Versions of the Sublime

Abstract

In the quest for the sublime women writers were curiously recalcitrant. By and large they withdrew from a vision that seemed to reach, without mediation to divinity. The grand marriages of sense and spirit, ‘a culminating and procreative marriage between mind and nature’, as M.H. Abrams calls it, are typically absent in female writing.¹ Rather, there is a crossing back, at the brink of visionary revelation, to the realms of ordinary, bodily experience — whether that experience is rendered subtle and elusive, as with Dorothy Wordsworth, or imaged in almost brutal excess, as with Mary Shelley. Typically then, such writing chooses to preserve rather than forget the materials of ordinary female life. And this choice, implicit, even covert at times, restructures a new feminine sensibility. When women do write of sublimity, there is frequently apprehension, a tightening of tone as if permission were sought from a patriarchal power.