Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Awakening 5This chapter’s exploration of significant misreadings in the historyof the sublime, along with the role and place of gender in producingthat history, will let us look at ways in which the sublime might bewritten otherwise, were that dimension not repressed. Kate Chopin’snovel The Awakening amplifies and elucidates precisely those elementsof the sublime that Sappho foregrounds and Longinus obscures. TheAwakening, which stands at the dawn of twentieth-century Americanwomen’s fiction and brings forward some of its basic preoccupationsand themes, also suggests a particular version of the feminine sublime,here understood not as a transhistorical or universal category, butrather as the attempt to articulate the subject’s confrontation withexcess in a mode that does not lead solely to its recuperation. At stakein Chopin’s novel is the very “transport” (ekstasis) Sappho inscribes, a“going close to death” that marks the limits of the representable. Herethe sublime is no longer a rhetorical mode or style of writing, but anencounter with the other in which the self, simultaneously disabledand empowered, testifies to what exceeds it. At issue is not only theattempt to represent excess, which by definition breaks totality andcannot be bound, but the desire for excess itself; not just the descriptionof, but the wish for, sublimity.IAs Chopin remarks, “The beginning of things, of a world especially, isnecessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.” 6 Webegin with a discussion of Longinus not only because, as the authorof the first treatise on the sublime, he defines the set of problems thatwill coalesce under this name, but because his treatment of Sapphois paradigmatic of the kinds of disturbances that are at the very heartof the sublime’s theorization. In order to grasp the significance of hisresponse to Sappho, however, we need to understand Longinus’ viewof sublimity, the better to ask in what ways Sappho’s lyric both exemplifiesand undercuts it.First and foremost, the sublime is a certain kind of linguisticevent, a mode of discourse that breaks down the differences andinvolves a merger between speaker (or writer) and hearer (or reader).“Sublimity,” according to Longinus, “is a kind of eminence or excellenceof discourse” (1.3). It is not an essential property of language butrather makes itself known by the effect it produces, and that effect is