Writing Against, Writing Through:

Subjectivity, Vocation and Authorship in the Work

of Dorothy Wordsworth
Jill Angelino

[Im]positions, Issue # 1, December 1996

In the past few years I've taught selections from Dorothy Wordsworth's journals
to undergraduates several times--both in introductory surveys and in seminars on
British Romanticism. This paper is motivated partially by my students' reader
responses to Dor othy's work. Each time I assign the texts without introductory
statements. And each time, the students' journal entries and class participation
invariably present the same thought--a good percentage are convinced, as F.W.
Bateson suggested over 40 years a go, that an incestuous relationship existed
between Dorothy and her brother, William.

Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden and Grasmere journals (1798-1803) pose a

problem for readers because her work does not fit late 20th-century paradigms of
sibling relationships or intersubjective power dynamics. In the 1990s age of
empowerment, the students feel, it's not normal for the individuated subject to
efface the self. The students want a motivation for Dorothy's selfless devotion to
William, and find that motivation in rationalizing that the siblings must have
shared an incestuous love relationship. After reviewing some of the cultural
differences between early 19th-century Britain and late 20th-century America, the
students reluctantly agree with my suggestion that their interpretation is, in part,
due to historical differences in gender roles and Dorothy's use of a romantic
rhetoric that is now outdated. They concede that Dorothy's affection for William
and her related daily activities are not necessarily an indication of sexual
activity/desire, but they still maintain that she was unhealthily obs essed with
William, and often shift their "diagnosis" to one of "codependence." Dorothy
remains deviant any way you look at her--either she is a pervert, a martyr, or in
need of intensive psychotherapy.

What's at stake in wanting to insist on incest, or the other unhealthy labels that
Dorothy gets assigned? It seems that the students' discomfort with Dorothy is the
result of a power dialectic that doesn't fall within recognizable models: they want
to vie w Dorothy and William as unitary selves; and they want a binary that
explains the power relationship between the two writers. Therefore, the students
do not easily come to the interpretation suggested by recent feminist critics: that
instead of the notion of the aggressive ego, or appropriating self, which best
articulates it's perception of self and world through linear narrative, we should
consider Dorothy's journals vis-a-vis models of fragmented, embedded
subjectivities and non-linear experience.
This paper uses contemporary theories of women's writing and gendered
subjectivity to discuss Dorothy Wordsworth's work in and for a domestic and
writing community centered around her brother. My study examines what Judith
Butler describes as "the conditi ons of the subject's emergence and operation"
(Butler 1993, 10)--Dorothy's relationship to the Grasmere community--which is, I
believe, the site of Dorothy's oppression and empowerment, as a writing, and as a
female, subject. My essay begins to interrogat e the power dialectics surrounding
that relationship, as represented in selections from her diaries, poetry and letters,
and asks two questions: What does it mean for Dorothy to write for William, and
what does it mean for Dorothy to write at all? Althoug h my study draws upon
recent theories of Feminine and Masculine Romanticism, it also problematizes
this opposition, by showing the interdependence of Dorothy's and William's
subjectivities, writing processes, and artistic vision. Exploring this interdepen
dence allows us to read Dorothy's texts as they reflect a non-unified sense of
subjectivity, as critics have previously argued. However, my reading also suggests
that while she renounces Authorship, Dorothy nevertheless sees herself and
negotiates authori ty as a writer.

As Ann Mellor asserts, the "Romantic ego is potently male, engaged in figurative
battles of conquest and possession, and at the same time incorporating itself into
whatever aspects of the female it desired to possess" (Mellor 1988, 7). Now that
the canon of late 18th and early 19th-century British literature has begun to
include the writings of women, critics have identified a "Feminine" Romanticism
in which "texts by romantic women writers explore the powers of domestic,
passive, natural continuities in the context of the powerful, assertive male
revolutionary consciousness that we characterize as the High Romantic Vision"
(Levin 1987a, 192). My (predominantly white, Western) students largely elide the
voice of masculine romantic writers with view of sub jectivity they feel now
applies to all subjects, male or female: a view of subjectivity comprised of
Cartesian tenets filtered through the values of the 1980s "me-generation." Their
sense of confusion and dissatisfaction with Dorothy, I assume, reflects t he
observation that female Romantic writers' depiction of themselves in relation to
the Natural world and the social community does not project such a masculine
consciousness, and thus does not reflect what they perceive to be the "normal"
dialectic of Se lf and Other (Levin 1987a, 193).

