Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime Canuel, Mark Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Canuel, Mark. Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.15129. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/15129 [ Access provided at 29 Sep 2021 18:58 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime This page intentionally left blank Justice, Dissent, M and the Sublime N Mark Canuel The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2012 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Canuel, Mark. Justice, dissent, and the sublime / Mark Canuel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4214-0587-2 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-0609-1 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-0587-3 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214- 0609-8 (electronic) 1. Aesthetics in literature. 2. English literature—18th century— History and criticism. 3. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Justice in literature. 5. Sublime, The, in literature. 6. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR448.A37C35 2012 820.9Ј007—dc23 2011047314 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 chapter 1 Beautiful People 14 chapter 2 Justice and the Romantic Sublime 40 chapter 3 The Reparative Impulse 63 chapter 4 Biopolitics and the Sublime 94 chapter 5 Aesthetics and Animal Theory 121 Notes 147 Index 171 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I am grateful for the questions and comments from several audiences who heard parts of this work as it unfolded—at meetings of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the Modern Language Association, at the English Department Colloquium at the University of Illinois at Chi- cago, at the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago, and at the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities. I want to add particular thanks to Jennifer Ashton, Lauren Berlant, Jessica Berman, John Bugg, Jim Chandler, Ralph Cintròn, Jenny Davidson, Lennard Davis, Stephen Engelmann, Andy Franta, Lisa Freeman, Linda Gregerson, Sharon Holland, Oren Izenberg, Justin Joyce, Anna Kornbluh, Kevin Lamb, Zach Lamm, Michael Lieb, Sandra Macpherson, Dwight McBride, Walter Mi- chaels, Davide Panagia, Larry Poston, Christina Pugh, Richard Sha, and Sarah Zimmerman. They commented on arguments, suggested reading, read chap- ters, or off ered encouragement as the book progressed. Thanks are also due to Matt McAdam, my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, for his early and continued support for the project, and to Colin Jager, the reader for the Press, who off ered extraordinarily detailed in- viii Acknowledgments sights on every chapter and helped to make this book better. Joanne Allen’s copyediting corrected many errors and infelicities in my writing. Rob Kauf- man gave the manuscript a complete reading that was both generous and rigorous, and I have only begun to think about some of his comments. Mary Beth Rose helped sharpen and expand arguments throughout the book; she also patiently listened to—and thoughtfully engaged—my arguments even in their earliest and sloppiest stages. Parts of chapters 1 and 2 were published in an earlier form as “Doing Jus- tice in Aesthetics,” Representations 95 (Summer 2006): 76–104. I dedicate this book to my many teachers from whom I continue to learn, including Lynda K. Bundtzen, Sharon Cameron, Jerome Christensen, Frances Ferguson, Jan Glitzenstein, Leo Grant, Larry Graver, Paul Holdengräber, Mary Poovey, Chris Pye, Willard Spiegelman, Karen Swann, and Betty Winograd. Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime This page intentionally left blank Introduction M begin with one of the most obvious features of Mary Shel- I ley’s celebrated novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Pro- metheus (1818, rev. 1831). The monster, we’re told over and over again, is ugly. Surely his creator, Victor Frankenstein, describes him in a way that wouldn’t exactly make him stand out in a lineup: he has yellow skin, stringy hair, wa- tery eyes, and thin lips.1 Still, as Victor reports (and others concur later), “no mortal could support the horror of that countenance,” and his bodily move- ment renders him “such a thing as even Dante could not have conceived” (51). The “deformity” of the monster’s “aspect” is “more hideous than belongs to humanity” (85); worse than a “mummy . endued with animation” (50), he’s a “wretch,” a “fi lthy daemon” (65), a “devil” (84). The absolute certainty that the monster is “hideous,” matched with the absolute vagueness about exactly what makes him so hideous, only magnifi es the importance of policing the boundaries around what proper humanity looks like. Perhaps it’s almost as obvious that this anxious insistence on the mon- ster’s ugliness underscores the degree to which Shelley’s celebrated novel is really also very much about beauty and about the function that beauty serves in forming human relationships. Hideous though he may be, the monster is 2 Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime supposed to have “beautiful” features, and thus his ugliness—what makes him appear an altogether diff erent “species” (46)—is a failure of resemblance to the whole from which his parts derive. The central characters in the novel attest to the numerous windfalls that accumulate from successful resem- blance and recognition. They continually report on being soothed into loving aff ection by one another’s beauty; “pretty” children are drawn to other pretty children (56); the monster’s recognition of his own deformity is all the more aff ecting when contrasted with the “lovely creatures” (97) he observes in the cottage of the DeLacey family and with the “beautiful creatures” in the Fran- kenstein family unit (121). It is only the blindness of old Mr. DeLacey that momentarily makes it possible for the monster to be included in their beauti- ful domestic space, from which he’s violently banished by the father’s lovely children and the “lovely stranger,” Safi e (99). In each of these cases, beauty functions as a description of persons but also, and more importantly, as a signal of their likeness to one another. Beauty is thus a description of persons and a motive for sympathy-generated social relations that create “mutual bonds” (103), exhibiting what Percy Shelley in his preface to the 1818 edition called “the amiableness of domestic aff ection” (5). A community of lovely beings, that is, enlarges to accept other lovely be- ings with an equally lovely symmetry. Critics such as Paul Youngquist have shrewdly noted this aspect of the novel’s normative aesthetics for quite some time. They have noted, that is, how the aesthetic of beauty creates exclusions that result in human society’s rejecting the monster.2 But it might even be said that the monster, once he understands that his horrifi c deformity makes him an outcast, to a certain degree only further underlines the exclusive as- pects of beauty. For when he asks Victor to create a mate for himself, the “hideous” creature asks for his features to be replicated symmetrically. The new creature will be like himself, thus “exciting the sympathy of some exist- ing thing” (124). There will be a kind of beauty in the replicated deformity; the attraction that creates communities is based on likeness. Throughout chapter 17 of the novel—in which the monster approaches Victor with the demand that his maker create a mate for him—Victor puzzles over the diffi culties that arise from the monster’s demands. Supposing the monster continues in his quest for “sympathy” with man once he has his mate, and supposing he is disappointed in that quest by meeting with “detestation,” wouldn’t a companion simply aid him in “the task of destruction” (124)? Vic- tor’s qualms trace out the logical implications of communities grounded in Introduction 3 sympathy. From his perspective, it seems that the only solution to the mon- ster’s dilemma would be a world in which similar individuals could be grouped but not mixed, so that that no one would either infl ict or suff er the pains of rejection. But negotiations with the monster don’t end here. Indeed, they take on an altogether diff erent character that emphasizes a diff erent aesthetic approach to other beings and also a diff erent moral-political perspective associated with that approach. The end of the chapter represents Victor’s reaction to sublime images in nature—the stars, the passing clouds, the dark pines (126). The scene inspires a sense of “wonderful solemnity” stirring Victor’s “strange thoughts” (126). In contrast to accounts of human beauty in the novel, the moment described here emphasizes an inward movement that delineates nothing other than Victor’s sense of estrangement itself, his separation from all those around him. (Curiously, that estrangement foreshadows his ultimate recognition that making a mate for the monster might simply induce the creatures to “hate each other” [140].) At the same time, however, that sense of sublime separation also ratifi es a new kind of connection.