In connection with Jessica Wells’ piece, “Forever Lilies”
“They are the meeting place of beauty and despair; they are the overlap of joy and pain”
It was with this quote that I, after hours and days and weeks of toil with the concept, defined the sublime. For the past dozen weeks, this theme of the sublime, as I had defined it, became a recurring theme in the literature of the course: Augustus Leopold Egg’s disturbing depiction of a failed marriage in Past and Present, and Particularly George Frederick Watts’ chilling oil on canvas painting, Found Drowned.
These paintings all take a circumstance like a marriage or a person like the young drowning victim, things that were once perfect and beautiful, and these artists depict them so that the viewer can still see the shadow of what used to be; the beauty that once was. The scene and the life has changed though; the people are cold, the beauty is gone, and the sublime has entered. These paintings are a depiction of what once was beautiful and what is now painful, and they are a stunning representation of that. They are sublime.
It is this theme of the blur between beauty and pain that carries through all of the characters entertained in the past few months. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny”, for example. What was once pure is now tainted; the white lily is now browned. These representations make the reader question what is beautiful. Why is the white lily beautiful? Why is purity a virtue? Why is the brown lily unwanted? Why is Jenny unwanted? This flower and this woman, in their two states, may be the same in essence, but they have undergone a change; a change form simply beautiful to a complicated sublime, and a change from wanted to unwanted.
-L.G.