Traditionally, female Romantic texts, with their unique style and concerns, have
been assessed as inferior to other contemporary, male authored literature, and
relegated to the margins of academic study; this has been particularly true of
Dorothy Wordswor th's journals, which have been negatively critiqued for her
self-denigration, servitude, excessive cataloguing of quotidian activity, and
minute natural detail. However, recent discussions of Masculine versus Feminine
Romanticism urge us not to read women writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth in
relation to masculinist norms, which render the women's texts mere
representations of a crippling self-abegnation in service to or dependence upon
others. Instead, the object-relations studies of Nancy Chodorow, and the related
feminist psychoanalytic theories of Carol Gilligan, suggest that Dorothy's non-
narrative, detail-oriented journal is not evidence of inferior artistic vision and/or
arrested development, but should instead be read as evidence of her radical de
parture from William's view of self and world. In this reading, as Susan Levin
glosses, Dorothy identifies with her environment, and processes the world and her
position within it through attachment, not separation (Levin 1987a, 180). Thus she
sees hersel f primarily in relation to the multiple roles she plays for William and
her community, and not as an individuated self. Dorothy then, provides an
example of women's identification through a multi-faceted continuation which
develops from the female child's identification with the mother--a continuity our
phallocentric culture has chosen to devalue. Thus Dorothy's behavior can be
analyzed in terms of female developmental models which challenge not only the
masculinist Freudian and post-Freudian conceptions of development and
subjectivity, but also challenge notions of the unitary assertive self of Romantic
writers.

Certainly, there are merits to setting up such an opposition between male and
female developmental narratives, and male and female Romantic texts. Indeed,
the work and life of Dorothy Wordsworth was radically different from that of her
brother. Dorothy's journal, critics have noted, presents a "seeing eye"--not a
"subjective I": she rarely uses the first person or talks about how she feels, instead
her emotions are reflected in the details of nature as she catalogues her
surroundings. For example, after W illiam leaves, the lake looks dull and
melancholy, and when his letters are long in coming, Grasmere appears "so
solemn in the last glimpse of twilight" that she cries 1. When she is happy
walking with William in the wood, Dorothy notes "the Gleams of sun shine and
the stirring trees and gleaming boughs, chearful lake, most delightful" (GJ 35).
Dorothy painstakingly records her daily duties and the world around her--she
orders her world through her writing and makes connections between things,
creating sen se from her life and her world. Thus, like her journal, written "To
give Wm pleasure" (GJ 15), Dorothy's writings, and her life, show a concern for
the individual within a community, and the lessons and pleasures of life to be
gained from connections to s uch a community, while William's writing and life
show a concern with the individual mind of the Poet, and with lessons and
pleasures to be learned from solitude.

Critics who study the voice of female Romanticism usually make claims like:
"women find in the traditional concerns of women's discourse the positive power
of seeming feminine passivity" (Levin 1987a, 178). As accurate as labels of
Feminine and Masculine Romantic writing seem to be, however, I find this kind
of reading problematic because it encourages perception of culturally constructed
difference as essential difference. If we valorize these differences--inverting the
binary terms male and female--for the sake of claiming feminine concerns,
moderation, modesty, continuity, non linearity, etc. as equal or better in value
than those textual characteristics associated with Masculine Romanticism, I
believe we fall prey to the kind of thinking critiqued by the feminists who point
out that "there is nothing liberatory in claiming as virtues, qualities that men have
always found convenient"2. As Susan Levin acknowledges, "these suggestions
about the structure of a female romantic imagination can be construed as a cliche
statement of passive feminine dependence" (Levin 1987a, 193). Feminist critics
must question the responsibility of making assessments which reproduce the kinds
of "ancient cliches" Levin is concerned about--to what ends, in what contexts are t
hese observations being used--so that we ourselves do not contribute to
essentialist ideologies which, traditionally, have furthered women's oppression.

