The Romantic Sublime and Middle-Class Subjectivity in the Victorian Novel

Stephen Hancock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415975452
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135492991
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study follows the aesthetic of the sublime from Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. Exploring the continuities between the romantic and Victorian "periods" that have so often been rather read as differences, the book demonstrates that the sublime mode enables the transition from a paradigm of overwhelming power exemplified by the body of the king to the pervasive power of surveillance utilized by the rising middle classes. While the domestic woman connected with the rise of the middle class is normally seen as beautiful, the book contends that the moral authority given to this icon of depth and interiority is actually sublime. The binary of the beautiful and the sublime seeks to contain the sublimity of womanhood by insisting on sublimity's masculine character. This is the book's most important claim: rather than exemplifying masculine strength, the sublime marks the transition to a system of power gendered as feminine and yet masks that transition because it fears the power it ostensibly accords to the feminine. This aesthetic is both an inheritance the Victorians receive from their romantic predecessors, and, more importantly, a broad historical phenomenon that questions the artificial boundaries between romantic and Victorian.

Chapter One Moral Authority and the Sublime: Kantian Idealism, Burkean Empiricism, and the Absolutely Small

DOI: 10.4324/9780203959336-1

In this project, I would like to question two cherished assumptions about the aesthetic of the sublime. Both eighteenth-century theorists of the sublime and most of the more recent critics of those theorists have assumed that the sublime is, as it claims to be, a masculine aesthetic that contrasts with the feminine beautiful. It has also been widely accepted at face value that the sublime is a representation of the absolutely great as Kant asserts and that it is inspired chiefly by overwhelming power and colossal objects. I wish to claim, contrary to both of these positions, that the sublime is always an aesthetic in transition. While it seeks to gender itself as masculine and attach itself to absolute power, it actually masks a transition from a traditionally male gendered system of power which relies on overwhelming force to a more pervasive power, gendered as feminine that relies on division of the social body into ever smaller degrees. As Thomas Weiskel points out, all versions of the sublime supply “a meaningful jargon of ultimacy” (36). I will claim that rather than finding this exclusively in the undeniable power of God, the transcendent phallus that signifies ultimate masculine power, the mind of the poet, the body of the king, or any entity that claims to encompass all of social production, the sublime pushes as well towards a transcendent depth and interiority connected to the ultimate moral authority associated with the middle-class ideal of womanhood.

The first of these assumptions, that the sublime is exclusively masculine, has already begun to be challenged by several recent critics. Barbara Freeman and Andrew Elfenbein, at least, have begun to point out the contradictions in the gender ideology behind the dichotomy of the sublime and the beautiful, and Anne Mellor has argued for alternate, feminine sublime modes. Still others, particularly Nina Auerbach, have examined the strength that lay in Victorian womanhood, readings of Victorian femininity that seem to contradict Burke’s assumptions about sexual difference. Interestingly, however, these examinations either leave the masculine sublime unquestioned in itself or they skip from Burke to the Victorians in examining the sublimity of womanhood.

The second assumption, that the sublime is always, or nearly always, associated with the colossal and the absolutely great has been less questioned, and seemingly with good reason, since Kant, for example, begins his examination of the mathematical sublime by stating “We call sublime what is absolutely large” (Critique 103), and he is very careful to outline the difference between apprehension and comprehension to show how the colossal inspires the sublime. Edmund Burke also claims that “Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime” (114). But he notes, as does Kant, that “as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is sublime likewise” (114). Kant’s formulation of the sublime nature of the absolutely small makes it apparent, as de Man has pointed out, that we are dealing with a question of magnitude. He states,

Nothing in nature can be given, however large we may judge it, that could not, when compared with still smaller standards, be degraded all the way to the infinitely small, nor conversely anything so small that it could not, when compared with still smaller standards, be expanded for our imagination all the way to the magnitude of a world; telescopes have provided us with a wealth of material in support of the first point, microscopes in support of the second. (106)

His point is that nothing which can be an object of perception is sublime, since something could always be greater, but in speaking of microscopes he invites us to contemplate, as Burke does, that which is absolutely small and, so, not able to be perceived. De Man explains the absolutely small in Kant by equating it with the absolutely large. “Quantity … expressed by number,” he tells us, “is always a relative concept that refers back to a conventional unity of measurement; pure number is neither large nor small, and the infinitely large is also the infinitely small: the telescope and the microscope, as instruments of measurement, are the same instrument” (“Phenomenality” 75). And yet, while the failure of either instrument to articulate the infinite might make them similarly incapable of measure, what they attempt to measure is not the same, and so, as metaphors for the ideological importance of the sublime, they reach towards different standards of ultimacy, and the ideological importance of the absolutely small has not been fully examined.

