IV.i.Man of Feeling and Romanticism in a History o...
The expressive mode of emotion in Western modernity gives rise to anxieties about affective authenticity and sincerity.It suggests a new kind of personality, which we call an “individual.”Literary critic Lionel Trilling puts it in this way:“At a certain point in history men became individuals”(Trilling 24).For Trilling, this is reflected in the impulse to write autobiography, establishing “one’s only authority”over “the truth of one’s experience and the intensity of one’s conviction of enlightenment”(23).Thus, the expressive mode is also about the increasing importance of representation in the making of modern self in the eighteenth century[1].The proliferation of feelings in the century and our accessibility to them itself argue for the point that the existence of emotion reflects not just the content of mental representations but the fact that they are representations[2].The realm of language is constructed as an autonomous epistemological field in the seventeenth century, through which modern knowledge becomes possible[3].This new mode of representation could be discussed with the concept of “theatricality,”concerning a selfhood individuated and privatized against an increasingly hypostatized “society.”For Trilling, this could have been included into a group of vocabulary now of capital importance that comes into use in their present meanings in the last decades of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the next:“industry,”“democracy,”“class,”“art”and “culture[4].”“Society,”as an aggregate of individual human beings, becomes “something other than human, and its being conceived in this way, as having indeed a life of its own but not a human life”(19).It is what Bruno Latour asserts about modernity, which is constituted by language as the domain of stories, texts, and discourses[5].In the case examined in this chapter, this period of history sees a vernacularization process.Sheldon Pollock identifies it as “literization,”which is the commitment of oral and vernacular poetic forms to writing, as forms of modern literature in the production of modern text-artifact[6].By 1800, James Raven points out, “print issued from hundreds of presses operating in London and almost every small town in the country[7].”Against this background, representations of sentiment and emotion are examined as politics of authenticity and sincerity, both of which occur in the space of hybridity between the source text—conceived as the oral—and a modern textual medium of the book in the eighteenth century[8].A new literary culture encapsulates a work of writing that generates forms of subjectivity.And it invents a nature through representations that are both historical and historicizing.Indeed, as Walter J.Ong argues, “writing restructures consciousness[9].”This new textual culture positions the oral as the dangerous other, from which literacy as the province of rational morality is promoted.This probably starts with what Frances Yates names “the inner deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century”—“the vital period for the emergence of modern European and American man[10].”
By the end of the eighteenth century, William Wordsworth attributes this formation of a “society”to “a multitude of causes unknown to former times”that “are now acting with a combined force”(Wordsworth 1974:232).This includes both “the great national events which are daily taking place”and the more gradual processes of modernization, such as “the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies”(232).For him, “the change has been silently going on ever since we were born; the disease has been growing, and now breaks out in all its danger and deformity,”as he writes in an 1812 letter to Catherine Carkson[11].The mission of Romantic poetry is to counteract “the gross and violent stimulants,”to which the human mind is vulnerable when exposed to “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse”(232).In other words, Wordsworth proposes an economy of selfhood different from that stimulated from emotional extravagance.He sees a mature British literary technology and system being contaminated by “the rapid communication of intelligence”from the media of foreign Gothic novels.His project is against the conformity with “this tendency of life and manners”that “the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country”commit.For him, this major feature of his contemporary popular literature distances a large population of displaced laborers, peddlers, and beggars away from being susceptible to the socializing influences of nature:“A primrose by a river’s brim / A yellow primrose was to him / And it was nothing more”(218-220).Instead, they are all too susceptible to “whatever vice / The cruel city breeds”(274-275).Wordsworth addresses this “disease,”“danger and deformity,”and “vice”through handling, hierarchizing, and authorizing medially disparate sources.He develops a complex system of anthropological poiesis with lyrical ballads, which is a genre of writing different from novels in its oral features[12].Through distinguishing his poetry from “the popular Poetry of the day”not by rejecting but by using its figures[13], Wordsworth explores that edge, geographically and medially, and renders his lyrical ballads as a quasianthropological trope[14].His critique of the contemporary reading public amounts to an attempt to replace debased readers with readers who have been “purified and exalted.”Jon P.Klancher writes:
Out of his [Wordsworth’s] prefaces, supplements, and letters emerged a whole vocabulary with which literary history and the sociology of culture came to distinguish the transmission of cultural works:their ‘reception’ by some readers, their ‘consumption’ by many others, and the abyss between serious and mass culture that has only recently begun to be critically explored.(Klancher 135)
The form of ballads, in which appear “the figure of the primitive, the popular, and the authentically emotive, whether encountered at home or abroad”(McLane 2008:223), and the deluge of feelings are domesticated into the emergence of a modern literary medium in Wordsworth’s poetry writing.It manufactures a vehicle of selfrepresentation:“I breathed(for this I better recollect) / Among wild appetites and blind desires, / Motions of savage instinct, my delight / And exaltation”(Home at Grasmere, MS.B, lines 912-915)[15].It is a poetic project of trans-mediation that encompasses various media activities, including reading, singing, watching, collecting, and transcribing.