Binaries such as "Masculine" and "Feminine" Romanticism are useful insofar as

they provide alternatives spaces that may be used to discuss previously ignored
texts. Such generalizations are also useful, of course, for introducing material to
undergraduate s who are eager for "rules" by which to categorize groups of
authors. However, now that women authors begin to be reclaimed as subjects of
serious study, we may do well to consider that the ideological boundaries that
divide "Feminine" from canonical "Hig h" Romantic texts may be as permeable as
the separate and gendered spheres that failed to contain their female authors.
Therefore, I believe it would be useful to explore and problematize the theory of
masculine versus. feminine Romanticism in order to em phasize the ways the
differing artistic visions are interdependent.3 A power dynamic exists which is the
locus of production of both William and Dorothy's writing subjectivities, and thus
we can examine how Dorothy Wordsworth, as a woman writer of this ti me
period, came to be who she was--and how her writing reflects that process of
coming into being, and its relation to William, a "masculine writer." I believe we
will find that not only are William's and Dorothy's respective Romanticisms
interdependent, but that Dorothy's writings testify to a power and a subjectivity
not traditionally associated with "feminine qualities" or for that matter, with
Dorothy at all.

The community at Grasmere, comprised of the Wordsworths, Coleridge, and

Southey, and often visited by prominent artists, including Charles Lamb, was a
community in nature, language and writing. Dorothy's domestic work greatly
enabled the business of everyday living, while she also played the part of muse,
secretary and editor. Her journals and letters deftly record the rhythms of the
natural and the writing life for those within the community, and vividly report
them to friends and colleagues outside. Yet, Dorothy, as an embodied
subjectivity, largely disappears from concrete representation of life at Grasmere:
it is mostly the results of her labor, that are seen and felt, in the tangible products
of food, laundry, shoes, and of course, William's poetry. Dorothy embraces a
seeming selflessness, and her letters and journals modestly protest that she will
not be able to live up to her friends' high opinions of her. Her self-proclaimed life
choice, as a single woman living in her brother's household, is merely to find
fulfillment the love and appreciation which comes from useful service to others.

In immediately obvious ways, Dorothy's relationship to William, through the

writing community at Grasmere, represents a power dialectic where she, the
female amanuensis, or subordinate term, serves and enables him, the male Poet, or
dominant term. Thus, Dorothy in many ways, typifies the woman who facilitates a
masculine Romantic ego which achieves subjecthood through appropriation and
transcendence. Through the service of his sister and colonization of a female
Nature, William "sees into the life of things;" he "half creates and half
perceives4", not only his world but his very sense of self. In many of William's
writings, Dorothy becomes alternately a disembodied natural or hearth spirit,
"wild eyes", or is projected into the past and future, albeit lovingly, as figment or
memory. In more general terms of pan-historical gender politics, as Judith Butler
has pointed out in her recent reading of Luce Irigaray on Plato (Butler 1993),
Dorothy and William thus provide an example of Man coming into being through
asserting a non-material soul which can exist only through dematerialization of
the female body.

Clearly, the interplay between William and Dorothy works well for William.
Through her, he receives support, and achieves subjectivity and Authorship;
through symbolic troping of her in his poems--the fruits of his vocation--he
expresses, via her physical or disembodied presence, his ideas about poetry, mind,
memory, and the selfhood of an artist. In this relationship, usually perceived as
Dorothy's willing servitude for William, he both profits from and is dependent
upon her service. But what does Dorothy gain? (What does she want?) And can
we say that, and if so, how, does Dorothy negotiate her situation in order to make
her coming into being a locus of a mediated, if not a completely individuated,
subjectivity and power?

