The Gothic Sublime (review)

164 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 will allow, showing that Wollstonecraft attains her uniquely strong persona by her belief that her sentiments, "her anger, her melancholy, or her idyllic hope ... legitimate her message" (p. 129). In the later works, especially in Letters in Sweden, "Wollstonecraft liberates sensibility from the inherited fictions that constrain it in her earlier writings— its otherworidliness and passivity; its proclivity to silence, illness, and death; its suspected associations with male tyranny—and then remythologizes it as the parent of imagination and the wellspring of true civilization" (p. 145). Many critics have argued a simpler trajectory—that Wollstonecraft simply repudiated her defence of sensibility and then re-found it, or even that Wollstonecraft was simply a confused thinker. Wollstonecraft's recent biographers have stressed the early psychological damage she suffered when she threw her body between her battling parents. Because Conger must concentrate on extremely close verbal analysis, she has cleared away all the debris of psychological interpretation. As a result, the Wollstonecraft she depicts is to some degree bloodless. Although it is probably true that Wollstonecraft consistently resisted the eroticized, masculinized "culture of sensibility" discussed by GJ. Barker-Benfield in his book ofthat name, her sensual side is never far to seek. Conger's disembodied Wollstonecraft is not really a complete Wollstonecraft. Still, the complexities of Wollstonecraft's mind are such that it is perhaps unfair to ask one writer and one book to contain them all. Given the diversities of "sensibility," the twentieth-century reader might want to damn all their houses, as in the satiric ditty from Mother Goose: "Dear Sensibility, O la! / I heard a little lamb cry, baa!" But we cannot really escape; the very existence of the Mother Goose poem emphasizes the pervasiveness of sensibility in eighteenth-century life. Conger, by way of Wollstonecraft, reveals how invasively sensibility's urgings and denials permeated many—perhaps most—educated eighteenth-century minds. No matter what rational theories a woman might purvey, these were metaphors and myths that continued to govern the common decisions of daily life. Conger has endeavoured to avoid the simple dichotomies eighteenth-century writers so often imposed on themselves— sense and sensibility, reason and passion—breaking these imposed patterns to achieve the fuller spectrum. In so doing she has provided us with a closer view of Wollstonecraft's struggle with issues that defy rigid bifurcation, re-establishing that struggle in all its daily intricacy. Janice Farrar Thaddeus Harvard University Vijay Mishra. The Gothic Sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. ? + 342pp. US$19.95. ISBN 0-7914-1748-4. Under the entry for the "Sublime" in the index to this book we find: "See also American sublime; Apocalyptic sublime; Arctic sublime; Female sublime; Genealogical sublime; Genetic sublime; Gothic sublime; Historical sublime; Indian sublime; Masculine sublime; Melancholy sublime; Natural sublime; Nuclear sublime; Oceanic sublime; Palaeographic sublime; Political sublime; Romantic sublime; Sexual sublime; Technological sublime; and Textual sublime." One of the many contradictions in Vijay Mishra's study is the way this seemingly endless proliferation of sublimes is also a collection of neat subdivisions . The book is simultaneously organic and mechanistic; it frequently articulates the REVIEWS 165 unsayableness of Gothic; it is eager to categorize its various denials of categorization; it aims to delimit and master a field that it declares is about the denial of limits and master narratives; and sometimes the reader is unclear whether the author is playing witty conceptual games or is simply not in control of his metaphors: "This ambiguous network may be deemed one of the underlying substrata of the Gothic. It is a pattern, or a core, that is forever transformed into texts, through a kind of a freeplay of the kernel . In the process the Gothic becomes a writerly text made up of a heterogeneous series that cannot be reduced to one text, to one master narrative. At the 'head' of this series stands Walpole's 77ie Castle ofOtranto, the founding text of the Gothic precursor" (p. 142). Mishra repeatedly gives us intertexts, founding texts, source texts, proof texts, and yet the Gothic is a single text, "one discontinuous text with ever-increasing levels of self-reflexivity" (p. 235). It would seem...