The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime." "Freeman has subtly analyzed the gendered drama implicit in several classic theories of the sublime written by men, and then brilliantly paired each theoretical text with a novel written by a woman, a novel in which that theory, and that gendered drama, is enacted, exceeded, and critiqued. This is feminist literary theory at its best." Barbara E. Johnson, author of The Wake of Deconstruction "An outstanding book. . . . Freeman's work is the first to link [the theme of empowerment] to the literary critique of the sublime, making possible the 'addition' of women to the list of English and American Romantic writers where they have been puzzlingly invisible." Diane W. Middlebrook, author of Anne Sexton "Barbara Claire Freeman radically unmans the discourse of the sublime. She makes explicit the gendered, gendering, and degendered aspects of the traditional discussions of sublimity. The results of her inversive readings are exhilarating new readings of texts that had been threatened by banalization from simplistic ideological misuse. A brilliant work!" Hayden White, author of The Content of the Form "Freeman has subtly analyzed the gendered drama implicit in several classic theories of the sublime written by men, and then brilliantly paired each theoretical text with a novel written by a woman, a novel in which that theory, and that gendered drama, is enacted, exceeded, and critiqued. This is feminist literary theory at its best."―Barbara E. Johnson, author of The Wake of Deconstruction "An outstanding book. . . . Freeman's work is the first to link [the theme of empowerment] to the literary critique of the sublime, making possible the 'addition' of women to the list of English and American Romantic writers where they have been puzzlingly invisible."―Diane W. Middlebrook, author of Anne Sexton "Barbara Claire Freeman radically unmans the discourse of the sublime. She makes explicit the gendered, gendering, and degendered aspects of the traditional discussions of sublimity. The results of her inversive readings are exhilarating―new readings of texts that had been threatened by banalization from simplistic ideological misuse. A brilliant work!"―Hayden White, author of The Content of the Form Barbara Claire Freeman is Associate Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction By Barbara Claire Freeman University of California Press Copyright © 1997 Barbara Claire Freeman All right reserved. ISBN: 0520208889 Introduction The Feminine Sublime If we had a keen vision and a feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. (George Eliot, Middlemarch ) The Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. . . . A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. (Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera ) She listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children were in their baths; there was on