Charlotte Smith’s “The Sea View”: Reimagining Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful

Abstract

ABSTRACTDeeply engaged with Edmund Burke’s psycho-aesthetic categories of the Sublime and Beautiful, Charlotte Smith’s 1797 sonnet “The Sea View,” part of her ever-expanding series of Elegaic Sonnets, nonetheless subverts Burke’s (gendered) hierarchy by elevating the latter both as an artistic and moral power. Rebelling against Burkean strictures, Smith also reverses in this poem the traditional generic valuation of the heroic above the pastoral as she graphically condemns literary celebrations of warfare and, more crucially, the actual bloody battles currently raging between the English and French—on land and, most urgent for the text’s tragically shifting view, sea. Smith strongly rejects Burke’s patronizing attitude toward the (feminine) Beautiful, which her sonnet crowns a powerfully beneficent nature spirit presiding over a pastoral scene of mountain glory and coastal radiance. As the sonnet unfolds and a brutal naval battle violently supplants the octave’s peaceful vision, Burke’s lionized, masculine Sublime devolves into what I call the “Demonic Sublime,” whose Satanic force Smith establishes with brilliant—and, until my essay, unremarked—Miltonic allusions. An oft-anthologized and taught—yet critically neglected—text, this sonnet plunges, in heretofore undiscovered ways, into crucial Romantic-era debates on aesthetics, gender, and the French Revolution and its aftermath, whose cross-Channel warfare the poem fiercely decries as it establishes Smith herself as the central figure of the Romantic sonnet revival.