When Lizzy Bennet, the witty sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), asks: “What are men to rocks and mountains?” she is thinking about ways of understanding self and world through the notion of the sublime.
The sublime was one of the key 18th-century philosophical ideas of Romanticism, balancing our physical insignificance next to something majestic like a mountain, with our imaginative capacity to conceptualise it. Lizzy is trying to get over her own and her sister Jane’s heartbreak by thinking beyond herself to the wider world of nature around her.
The philosopher Sianne Ngai claims that the notion of the sublime no longer holds any force. Instead, today’s culture replaces the idea with concepts that have a weaker emotional impact on us, such as the “zany”, the “cute” and the “interesting”.
