Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry by Anne C. McCarthy (review)

Awful Parenthesis presents a convincing case for re-theorizing the sublime by recognizing suspension as its condition of possibility, as Ann C. McCarthy locates a sublime aesthetics of suspension in both Romantic and, somewhat less expectedly, Victorian poetry. McCarthy's study reveals how literary treatments of suspension developed throughout the nineteenth century and emerged in quite different forms in the work of poets who do not often appear in company, with chapters on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti. By suspending the boundaries of periodization, McCarthy offers a far-reaching analysis of the aesthetics of suspension that will be of interest to scholars of Romantic and Victorian literature alike.

McCarthy's title, which hints at the study's emphasis on the formal and rhetorical modes of suspension, comes from Thomas De Quincey's 1823 essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," in which De Quincey finds that the knock that interrupts Duncan's murder creates space for sublime contemplation by making the audience aware at once that an otherworldliness has allowed the murder to take place and that this suspension is now over and ordinary life has resumed. For McCarthy, De Quincey's obvious fascination with Shakespeare's "awful parenthesis" indicates how suspension offers a way for nineteenth-century poets to respond aesthetically to the ontological crisis of contingency that Romanticism, in particular, took as its impetus. Suspension in this sense is not just a temporary pause but also one that serves to interrupt habitual modes of existence and enable new forms of perception: "[S]uspension," McCarthy suggests, "calls attention to what it places in abeyance" and becomes "the means through which the impasse may be crossed without erasing or ignoring the genuine discontinuity that gave rise to it in the first place." While the sublime has long been recognized as a central preoccupation of Romantic poetry, and while suspension has more recently become an area of critical interest, McCarthy brings them together to discuss their philosophical implication. For McCarthy, suspension is "the constitutive movement of the sublime," and its operation "discloses the essential discontinuity of the world" – a disclosure that Romantic and Victorian poetry responds to in diverse ways.

Following McCarthy's introduction, in which she lays out the theoretical background of suspension, are two chapters on Coleridge, the first serving to clarify Coleridge's conception of the sublime and its relation to suspension and the second bringing the implications of this relationship to bear on "Christabel" and Aids to Reflection (1825). Inevitably, given this uneven structure, McCarthy's attention to Coleridge far outweighs what she gives to the other poets; he becomes a point of reference throughout the study, which is often useful but sometimes seems in tension with the introduction's promise to offer "a version of the sublime that is capacious enough to function in readings of both Romantic and Victorian literature, without assimilating one into the other." McCarthy's third chapter focuses on Shelley's "ecstatic suspension," which celebrates the contingency that Coleridge had registered more ambivalently. The fourth chapter moves into the Victorian period, dealing with Tennyson's reimagining of suspension in Maud (1855), which registers Victorian anxieties around being buried alive – a particularly gruesome kind of suspension – as contemporary medicine struggled to definitively ascertain the state of bodies "suspended" by paralysis. Finally, the fifth chapter examines what McCarthy terms Rossetti's "poetic faith" and offers an exciting reinterpretation of Rossetti's Christian beliefs in terms of suspension. McCarthy deftly navigates Rossetti's complex treatment of faith in "The Prince's Progress" and her devotional prose to argue that contingency and uncertainty do not threaten her Christianity but, rather, make the experience of faith possible.

Each chapter offers compellingly close readings attuned to the ways in which suspension emerges not only in the thematic concerns of the poems but also in their grammar, syntax, and rhythms. This integration illuminates the ways in...