Dorothy's journals and letters repeatedly indicate that she wants to be loved,
useful, and needed. Thus, Alan Liu provides an accurate account of Dorothy's
self-perception, I think, when he quips, "I work therefore, I am" (Liu 1984, 116).
In a characteristic statement, made prior to their move to Alfoxden, Dorothy
writes of their plans to care for young Basil Montague: "it will greatly contribute
to my happiness and place me in a situation that I shall be doing something, it is a
painful idea that one's existence is of very little use, which I really have always
been obliged to feel5" (her italics). Here, Dorothy elides her difficulty gaining a
sense of her existence--a problem of subjectivity--with her lack of a useful
vocation. Furthermore, the feminist critic suspects Dorothy's frustration with
uselessness--of lacking a vocation--is linked to her limited opportunity as a
woman, especially one who sees herself in comparison to her brother's
productivity in a vocation which is both authoritative and valuable. Dorothy's life
with William creates a solution to her complaint: he needs her, is dependent upon
her, and consequently, she feels needed, loved and appreciated. As Susan Levin
notes, "women writers challenged central notions that have achieved canonical
status in our standard account of romanticism, while at the same time they
depended upon those notions" (Levin 1987a, 179). Clearly, Dorothy's world and
self-view contrasts notions of the Romantic egotistical sublime, yet, her selfhood
and vocation is ironically and inextricably linked to and dependent upon a service
which enables, while it opposes, the masculine Romantic vision.
When friends suggest that she publish her own writings, Dorothy rejects "setting
myself up as an Author6". Yet, she does write, continually and passionately; her
writing catalogues her environment, and fosters her own and William's work and
sense of self. And while Dorothy denies she is an Author--the position occupied
by William--she nevertheless does negotiate authority, not only through the
importance of her service, but as a writer. As Dorothy's writing orders and enables
the world around her, her writing self and the act of writing legitimates and orders
her other selves and actions, and makes possible a set of discourses within which
she can define and defend her subjectivit(ies).

For instance, many critics have persuasively argued that Grasmere Journal's
organizing principle is William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson (Levin 1987b;
Heinzelman 1988). Dorothy's frequent depictions of abandoned, homeless women
have been interpreted as betraying her own fears and feelings of abandonment
during William's absences and courtship of Mary (Levin 1987b, 41). She records
her unhappiness at William's infrequent letters--and her efforts to remain busy and
to look well--things she knows William will appreciate. Dorothy's writings about
herself and her female body document the labor that body provides for others;
even frequent traces of physical pain--headaches, bowels disorders--significantly,
are often directly or implicitly attributed to emotional conflicts with others in the
community. Through displacement of her negative emotion onto natural scenes
which she refuses to analyze, and by constant reference to physical ailments, the
journal she knew William would read thereby reveals encoded dissatisfaction--a
mode of writing the self which allows Dorothy to express concern with William's
impending marriage in ways that do not threaten her place in his heart and home
(McCormick 1990s, 472). It seems likely that in creating a discourse of
abandoned women and of physical pain, Dorothy unconsciously expresses
emotion, strives to induce guilt, and to negotiate authority and power, and she
does it specifically through her use of language--as a writer.

Dorothy rejects phallocentric language, culture and subjectivity in renouncing

Authorship, but does not reject writing. Instead, Dorothy's texts indicate that she
makes a vast distinction between Authoring and writing. Her texts indicate she
does see herself as a writer--one of a different sort than William--but nonetheless
a person with a complex vocation in which writing, not just amanuensis, plays a
central and pleasurable part, in addition to sisterhood, friendship, and domesticity.
For example, Dorothy indicates that she values her communal/domestic roles;
however, she sometimes expresses resentment against these roles which bring her
the love and utility she craves, especially when her duties interferes with her
personal writing, which she explicitly says she enjoys. Thus Dorothy exhibits
ambiguous emotions about the relationship between writing and other forms of
work. Throughout her life, she apologizes to correspondents, bitterly complaining
when work interferes with letter-writing; especially in her early letters, she
worries that her friends will become angry or forget her. In letters to her
childhood friend, Jane Pollard, Dorothy apologizes for wandering, circularity, and
detail, but says that she knows Jane will forgive and understand her manner of
writing, because, "I write what springs from the heart", and "what is uppermost in
my mind I must write"7. Just as Dorothy's letter about Basil Montague, above,
links her perception of self with a useful occupation, here, Dorothy clearly
connects an awareness of self with writing, although, as I will show, this
connection is very different from the way she perceives William's relationship to
writing.

