Edmund Burke was one of the most influential aesthetic theorists of the eighteenth century. His aesthetic theory has its philosophical basis in Lockean empiricism and the newly-burgeoned sciences of physiology and anatomy. Revising Addison’s trinity of the “great,” “uncommon,” and “beautiful” into the binary
opposition of the sublime and the beautiful, he also elaborates Addison’s natural appreciation to the full.30 Burke locates the origin of the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful in the “leading passions” of “self-preservation” and “society” (A
Philosophical Enquiry 35, 37). The sublime arouses fear and pain, with the implication of a danger of death (though distance is to be maintained to ensure the delight of the viewer), while the beautiful causes feelings of attraction and love. The instinct of “self-preservation” concerns not just the preservation of one’s life, but “the
29 The sublime is a time-honored aesthetic category that has early caught the attention of literary theorists since ancient Greece and has proliferated with accumulated meanings alongside heated debates. Its theory is founded in Cassius Longinus’ On the Sublime, in which this Greek critic summarizes the ancient rhetoric tradition from Aristotle to Quintilian. Longinus’ influence is long-standing, in that the system of rules he sets up incorporates what Roman Jakobson terms the communication chain of “addresser---text---addressee,” in this way he maps out all possible directions for later theorists to develop: the focus on the text (literary technique) prefigures the idea of the
“rhetorical sublime” in Neo-Classicism; the innate power of the poet (addresser) evolves into both the
“natural sublime” (Nature as the first addresser to the poet-addressee) and Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime.” Besides, the philosophical development of empiricism and idealism gives birth to two aesthetic discourses, on the “empirical sublime” and the “idealist sublime” (Trott 78), typified respectively in the theories of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.
30 Joseph Addison, an important figure in the history of the sublime in the Neoclassicist Period, differentiates to posit a tripartite aesthetic category of “great,” “uncommon,” and “beautiful,” which prefigures the dichotomy of the sublime/beautiful in both Burke and Kant. The importance of Addison is that instead of having a literary text as the only reference for his aesthetic theory, he also included natural scenery as a frame of reference. This change of attitude towards natural scenery, mountains especially, marks the turn from the rhetorical sublime to the natural sublime.
multiplication of the species”; the passion of “society” designates not just the
relationship between men and other men, but most important of all, the “society of the sexes” (37). The two “leading passions” of “self-preservation” and “society of the sexes” posit the importance of the human body as a subject of aesthetic appreciation, whose limitations and extensions are determined by the aesthetic basis: every “body”
is doomed to decline and decay, and the generation of another “body” through sexual relation is one way human beings see the extension of their lives. The two sides of
“body,” the body limited by death and the sexual body leading to life, “the multiplication of the species,” are the ontology of the sublime and the beautiful.
With his emphasis on the function of body, Burke lays the ground for a secular exposition of the aesthetic.
As Burke starts to define the traits of the beautiful, the body that is imbued with a sexual connotation gradually obtains a gendered identity. He objects to the contemporary theory of the beautiful that relates beauty either to the faculty of understanding or that sees it as possessing some kind of metaphysical undertone, designating that the elements of beauty can be found in the object itself before further meditation:
By beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it. I confine this definition to the merely sensible qualities of things, for the sake of preserving the utmost simplicity in a subject which must always distract us, whenever we take in those various causes of sympathy which attach us to any persons or things from secondary considerations, and not from the direct force which they have merely on being viewed. (83; my italics)
His objection to “proportion” (93) and “fitness” (95) as sufficient causes of beauty, two theories of beauty represented respectively by Francis Hutcheson in An Inquiry
into the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue and David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature, shifts the critical focus from abstract idealization and utilitarian interest to empirical observation of “those qualities in bodies by which they cause love.” That is to say, the aesthetic experience is from the very beginning a relation between two bodies, one observing and the other observed. However, the position of the viewing/viewed bodies are rather fixed rather than exchangeable, in that the observed is presupposed to be possessed of feminine traits as crystallized in the female body. According to Burke, qualities of the beautiful include “smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, and delicacy” (102-105). These traits can be found in material nature, such as “smooth streams in the landscape,” “delicate myrtle” (104, 105) as well as the female body. The fact that the female body arouses not only a feeling of “love” as other beautiful sceneries the but also satisfies the human need of
“the multiplication of the species” reveals the primacy of the female body in the category of the beautiful. All these traits of the beautiful combine to form an ideal image of the female body:
Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. (105)
The “gendered vocabulary of its social evaluations (the praise of women’s ‘delicacy’
and ‘innocence’; the stigma of a woman’s being called ‘masculine’)” (Wolfson 388) betrays the ideology of a male-dominated society: the male is the observer, the yardstick of the standard of beauty of the female body. While man is capable of objective reasoning, the female is a passive character, one to be viewed because women were not born animals of reason. Woman’s body is disciplined through an
aesthetic discourse tainted with male power: the shape of the ideal female that would invite man’s “love” and his willingness to have a relationship with her in order to make possible “the multiplication of the species.” The fact that “[h]undreds of upper- and middle-class women in England in the Romantic era aspired to become the languorous, melting beauty that Burke envisioned” (Mellor 109) testifies to the power of aesthetic discourse to shape the female body. It is therefore understandable that in Burke’s aesthetic theory the subject of aesthetic appreciation is presupposed to be the male, as testified by the sexual object being woman, the main focus of “society” that produces next generation. The demand for the ideal beauty of women is not limited to the outer shape, but also extends to the quality of mind: the ideal beauty reveals in an image of “weakness…enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it” (106). Women were said to have a weak mind and an indulgent sensibility, or bodily sensation, while men were more animals of reason.
This gendered mind/body distinction is further consolidated in the category of the sublime. While in the beautiful a clear image of the female body is presented together with nature, in the sublime the human body is absent from any reference to the idea of the sublime. According to Burke, there are two sources that arouse the feeling of terror: one is visible― vast, great, and rugged objects, such as high mountains, buildings, the vast ocean; the other is invisible― a dark, mysterious, and solitary atmosphere. The vast ocean, according to Burke, is more capable of
arousing the idea of the sublime than a level plain, because the ocean is unknown and unpredictable. As exemplified in the high mountains, the pleasure deriving from the sublime is not so much the possible danger that causes pain in the body (since this danger must be distant) but the elevation of mind through observing their infinite
power over man.31 High mountains and the vast ocean, in contrast to smooth streams and rivers, are more likely to arouse the feeling of the infinite. The
symbolic power of the sublime in nature is what a man endeavors to attain instead of a woman. In this sense, the pleasure from the sublime is not so much the pure
appreciation of natural scenery but the confidence in masculine reason, which is best described by Kant.32