Nature "so akin to pleasure and pain" : abjection and sublimity in Wollstonecraft's Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Date
1997
Authors
Harper, Heather Megan
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Abstract
I suggest that Wollstonecraft's sublime landscape aesthetic in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is a response to woman's historical position at the boundary between nature and culture. Creating a dialectic between Julia Kr isteva's psychoanalytic analysis of cross-cultural abjections of the "feminine" in Powers of Horror and Wollstonecraft's ambivalent response to popular metaphors of nature as sensual, maternal or threatening "femininity", I will argue that Wollstonecraft's sublime transcendence symbolizes or translates this abjected body of woman/nature. Chapter one suggests that the visibility of the feminine (excessive or resplendent) in Wollstonecraft's travel narrative explains tensions in her account of woman's self-governance. Chapter two examines this "translation" in the context of the Romantic (egotistical) sublime, an encounter which ultimately insists on Wollstonecraft's own position both inside and outside of culture.