In a telling passage from a 1805 letter to Lady Beaumont, Dorothy reflects upon a
young girl whose poems she recently read:

Above all take care that her productions are not printed and published as
wonders. Should this be done, farewell all purity of heart, all solitary
communion with her own thoughts for her own independent delight. She
will never do good more.8

Here, Dorothy seems to identify with the young girl and imagines a potentially
endangered writing selfhood. "[S]olitary communion", "independent delight"--
these phrases support a strong sense of subjectivity that is enriched and perhaps,
made possible by writing, but one that is also threatened by public, or masculine,
authorship. Thus, Dorothy rejects the life of an Author, perhaps wiser for
observing that William is often ill when he writes--especially when he revises his
works for publication. She again distances herself from the office of Poet in
another letter to Lady Beaumont: "I have no command of language, no power of
expressing my ideas, and no one was ever more inapt at molding words into
regular metre"9. Apparently, Dorothy perceives her writing in different terms than
William's--rejecting power, command, use of meter -the things she associates
with being a Poet, an Author.

Thus, Dorothy writes for William, as observer, scribe, and editor, while her
poems and private writing show that she writes against him as well,
experimenting with ideas that clearly subvert her brother's notions of subjectivity,
poetry and of what it means to be a writer. Dorothy's radical departure from
traditional content and form features characteristics now associated with French
Feminism's l'ecriture feminine: her semiotic style invokes repetition and
spasmodic separation from male writing and power;10 and thus her journals can
be said to exhibit multiple (libidinal) energies which cannot be expressed or
understood within ego-identified discourse. Furthermore, Dorothy's position
within and for the Grasmere community indicates a diffuse understanding of
subjectivity, and experience. The way she represents Nature, for example, when
read against the theories of Helene Cixous, demonstrates a feminine11 ability to
perceive and relate to objects in nurturing rather than dominating way. Dorothy's
conflation (without appropriation) of Nature and her emotions, and her focus on
her emotions and her often physically ill female body suggests that her body's
connection to Nature and Community is a direct source of female writing, as
compared to the phallic, unitary tropes of masculine subjectivity found in Western
writing by men. Seen in these terms, her writing thereby resists--even directly
opposes--William's notions of subjectivity, writing and art.

Can we say that Dorothy derives pleasure and empowerment not only in her
subordinate position as William's scribe and helpmate, but also in seeing herself
and her writing in his? Given evidence of Dorothy's discomfort with Authorship,
but her pleasure in writing, I disagree with the suggestion that Dorothy's
resistance to publication "may reflect a discomfort with notice she had gained as a
figure in William's poetry" (Woolfson 1988, 140). On the contrary, traces of
Dorothy in William's work suggest that even as he writes through her, Dorothy's
mediation of his writing facilitates a power dynamic in which she can write
herself through him. William fulfills a function for her writing self: he gives her a
job as inspiring muse and helpmate. Dorothy--a women who desires to be useful--
sees tangible results of her employment through his published poetry, some of
which contains lines actually composed by her. Furthermore, she becomes
immortalized through his writing, which often mentions her, such as Tintern
Abbey, the Lucy poems, Glowworm, and Home at Grasmere. Thus she is written,
through his writing, in a much more concrete way than many other women of her
time. Consciously or not, this must have afforded her pleasure, (at least there
seems to be no evidence to the contrary) especially considering that, in his poetry,
she comes into being through public affirmation of her brother's love and need for
her. Most importantly perhaps, to this line of thinking, William's portrayal of
Dorothy stresses those loving and selfless qualities that, within dominant
ideology, would have been admirable feminine traits, in short, an conservative
and acceptable reason for public acclaim.

Writing against or writing through William, her position as writer is relational to

his, yet it is central to her sense of self, and grounds that self in a vocation which
her community considers both useful and authoritative--that of a writer. If we
assume for a moment that Dorothy did have a sense of herself as writer (among
other things), we then can reinterpret much of her work which has been
overlooked or only discussed as a curious example of a writer who claimed she
had no desire to become one. For instance, consider the poem, "Floating Island at
Hawkshead, An Incident in the schemes of Nature" (c. 1820)12:

Harmonious Powers with nature work

On sky, earth, river, lake and sea:
Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breeze
All in one duteous task agree.

Once did I see a slip of earth,

By throbbing waves long undetermined,
Loosed from its hold;--how no one knew
But all might see it float, obedient to the wind.
 Might see it, from the verdant shore
Dissevered float upon the Lake,
Float with its crest of trees adorned
On which the warbling birds their pastime take.

Food, shelter, safety there they find

There berries ripen, flowrets bloom;
There insects live their lives--and die:
A peopled world it is:--in size a tiny room.

