The following post by Holly Hirst is part of an ongoing
'Gothic Bible Blog Series' and part of the Gothic Bible project, a
collaborative project run by Sheffield Gothic and SIIBS at the University of
Sheffield, and also the University of Auckland. You can find out more about the
project here, and if you want to contribute to the blog series you can email us
at Gothic Bible@sheffield.ac.uk or tweet us at @GothicBible
It's a dry title. I’m not selling out any arenas with a dry cough and
reference to theo-aesthetic strategies. But its time to move away from
sensation. The Gothic is all about shocking titles and over-exaggeration:
affect and hyperbole. Not in my world! Quite literally. I have aphantasia,[i]
which means I have no mind’s eye or very little ability to ‘picture’ anything.
Some read about a looming forest and are gripped by ‘daemonic dread’[ii] or
plain old fear. Some are infected by the sombre shadows, the creeping sense of
claustrophobia or a soaring sense of nature’s power. I, on the other hand, just think ‘oh, they’re
walking through some trees.’ Zero emotional impact. Zero affect. The more
detailed, the less I care. It gives me a somewhat unique perspective as a
scholar of literary, and particularly gothic, aesthetics. I’m not distracted by
the expectation of ‘gothic’ affect and take a more theoretical approach, that
of theo-aesthetics – the point of intersection between theology and the
aesthetic strategies of the gothic novel.
 |
| (A mist-steeped and terrifying forest hinting at the obscure mysteries of sublimity - or just some trees) |
To make any steps in investigating theo-aesthetics, we need to get rid of
some baggage. This baggage is Burke. Burke’s applicability to the gothic is
obvious and his defence of ‘terror’ correctly considered key in the
legitimisation of the gothic and its aesthetic. We can take the debt owed too
far though and forget that Burke’s Enquiry
was an interjection in a much longer debate which continued to swirl with
abounding fury for decades after his work was published. Thomas Lauder’s 1842
review of aesthetic theory suggested that by 1794, and the publication of
Uvedale Price’s work on the picturesque and Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, Price’s rigorous adherence to Burkean
delineations and theorisation was old-fashioned.[iii]
It seems historically dubious to suggest that it was Burke’s theory alone which
dominated the literary aesthetics of Gothic novelists while the wider world
moved on.
The debate continued beyond Burke in the work of Joseph Priestley, Mary
Schimmelpenninck, Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, Radcliffe herself and countless
others (or so it seemed when researching the never diminishing pile of
theories). The debate didn’t stop with Burke’s exclusive focus on the ‘terror’
sublime and his claim that:
‘Whatever is
fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say,
whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or
operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.’[iv]
The suggestion that ‘terror’ and the sublime mix didn’t even start with
Burke. We can turn back the clock over half a century to find the first
references to the ‘delightful horror’ Burke would later claim was ‘the truest
experience of the sublime.’[v] The
idea springs from the work of John Dennis (1658-1734), who points to six whole
sources of the sublime, of which terror is only one: admiration,
terror, horror, joy, sadness, and desire.[vi]
This is in keeping with a much wider tradition of the multiplicity of the
sublime from Joseph Addison’s 1712 discussion of the pleasures of the
imagination, which ambiguously mixes the ‘grand,’ the ‘uncommon’ and the
‘beautiful,’ to Mary Schimmelpenninck’s 1814 discourse on the ‘active’ and
‘passive’ or ‘contemplative’ sublimes.[vii]
 |
| Edmund Burke |
Burke’s theory rides roughshod over these differentiations, leaving the
bleeding victims of his singular focus watching him pass on with an
interrogative eyebrow as his out of control horse heads towards future sublime
theorists whom modern critics are all too happy to push off the road for him. For
we have to admit, if Burke is all too happy to ignore other contemporary
conceptions of the many ‘sorts’ of sublimity and all their implications, Gothic
critics are eager to follow his lead. From David Morris’ article ‘Gothic Sublimity,’ which confounds a Burkean terror sublime with the Freudian
uncanny as the Gothic sublimity, to
Robert Geary’s exclusive emphasis on the terror sublime and the ‘daemonic
dread’ of the numinous (divorced from Otto’s concept of the ‘holy’) – we are
quick to turn to Burke because he fits our ideas of what the Gothic does and is
particularly in terms of affect.[viii]
Unfortunately, the novels themselves get in the way of our neat critical
packages. Radcliffe is the most obvious reference here. She comes in swinging
with bold faced references to multiple forms of sublimity. Three examples are,
I think, sufficient to illustrate this (my emphasis).
