 Even as theorists extolled the possibilities for universal taste, however, they often drew gender distinctions regarding its exercise. Many theorists argued that women and men possess systematically different tastes or capabilities for appreciating art and other cultural products. The most noticeable gender distinctions occur with the two central aesthetic categories of the eighteenth century, beauty and sublimity. Objects of beauty were described as bounded, small, and delicate—“feminized” traits. Objects that are sublime, whose exemplars are drawn chiefly from uncontrolled nature, are unbounded, rough and jagged, terrifying—“masculinized” traits. These gender labels are unstable, however, for the terrors of nature have an equally strong history of description as “feminine” forces of chaos (Battersby 1998). What is more, gendered meanings in the sublime are intensified by surrounding discourse about the strange, exotic, and foreign. Meg Armstrong argues that “exotic” bodies become subjected to aesthetic discourse in theories of the sublime, noting that Burke singles out the black female body as a special object of terror (Armstrong 1996). In short, aesthetic objects take on both gendered and racialized meanings with the concepts of beauty and sublimity (Bindman 2002). Moreover, so do aesthetic appreciators. As Kant put it in his earlier Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763), a woman’s mind is a “beautiful” mind. But a woman is incapable of the tougher appreciation and insight that sublimity discloses (Wiseman 1993, Kneller 1993). The preclusion of women from the experience of the sublime limits their competence to apprehend the moral and existential weight of the might and magnitude of both nature and art. Women’s supposed weaker constitutions and moral limitations, as well as their social restrictions, contributed to a concept of sublimity that marks it as masculine. Debates over the nature and concept of sublimity gave rise to feminist debates over whether one can discern in the history of literature an alternate tradition of sublimity that counts as a “female sublime” (Freeman 1995, 1998; Battersby 1998, 2007; Mann 2006).