Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry, by Anne C. McCarthy

Reviewed by: Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry by Anne C. McCarthy Casie LeGette (bio) Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry, by Anne C. McCarthy; pp. x + 218. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018, $75.00. Anne C. McCarthy’s Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry is primarily concerned with the relation between suspension and contingency. Suspension functions in this book as a way to live in and with the unstable contingency of the world, and the different chapters investigate the ways in which a series of nineteenth-century poets (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti) negotiate contingency via suspension. Coleridge is by far the most important figure here: two chapters are devoted to his philosophical and poetic treatments of suspension. Coleridge is where the sublime comes in, as McCarthy argues that he provides a crucial revision of the Kantian sublime by privileging the role of suspension. Whereas Immanuel Kant (according to McCarthy) moves quickly from the unsteady state of suspension to the moment of transcendence, when the mind reasserts its own powers, Coleridge lingers in that state of suspension instead. This model, in which suspension is understood “as the constitutive movement of the sublime[,] discloses the essential discontinuity of the world—a discontinuity that cannot be fully recovered or resolved” (13). McCarthy is right that Coleridge is at his most fascinating and compelling when grappling with such discontinuity. The poet’s desperate desire for unity and wholeness is painfully at odds with his awareness of contingency, and McCarthy offers a sympathetic and sophisticated reading of Coleridge’s attempts to bridge that gap by, interestingly, remaining in the gap that is suspension. McCarthy’s understanding of suspension is a capacious one. At times throughout Awful Parenthesis, this reader wondered if the concept was being asked to cover too many different ideas and forms and moments. But the advantage of McCarthy’s capacious treatment of suspension is that it allows her to put into conversation works that are often shunted off into separate silos. The most exciting such moment is her second chapter on Coleridge, which combines “Christabel” (1816), Biographia Literaria (1817), and Coleridge’s religious text, Aids to Reflection (1825). “Christabel” shows, most obviously, the terror of suspension, as Christabel suffers profoundly from the trance state that leaves her unable to confront or blame Geraldine. But with her work on Coleridge’s prose and religious texts, McCarthy shows that Coleridge considers suspension as a means to acknowledge discontinuity within the self. So rather than seeing Christabel’s hospitality to Geraldine as a mistake, McCarthy argues that Coleridge is affirming, here and elsewhere, the necessity of granting hospitality to the dark, unacknowledged parts of the self. Coleridge’s thinking and writing about religion is critically important to his poetry, and it is a pleasure to watch McCarthy pull those threads together. Her combined treatment of Christina Rossetti’s religion and poetry (discussed below) is similarly valuable. In the second half of Awful Parenthesis, with a turn to Tennyson, McCarthy shifts to the idea of the suspended body. Although McCarthy does include references to bodies in the first half of her monograph, this chapter still feels like a departure from the book’s earlier concerns. McCarthy nonetheless offers an intriguing reading of suspended animation in Tennyson, showing persuasively that the poet returned over and over to the problem of bodies that look dead but are not. This chapter puts Tennyson’s concerns in conversation with a detailed and fascinating discussion of Victorian anxieties about being [End Page 151] buried alive. The central text here is Maud (1855); McCarthy argues that suspension appears in that poem not only in relation to the worry that a suspended body might be buried alive, but also in relation to poetic form: “Enacted through a frequently disjunctive poetics, Tennyson’s rhetoric of suspended animation resists the ascendency of narrative suspense and the closure upon which that suspense depends—implying that such closure may always come too soon” (120). McCarthy’s final chapter on Christina Rossetti is more immediately connected to the philosophical and religious concerns of the...

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