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(2016
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2016 #2b: Short Essay (Favorite Term) |
LITR 4328 |
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Kimberly Hall
The Sublime: A Study in Emotional Contrast
“She
lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light
that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo
seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and
worshipful.”
– The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
Whenever any mention of the sublime comes up in class or study, this is
the scene my brain automatically jumps to. The sublime, as I knew it before
studying literature, is an image or scene that is depicted as simultaneously
beautiful and terrifying. While I had not known the term as a child, I
recognized the feelings it gave and loved it for its vividness. Due to its grand
scale I most heavily associated it with fantasy and science fiction, but when
Romanticism entered my life, I realized that the sublime was not just asking me
to feel on a grand scale–it was asking me to move out of any comfort zones and
take in the most pleasurable and terrifying scopes of human emotion at the same
time.
In Romantic text, the sublime is primarily an image provoking extreme,
seemingly contradictory feelings. The most mundane, yet poignant, example I
found in our texts was from Maria Susanna Cummins’
The Lamplighter: “How much she came
to love that kitten no words can tell...So she poured out such wealth of love on
the poor kitten as only such a desolate little heart has to spare.” The sublime
here takes the form of the stark contrast of this child’s emotions–both
consuming despair and consuming love. The intensity of these simultaneous
feelings turns something rather mundane, like a child’s love for a kitten, into
something almost transcendental, which is characteristic of the sublime.
A grander, but just as poignant, example of the sublime is found in Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s Nature. Emerson, a
Transcendentalist, states, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight
under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special
good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of
fear.” This is a standard depiction of the sublime, happiness so intense that it
borders on fear. In conjunction with unnerving images, such as shedding snake
skin and transparent eye balls and beautiful corpses, Emerson uses the sublime
to describe how he feels all people should experience nature.
If Transcendentalism depicts the sublime as beautiful to the point of
terrifying, then gothic Romanticism would depict it as terrifying to the point
of beautiful. Edgar Allan Poe’s work is rife with the sublime, specifically in
combining images of death with those of beauty–he even wrote that “the death
then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the
world”. Poe uses this contrast in Ligeia,
wherein the titular character’s struggle with death is described as, well,
indescribable. Poe writes, “Words are too impotent to convey just any idea of
the fierceness with which she wrestled with the Shadow”; the intensity of the
contrasting elements here, impending death and the desire for life, is evident
in that the narrator cannot accurately describe them. Poe’s descriptions of
Ligeia herself are also full of superlatives and beautiful language, even as she
is dying (“skin rivalling the purest ivory”, “wild eyes blazed with a too-too
glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became the transparent waxen hue of the
grave”). This coinciding appearance of death and overwhelming beauty is a common
form of the sublime, and exists even in modern gothic Romantic works–such as the
variety of murder tableaus in the cancelled-too-soon NBC series
Hannibal. The emotional result for
the audience is decidedly discomforting, with our modern sensibilities about
death pushing us away but the sense of beauty at the same time drawing us in.
As a child, I only knew of the sublime as something fantastical,
something larger than life. In studying the works of Romanticism though, I have
realized that the sublime exists as a means to bring things together that seem
to contradict each other. An angry child can love a kitten more than life; the
beauty of nature can bring simultaneous joy and terror; a woman dying as the
most beautiful experience in the world. The elements of the sublime do not have
to be larger than life–they simply have to evoke those contrasting extremities
of human emotion.
