The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction

by Barbara Claire Freeman

The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime.

Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime."

Genres: Theory

216 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1995

Reviews

[Barbara Lock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gave me some useful perspective and definitions pertaining to the undefinable. The feminine sublime is: a moment of blockage followed by one of heightened lucidity; a strategy of appropriation; something which fills one with a reverberating awe; productive of ecstasy rather than persuasion; a state of transport and exaltation; a movement from chaos to unity; a vague anguish; the possibility of desire without loss; an experience bordering on terror but productive of delight. Sounds like an orgasm, yes?

[Heleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not very groundbreaking research, I would say, more of a summary of some recurrent ideas on gender and aesthetics.

[Whitney Borup · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book was brilliant, and it has already helped me shape some ideas about Wonder Woman and the sublime. I did question her (and Lyotard's...who I think she relies on perhaps too often) emphasis on the borderlessness of Kant's sublime. It seems clear to me that Kant believes the sublime ultimately establishes clear boundaries through their initial upset, and she might have pushed the Isis footnote too far. I wonder why she didn't turn more towards Bataille, who is much more interested in the continuity and expenditure found in the aesthetic.

[Dominique · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so much from this book that I didn't learn in my undergraduate aesthetics class, I'm in shock. Of course, that might just be because I went to a pretty limited university. But damn! Burke's sublime? Completely grounded on the dual sex distinction and the stereotypes that go with it. And listen to this: the female body, right? It actively *resists* the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime within Burke's own writing. Despite his best attempts at making it soft and malleable and passive, it rebels! Isn't that just fucking *classic*? Judge me if you must, but there's simply something *so* satisfying about seeing someone's stereotypes come back to bite them.

Absolutely recommend this text. It touches on a lot of contemporary issues (including a very obvious applicability to instagram) and is a fantastic introduction to the unique version of the sublime featured in women's literature.

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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 define its peculiar force"

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

lots of big words in this one

[Kiki · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for my thesis slay

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good points, and I understand the perception that the sublime was closed off to women in the 18th century, but it's a bit reductive to claim they didn't interact with it at all...