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is, in part, due to historical differences in gender roles and Dorothy's use of a romantic rhetoric that is now outdated.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 workOn sky, earth, river, lake and sea:Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breezeAll 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 knewBut all might see it float, obedient to the wind.

Might see it, from the verdant shoreDissevered float upon the Lake,Float with its crest of trees adornedOn which the warbling birds their pastime take.

Food, shelter, safety there they findThere 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 spaceThis little Island may surviveBut Nature, though we mark her not,Will take away--may cease to give.

Perchance when you are wandering forthUpon some vacant sunny dayWithout 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 PerryGlasgow 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 '