The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness by Catherine Maxwell (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 963 Mather who firstchoose to represent the fallen Adam and Eve, humankind at its most shameful and degraded, as backward Asian and American Indians, but John Milton (ix. 1099-133). Zwierlein's inability or refusal to see the importance of this point epitomizes the degree to which her argument is a little too one-sided (pp. 99, 156). This having been said, it needs to be emphasized that Majestick Milton is a sub? stantial work. In the extraordinary range and detail with which it demonstrates the pervasive presence of Milton in the discourse of British imperialism, including his ability to arouse opposition to that discourse, the book is likely to prove influential. There is not a chapter that doesn't contain some surprisingly fresh and illuminating information?especially interesting, for instance, are the excellent chapters on the complex function of Milton in the abolition of the slave trade and on contemporary postcolonial writers' responses to Milton. In its ability to marshal, catalogue, and survey all kinds of material, the book sometimes seems to imitate the epics it so admires. Indeed, in the relentless way it pursues its master narrative, it sometimes seems impressively Miltonic, one might almost say imperial. University of Toronto Paul Stevens The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness. By Catherine Maxwell. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2001. viii + 279pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7190-5752-3. It was a standard insult in Victorian critical discourse to describe a writer's work as 'unmanly' at a time when, as Alfred Austin complained in 1870, 'we have, as novelists and poets, only women or men with womanly deficiencies, steeped in the feminine temper ofthe times' ('Mr Swinburne', in The Poetry of the Period (London: Bentley, 1870), 77-117 (p. 96)). Austin insists that the feminization of literature he so deplores is ineluctably a product of 'the times', and indeed recent commentators on Victorian writing have also sought historical explanations for the sexual politics of poetry and poetics, including Austin's own kind of critical misogyny, in the gender economy of nineteenth-century culture. The Romantic poets' anxious oscillations between contemptuous rejection and lordly appropriation of the feminine, and the Victorians' nostalgia for a time when poetry inhabited a masculine public sphere and seemingly neurotic obsession with the lack of virility displayed by modern art, have been the subject of some finehistoricist readings of nineteenth-century gender ideology. How? ever, in her provocative revisionist study Catherine Maxwell takes issue with this emphasis on cultural history, and instead locates the feminized post-Romantic male poet in an English poetic tradition that goes back to Milton and invokes a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus, and Sappho. What links these figures, she argues, is their attainment of poetic vision through symbolic blindness and castration, and their encounter with and embrace of the female sublime. The very term 'female sublime' challenges conventional associations of the aes? thetic category of the sublime with masculinity. Maxwell interrogates the familiar gendered distinction between the masculine sublime and the feminine beautiful, and moreover refuses to play down the disturbing effectsof the experience of the sublime on the male poet, who, she maintains, is threatened, violated, and emasculated by his art. Contendingthat some feminist critics have accepted too uncritically the received view of the male poet as patriarchally endorsed cultural authority, she proposes in? stead that 'To write and envision as a lyric poet is to give up masculine status, and, far from the penis being a metaphorical pen, it is its lack rather than its presence that is the sign of the visionary writer' (p. 6). Maxwell positions herself in a quite differentcritical tradition, aligning herself more closely with Camille Paglia's work 964 Reviews on feminization in male Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and giving a powerful feminist inflection to Harold Bloom's Oedipal theory of poetic descent in The Anxiety ofInfluence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). The differentstrands of this richly textured study are identified and interwoven in an introduction which, like the rest of the book, is learned, engagingly written, and persuasively argued. The theme of blindness and...