It has been admitted as a critical fact that Wordsworth—at least for many of his early readers—was notorious for “the disproportionate nature of his emotions”(Pinch 72).Lucy Aikin remarks in her review of Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes(1807) upon the poet’s “unfortunate habit … of attaching exquisite emotions to objects which excite none in any other human breast[16].”Another reviewer puts Wordsworth’s emotional extravagances in gendered terms:“Mr.Wordsworth … gave considerable testimony of strong feeling and poetic powers, although like a hysterical schoolgirl he had a knack of feeling about subjects with which feeling had no proper concern[17].”Samuel T.Coleridge, the collaborator of the lyrical ballad project, agrees that Wordsworth demonstrated
an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize[18].
Wordsworth refers himself as the “sentimental traveller”in a note to Descriptive Sketches(1793)[19].In his anthologized poetry album as a gift for Lady Mary Lowther, more than half of poems consist of the poetry of women[20].He expropriates the conventionalized images of women’s suffering as the medium, through which a transmission of feeling and of a romantic poiesis is(re)produced[21].Wordsworth’s editorial practice, Adela Pinch argues,
suggests that for the poet and his contemporaries, what motivated the anthologizing of women’s poetry was a desire to represent women’s voice as the production of a certain kind of lyric feeling predicated on women’s suffering.(Pinch 75)(https://www.daowen.com)
Seeking for “appropriate human centers”is a very significant means for the central figure of Wordsworth’s poetry to locate himself in a “hurrying world”(Wordsworth 1979b:143).It differs from Henry MacKenzie’s lachrymose man of feeling Harley, whose response to an insane girl cry—similar to Wordsworth’s Mad Mother—is to “burst into tears[22],”an explicit instance of emotional extravagance.Wordsworth’s contemporaries did not miss this point.His “reworking and intensification of what sentimentalism conventionally labeled ‘the pathetic’”(Averill 1980:11) is well recognized.For instance, William Hazlitt writes in “My First Acquaintance with Poets”:
[I]n The Thorn, The Mad Mother, and The Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman, I felt that deeper power and pathos which have been since acknowledged, ‘In spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,’ as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me[23].
Coleridge, who initiates the project of “interiority”into Romanticism[24], defines Wordsworthian economy of poetic sentiment more regarding its narrative structure:
a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator; rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate,(spectator, haud particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine.(Coleridge 1983:150)
For him, Wordsworth, with Goethe, “both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry.They are always, both of them, spectators ab extra,—feeling for, but never with, their characters[25].”Charles Altieri argues that Wordsworth’s 1802 “Preface”attempts “to provide a passionate rendering about the effects of passion, which then makes sense only if one provisionally adopts the projected state of mind[26].”Wordsworth admits his economy of emotions, especially in his discussion of “the pathetic”in the 1815 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.”There are two “emotions of the pathetic”:one as “simple and direct”that “participates of an animal sensation,”another as “complex and revolutionary.”More significantly, “there is also meditative, as well as a human, pathos; an enthusiastic, as well as an ordinary, sorrow; a sadness that has its seat in the depths of reason, to which the mind cannot sink gently of itself—but to which it must descend by treading the steps of thought.”“The depths of reason”and “treading the steps of thought”create a space of reflection and a medial distance towards immediacy.Thus, Wordsworth lists “Sensibility”second among “the powers requisite for the production of poetry,”commenting that “the more exquisite it is, the wider will be the range of a poet’s perceptions; and the more will he be incited to observe objects, both as they exist in themselves and as re-acted upon by his own mind[27].”A poet’s perceptions and ability to observe is of primary significance for the production of poetry for Wordsworth, that is.In the note to “The Thorn,”Wordsworth stresses the intrinsic connection between a poetic language and passion:“Words, a Poet’s words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured by the space they occupy upon paper.For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion.”Thus, the history of poetry is also a “history or science of feelings[28].”The dual focus of the emotional object and subject