The Feminine Sublime

Barbara Claire Freeman

The Feminine Sublime provides the first comprehensive feminist critique of the theory of the sublime. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend on 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 and at the same time engages a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Locating her project in 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, passion, and alterity in modern and contemporary women's fiction. She argues that the theoretical discourses that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also function to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that, almost without exception, is gendered as feminine. Just as important, she 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."