ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens and the sublime, perhaps, but the Hegelian sublime? And why deformed children? Particularly since this paper most concerns a Dickensian child who is not in fact deformed, Jo in Bleak House (1852-53). Surely a certain distortion is going on. That distortion, though, is not in my argument but in its subject: the common ground between deformed children and the sublime is, in the first instance, precisely physical distortion. In both Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, the sublime arises from an inadequacy in the appearance of an art object or an aspect of nature to represent its significance, a significance with a moral or theological tinge. The sublime object is able to manage that reference to a moral or theological significance (one that contrasts, at least in Kant, with the morally neutral quality of the beautiful) only because the significance itself inadequately corresponds to the ultimate essence of which it is a concept. Thus the sublime object refers to its signified as a result of its inadequacy as a signifier. And the sublime signified acts as a moral or theological concept precisely because of its inadequacy in comparison to the essence it conceptualizes.1 Con sequently, the sublime inheres both in the significance inadequately embodied and in the very inadequacy itself, which communicates the superiority of both signified and ultimate essence to all physicality.
