"I Will Be Myself": Finding the Feminine Sublime in Jane Eyre

Abstract

 The “sublime” is an aesthetic characterized by powerful, dramatic scenery, colossal objects, and extremes of natural phenomena. The concept of the sublime originated with Longinus, a Greek writer in the 1st or 3rd century A.D., who wrote, On the Sublime. Put simply, the sublime was a quality of expression that aroused emotion in the reader or listener. It gives speech an invincible power; it leads the listeners not to persuasion, but to ecstasy. For European artists and philosophers in the 18th- and 19th- centuries, the sublime often existed in landscape but could also be embodied in a person. Edmund Burke, the first English author and philosopher to write extensively on the sublime, asserted in his 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, that encounters with the sublime move the imagination to awe, pleasure, horror and terror. The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth portrayed the sublime in Nature as producing awe and wonder. In fact, it is through encounters with nature that one’s spirit is able to grasp the sublime. This idea is consistent with the Romantic philosophy that nature is a manifestation of the divine, and the sublime in nature reflects God’s grandeur, omnipotence, and omnipresence.