ABSTRACT
Masculine English Romanticism has long been associated with a love of nature, or more precisely, with the epistemological relationship of the perceiving mind to the object of perception. When the fully conscious poetic mind grasps a nature that is entirely unmediated by language—or wholly constructed by its own linguistic tropes—it experiences what the Romantic writers called “the sublime.” This concept of the sublime promoted by eighteenth-century theorists and the male Romantic poets, as well as by their myriad modern commentators, from Samuel Monk and Marjorie Hope Nicolson to Geoffrey Hartman and Thomas Weiskel, 1 is distinctly, if unwittingly, gendered. The sublime is associated with an experience of masculine empowerment; its contrasting term, the beautiful, is associated with an experience of feminine nurturance, love and sensuous relaxation. This gender differentiation was implicit in the most famous treatise on the sublime published in the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Grounding his aesthetic categories on a psychology of pain and pleasure, Burke identified the experience of the sublime with the idea of pain or the annihilation of the self, at a time when one also knows that one's life is not genuinely threatened. As Burke wrote:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant 86about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. 2
