenth century, identities are formed; and reflect upon the value and diversity of individual taste. Just as important, both offer a fundamentally narrative account of that subject's nature and development.
That many readers may think of romantic poetry in connection with the sublime does not diminish its affinity with the novel. The sublime of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley finds its most typical expression in epic or narrative, rather than lyric, poetry, yet there is nothing inherent in the genre of poetry that makes it uniquely suited to or evocative of the sublime. The genre of sublime poetry was effectively closed to women. Dorothy Wordsworth, or any woman of her period, could not have written a poem such as "Tintern Abbey," with its celebration of "A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused" and abiding faith in the poet's infinite ability to "revive again."[13] Wordsworth, the poet of the "egotistical sublime" that so provoked Keats, inherits as his birthright a self-assurance, entitlement, and confidence in his right to speak and be heard that no woman of his era could share. The moment of conversion Wordsworth experiences in The Prelude when he encounters a blind beggar in the streets of London, "My mind did at this spectacle turn round / As with the might of waters" (VII, 643–44), is a paradigm of romantic transcendence and celebrates a kind of power that was forbidden to women. It also privileges a subject who subsumes all experience into an infinitely expanding "I," as if the goal of the Wordsworthian sublime were to consume the very otherness it appears to bespeak and demonstrate mastery over an experience that had seemed overwhelming.
Keats criticizes the "wordsworthian or egotistical sublime" as "a thing per se" that "stands alone." Unlike Wordsworth, he views the sublime as residing in the extinction and not the enhancement of identity: "poetical Character," he observes, "is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—it has no character": to be sublime is to have "no Identity . . . no self"[14] As with Keats, Coleridge's sublime also depends upon the self's awareness of its own absence. His comments upon the sublimity of a Gothic cathedral provide a striking contrast to Wordsworth's response
to the craggy peaks in the Mount Snowdon passage of The Prelude or Shelley's rhapsodic identification with Mont Blanc:
But Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible expression left is, "That I am nothing!"[15]
Whereas Wordsworth's sublime culminates in what Weiskel describes as "an infinitely repeatable 'I am,'" in the sublime of Keats and Coleridge individual consciousness is subsumed by the eternal.[16] The grandeur of the Gothic church suspends Coleridge's self-awareness; all the self can know of itself is that it is "nothing."
In contrast to Wordsworth's "I am every thing" and Coleridge's "I am nothing," the feminine sublime neither celebrates self-presence and the self's capacity to master the other nor consecrates the immediacy of its absence.[17] If Coleridge's identity is diminished by the sublime while Wordsworth's expands, Irigaray contests the logic of identity that conceives of the self in exclusive terms of presence or absence. Her articulation of the feminine self as a "no-thing" for which "no identity can be defined" partakes of a very different order than Coleridge's sense of the self as "nothing."[18] Rather, she envisions a sublime in which the self neither possesses nor merges with the other but attests to a relation with it.
It is not my intention to identify the feminine sublime with the work of Irigaray, or with that of any particular theorist or theoretical practice. Nor do I imply that an innate femininity or unique style of women's writing accompanies the feminine sublime. Indeed, the very search for an essential difference that would function outside any specific context to fix, determine, guarantee, and control meaning is precisely what the sublime contests. At stake in the notion of the feminine sublime is the refusal to define the feminine as a specific set of qualities or attributes that we might call irreducible and unchanging. I employ the term "feminine" as that which contests binaries, including a rigid notion of sexual difference that would insist upon separate male and female selves. The appeal to a "feminine sublime" is not to a specifically feminine subjectivity or mode of expression, but rather to that which calls such categories into question. It is one name for what we cannot grasp in established systems of ideas
or articulate within the current framework in which the term "woman" has meaning.
To investigate the feminine sublime is not to embark upon a search for an autonomous female voice, realm of experience, or language, although these categories may be valuable as a dimension of the strategic interventions of feminist practice. What is specifically feminine about the feminine sublime is not an assertion of innate sexual difference, but a radical rearticulation of the role gender plays in producing the history of discourse on the sublime and the formulation of an alternative position with respect to excess and the possibilities of its figuration. To assert the importance of the feminine in this context is not to reinscribe normative gender categories, but to offer a critique of a tradition that has functioned historically to reassert masculine privilege. In this sense, the notion of the feminine does not refer to a particular affinity group, gender, or class, but rather to a putting in question of the master discourse that perpetuates the material and psychological oppression of actual women.
