The Sublime Burke’s Aesthetic Theory of the Sublime and its Reflections on 19th Century Novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Abstract

The meaning of the term ‘sublime’ has gone through several phases of development since its first formulation. Its birth dates back to the ancient Greece, when the rhetorician and philosopher Longinus for the first time puts to words what the ‘sublime’ is: something elevated, exceptional and extra-ordinary. His Peri Hypsous presents sublimity as strictly connected to the realm of rhetoric, a realm to which it would be confined for ages until the intervention of the French philosopher Nicolas Boileau in the seventeenth century. Slowly but incessantly, as the writings from John Dennis, Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside and John Baillie show, in the eighteenth century the rhetorical idea becomes ever-more connected to a more psychological approach, until in 1757 the epoch-making treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke firmly establishes the sublime within the field of aesthetics. The young Irishman sets out to provide an analysis of both sublimity and beauty, however, the sublime idea would exercise a much wider influence in the century to come. Burke’s definition employs terms such as darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, but most importantly, claims that the emotive response of the individual in the presence of sublimity takes the shape of pain in pleasure, delight in terror. Of all the sources of sublimity, surely nature is among the most powerful: violent storms and raging seas, towering mountain chains, profound chasms etc. The aim of this dissertation is the analysis of the great influence of this theory, by taking into consideration the aesthetic responses of two of the most brilliant women writing in the nineteenth century and their unforgettable masterpieces, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.