Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

world will be long in freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops
the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished. 66
Where, then, are heroes to be found? In her basic reversal, Wollstonecraft calls
on women to exemplify the sublimity absent from patriarchal society. “It is time
to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost dignity—and
make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming
themselves to reform the world.” 67 The overthrow at once of the divine right of
husbands and the divine right of kings will abolish a corrupt social order, in
which “wealth and female softness equally tend to debase mankind.” 68 Beauty
may be, as Burke proclaimed, the virtue of subordinates, but if the great end of
human beings is “to unfold their own faculties, and acquire the dignity of conscious
virtue,” 69 then the beautiful must be recognized as itself an image of
deformed nature, whose true shape is visible only in the sublime.
Sublimity for Wollstonecraft remains a masculine attribute, although one that
men themselves have lost. Taken up by women, it is desexualized, and her ideal
woman seems to be a widowed mother. The embodiment of republican virtue in
a world without men,
she subdues every wayward passion to fulfill the double duty of being
the father as well as the mother of her children. Raised to heroism by
misfortunes, she represses the first faint dawning of a natural inclination,
before it ripens into love, and in the bloom of life forgets her sex. 70
The categories are strained to the breaking point in the effort to figure a radical
alteration of society.
Given the aesthetic character of these categories, it is no wonder that Wollstonecraft
steps with ease from a critical analysis of Rousseau’s fantasy of family
life in Emile to a critique of “Milton’s pleasing picture of paradisaical happiness.”
The picture of Adam and Eve in Paradise evoked by Milton’s verse is indeed a
beautiful one; “yet, instead of envying the lovely pair, I have with conscious dignity
or satanic pride turned to hell for sublimer objects.” Similarly, “when
viewing some noble monument of human art,” her mind looked for “the grandest
of all human sights; for fancy quickly placed in some solitary recess an
outcast of human fortune, rising superior to passion and discontent.” 71 She must
be thinking here of an image like Reynolds’s Count Hugolino, exhibited in 1773,
when it attracted much interest, and published as a mezzotint the following
66 Ibid., pp. 131–2.
67 Ibid., p. 132.
68 Ibid., p. 140.
69 Ibid., p. 109.
70 Ibid., p. 138.
71 Ibid., p. 108 n.
BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
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