I use the word "feminine" in at least two ways: on the one hand, to refer to the socially constructed category of woman that has endured universal and transhistorical oppression and thus to underscore the reality of women's suffering; on the other, to indicate a position of resistance with respect to the patriarchal order, whether it is perpetuated and sustained by biological women or by men. Here the term does not so much refer to actual women as designate a position of critique with respect to the masculinist systems of thought that contribute to women's subjugation. Although such a conception of the feminine does not suspend reference to existing women, it does suspend the notion of an ultimate feminine identity that could function as the ground of sexual difference. Rather it becomes one name for a residue that disrupts the oppositional structure male/female and thereby calls for a radical rearticulation of the symbolic order. My central question is not, what is the feminine sublime? but rather, how does it signify? It refers to what, in Anzaldúa's sense, is a site of passage and border crossing in which meanings collide and transform one another, an ongoing process of re-metaphorization in which we may perceive, in Judith Butler's wonderful phrase, "the movement of boundary itself."[19]
The sublime has been aligned with a wide variety of political practices. Although an interest in it often marks the conservative (Burke, for example, lauded the sublime but condemned the French Revolution), a
number of theorists associate the sublime with the possibility of liberty and freedom.[20] Subsequent chapters will argue that there is no single, unchanging politics with which one can identify the sublime. Indeed, the fact that it can so readily embrace political positions of every persuasion attests to its metamorphic capacity and ability to exceed any particular designation, definition, or category.[21] That the sublime has no inherent politics, however, does not mean that its effects are not inevitably and necessarily political. And while the present study is not political in the sense of proposing a specific blueprint for social action, it does, I think, imply a strong sense of the form a politics of the feminine sublime might assume.
The dimension of the unrepresentable would be a central feature of any sublime politics. One of the main contentions of this book is that the sublime involves an encounter with a radical alterity that remains unassimilable to representation. Such an encounter marks the very limits of the representable, for it entails the question of symbolizing an event that we cannot represent not only because it was never fully present, but because it presents the subject with an unrecuperable excess of excess. In the formulation of Jean-François Lyotard, for example, the sublime is not the presentation of the unpresentable, but the presentation of the fact that the unpresentable exists.[22] To invoke the nondemonstrable—not as a familiar feature of aesthetics but rather in the context of the incommensurable—is to situate the sublime as a site of resistance to aestheticism and also to underscore its political and ethical dimensions. In this sense, the notion of alterity eludes particular ethnicity, sexuality, class, race, or geopolitical positioning but implies both a general concept of the unrepresentable as that which exceeds the symbolic order of language and culture, and the particular otherness of actual others, who remain nameless insofar as they are outside its borders.
Unlike the masculinist sublime that seeks to master, appropriate, or colonize the other, I propose that the politics of the feminine sublime involves taking up a position of respect in response to an incalculable otherness.[23] A politics of the feminine sublime would ally receptivity and constant attention to that which makes meaning infinitely open and ungovernable. As Bill Readings suggests:
A sublime politics would not attempt to subject politics to the radical indeterminacy of the sublime as a questioning of rules and criteria . . . it is to refuse society as the locus of modeling and authority, to argue for
heteronomous community in which there can be no absolutely authoritative instance and no consensus that might legitimate such an authority.[24]
Such a practice would authorize concrete strategies and tactics of resistance without the need either to identify itself permanently with any one particular political position or to depend upon a fantasy of collective identity as the basis for consensus. Its most enduring commitment would be instead to sustain a condition of radical uncertainty as the very condition of its possibility. It would not, for example, attempt to represent the total and unspeakable horror of American slavery but offer, as does Morrison's Beloved , a mode of historical witnessing that, through the ghostly figure of Beloved, signifies both the traumatic institution of slavery and the immensity of that which cannot be said. This textual and political practice opens language to the necessary task of giving voices to those who have been silenced and finds words for the silence within speech that language cannot say—and thus makes resonant what Kate Chopin hears as "the everlasting voice of the sea."[25]