1)
St Aubert speaks of the ‘sublime pleasure’ of
‘thought and contemplation’ in ‘the taste they create for the beautiful and
the grand.’[ix]
2)
During the St Aubert’s
travels, ‘the serenity and clearness of
the air in these high regions were particularly delightful to the
travellers; it seemed to inspire them with a finer spirit, and diffused an
indescribable complacency over their minds. They had no words to
express the sublime emotions they
felt.’[x]
3)
At St Aubert’s death, Emily
‘heard those affecting and sublime words:
“His body is buried in peace, and his soul returns to Him that gave it”’[xi]
The first example shows an almost Godwinian emphasis on the sublime nature
of thought and reason[xii]
and reflects Mary Schimmelpenninck’s ‘contemplative sublime.’[xiii]
The second example emphasises ‘complacency’ and tranquillity, echoing Andrew
Kippis’ emphasis on ‘sublime serenity’’[xiv]
or Dennis’ and John Baillie’s emphasis on the sublime of ‘joy.’[xv] The
third example, although it appears to be connected to Burke’s emphasis on death, focuses not on fear but on the ‘feeling’
of spiritual security and divine comfort reflected in Anna Barbauld’s
discussion of aestheticised devotion.[xvi]
Not a drop of terror or horror to be had. In Radcliffe’s work, we see far more
clearly the hand of Dennis than that of Burke. The key to Dennis’ theory is
sublime multiplicity, which is connected to his theory of divine multiplicity,
unit and balance – the key to Radcliffe’s theo-aesthetics.
 |
| (William Blake's illustration of Paradise Lost depicting only a wrathful God) |
A concentration on the ‘terror
sublime’ not only ignores other arguments on the sublime and other forms of
sublimity – it is an act of theological perversity. Burke’s theory relies on a
focus on God as a God of wrath. According to Burke, ‘in the scripture,
wherever God is represented as appearing or speaking, every thing terrible in
nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence.’[xvii]
As Natasha Duquette insightfully articulates, Burke’s exclusive division of the
sublime and the beautiful and his emphasis on the connection of the sublime and
the terrible ‘leads to extreme divisions between the Old Testament and the New
Testament, law and grace, justice and love, death and generation.’[xviii]
When any theorist, contemporary or modern, excludes the sense of sublime
multiplicity, they exclude the sense of divine multiplicity. They divide the
Old and New, the Father and the Christ and ultimately confound the atheistic
and the theologically skewed. Novels like The
Monk or Zofloya, in their almost
exclusive focus on the terror and demonic sublime, don’t depict a world where
‘God does not truly exist but the devil does’ and where ‘providence,
secularized out of existence, leaves only unappeasable terror.’ [xix]
Rather, they represent novels in which terror has taken over – divine terror.
They are novels in which the God has become unmoored from Christ and the devil
acts as an avatar of a God of pure wrath, judgement and punishment.
If we attempt to read Radcliffe
with a conception of the sublime as the Burkean sublime, we are ourselves going
to slip into theological perversity and miss the theologised nuance of
Radcliffe’s bildungsroman of spiritual growth. When we read Mysteries of Udolpho as a novel of clear
cut aesthetic boundaries, with Emily moving from the pastoral/beautiful to the
sublime and back again, we miss the fact that Emily’s journey isn’t
about an adventure into the sublime; it’s a journey of discovery to
re-understand the sublime. The natural world, and particularly the sublime, is
shown to be a form of divine self-revelation, leading Emily to contemplate the
deity. Thus, her journey is one in which she engages with a multitude of often
aesthetically mixed landscapes, and learns to understand the multiplicity of
the sublime and the divine.
Montoni and Udolpho represent a ‘deformed’ version of that sublimity, its
terrifyingly similar opposite. Emily
(and the reader) must learn to discern the true sublime, reject its deformed
twin, quash her own tendency towards a deforming relish for terror itself and,
in the process, escape superstition and a wrong conception of the divine. She
must learn to rejoice as she trembles, put aside her earlier preference for
‘the mountain’s stupendous recesses’[xx]
at La Valleé and be refined by the journey towards a Dennisian balance of
reason, passion, and sentiment. She must confront terror and learn to differentiate
the ‘false’ (profane) from the ‘true’ (divine) sublime. Emily’s initial
position is one of excessive emotional receptivity and a preference for the
extreme emotional experiences of a Burkean sublime. This makes her susceptible
to superstition, to experiencing ‘more terrors, than her reason could justify,’[xxi]
and to being led into a Burkean theological error: a conception of a God of
wrath but not of comfort, of justice but not of providence, terrifyingly
powerful not powerfully loving, a God of despair.
