Jane Austen, Early Modern Aesthetics and Contemplative Sublimity

Abstract

This chapter considers Jane Austen’s construction of contemplative sublimity within her novels in the context of eighteenth-century culture and its early modern literary, religious, and philosophical roots. Aesthetic theorists are considered in the chapter as well as Mère Marie Angélique Arnauld, a French Cistercian abbess at Port Royal who influenced the development of discourse regarding the sublime through her connection to Nicolas Boileau. Austen’s conception of the contemplative sublime moves beyond the terror typical of the shrinking Burkean sublime. Her heroines’ paradoxically humbling and liberating experiences of sublimity draw them away from solipsism towards active love. For Catherine Morland, Elinor Dashwood, and Emma Woodhouse – in Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma, respectively – a bewilderment of the heroine’s reason, by an unexpected, happy, and sublime reversal, leads to wonder, love and marriage. For the quieter, pensive and more contemplative heroines of Mansfield Park and Persuasion, Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, an encounter with sublime grandeur precedes an increase in social consciousness. This prompts Fanny and Anne to care for the vulnerable, reflecting Austen’s Christian virtue ethics as an Anglican. Austen’s Anglicanism also informed her art critical response to Benjamin West’s painting “Christ Rejected”, consideration of which frames this chapter.