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(2018
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2018 #2b: Short Essay (Term) (Index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Curtis Crunk
A Short Look at the Sublime
As you will come to see in the rest of
my midterm, I am quite the fan of the sublime. This is by no means simply
because of its combination of the beautiful natural world and the terror of said
realm, but because of its more subtle interpretations that are only faintly
discussed further than at a surface level. For this short essay, the term
sublime will be defined further and elaborated upon in order to see the sublime
in more than just the broad sense. By looking at
Rip Van Winkle, the nature of the
sublime should become much more complex than it appears to be while also adding
more to the dialogue over the sublime.
Generally speaking, the sublime refers
to beauty and horror intermixed on a grand scale. In
Rip Van Winkle, this can be seen as
Rip paints us the image of the landscape, saying that “The rocks presented a
high impenetrable wall over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of
feathery foam, and fell into a broad deep basin, black from the shadows of the
surrounding forest” (25). The notion that the rocky formation acts as a wall
that is meant to protect you from the foreboding, torrential grasp of the forest
offers us the easiest example of the sublime in action; the juxtaposition of the
two natural structures creates a sense of beauty and dread atypical of the
gothic but also works in tandem to create a sublime moment. To be more specific,
the “broad deep basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest” is the
most poignant example of the sublime because of its mixture of beautiful imagery
of mysterious, and possibly dangerous, shadowed basin that defines Rip’s
comprehension at the time of his travel. In essence, the sublime most easily
encapsulates the beautiful and dangerous realms of nature as seen in this
passage from Rip Van Winkle.
One of the other key elements of
Rip Van Winkle is the passage of time and its effect on the world. In the
story, Rip notices that “There was a wooden tombstone in the church-yard that
used to tell all about him, but that’s rotten and gone too” (36), which at first
appears to lend more to the gothic tradition than it does to the concept of the
sublime. However, consider for a moment that time as force of nature is
something of a beautifully terrifying mechanism in our world that we are not
able to fully comprehend due to its subjective nature as well as its blatant
disregard for every possible system we have come to know in science. If we can
agree that time is not only amazing but also quite threatening because of its
disregard for everything and overwhelming in regards to true comprehension of
its inner workings, than time can be viewed as sublime in regards to
Rip Van Winkle; everything falls to
time and nothing escapes the magnificent and foreboding power only time holds as
seen in the quote. To summarize, time is one of the most sublime elements of
Rip Van Winkle because time itself is
naturally awe-inspiring and dangerous in its own right.
The sublime is one of the more
fascinating components of Romantic era literature. This is not because the
gothic is not as interesting, but because the sublime can be seen even at a
micro level and requires more attention to detail. While connected in some ways,
the sublime deals less with the macabre and more with the amazing force that is
nature as seen in the texts for this class. There is nothing more terrifying
than nature itself, for it does not care for us and we are all slaves to its
will and its grandeur, and that even the most beautiful things in our world can
hold something dangerous and terrifying beneath the surface like a murky, lily
pad filled lake hides its secrets beneath the surface.
