It had then filled me with sublime ecstasy
The sublime is one of those phrases where you know the literal meaning, but when someone throws it in a list of Gothic elements (like I did), you start second guessing yourself. Sublime means to elevate or exalt; lofty or grand in thought; of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth.
The concept of the sublime in art, literature, and philosophy can get really academic, really fast. Simply put, the Romantics countered the Enlightenment period’s rationality by evoking emotion through nature and the natural world through the sublime writing style (this includes: great thought, strong emotions, certain figures of thought/speech, noble diction, & dignified word arrangement -Longinus, cited in Amy Polyzogopooulou’s article for Arcadia). Again, this is a very basic explanation (whole books are devoted to this concept).
Sublime, but make it spooky
Gothic sublime is the same writing style, but those strong emotions are also evoked using terror, which early Gothic fiction author Ann Radcliffe claimed “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties of to a higher degree of life.” Mary Shelley shows how its done in Frankenstein:
“When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”
The creature’s exaltation of nature and the world is blended with the terror of his own creation, his crimes, and of Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s own awe of nature and the creature is mixed with the fear of what he made and what his ambition unleashed in the world.
Queering the Gothic Sublime
Definitions of queer sublime, from what I have found, vary. Some define it as the beauty of queerness mixed with the terror of oppression and homophobia; others explore the concept in the traditional sense of the sublime with the lens of queer characters; and others interpret it as a mix of astonishment, terror, and otherness.
Personally, I would define the Queer Gothic Sublime as all three, and She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran is a great contemporary example of this.
“When Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam for a visit with her estranged father, she has one goal: survive five weeks pretending to be a happy family in the French colonial house Ba is restoring. She’s always lied to fit in, so if she’s straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, she can get out with the college money he promised.
Bu the house has other plans.”
The story incorporates the sublime and Gothic themes, but part of the terror threaded throughout stems from Jade’s internal terror of familial rejection for her queer identity. At first, she is the only character who can see the rot of the house. She is alone in the recurring nightmare that somehow becomes to entrance her; she is other from her father and sister—both in her ability to see what is truly happening and in her queerness.
As we’ve discussed before, the Gothic genre is being used more and more frequently by marginalized authors to reclaim that which has been taken from them. And this includes the sublime. Yes, there is terror in the queer experience, but there is also a profound and exalting beauty.
For more…
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or the Modern Prometheus is available for free on Project Gutenberg.
Content warnings for She is a Haunting include internalized biphobia, body horror, bugs, systemic/interpersonal racism, colonialism, death of a parent, blood, bones, depiction of a hanging, murder, mention of domestic abuse, some depictions and conversations of food may be difficult for some readers (though eating disorders are not discussed).