This is partly because these statements on absolute smallness are continually subordinated to the absolutely great. For Kant the absolutely small becomes an elaboration of the statement “That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small” (105). Burke gives it place in a section on “Vastness” (114), though it occupies almost half of that section. De Man follows suit when he places the small in a parenthetical phrase, “(or, for that matter, the infinitely small)” (75). Then after equating it with the absolutely large, he immediately drops it and discusses the sublime as “not ‘the large’ but ‘the largest’; it is that ‘compared with which everything else is small.’ As such, it can never be accessible to the senses” (75). He quotes Kant, but, following Kant, he seems not to know what to do with the absolutely small, and so it drops away.

In discussions of gender ideology the absolutely small slips even further from view. Anne Mellor’s work, for instance does not mention the small because the absolutely great is the obvious locus of transcendence in Burke’s attempt to ground the difference between the sublime and the beautiful on sexual difference. Burke, in hisEnquiry, claims that the prospect of pain is the cause of the sublime. As Mellor points out, in Burke’s formulation the great emotion associated with the sublime “can only be produced … by a power greater than oneself” (86). Thus greatness becomes associated with masculine empowerment enforced through the threat of violence, and the absolutely great becomes the transcendent phallus which signifies the absolute dominance of the masculine. The small seemingly presents no threat and thus, though it is mentioned as sublime, it ceases to seem so in discussions of gender difference.

The principle aim of this book is to examine the ways that the aesthetic of the sublime is integral to shifts in the organization of power from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century. Following the trajectory of the romantic aesthetic of the sublime from the treatises of Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into the works of William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I demonstrate that the sublime mode was part of a transition from a paradigm of overwhelming power exemplified by the body of the king to the pervasive power of surveillance utilized by the rising middle-classes. While the domestic woman connected with the rise of the middle-class is normally seen as beautiful, I will claim that the moral authority of the middle-class woman is actually sublime. The binary of the beautiful and the sublime seeks to contain the sublimity of womanhood by insisting on sublimity’s masculine character. Thus, rather than exemplifying masculine strength, the sublime is a divided aesthetic that marks the transition to a new system of power gendered as feminine and yet masks that transition because it fears the power it accords to the feminine. This aesthetic is both an inheritance the Victorians receive from their romantic predecessors and, more importantly, a broad historical phenomenon that questions the artificial boundaries between romantic and Victorian.

Such an examination certainly raises questions of the applicability of romantic aesthetics to authors who were not strictly the contemporaries of the figures we associate with romanticism. Simon Malpas, citing Paul Hamilton’s discussion of a change in romantic studies, claims that “one of the key factors that has led to critics giving up reading Romantic poetry ‘through … idealist philosophies’ is the accusation of an acquiescence with ‘Romantic ideology,’ the ideology that ‘empower[s] poetry to save philosophy from its inability to grasp conceptually its own ideals’” (2). An attempt to extend such readings to the Victorian novel might look like an attempt to re-mystify a body of work that Foucauldian, Derridean, and other post-structuralist and ideological critics have productively analyzed in order to reveal its ideological underpinnings and expose the naturalizing discourses that utilized idealist notions to buttress cultural hegemony.

