Creaturely Shifts: contemporary animal crossings through the alluring trace of the Romantic sublime

Abstract

This paper considers the transformative use of the sublime aesthetic in two contemporary Gothic novels, Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969) and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). My exploration begins with the Romantic sublime, defined here as a mode of perception created through art that is concerned with the awe-inspiring, the frightening and the ineffable. Sublime metamorphosis extends the Romantic sublime alongside the more fragmentary postmodern sublime through posthumanism. Sublime metamorphoses occur in these two speculative novels when their protagonists pause in the moment of sublime arrest in response to nonhuman others. Such moments create new embodied potentialities that may reshape human/nonhuman relations. When Carter’s central protagonist Marianne considers her position in moments of terror, she improves her marginalised status. She pushes through the boundaries of her species and the limitations of an injured world of mutation and brutality, evolving, in the end, to Tiger Lady. In Wood’s novel, the entrapped Yolanda shifts from prey to predator to a new kind of self-determination that frees her from her human confinement. Yolanda’s friend Verla follows with her own radical transmutation. In these novels sublime metamorphosis resists ideas of human exceptionality and troubles typologies that separate humans from other creatures. This approach may be of interest to creative writers concerned with more generative relations with the world’s nonhuman creatures. My own creative efforts are learning from such work.