St Kilda and the Sublime

Abstract

This paper considers how the search for the sublime in nineteenth-century Scotland found its expression in the voyage to St Kilda, a remote island archipelago west of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. It looks at the historical construction of St Kilda as an ultima Thule for Victorian travellers, a site which offered an incongruous set of discourses on antiquity and modernity; improvement and romance; evangelicalism and impiety. Grounding the early interest in St Kilda in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory - specifically that of James MacPherson and Edmund Burke - the paper shows how this corporeal adventure into the Ossianic and oceanic sublime was disrupted by the islanders’ religion and social organization. If the rhetorical strategies of the early tourists located St Kilda ‘on the edge of the world’, I draw attention to how the island was central to the ecclesiastical geography of Scotland. Given that for nineteenth-century Scotland the political life of the church eclipsed that of the state, the use of St Kilda as an emblem of Presbyterian polity was highly significant. In the context of a modern Scottish nation searching for historical perspectives on governance and community, the story of this ‘island republic’ has become important in the production of contemporary meaning. By challenging the moral-political authority of the travellers’ accounts, I ascribe a greater degree of agency to the islanders and thereby question the dominant narrative of St Kildan history.