The alternative, then, is to turn to materialist accounts of the sublime, such as those posited by Terry Eagleton and Paul De Man. Their interpretations of Kant tend to center on the ideological importance of aesthetics, and so they will be central to my thinking about the sublime in this discussion. Still, as Francis Ferguson argues, there can be difficulties with this approach as well. “Criticism,” he explains in the preface to Solitude and the Sublime, “has enmired itself in the project of showing, from an empiricist perspective, the implausibility of the Kantian account” (vii). Not only does such an endeavor tend to “reduce … [aesthetics’] potential for disruption by positing it as an ideological tool of the bourgeoisie” (Malpas 3), but it also seems fruitless. Though the work of Eagleton and De Man is quite helpful in establishing an account of the sublime’s centrality to ideology, this is not denial of the disruptive potential of aesthetics any more than more traditional accounts are a denial of the potential pitfalls of aesthetic ideology. What is important is the centrality of the sublime aesthetic to establishing the authority to claim universal validity for claims to moral truth. It is because of its centrality to such claims that this aesthetic is important to both despotic regimes and the more democratic system that accompanies the advent of industrial capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

To demonstrate this centrality, I will begin by examining how a Kantian idea of the sublime helps in understanding the ways that transcendence is important to the claims of monarchical government, a convenient starting place in studying the transitional nature of the sublime. As DeMan says, “the architectonics of the transcendental system … functions as the cause of the ideological motions” (72), in this case a motion from the centralized authority of a monarch to a more diffuse power under industrial capitalism. I will then explain how the differences between Kantian Idealism and Burkean empiricism are symptomatic of a split that exists in the sublime from the time it is formulated as a discourse in the eighteenth century between the absolutely great and the absolutely small. Burke’s empiricist project breaks down because it is unable to provide absolute evidence; experience is either not broad enough to see all of the social body or not deep enough to understand that body. In the wake of his failure, Kant’s idealist account provides, in the sublime, a discourse of ultimacy that allows for the absolutely great that can encompass the entire social realm and the absolutely small that can break down the social body into the minutest particulars in order to understand it. If the absolutely great is representative of the sort of moral authority that is claimed by the sovereign in his second body, the absolutely small is representative of the moral authority of the body of the middle-class woman who provides unity within the entity that becomes the “social body.”

The Sublime, Moral Authority, and Monarchy

To begin, the sublime is transcendent. As Thomas Weiskel points out, “The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human. What, if anything, lies beyond the human—God or the gods, the daemon or Nature—is a matter for great disagreement” (3). When we speak of the sublime moment we speak of the moment in any text that references an encounter with something “beyond the human.” This encounter promises a unity that is not found in the finite world. Kant’s mathematical sublime, for instance, rests on the difference between apprehension and comprehension. Mathematical estimation of magnitude, “progresses without hindrance to infinity” (111). We can measure or apprehend forever, but eventually we exceed the mind’s ability to contain all that it apprehends and unite it. We cannot apprehend the whole world at once; the self encounters an “inability to take it in” (116). And yet the sublime allows the mind to imagine a unity despite this. It conceives of the absolutely large, and is able to comprehend “a multiplicity in a unity.” As Ferguson explains, “The relationship between finitude and infinitude rests upon an assertion of the possibility of reassembling … discreet units into a unity, of insisting that a one can be made out of this many” (25).

At the same time the sublime is also an aesthetic judgment in that “to be able to even think the infinite asa whole indicates a mental power that surpasses any standard of sense” (Kant, Critique 11). Thus the Kantian sublime points to an ideal space of aesthetics, outside the empirical. As such it is part of a system that includes at least judgment on the beautiful, and shares much with the beautiful because of this. Kant, in analyzing the sublime, points out these similarities. First, any aesthetic judgment is one that does not rely on any utility as a reason for liking a thing. Instead, “the liking is connected with the mere exhibition or power of exhibition” (97). Because the judgment is thus made independently of the utility of the object, it presents itself as a characteristic indivisible from the object. “That,” Kant tells us, “is why both kinds of judgment are singular ones that nonetheless proclaim themselves universally valid for all subjects” (97). This seemingly disinterested ability to claim universally valid judgments gives an impression of unity that is essential to a person or group of persons that presumes to make moral law, to make moral decisions for others that present themselves as binding. And this is what makes aesthetics so useful to ideology, especially to the construction of moral laws that can claim universal validity. Turning again to Fergusson:

Kant’s discussion thus presents the sublime, in conformity with his account of the moral law, as a disclosure of the mental legislation involved in even the most apparently useless endeavors. It is conspicuously absurd, from one perspective, for a solitary individual to decide, without any aid from technology to start measuring boundless nature, because its phenomenological boundlessness means that an individual can never get to the end of it. (29)

Thus every moral choice requires the consideration of a whole that can never be quite grasped with the senses. One person, or even a group, must conceive of a whole they can never “take in” in order to pass judgments that can claim universal validity. Admittedly the sublime is only part of this system, but it represents the aesthetic that is capable of providing absolutes and universals by uniting an incomprehensible whole like the social body.

