The Spleen

2426 Words5 Pages

The Spleen by Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea, presents an interesting poetic illustration of depression in the spleen. The spleen for Finch is an enigma, it is mysterious, shape-shifting, and melancholic. Melancholy leads the subject to flashes of a grander, terrifying emotion: the sublime. The subject of Finch’s Pindaric ode experiences the sublime, and yet has the uncanny ability to reflect and reason on the feeling with acuity--even though the subject suffers from depression, which in effect dulls sensory information. The fact that she intensely perceives the sublime suggests a paradox where dulled senses can produce a penetrative emotional episode. To understand the paradox, the theory of the sublime and Finch’s engagement with the sublime in The Spleen must be traced to conceive the state of the dulled mind in the thrall of an infinite, and transcendent wave of emotion. The focus of this essay is that Finch understands that Dullness, as a by-product of depression, enables rational thought during a sublime experience. Furthermore, she thus illustrates her experience through images where she emphasizes her sensory information and her feelings, which were supposedly numbed by depression. Her feelings, indicated in The Spleen, are the crux to how Finch is able to simultaneously feel numb, and process the sublime.

First, a general theory of the sublime, from the theories of Longinus and Burke, must be established before it can be asserted that Finch participates in the discourse of the sublime in The Spleen. Longinus states that the sublime evokes unrelenting emotion with elevated style and rhetoric(Longinus, On the Sublime). He indicates the five sources of the sublime are when the author exercises grandeur of thought, ...

... middle of paper ...

...ly use rational. Unfortunately for Finch, mental disease and dull senses are prerequisites for the mind to use this capability. One surprising twist of The Spleen is that Finch might have meant that this type of sensation is a predominantly female experience. However, Depression and Madness can also strike even “Men of Thoughts refin’d” (70), and not only depressed women who have been forced to live in the woods because of their political leanings.

Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics. New

York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. Online.

Finch, Anne. “The Spleen”. Ed. David Fairer & Christine Gerrard. Eighteenth Century Poetry:

An Annotated Anthology. 2nd Ed. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, 2008. 22-26. Print.

Longinus. On the Sublime. Project Gutenberg Ebook. 10 March 2006. Online.

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