And thus through many season's space

This little Island may survive
But Nature, though we mark her not,
Will take away--may cease to give.

Perchance when you are wandering forth

Upon some vacant sunny day
Without an object, hope, or fear,
Thither your eyes may turn--the Isle is passed away.

Buried beneath the glittering Lake!

Its place no longer to be found,
Yet the lost fragments shall remain,
To fertilize some other ground.

Dorothy's image of the "slip of earth" is largely interpreted as a metaphor for

herself--tied to Nature, obedient, supporting a little community, a "tiny room".
But Dorothy's sense of self (as represented by the floating island which can sink
beneath the surface of the water) is not only communal, it is also evasive, elusive,
and thus it negotiates control. Particularly since no one knows how it floats, only
that it does, the island seems to function and is empowered through its
relationship with Nature, which cannot be described or understood within
traditional phallogocentric thought. Furthermore, despite it's seeming fragility, the
island fragments, we are told, endure and are fertile--like Dorothy's
creative/poetic ideas, which exceed the (traditionally) limited speaking space of a
journal and assert her voice/self for anyone who reads it (or William's poetry).
Dorothy creates a metaphor for a perception of subjectivity, vocation and writing
that cannot be expressed within the confines of patriarchal language--rather, her
description of the island draws upon something more akin to Julia Kristeva's idea
of a (feminine) semiotic language. In departing from her brother's way of writing,
she creates her own--one that not only serves, but has a strong sense of self for the
reader who looks for it, as the island can be seen by the traveler who looks
carefully enough.

Throughout this essay, I have called attention to Dorothy's relationship to her

writing community--and specifically to William--as the site from which
subjectivity springs and is oppressed. If Dorothy perceives herself, in part at least,
as a writer, what happens when that writing self is imperiled? Anxious moments
in her text, usually attributed to emotional dependence on William, need to be
reevaluated in terms of a concern for a writing vocation as well as for preserving a
domestic situation. Thus, future studies need to reread passages like William's
wedding morning, not only in terms of a fear of emotional abandonment or
replacement, but also in terms of a fear of losing her role as William's
collaborator, as that role specifically contributes to the notion of a working, if
fragmented, self.

In some ways, reading and interpreting Dorothy Wordsworth's work exemplifies

the difficult and perhaps inevitable conflict between feminist and post-structural
theory. My discussion of Dorothy's distinction between "Authoring" and
"Writing" seems both particularly germane to, and simultaneously a product of, a
postmodern critical sensibility influenced by Foucauldian theories of "the death of
the author." Dorothy's rejection of Authorship both embodies and problematizes
post structuralist realizations that, ultimately, the Author's claim to control over
the text and its reception is false. One the one hand, she seems to prefigure the
Derridean notion that "there is nothing outside of the text", including the
subjectivity of the author, which is, itself, a fiction, and therefore, negligible.
Thus, when Dorothy downplays her subjecthood within the Grasmere community,
we can elide her stance with the post structuralist realization: "I have no
subjectivity, I am merely a product of multiple discourses which penetrate and
circulate within my environment."

Dorothy's struggle to imagine her position and value in relation to a phallocentric

literary tradition invokes many theoretical questions- authorship, subjectivity,
negotiating the limitations of language--which are still of concern today, although
they resonate differently after two centuries. Given such contextualization, does
Dorothy Wordsworth's life provide a liberatory example for feminism? Maybe
not. Her passivity, self-sacrifice, and constant self-denigration, even when cleared
of charges of "codependence" and attributed to societal expectations or false
modesty, suggest that if her writing does indicate a subtle negotiation of
oppressive gender roles, she simultaneously performed that negotiation with a
certain degree of guilt and ambivalence. Yet, as Susan Levin notes, her "writing
contains a certain rage at the limitations imposed on the life of the woman artist,
as well as recognition of the glory of that life" (Levin 1987b, 4). I believe it is
Dorothy's action (conscious or otherwise) against such limitations that is
important. Through her negotiation of the interdependence between dominant and
subordinate, traditional and revolutionary, masculine and feminine subject
positions, Dorothy Wordsworth's work resists a masculinist authorial tradition,
and instead can be seen to contribute to an alternate mode of perceiving and
recording experience.

