Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime (review)

Ann C. Colley's Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime examines the aesthetic dimensions of Victorians in the mountains in thematically linked essays. Apart from a brief coda on the Himalayas, the focus is exclusively on British visitors to Switzerland and the Alps. Colley modifies the argument foreshadowed in the subtitle: the sublime was "sinking" or becoming a hackneyed cliché in the Alps, but it persisted in the Himalayas and served to limit imperial self-congratulation.

Wide reading in the literature, diaries, and letters associated with Victorian tourism and mountaineering informs the essays of part one. Colley suggests that satires of Swiss tourism from the 1850s onward influenced realist novels with a "sublime of the ordinary" (55). A compelling chapter on "Spectators, Telescopes, and Spectacle" examines mountaineering in the Alps as a spectator sport. The return from a successful ascent was a ceremonial occasion, and Albert Smith performed his entertainment about Mont Blanc in London in the 1850s. Climbers were observed through telescopes, and illustrations often adopted this circular, telescopic perspective. The voyeuristic pleasure of watching climbers at a distance as they faced death-defying danger almost certainly sustained the sublime even longer than Colley allows. A chapter on lady mountaineers attempts to rescue female tourists and climbers from the condescension of posterity but does not address their relationship to the sublime.

In part two, "Literary Figures in the Alps," Colley convincingly argues that John Ruskin's physical and kinetic relationship to the mountains was essential to his understanding of them. Even if the scenic viewpoints to which Ruskin clambered above Chamonix and Zermatt were well below the peaks climbed by the Alpine Club, Ruskin's vulnerability while climbing reinforced a "vulnerable eye" that shaped his sketches of the mountains and perception of Venice (155). Chapters on Gerard Manley Hopkins's Swiss tour in 1868 and Robert Louis Stevenson's convalescence at Davos in the 1880s are less satisfying. Colley compares these more sedentary authors to John Tyndall and Leslie Stephen, both of whom deserve fuller treatment as Victorians in the mountains. Colley's discussion of embodiment fruitfully considers Stevenson's texts in terms of "a space between the landscape and his body" (207). A reference to the Catholic convert Hopkins's "divine way of seeing" is the book's only allusion to the relationship between religion and the sublime.

Colley contends that aesthetic responses have been overlooked by scholars more interested in imperialism, colonialism, gender, and tourism. Aesthetic sensibilities encouraged travelers in the Himalayas to reflect on the play of light on the landscape rather than the glory of empire. The "sinking" sublime in the Alps was recovered in the Himalayas where an "Ur-sublime" denied British travelers a sense of imperial mastery (227).

The problems with this argument are twofold—one conceptual or theoretical and the other related to the chronology associated with Victorian studies. The theoretical problem concerns the interplay of politics, gender, and the sublime. Colley's sublime is rhetorical and surprisingly static, with Edmund Burke's theories providing an unproblematic discursive definition that is evoked, recalled, ridiculed, resisted, or considered resonant, as if the concept itself did not evolve in the intervening years or change during the Victorian era. Colley holds that the sublime is "erroneously thought to be a gendered notion traditionally associated with masculine power" (5). This assertion may explain why Colley views reactions to the Himalayas as concerned with light and shade but not politics and empire; it is less clear why the chapter on women climbers does not discuss their relationship to the sublime.

The chapter on lady mountaineers attempts to recover the stories of celebrated female climbers to challenge the assumption that women were excluded from mountaineering. Colley writes that "when it came to climbing in the Victorian period, gender did not, as a rule, matter in the overwhelmingly debilitating way commentators have claimed," and she repeats this assertion three separate times (5, 102, 140). Colley considers debates over women...