I utilize Barbara Freeman's text, The Feminine Sublime, to understand how females can embody what Kant and Burke define as the sublime. Although Freeman focuses on female authored texts, my argument reinterprets her theory for nineteenth-century male authored texts. Ultimately, the "feminine sublime" shows how female presence can be represented through a third category, the sublime, in addition to the "madwoman" and the "angel." In order to find representations of this third category, the reader must look beyond the main section of the text to overlooked corners of the text....

The sea, whaling towns, and ships are three specific areas of Moby-Dick where readers can locate both a feminine perspective and power reflective of the sublime. For example, the towns are feminized through the use of "her," and they are a source of constant movement; people continually leave and return to Nantucket evidencing the power it holds as though the town itself is calling the people back. These inhuman and inanimate objects can embody the sublime as defined by Burke and represent the feminine sublime as defined by Freeman through their power, strength, astonishment, and terror. The feminine sublime addresses feminine worries--anxieties of the nineteenth century such as motherhood, marriage, and struggles for power associated with womanhood. This new interpretation of Moby-Dick utilizes the sublime as support to discuss these worries and provide feminist readers with the opportunity to claim the text through understanding how male-authored canonical literature can be analyzed through a feminist lens.