‘It’s not too much, is it?’: Keats, Fancy and the Ethics of Pleasurable Excess in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette

Abstract

This chapter explores Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in relation to personal subjectivity and excess, specifically drawing on notions of poetic fancy, modernity, gender and ‘unwholesome’ consumption, and the poetry of John Keats. Coppola’s emphasis on sensation and surfaces elicits what Keats refers to as the ‘material sublime’, an engagement with sensory excess contrasted with the core subjectivity the Romantic sublime invokes. The film is compared to Keats’ Lamia, an allegorical poem about attempted psychological recuperation through aesthetic excess, as well as Colin Campbell’s description of ‘modern autonomous imaginative hedonism’. The chapter also engages with the ‘depth model’ of Romantic subjecthood that Coppola brings to the fore when Marie Antoinette’s bulwark of sensory pleasure is stripped away, along with its attendant aesthetic function, signalling not just the maturation found in her ethical acknowledgement of the suffering of others, but also her imminent death.