Beyond the Burkean Sublime

Any discussion of Gothic theology is incomplete without reference to its complicated deployment of aesthetic strategies. And any discussion of Gothic aesthetics inevitably turns to the sublime. In its Burkean iteration, sublimity's link to the Gothic is clear: both centre on an ‘indulgence in the pleasures of terror’ (Clery 1996, 165) and there is a shared concentration on extreme emotions. This connection between the Gothic and the sublime is emphasised by the fact that ‘illustrations of the sublime have provided something like a readers’ guide to the Gothic novel’ (Morris 1985, 300). For example, John Dennis’ list of catalysts of ‘enthusiastick’ (sublime) terror includes ‘gods, daemons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcraft, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine etc’ (1721, 460); it reads like a list of common Gothic tropes. However, neither the sublime or the Gothic exist ‘purely for the sake of evoking pleasant terror’ (Monk 1960, 90).

Criticism of the Gothic frequently concentrates almost exclusively on the Burkean ‘terror sublime’ as the Gothic's dominant aesthetic. Such an emphasis, however, ignores the centrality of other aesthetic modes (the beautiful, the picturesque) and relies on an inaccurate monolithic conception of the sublime. In 1809, Martin Shee despairingly writes of the sublime as ‘vague, irregular and undefined’, bemoaning the fact that ‘scarcely two writers are agreed as to its properties or powers’ (193). To engage with the Gothic sublime, we must confront this multiplicity of definitions and the ways in which the Gothic reflects and engages with them. The necessity of doing so is illustrated by Gothic writers’ diverse uses of the term ‘sublime’, as we see in the following three examples from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

First, the virtuous St Aubert, discourses on the ‘sublime pleasure’ of ‘thought and contemplation’ in ‘the taste they create for the beautiful and the grand’ (1795b, I, 17–8).