ABSTRACT
Contributing to the current conversation between feminism and formalism, this paper challenges the gendered assumptions that underlie the categorical distinction of the sublime and the beautiful. In order to masculinize the sublime, eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant attempted to bring the boundless power of “feminine” imagination under the ordering control of “masculine” reason while relegating femininity to the weaker category of the beautiful. Through a formalist close reading of Antony and Cleopatra, I demonstrate that Shakespeare reverses this gender polarity, as the Egyptian, excessive, feminine sublime triumphs aesthetically over the Roman, moderate, masculine beautiful. While emphasizing the power of the feminine, my reading shows how the poetics and politics of gender in Shakespeare transcend the corporeal limitations of the sexed body. In particular, I argue that the play’s image patterns privilege water as a feminine element whose power represents a transcorporeal flowing or spreading of Cleopatra’s own emotive, erotic, and political power. As her person “beggared all description,” she becomes associated with boundlessness, ineffability, and absence – all qualities conducive to sublimity. By mapping the categories of the sublime and the beautiful onto the gendered geographies of Egypt and Rome, this essay reveals the more positive valence that the play gives to the “feminine” form of formlessless, fluidity, and excess, which resists the order that masculine subjectivity would impose upon it through the descriptive specificity of the poetic blazon.