makes Wordsworth’s poetry writing possible.And his sense of observational neutrality or impartiality in the management of sentiments from the “objects of distress”is discernible in his marginal figures like women, beggars, old men, and maniacs among others.In the American context, it is not until the late nineteenth century when “the discourse of virility so central to the rhetoric of literary realism”becomes “part an attempt to keep distinct ‘quality’ writing from the creeping sensuality of romance[29].”In the British context, as this writing argues through this chapter, Wordsworth’s political economy of feelings is gendered as female in the making of British Romantic poetry, which is gendered as male.This poiesis seems like what Henry Mackenzie explains as the genesis of The Man of Feeling:“I was somehow led to think of introducing a Man of Sensibility into different Scenes where his Feelings might be seen in their Effects[30].”However, for Wordsworth, a relation between the oral(either singing, or reading) and the print(or the “textual”) is transposed, presenting the poet as a mediator.It thus positions a poetic “author”in the British Romantic poetry as a bona fide transmitter, which is a performative medial role absent in the fragmentary episodes of the life of Harley in Henry Mackenzie.In this sense, literary form, and its proprieties of authorship and consumption absorb the nature of gender, which runs through a history of modern media [31].In this cultural history of modes of containment and management, a textual culture presents itself as neutral and objective in a historical period that Jeremy Bentham categorizes as “the regime of publicity[32],”whereas the oral, female, sentiment always as that of the other.The other of writing(reading, singing, speech), of culture(the voice of nature), of the modern(a pre-modern, pre-linguist past), that is.Stylistic strategies and modes of narration required of modern publics absorb viewers into textually constructed positions of general subjectivity, which also serves the historical convergence of social and economic objectives[33].It is from here, I argue, a poetics of interiority is deployed and well developed in the growth of a poet’s mind, which maintains an economy of exclusion that otherwise marks the domestic sphere.
Contemporary media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, following Marshall McLuhan, call the constant remix of older media forms by newer ones and vice versa as “remediation,”the goal of which, as reform, is “to refashion or rehabilitate other media”(Bolter and Grusin 55-56).Their influential formulation is invoked by N.Katherine Hayles in Writing Machine into a simpler formula:“Remediation, the cycling of different media through one another”(5).In the light of this theoretical framework, Wordsworth remediates what he calls “the gross and violent stimulants”and “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.”Out of this process the oral is transposed into the textual.This conjuring of “orality”in textual culture invites us to reckon with what another media theorist Friedrich A.Kittler calls “a transposition of media[34].”It is an attempt to recoup the voice of orality in all its presumed authenticity of context.What matters here is to see what theatrical presence Wordsworth performs in transposing feminine sentimentality into poetic work in “the history or science of feelings.”This would be of significance to throw light upon an investigation of the making of sentiments and feelings in moral philosophy, literature, political economy and science from the middle of the eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, which is a history of media as “historical subjects”in their full historical and historicizable complexity[35].Raymond Williams takes “mediation”as “an active relationship, or, more interestingly, a specific transformation of material”(Williams 1977:158), as “a way of emphasizing the material production”(163)[36].The print medium of communication is, for Williams, also a “means of production[37].”The current writing follows this Marxist vein of realism, and locates how the man of feeling appropriates what Maureen McLane calls “the glamor of the oral”(214) in the Romantic period to configure the real in the emergence of a textual media culture.Robert Miles argues:
Romanticism is distinguished by a self-consciousness that simultaneously looks backward toward a state of naivety from which history has permanently deviated, and forward toward new forms of expression ....Thus one of the fundamental ironies of Romanticism:it is often most modern when most ‘nostalgic,’ or backward-looking.(Miles 185)[38]
In a history of media, it could be addressed as less a transition stage and more a “cusp”that partakes both the oral and the print, the reader and the writer, interiority and media[39].