Thus, though the sublime develops as a phenomenon during a time of Bourgeois ascendancy, it addresses difficulties that were also inherent in absolutist power. Terry Eagleton points out that transcendence is an integral part of ideology in ways that are applicable to the current discussion. Any power structure, he claims, must fill a gap between the ideal reasoning that supports that structure and the physical realities of those who are subject to the structure, if it “does not want to trigger rebellion” (19). As Mary Poovey points out, the poor laws inspired disturbances, though they were meant, ostensibly, to serve the poor. The laws may have justified the power structure to itself and those in power, but it did not, on that account, justify itself to the physical needs of the people. Power needs to justify itself to the people and their physical realities, physical realities that can never be empirically accounted for. Power structures need those governed by them to believe in them, and thus need to understand how the power structure is perceived by the governed. Eagleton writes:

Yet how can reason, that most immaterial of faculties, grasp the grossly sensuous? Perhaps what makes things available to empirical knowledge in the first place, their palpable materiality, is also in a devastating irony what banishes them beyond cognition. Reason must find some way of penetrating the world of perception, but in doing so must not put at risk its own absolute power. (15)

What is at risk is the point at which ethics meets with the moral authority of a governing power. As Kant demonstrates, the establishment of any moral authority requires the possibility of pronouncements that can present themselves as universally valid. And yet the ability to make such universally valid moral judgments is forestalled by the inability of those making what amounts to moral law to access the perceptions of the other for whom they propose to speak. What ethical philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas term “alterity” specifically precludes this ability to access the “world of perception.” InEthics and Infinity, Levinas states, “In reality, the fact of being is what is most private; existence is what I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I can’t share my existence” (57). Thus power requires exactly that to which it cannot have access, and to compensate, an aesthetic of transcendence is necessary.

In absolutist government, the sovereign’s second, theological body provides the site at which the governing authority can appear to bridge the distance between the theoretical underpinnings of its power and the physical reality of the governed. The body of the king, though it is certainly a concept that develops before the eighteenth century sublime, is still an object the perception of which allows for a concept of transcendence that can fill this gap. The body of the king is, in essence, an object that inspires the sublime, though the term “sublime” would only become of use later as an attempt to shore up the authority of a transcendence which no longer seemed viable to many.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault points out that the system of deference that predates the rise of the middle-class is intimately tied to the body of the king. His example, of course, is the power tied to the right to punish. This right under a system of class deference is derived from the idea that any crime is a crime against the body of the king. “Besides the immediate victim,” Foucault tells us, “the crime attacks the sovereign: it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign” (47). Thus a crime becomes “an affront to [the king’s] very person” (48). This affront is tied to the king’s body and thus punishment must be inflicted on the body of the offender in order to demonstrate the superiority of the body of the Prince. “By breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince—or at least those to whom he has delegated his force—who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken” (49).

The concept of the body of the king, however, signifies more than simply a physical body. Ernst Kantorowicz, in The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, quotes Justice Southcote in the case ofWillion v. Berkley, to the effect that the king’s second body is “a Body politic, and the members thereof are his subjects, and he and his subjects together compose the Corporation” (13). This second body is immortal in that it is coequal with the entirety of social production. The body of the king is a site of social inscription, what Deleuze and Guattari would call a body without organs: “The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that the desiring machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent obje...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Seriespage
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Moral Authority and the Sublime: Kantian Idealism, Burkean Empiricism, and the Absolutely Small
• Chapter Two “That Huge Fermenting Mass”: Wordsworth and the Divisible Self
• Chapter Three Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Sublime Woman and the Divisible Sublime
• Chapter Four The Sublime Woman and the Mature Middle-Class Man in Middlemarch
• Chapter Five Fearing Their Bodies: The King, the Queen and the Sublime in Thackeray
• Chapter Six How Little is Dorrit?: Dickens and the Sublimity of Absolute Smallness
• Chapter Seven Jude the Obscure and the Tragedy of Aesthetic Ideology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index