Women: Sublime and Beautiful

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/fx719n65g

Abstract

The Sublime has been characterized by the gendered dichotomy of the Beautiful versus the Sublime. It is proposed that Femininity is associated with the Beautiful and Masculinity with the Sublime. I wish to challenge this notion and assert that the Sublime and the Beautiful are two sides of the Feminine. Freud’s theory of the Madonna/Whore Complex splits the Mother image in two, the good mother and the bad mother, or the Beautiful and the Sublime. The Sublime works outlined in this thesis follow a man that seeks something greater than himself, or the Sublime; he does this through women or Nature. Nature is often referred to as a feminine entity, therefore the Sublime is a pathway for Man to connect with the Feminine. Connection with women or solitude in Nature is a binary that represents one idea: Love, or more specifically Mother’s Love. In our patriarchal world, man encounters the Sublime though Nature and Woman, also known as The Divine Feminine.

Creator