Works Cited
 Issue's Table of Contents

Trott, Nicola and Seamus Perry. "Lyrical Ballads, 1798-1998 - A Special Issue
of Romanticism On the Net." Romanticism On the Net 8 (February 1998) [Date
of access] <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/guest3.html>

Copyright © Michael Eberle-Sinatra 1998-2002 - All rights reserved - ISSN

1467-1255

Lyrical Ballads, 1798-1998 - A Special Issue of

Romanticism On the Net
Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry
Table of Contents

It is now over forty years since Robert D. Mayo published his essay on 'The
Contemporaneity of Lyrical Ballads', arguing that the experimental novelty
claimed so eloquently by the volume's 'Advertisement' was, in fact, illusory,
and that the ballads were just the sort of thing any reader of magazine verse at
the end of the eighteenth century would be used to. In her influential survey,
Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (1981), Marilyn Butler was heard
similarly dismissing 'the belief, still widely held, that Wordsworth's
contribution to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 represent an altogether new kind of
poetry'. Of course, no poetry is ever 'altogether new', and there is no doubt that
the 'Advertisement', like the later 'Prefaces', is at least as much an episode in the
history of publicity as it is in the history of poetry (to use Leavis's phrase). But
despite the revisionary ambitions of such historically-minded critics, and the
undoubted justice of their case, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads seems oddly resistant
to all attempts to relieve it of its momentous character: 1798 remains one of
those indisputably memorable dates of literary history (though it was hardly
noticed at the time), and the small volume must have a good claim to being the
most famous single book of poems of all, Shakespeare's Sonnets being its only
serious competitor.
The occasion of the Lyrical Ballads bicentenary comes around as more than
just another welcome opportunity to commemorate romantic literature and
thought. We have had many such occasions recently, making it, if not exactly
bliss to be alive, then at least a happy time for conference-goers. But the
Lyrical Ballads bicentenary feels like something with much more to do with us
than does, say, the anniversary of Political Justice, or of Wollstonecraft's
Vindication, both of which otherwise promise a contemporary relevance so
loudly. It is an unlikely volume to launch a revolution: the utter contingencies
of the project, and the nonce quality of the book that happened to happen, are
very well known; and the discrepancy between 'Advertisement' and many of the
poems that follow it (including 'The Ancient Mariner') are obvious to anyone.
But then it is the the strangely hybrid quality of the volume, catching between
covers the tangle of common pursuit and cross-purposes that characterised the
Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership, that make it seem so much more closely
involved with the possibilities open to the literary intelligence now than, say,
Blake or Byron or Keats, each of whom recent anniversaries and birthdays have
similarly brought to mind. To speak of Lyrical Ballads as somehow the
foundational work of English Romanticism is, of course, to create an historical
myth, possible only to one wise after the event. But perhaps Lyrical Ballads
makes itself exemplarily romantic in our eyes precisely because it contains the
radical difference that Coleridge would later discern between himself and
Wordsworth - and go on to detect, as well, within the mysteriously double-
minded genius of Wordsworth alone. Such difference persists through
succeeding literary generations as a provision of imaginative possibilities,
between which choices are to be made. Such difference persists, as well, to
shape the conflicts of our contemporary critical schools - largely thanks, no
doubt, to the lasting influence of Coleridge, 'father of modern criticism', whose
self-examinatory mulling over that difference animates the Biographia
Literaria. We could express the kinds of difference in many ways: as the
democratic injunction to use language of men against the 'elitist' insistence on
the special languages of art; as a preference for subjects drawn from the
everyday versus an adherence to subjects romantic or supernatural; as an
humanistic interest in the possibilities of the dramatic method opposing a self-
elevating concern with the experience as the poet qua poet; and so on. Perhaps,
then, we are looking in the wrong place when we surprise ourselves by
discovering that the poems in Lyrical Ballads, individually, are not that
different from what was going on elsewhere at the time: maybe it is the
generative sense of difference within the volume, animating the implicit but
unmistakable sense of dialogue between the individual poems, that is the
important kind of differentness at stake.
The fine interpretative essays gathered here each, in their diverse ways,
