Tags
A large portion of the beginning of The Mysteries of Udolpho is taken up with Emily and her father traveling through the Pyrenees of France. It seems on nearly every page there are comments on the “sublime charms of nature” with long descriptions on the craggy mountains, the deep valleys, rushing torrents, and the quality of the light. In fact, there is so much of this I began to think Radcliffe was up to something. So it wasn’t long before I found myself borrowing a copy of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. And now this early sentence in the book makes so much more sense:
This landscape with the surrounding alps did, indeed, present a perfect picture of the lovely and the sublime, of ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror.’
I have vague recollections of reading Burke back in college as part of a class in literary theory but my memory has been wiped out to save myself from the trauma that was Hegel, Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Poor Burke never had a chance. Since he is associated in my mind with that class I assumed he was going to be hard going and I’d be scratching my head. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Burke is so very concerned with everyone understanding him that large portions of the essay are given over to explaining his words. I appreciated his precision to a point, after that point I found myself muttering, okay okay, can we just move on? All that to say that if you ever feel inspired to read Burke, you don’t need to worry about not “getting him” because if this essay were a math problem, he’d be getting full credit for showing his work so his readers can follow along with his arguments and not be left in doubt.
If you are like me you equate sublime with beautiful, maybe not every day beautiful but startlingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that moves you to tears. But no, beauty and the sublime have nothing to do with each other. Beauty, you see, inspires pleasure and love in the beholder. It is sunshine and rainbows.
The sublime? It is composed of delight derived from terror, pain, distress and danger. It is a feeling far more intense and elevated than mere beauty. The sublime, according to Burke, is the “strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.” This is because pain, the root of the sublime, is more powerful than pleasure.
Now the pain Burke refers to is not necessarily physical pain caused from tumbling over a cliff while hiking in the mountains in search of the sublime. It is a physical pain but more of one caused by extreme emotion than a broken leg. It’s a hurts so good kind of pain caused by an “unnatural tension of the nerves.”
What elements go into producing the sublime? Burke is kind enough to explain each one in great detail but I will spare you and just list out a few for you:
- Obscurity. This is because you can’t see something clearly and so you are thrown into a state of fear and uncertainty. Obscurity can be caused by darkness or fog, or lots of trees.
- Power. Anything powerful is dangerous and potentially destructive and terrifying. Like a king or a bull or flash flood or God.
- Vastness. As in size. This can be a tall mountain or a deep valley or great plain, lake or ocean. Infinity is also a source of the sublime. Think of the size of the universe and your mind will likely be filled with a sort of delightful horror as you try and fail find the edges.
- Magnificence. As in a great profusion of things as in the stars in the night sky or millions of buffalo on the Great Plains before settlers killed them all.
- Color. Pink is not the color of the sublime. The sublime is not cheerful. The color of the sublime is dark and gloomy, a cloudy sky not a clear blue one, dark brown jagged rocks not a gentle verdant slope.
Can you kind of see a little how Emily and her father’s travels through the mountains was so sublime? And why Radcliffe might want all that in a gothic novel? Because the whole point of a gothic novel is horror (and romance) and since the source of the sublime is terror, perfect combination, right? Radcliffe didn’t write a book based in the supernatural so she pulls much of her gothic horror in early on by using the sublime. We don’t feel it like the readers in 1794 would have, but no doubt much of the scenic descriptions would have been terrifying.
Also of note is that Radcliffe uses the sublime to clue us in to who the good and bad characters are. The good ones all experience the sublime at one time or other while out in nature. The bad characters, not one has a sublime experience. They are too small-minded and petty and the sublime scene that moves Emily so produces nothing but boredom to those who are not good.
That is a bit of what Radcliffe is about with so much mention of what is sublime. While it gets a bit repetitive for a modern reader, she wasn’t just rambling on and on to add padding to the story. Instead, the sublime is an integral part of her approach to the gothic, at least in this novel. I’ve not read any of her others so I can’t say whether it holds true for them. Perhaps next RIP Challenge I will read Romance of the Forest and find out.
Outstanding. Laura Ingalls WIlder uses the sublime to divide people into categories, too, although the categories are not good and evil but “enjoys and seeks out the sublime” and “is afraid of the sublime.” The people in the latter category are more sensible.
The usage of the word “sublime” has changed, and I do sometimes use it as meaning something like “superlatively beautiful,” but I think since I read Burke – or maybe since I saw his ideas in practice – I am more careful to keep the concepts separate, or at least to try to be more precise. As you note, Burke is willing to be boring for the sake of precision.
At some point I hope to read a book or two about one episode in the taming of the sublime that it seems is relevant to Udolpho, the history of how, roughly in the mid-19th century, through tourism and mountain climbing and little chalets that serve hot chocolate the mountain landscape lost much of its scariness.
LikeLike
Thanks Stefanie for putting Radcliffe’s use of the sublime into context so lucidly. I loved the Literary Theory trauma remark! Of course Edmund Burke also the founder of conservative ideology- difficult to imagine Bush or Cameron weiting anything as interesting!