 |
| (The Castle of Udolpho - Terror is in the eye of the beholder!) |
Emily must learn to find the divine (and thus experience sublimity) in both
‘the ordinary and the extraordinary of the natural world’ for God is ‘wonderful
in all his works.’[xxii]
She must find the many faces of God in the ‘beautiful’, the ‘picturesque’ and
in the sublimes of terror, admiration, joy, peace. She must encounter in the
face of nature not only the ‘Great Creator’[xxiii]
but also the ‘benevolent God’ who designed ‘innocent pleasures’ to be ‘the
sun-shine of our lives,’[xxiv]a
‘present God’[xxv]
and the ‘Being, who has protected and
comforted us in every danger.’[xxvi]
All of these last examples are spoken of by St. Aubert before his death, his
‘knowledge’ of them is personal and emotional and it will be the work of the
novel for Emily to know the same God. Her return to La Valleé does not
represent a return to her starting place. The new eyes with which she sees the
scene, eyes that view it in its entirety and avoid a concentration on any one
aesthetic aspect (especially the terror sublime), confirm the success of a long
and exhausting theological journey.
When we move away from the
Burkean sublime as the sublime, we
become open to the aesthetic possibilities of the sublime and the theological
implications of a literary (or even critical) emphasis on the terror sublime.
The next time you read some early British Gothic, be it Radcliffe, Lewis,
Godwin or Shelley, put down the Burke. Unless we accurately historicise the
usage of the sublime, we deform it and, needless to say, we deform its
theological implications with a blind-eyed and dismissive secularity. To read
Radcliffe, or most of her contemporaries, we must re-theologise a debate
inextricable from the theological in its contemporary manifestations. We must
commit to the dry practice of theo-aesthetics and, who knows, find its more
adventurous and illuminating than we imagined.
Holly Hirst is a PhD student at MMU researching the theology of the
Early British Gothic. She has a healthy love-hate relationship with gothic
theo-aesthetics but if she had one wish, it'd be to go back in time and
convince Radcliffe not to include quite so many trees. She is a passionate
advocate of the need to historically theologise our readings of the Gothic and
you should probably not get her started on any such topic. Catch her at a
variety of Gothic conferences or twitter stalk her @Holly_Hirst_MMU
[i]
See the Exeter University website for further details on the study http://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/research/healthresearch/cognitive-neurology/theeyesmind/
[ii]
See Rudolf Otto’s theory of the numinous in The
Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the
Divine and its Relation to the Rational, translated by John W. Harvey, 6th
Impression, (London: Oxford University Press, 1936)
[iii] Sir
Thomas Dick Lauder, ‘On the Origin of Taste’ in Sir Uvedale Price on the Picturesque with an Essay on the Origin of
Taste and Much Original Matter, edited by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bart.
(Edinburgh: Caldwell, Lloyd, and Co., 1842), pp. 1-59
[iv]
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful edited with
notes by Paul Guyer, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), p33
[v]
Burke, Enquiry, p60
[vi] John
Dennis, ‘The Grounds of Criticism in
Poetry’ in The Select Works of Mr. John
Dennis, in two volumes: consisting of plays, poems, &c, (London: John
Darby, 1721), p423
[vii]
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, Theory of the
Classification of Beauty and Deformity, (London: John and Arthur Arch,
1814)
[viii]
David Morris, ‘Gothic Sublimity,’ New Literary History, 16.2 (1985), pp. 299-319 and Geary, Robert, The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary
Change, (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992)
[ix]
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, (London,
G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795), vol.1, pp17-18
[x] Ibid., p118
[xi] Ibid., p234
[xii] See William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and
its Influence on Morals and Happiness, , (Philadelphia: Bioren and Madan,
1796) and also Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin), A Vindication of the Rights of Men, (London: J. Johnson, 1790)
[xiii]
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, Theory of the
Classification of Beauty and Deformity, (London: John and Arthur Arch,
1814)
[xiv]
Andrew Kippis, Sermons on Practical
Subjects, (London: G. G. J. Robinson, 1791), p248
[xv] Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, p423. John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, (London: R. Dodesly, 1747), p32
[xvi]
See Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, and on Sects and
Establishments’ in The Works of Anna
Laetitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aiken, Volume 1, (London: Longman
and Co, 1825), pp232-259
[xvii] Burke, Enquiry, p57
[xviii] Natasha Duquette Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic
Approach to Biblical Hermeneutics, (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications,
2016),, p20
[xix] Ibid., p63
[xx] Radcliffe, Mysteries, vol. 1, p5
[xxi] Ibid., p173
[xxii] Tamsworth Reresby, A Miscellany of Ingenious Thoughts and
Reflections, in Verse and Prose, (London: H. Meere, 1721), p27
[xxiii] Radcliffe, Mysteries, vol. 1, p96
[xxiv] Ibid., p54
[xxv] Ibid., p74
[xxvi] Ibid., p202