addresses the question of differentness and the Lyrical Ballads. James
Treadwell's exploration of 'Innovation and Strangeness'‚ in the poems deals
with just these matters, singling out 'Tintern Abbey' as the place where the self-
consciously innovative programme of the volume meets alternative kinds of
imaginative impulse: the dialogic interest that characterises the
experimentalism of the 'natural' poems suddenly meets the monologic
ambitions of a poetry creating an authoritative voice of experience. Keith
Hanley's piece similarly explores varieties of self-division within Wordsworth's
imaginings, setting them off suggestively against one of the contemporary texts
with which the Lyrical Ballads project seems to have most in common: Joanna
Baillie's plays, and especially De Monfort. The first two sections of the essay,
meanwhile, pursue the 'revolutionary' language-project of the book, arguing
that Wordsworthian subjectivity precedes the ideological premises of modern
critics like McGann and Bate in its 'preoccupation with the metalinguistic
potential of language itself to recover the originary structure of imaginary
subjectivity'. Wordsworth and Coleridge weren't alone, of course, in the ballad
revival, and Christopher Smith's expert scholarship relates Southey's
ambivalent place within the history of the Lyrical Ballads: his work stands on
either side of the book, as both an important source and a tendentious rejection
of its literary experimentalism. Southey's attitude towards the genre is
interestingly muddled from the start: drawn to the antiquarian pursuits of
balladry, he is yet rather disdainful of the ballad form itself; and mixed feelings
like these are brought into sharp relief by the volume of his two more-or-less
friends. Southey's famous review is fruitfully re-examined by Smith, and the
poems of his 1799 volume suggestively interpreted as, in part, a kind of
'corrected' Wordsworthian-Coleridgean idiom. Finally, Joel Pace, in another
piece of original and important research, deals with a different aspect of
influence, tracing the delayed impact of the Lyrical Ballads in America,
especially within the Unitarian community, and particularly upon Emerson.
One of the most tenacious forms of influence exerted by the little volume of
1798 was upon the two authors themselves: by the end of his life Coleridge was
being casually referred to in diaries and journals as 'The Ancient Mariner', and
Wordsworth never escaped his association with low and humble subjects,
although, considering his career as a whole, the connection is much less
obvious than the Ballads might lead one to expect. For both poets, self-
examination manifested itself in an obsessive habit of revision, returning to the
poems, touching, pruning, and (in the case of 'The Ancient Mariner' especially)
large amounts of complete re-writing: here is a new kind of differentness, the
internal kind that arises when an older author returns to the words of his earlier
self. Critical opinions differ on this point, some finding in the re-writing a
betrayal of revolutionary youth, others (most recently Zachary Leader, in his
outstanding Revision and Romantic Authorship) finding instead a moving
insistence on the continuity of the self. What everyone is agreed upon is the
desirability of knowing as much about the revisions as we can; and this is the
problem facing all editors of the Ballads. Like the poets, we live in
revolutionary times, though perhaps the most significant revolutions of our own
are of a technological rather than sanguinary variety; and the rapid
development of electronic editions has begun to make possible kinds of
scholarly texts that were unimaginable even ten years ago. The chaos of
revisions and second-thoughts that the successive versions of the Lyrical
Ballads poems reveal might have been designed to show off to best advantage
the capability of the electronic text; and Romanticism on the Net is very
fortunate to have two reports on progress by editors engaged on just such a
project. Ronald Tetreault and Bruce Graver's electronic Lyrical Ballads is due
to appear from Cambridge University Press in the near future, and may well, by
a happy contingency, put the little volume of 1798 at the heart of a new kind of
momentous change.

Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry

Glasgow University

Table of Contents of RoN 8 (February 1998):

• Keith Hanley (Lancaster University): 'Wordsworth's Revolution in

Poetic Language'
• James Treadwell (Christ Church, Oxford): 'Innovation and Strangeness;
or, Dialogue and Monologue in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads'
• Bruce Graver (Providence College) and Ronald Tetreault (Dalhousie
University): 'Editing Lyrical Ballads for the Electronic Environment'
• Christopher J. P. Smith (Open University): 'Robert Southey and the
Emergence of Lyrical Ballads'
• Joel Pace (Blackfriars, Oxford): '"Gems of a soft and permanent lustre":
The Reception and Influence of the Lyrical Ballads in America'