Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
In this picture of the revolutionary mob we can recognize the traditional association
of the female—and in particular the woman of the lower classes—with
the danger of social disorder. Here this reaches its ultimate point, an attack on
the king himself, the paternal keystone of political order. The violation of the
queen, embodiment of beauty, is equally terrible, not only in itself but because it
mirrors the refusal by the women of the mob to accept their place in the social
cosmos. They inspire Burke with horror by their negation of womanly beauty,
but this horror is not one that can lead to delight and the sublime. These women
are by social nature ugly—“swinish” and “vile.” 61 Their action spells the abolition
of the social differentiation both exemplified and symbolized by the male
privilege implicated in the category system of sublime and beautiful.
We might call this radical undermining of the aesthetic system the Female
Sublime or—from the dominant point of view—the Bad Sublime. The whole
cast of aesthetic characters can be seen at play in Mozart’s Magic Flute of 1791.
Sarastro, of course, incarnates the sublime: mysterious, deep-voiced, his is the
fatherly power whose victory over rebellious femininity the opera celebrates as
the triumph of the light of reason over darkness. The Queen of the Night, risen
against him, seeks to seduce the young Tamino with her daughter’s beauty, as an
ally against her husband. Inevitably, social harmony (modeled by that of music)
is reestablished: under Sarastro’s dominion, Tamino and Pamina take their
places as domestic master and wife, while the queen (with her black ally) is
“demolished, extinguished, defeated.” 62 But Mozart’s genius—concretely, his
responsiveness to the needs of opera and the demands of singers—makes him
give her the great, wild “revenge” aria, in which she achieves true sublimity, if
only as prelude to her end.
In a radical woman’s treatment of the female sublime the inherent conflict of
categories becomes more interestingly apparent: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (1792) is an explicit attempt “to convince the world that
the poisoned source of female vices and follies,” as well as of women’s oppression
by men, “has been the sensual homage paid to beauty.” She contrasts “beauty of
features” or “a pretty woman, as an object of desire” with “a fine woman, who
inspires more sublime emotions by displaying intellectual beauty.” The juncture
of aesthetics and politics is as clear here as in the writings of her great antagonist,
Burke. Wollstonecraft’s enemies are “tyrants of every denomination, from
the weak king to the weak father of a family;” she wishes to move “the civilized
women of the present century” who, “with a few exceptions, are only anxious to
61 Burke complains that the mob’s action expresses a scheme of things in which “a king is but a
man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest
order” (Reflections, p. 67)—that is, queen and woman of the “swinish multitude” are equalized.
62 “Zerschmettert, zernichtet ist unsere Macht,/ Wir alle gesturzet in ewige Nacht.”
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