Christine Ford

October 13, 2008

Pleasure and Pain in the Sublime

In reading past midterms on the sublime and its various aspects, I found that most students focused, very logically, upon the ties between sublime experiences and nature, as Aaron Morris observes in his essay: “While developing a comprehensive definition of the term may prove to be an arduous task, to say the least, we can develop an understanding of the beginning of the romantic period by noting the use of the sublime to describe the landscape of the wilderness in many pre-romantic works.” However, I noted another aspect of the sublime experience that was usually only briefly touched upon, one that is quite central to the whole concept: the combination of pleasure and pain in a sublime encounter. Edwards, Irving, and Hawthorne all make mention of this duality as their characters each undergo some sort of monumental sublime moment.

Jonathan Edwards’ “Personal Narrative” could be seen as one extended account of his sublime religious experiences. He repeatedly describes his walks in the fields and pastures and how in his meditations “there came into [his] mind a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that [he] knew not how to express” (172). Nature is clearly key to his moments of transcendence, as Mary Brooks notes in her midterm: “Edwards finds his sublime religious meaning from being alone in the vastness of nature and from encountering all the vast array of phenomena that nature has to hold.” Yet I differ from Brooks in her notion that Edwards finds  his religious meaning through nature alone. Edwards describes moments that are extremely emotional, almost otherworldly; while they do take place in nature and are sometimes a response to nature, they are even more a product of a mind and heart attuned to the metaphysical in everything. Ultimately, his sensitive spiritual nature leads him to a profound pleasure/pain response: “I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction: majesty and meekness joined together…an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness” (172) and again later, “And his blood and atonement has appeared sweet…which is always accompanied with an ardency of spirit, and inward strugglings and breathings, and groanings, that cannot be uttered, to be emptied of myself, and swallowed up in Christ” (178). Particularly in this second quote, we can see how the pleasure/pain sublime response leads to change, or at least a desire for change, in Edwards’ life. At least in the three accounts I examined, it appears impossible for a character to undergo a dramatic sublime experience without also undergoing some sort of change, either in their mental life or their physical life.

“Rip Van Winkle” finds its title character in a similar, albeit much less spiritual, situation. During a jaunt in the woods to escape his nagging wife, Rip encounters a very odd man and decides to follow him up the mountainside, despite his increasingly sublime sense that “there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe, and checked familiarity “ (460). When Rip meets the rest of the strange group, he reflects that they are “the most melancholy part of pleasure he had ever witnessed” and that when they actually look at him “his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together” (460). An originally pleasurable expedition with a curious stranger is now tinged with the pain of fear, and we all know the story ends with dramatic physical change for Rip as a result of this sublime experience. Had his strange journey been completely painful or completely enjoyable, it would not have been sublime—terrifying perhaps, or amusing, but not full of “awful sweetness,” to use Edwards’ phrase. Still, Rip and Edwards do not have the same kind of experiences; Rip’s sublime encounter is less one of personal spiritual magnitude than of falling victim to the whims of strange forces, yet both of them have similar emotional responses, showing us that the sublime can take many shapes but will elicit the same feelings.

Of the three stories I examined, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” gives the clearest picture of how pleasure and pain are necessary for a true sublime moment. It pits two groups against each other, the happy pagans of Merry Mount and the stern Puritans of the rest of New England, painting a picture of what happens when people live without balance. The people of Merry Mount are exactly as their name describes: “Sworn triflers of a life-time, they would not venture among the sober truths of life, not even to be truly blest” (618). All they are interested in is fun and thus they miss out on all the other facets of life. The Puritans are just as unbalanced, but in the other extreme: “Most dismal wretches, who said their prayers before daylight, and then wrought in the forest or the cornfield, til evening made it prayer time again…..Their festivals were fast-days, and their chief pastime the singing of psalms” (618-19). Neither of the groups is able to experience the sublime because they so limit themselves, refusing to get near anything that is outside their preferred mode of living.

Yet when these two groups crash together, newlyweds Edith and Edgar of Merry Mount find themselves aparty to the sublime: “There they stood, in the first hour of wedlock, while the idle pleasure, of which their companions were the emblems, had given place to the sternest cares of life, personified by the dark Puritans. But never had their youthful beauty seemed so pure and high, as when it was chastened by adversity” (621). The sublime elevates these two beyond the one-dimensional lives of the others into a moment that will sustain them the rest of their lives. They have to leave Merry Mount and join the Puritans, but they keep “all the purest and best of their early joys” as they “went heavenward, supporting each other along the difficult path it was their lot to tread” (622).  This is, to me, the most touching account of the sublime that we have, largely because it is a shared moment rather than a single person’s experience. Edwards and Rip have their sublime moments in very solitary places and ways, while Edith and Edgar find the sublime in the midst of a wedding ceremony and a Puritan conversion coup. Also, the change they experience is less a physical one, as with the years Rip misses in his life, or a spiritual one, as with Edwards’ pledges to life a better life, than one of the heart, as it carries them through a lifetime of hardship—that is a truly Romantic notion.