Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
and political rights. Of course, the emerging situation could be represented as one
of their acquisition of a new dominion of absolute power, within the family, but
Rousseau’s prescription reveals the basic system of power relations:
The woman ought to have sole command within the home, and it is
even indecent for her husband to know what’s going on there. But in
turn she ought to limit herself to domestic governance, not meddling
with anything outside it, and shut up in her home; mistress of everything
around her she ought always to submit her person to the absolute
law of her husband. 49
Nature reconstituted as the domestic sphere called for enclosure.
Formulations like Rousseau’s testify that the transformation of gender relations
did not happen without resistance on the part of women. From the seventeenth
century on we find women “telling off priests and pastors, being central actors in
grain and bread riots in town and country, and participating in tax revolts and
other rural disturbances.” 50 Given the role of the patriarchal family as model for
the social order as a whole (visible, to take two examples, in the conception of the
king as “father of his country” and in the very name of the new science of “political
oeconomy”) it is not surprising that “the relation of the wife—of the
potentially disorderly woman—to her husband was especially useful for expressing
the relation of all subordinates to their superiors.” 51 The male–female
relationship could, that is, be used to figure both the hierarchical order required
for social health, and the threat to or actual disruption of that order. We cannot
be surprised when we discover this relationship reappearing, on a more abstract
level of representation, in the use in political discourse of the aesthetic categories
of the beautiful and sublime.
Aesthetics and politics
Burke emphasizes the connection between aesthetic and political categories in
the Philosophical Enquiry itself, listing as exemplars of the sublime not just stern
fatherhood but “those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions
of men, and principally on the passion of fear,” who “keep their chief as much as
may be from the public eye,” thus creating the effect of obscurity basic to the
49 J.-J. Rousseau, “Fragments pour Emile,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard [Pleïade],
1969), p. 872. For a detailed study of the redefinition of social and economic gender roles in
England around 1800, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women
of the English Middle Class, 1781–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987).
50 Davis, “Women on top,” p. 126.
51 Ibid., p. 127. During the same period—and well into the nineteenth century—we also find male
rioters and resisters to oppression dressing as women or taking women’s names.
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