LikeLike
Ian, and thank you! Heh, I still get tense when I think about it! There were some bright spots in the class since I seemed to get on pretty well with Heidegger for some reason and Foucault still makes me giddy. Burke might be at the base of conservative ideology but I wonder if Bush would even know who he is? I’d eat my hat if he did 😉
LikeLike
Thanks Tom! After reading Burke I think it a shame that our usage of “sublime” has changed. It is a good word for an emotion that we have no other word for. Maybe we just don’t feel it like people used to? Interesting how LIW uses the sublime to separate her characters. I haven’t read her since I was ten so that just went right on by in favor of worry about Pa getting lost in a blizzard.
That would be a really interesting book about the taming of the sublime. Is there one you have specifically in mind?
LikeLike
A specific book – no, I hope to find one. My plan is to read some of the mountaineering memoirs, like Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps and Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, and related books like Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, and see where they lead me.
Bush, an avid reader of American history, would likely know Burke as a prominent English supporter of American independence and opponent of the French Revolution, not so much for his aesthetic ideas.
This is the Little House on the Prairie post, Having read Burke, the connection, will be instantly visible.
LikeLike
Oh yes … Isabella Bird … I’m reading in fits and starts Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten tracks in Japan (at least I think that’s the title, because I’m also reading Lafcadio Hearn’s travels in Japan too). Love reading those old travel tales.
LikeLike
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is full of fascinating things. When I was briefly in Tokyo I found a copy of the book in the neighborhood department store and bought it. I wrote about it a bit. Boy, that seems like a long time ago.
LikeLike
I look forward to the results of your investigations!
LikeLike
Oh cranky pants. I just wrote a complex reply to this, hit submit and it said “sorry your comment could not be posted”. Why? Perhaps I was cross-posting with Ian because Ian’s comment wasn’t there as I was typing in mine, but was there when I came back seconds later after being rejected! Boo-hoo! (Nothing against you Ian of course!)
Anyhow, I was commenting on Turner and the sublime, and how I’d been thinking about this issue a few months ago when we had the Turner from the Tate exhibition here. I think Ruskin took up where Burke left off. And, I think the Romantic poets like Wordsworth saw nature in terms of the sublime too – its awe-inspiring, terrifying (in the old sense of the word) sense.
Oh and I love your description of Burke and his care to make sure the reader understands what he’s saying.
LikeLike
whisperinggums, oh no! I’ve had complex comments eaten up before too so I know how frustrating it is. Thanks for not just giving up completely!
I can see Turner definitely as a painter of the sublime. You might be interested to know that Tom at Wuthering Expectations recently spent over a week writing about Ruskin (and Turner) with lots of really interesting things to say. I do think Wordsworth and company also saw nature in terms of the sublime but I think it might have been losing its bite of pain and terror at that point and merging into the beautiful. Byron still had it I think but Wordsworth went a bit soft, at least from what I remember of him so I could be completely wrong!
And thanks, if only most thinkers would take the care that Burke did we’d all have an easier time of it! Sure it makes for some dull reading at times, but you always know what he means and that’s something.
LikeLike
I suspect you’re right … He had a long life and moved more and more into the Romantic and emotionally softer view of nature I think. Some of the earlier works were probably closer the the Sublime with a capital S but I’d have to go suss them out and I’m about to do the chores! Woo hoo … Not!
LikeLike
Chores? Chores can always wait especially when reading calls 😉
LikeLike
Not having heard of Burke before and finding this very interesting, you are now responsible for me wanting to reread an essay I have last read in 1988 🙂 on The Repression of the Sublime by Frank Haronian. (Let me know if you’d like a copy).
LikeLike
Cath, Burke is an interesting fellow, very meticulous. And thanks for the Haronian essay!
LikeLike
I’ve only just come to terms with the meaning of sublime myself thanks to the wonderful people at my local art gallery who give free tours and lectures every Tuesday and Wednesday. It makes you stop and think about how many other words we are interpreting in the wrong way, doesn’t it. Romance and romantic when associated with the arts are definitely ones I would not be too sure about.
LikeLike
Alex, oh yes, there are so many words that have lost their original power which is unfortunate, isn’t it? And so many other words whose meanings has slipped into something else. But language does that and suddenly what could be a perfect word in its original sense no longer has that meaning and we struggle to find a replacement. But you know all of this! 🙂
LikeLike
It’s so interesting to me how people respond differently to books in different time periods. It’s hard to imagine readers crying over sentimental novels of the time, but apparently people did. I can a little more easily understand reading Radcliffe and feeling terror over the sublime, but still, it takes quite a lot of imaginative work. I liked your overview of Burke very much!
LikeLike
Rebecca, It is hard to put ourselves in the place of the original audience for a book, another additional feat for the imagination to perform which can be a pleasant challenge. While I might not cry over the sentimental or feel the terror of the sublime, I can still get some intellectual satisfaction from understanding it. And thanks, Burke turned out to be more interesting than I expected!
LikeLike
Thanks for this enlightening comment! I am right in the middle of Udolpho and I had not given much to analysis so far, just enjoying the story.
LikeLike
sylvie, glad to hear you are enjoying Udolpho yourself. It is a fun, fat book!
LikeLike
How interesting–I’ve always thought of ‘sublime’ as the first meaning you mention in your post–and it is/was really so vastly different! It puts an entirely different spin on the story, doesn’t it? And I really must give Burke a try–I like that he is so accessible (am fliling him away in my brain for later). Is he a contemporary critic?–Will have to look him up now.
LikeLike
Pingback: And all you wanted was a good ghost story… « Archetypal Assets