“Our feelings become impressed with the grandeur of Omnipotence”: Mary Somerville's Feminine Scientific Sublime

Abstract

Writing prominent scientific texts during the nineteenth century, Mary Somerville successfully blended literary style with empirical methods. Examining many of Somerville's popular scientific texts, including On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Physical Geography, and On Molecular and Microscopic Science, this article explores the multiple ways that Somerville employs and reimagines the traditional Romantic sublime in her writing. Somerville's use of the sublime reflects the historical changes regarding gender during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Ultimately, this essay argues that Somerville articulates a feminine scientific sublime located in the invisible and microscopic, which challenged the ego-centered discourse of the traditional sublime; however, Somerville's reimagining of the sublime steadily disappears from her writing as gender roles become more restrictive during the Victorian era, which excluded women from the public discourse on science. By revealing the sublime in the very small rather than the extremely large and invoking Romantic tropes regarding nature, Somerville questions male Romantic poets' construction of the sublime by proposing an empathetic rather than dominating response, reflecting an ecocritical representation of the sublime.