6/18/2023 0 Comments Sublime in gothic literatureWhen she first appears, Raymond mistakes her for his lover Agnes, but after a near-fatal crash, she returns to him night after night and drains him of all vitality. The Bleeding Nun is both the unquiet ancestor of Raymond and his spiritual wife, once Raymond inadvertently promises himself to her body and soul. ‘The Bleeding Nun’, the ‘Wandering Jew’, and the Devil all represent the sublime. The sublime in ‘The Monk’ is uniformly supernatural in nature. In early Gothic novels, these traditional institutions, characterised by their vast influence and unlimited power, were represented by the sublime. Ambrosio and Antonia’s birth, the seizure of Otranto by Manfred) are corrected or punished. In ‘The Monk: A Romance,’ and ‘The Castle of Otranto,’ not only are traditional institutions restored precisely as they were, but historical challenges to this order that occur even prior to the events of the novel (e.g. In Ann Radcliffe’s books, these traditional institutions are modified to reflect the English middle station’s more significant share of power. The Gothic plot revolved around the undermining of these institutions, their near or actual dissolution, and their eventual reassertion or reformation. Gothic novels often externalised English fears and anxieties regarding the decay or corruption of traditional institutions. The volatile scenes of horror depicted in these novels, against which these Gothic authors, both male and female, were ostensibly preaching, caused reactionaries such as Thomas James Matthias in his book ‘The Pursuits of Literature’ (1796) to accuse them of seeking to undermine traditional values and spread revolutionary or “terrorist” ideas to England. In contrast, emerging male Gothic authors such as Matthew Lewis capitalised on the reactions against sensibility, against faith in the progress of the Enlightenment, and against the resulting revolutionary upheaval that they heard about abroad. The female Gothic aligns the beautiful and the feminine with the sentimental. The Gothic novel engages in the debate over the relative merits of the sublime and the beautiful and fosters an appreciation for the beautiful by excessive engagement with the sublime.Īn appreciation for the beautiful often appears in Gothic novels by women, as the beautiful, identified with the heroine and domesticity, ultimately subdues the sublime, associated with the villain and with events that inspire awe, fear, and terror.Īs noted earlier, female writers of the Gothic tradition were an exception from the general retreat from the culture of sentiment during the 1790s, as they continued to promote sensibility due to its valorisation of the feminine. Authors such as Richard Hurd excited interest in the English romantic heritage. The dichotomy between the beautiful and sublime effectively enabled two standards by which to evaluate a work of art, architecture, or literature. This assessment challenged neoclassical assessments such as that of Lord Kames, Henry Home in his ‘Elements of Criticism,’ in which he gloried at the sight of Gothic ruins, but found the appearance of Grecian ruins to be melancholy. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s translation of Longinus toward the end of the previous century provoked a number of essays on the sublime, of which the most famous and influential was Edmund Burke’s ‘Enquiry.’Įdmund Burke contrasted the beautiful with the sublime, describing the beautiful as small, smooth, delicate, bright, and symmetrical, and the sublime as vast, rough, obscure, and awe-inspiring. The construction of new epistemological paradigms, such as John Locke’s inquiries into the mind and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s examinations of human nature and civilization, challenged the monopoly that religious authorities held over metaphysical matters while emerging technologies and political theories challenged traditional social roles that remained from feudalism. The engine driving these revolutions was the Enlightenment’s emphasis on science, progress, and the individual. Historians traditionally characterise the latter half of the eighteenth-century in England as an era of technological and political revolution.
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