IV.ii.Sensibility as Gendered, Authenticity, and t...
In the eighteenth century, as Michel Foucault suggests:
The entire female body is riddled by obscure but strangely direct paths of sympathy; it is always in an immediate complicity with itself, to the point of forming a kind of absolutely privileged site for the sympathies; from one extremity of its organic space to the other, it encloses a perpetual possibility of hysteria.The sympathetic sensibility of her organism, radiating through her entire body, condemns woman to those diseases of the nerves that are called vapors[40].
This problematic relation between control and anxiety upon the female body is a reflection upon the long-time existent discourse upon women’s susceptibility to “passions,”which leads to hysteria, the depictions of feminine sensibility and disorder.Robert Whytt, for example, writes in his Observations of 1765:
It is true that in women, hysteric symptoms occur more frequently, and are often much more sudden and violent, than the hypochondriac in men; but this circumstance, which is only a consequence of the more delicate frame, sedentary life, and particular condition of the womb in women, by no means shows the two diseases to be, strictly speaking, different[41].
Woman’s liability to disorder is particularly associated with her reproductive capacities, which is the womb.Several pages latter, Whytt defines the problem through the nervous system.“WOMEN, in whom the nervous system is generally more moveable than in men, are more subject to nervous complaints, and have them in a higher degree[42].”Certainly this discursive attribution of sensibility to women does not merely exist in medical treatises.John Mullan writes:
In many of the novels of the eighteenth century which elevate sentiment, and most notably in Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, the investment in sensibility is an investment in a particular version of the feminine—tearful, palpitating, embodying virtue whilst susceptible to all the vicissitudes of ‘feeling.’(Mullan 218)
Terry Eagleton calls this into a broad “feminization of discourse”(Eagleton 1982:14) that is represented in Richardson.E.J.Clery argues that this constitutes a “feminization debate,”in which the growing status and influence of women was “variously condemned as cause and symptom of national decline, or celebrated as an index of increasing refinement or civility”(Clery 1).Thus, through the century, different discourses, medical or literary, attribute to women “an elevated sensibility, an especially vivid imagination, a highly tuned sympathy, and a susceptibility to narratives of misfortune and suffering”(Brown 113)[43].Feminine sensibility and disorder “is, and continues into the nineteenth century to be, the object of a male scrutiny which is by turns suspicious, enraptured, and dismissive”(216-217).This is partially true of Wordsworth’s first published composition, “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress,”the title of which already suggests a tinge of scrutinizing voyeurism into a sentimental reading scene, sedentary, domestic and private[44].The poem, as one of the many youthful poems of Wordsworth’s, was published pseudonymously in the European Magazine of March 1787 under the Latin name of “Axiologus,”which means “words’ worth.”Miss Helen Maria Williams’s Poems, in Two Volumes was published in 1786, and short poems of recognition to a fellow poet were a minor genre popular in the late eighteenth century[45].In many ways, however, this first composition is not simply an exercise for Wordsworth[46].Neither there lies any significance to see that James Averill argues the development of “a connection between sympathetic emotion and moral improvement”started from The Ruined Cottage and Peter Bell[47].Instead, it reveals much about Wordsworth’s self-consciously established relationship to contemporary popular culture and to a history of sentiment as materialized in textual media, with its extraordinary dramatic complexity and tensions within Wordsworth’s early experimental poems.As a matter of fact, the theatrical strategy of posing himself not only as a writer but as a viewer and a cultural transmitter, with a sophisticated manufactured perception of and proximity to feminine sentimentality, is throughout Wordsworth’s rhetoric of sentiment.It is also among the century-long “attempts to raise the dead, to hear what has vanished, to re-animate the scene”that “become coupled with the authors’ desire to fix their own history in perpetuity—that is, to control the future of language as well”(Stewart 8).It is one of the primary means that British Romantics deploy for the production of their literary work and project themselves as productive and valuable through their work of writing[48].
In this first published poem of Wordsworth’s, he moves swiftly across gender lines in expressing a response to another person’s emotion as a beholder in an elaborate and fictitious situation devised through the work of writing:
SHE wept.—Life’s purple tide began to flow
In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Dim were my swimming eyes—my pulse beat slow,
And my full heart was swell’d to dear delicious pain.
Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye;
A sigh recall'd the wanderer to my breast;
Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh
That call’d the wanderer home, and home to rest.(https://www.daowen.com)
The sonnet’s language is conventional and derivative, with a strong overdependence on adjectives, and much of the vocabulary echoing that of Helen Maria Williams[49].In the late eighteenth century, there exists a type of sentimental figure responding to sentimental objects, who mediate between human suffering and its ultimate audience—figures such as Yorick, Tristram, Belford, Harley, and even Rasselas[50].Probably this is why this poem has not been given that much critical attention and significance, and was often brushed aside mainly as a “marginal poem”or “an exercise in a certain style of late eighteenth-century poetic diction”(Pinch 76).The original pathos, however, is placed further from the reader than it had ever been in other similar literary texts—such as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling.In this poem, the real or present objects of distress is not accessible to the reader, to whom is presented a mediated occasion to view Miss Williams’s reading or hearing a tale of distress—both as oral activities.Her book or tale is enclosed to the reader, and in this textualized situation merely a sentimental woman figure is manufactured[51].In place of a presentation of the moving incidents from the tale Williams was reading(qtd.in Averill 1980:208)[52], there is the drama of consciousness, sentimentality, and somatically involved trepidation.Wordsworth authors a context as well as an artifact.Right at the beginning, we have the poetic incident presented through a short but significant predication—“SHE wept,”which, different from “a void of physical sensation”(Averill 1980:200) in Wordsworth’s later poems such as “The Pedlar[53],”initiates a “descent”into the meticulous somatic details of the poet’s body in the octet:the purple tide, the thrilling vein, the slow pulse, the swollen, “loaded”heart, the closing eye[54].It suggests what Paula McDowell discerns “a renewed fascination with the human body as a powerful(and potentially universal) communications medium”(McDowell 2010:241) in the eighteenth century.The quickening impulse comes from the contemplation of the sentimental.It reminds of Coleridge’s description of The Recluse as a poem that would involve a history of the progress of sensation in its relation to conjectural history popular around that historical period:it treats “man as man, a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses[55].”Peter Murphy argues that
in the modern world the written self may appear to be more capricious and free, but that self is sutured ever closer to the bodilyself, since its career generates profits that the bodily self wants, and which culture becomes ever more capable of overseeing and collecting.(Murphy 134)
Vision, as a metaphor of encounter and interaction between subject and suffering object, becomes contagious and tactile, through which what Earl Wasserman has called the “doctrine of sympathy[56]”is achieved.It already initiates Wordsworth as a Romantic poet, who stands for “a particularly powerful form of sympathetic relationship between author and reader”(Franta 55)—what Coleridge writes in the following way:
And therefore it is the prime merit of genius and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence[57].
This self-sentimentalizing move collapses the distance between the sympathizing observer and the weeping subject he contemplates upon.It is among the tendency of Wordsworth’s contemporary sentimental literature, which is “to bring the reader self-consciously into literary structure”(Averill 1980:37), and to remind of “a literary situation in which the reader had been aware of himself as reader and of the work as literary artifact”(45)[58].It subordinates the concreteness of lived relations to an imaginary, which thereby substitutes and cancels the unruly detail and flux of the real through gestures of suppression and absorption.This is a gesture of confining it in the feminine sentimental scene so that it is possible to reassert orality as a nurturing mode rather than the corrupting influence of popular literature.Maureen McLane categorizes this as “the romance of orality”in the transformation of a Romantic poiesis, an “emergence of a new literary orality”in eighteenth-century Britain[59].
The central role of language is placed a significant position by Wordsworth in the formation of moral sentiments and beliefs.In a criticism of the contemporary moral philosophy, he suggests that moral philosophers set an “undue value ...upon that faculty which we call reason”and, therefore, appeal to us in “lifeless words, & abstract propositions.”They are “impotent over our habits,”as he writes.For him, only if a language is directed toward the body can our passion and habit be reshaped:
Can it be imaged by any man who has deeply examined his own heart that an old habit will be foregone, or a new one formed, by a series of propositions, which, presenting no image to the [?mind](sic) can convey no feeling which has any connection with the supposed archetype or fountain of the proposition existing in human life?(Wordsworth 1974, 1:103)
And a text—like what Miss Williams is reading as well as the artifactualized text through Wordsworth’s work of writing—should “melt into our affection[s]”and “incorporate itself with the blood & vital juices of our minds”in the act of reading, so as to inform “us how men placed in such or such situations will necessarily act ...thence enabling us to apply ourselves to the means of turning them into a more beneficial course”(qtd.in Bewell 11)[60].Thus the ethos of a reading audience is interpellated through the regulation of an expanding cultural economy of intimacy, and a rhetorical relationship between readers and the writer is established.It is through presenting the illusion that he and the actual readers share the activity of constructing a literary reality.Reader and writer are conflated in the act of watching through a sense of complicity, which merges reader and writer in the “action”of the poetic text.This is different from moral philosophy[61].A sense of contextual realism is negotiated through a developed sense of closeness between narrator and audience.It follows the empirical mode of sentimentalism prevalent in the eighteenth century[62].The dramatic monologue form of the poem initiates what Robert Langbaum recognizes as the impulse toward the “poetry of experience”stemming from the late eighteenth century[63].
There is not merely a transition of poetic objects, presumably from the feminine sentimental scene “SHE wept”to descriptions of its “physiological effects”(Pinch 77) upon the poet’s body, however.More than that, this description of the internal response to the tale of feminine sentimentality is a transposition of media, from the visual and aural(and even tactile) to the literary and in the extension from the mimetic into the realm of pure language.It anticipates—if not already an instance of—what Celeste Langan identifies print as quite “recognizable as a medium”by 1800:“[T]he medium of print becomes recognizable as a medium ...by its attempt to ‘deliver’ audiovisual information [64].”Literature as part of the emergent modern print medium invents and legitimates the personal and familial in the oral forms as “a nostalgia for the presence of the body and the face-to-face, a dream of unmediated communication that, of course, could never be approximated even in the oral—a dream of an eternal present, a future-past”(Stewart 23)[65].If, starting from the early eighteenth century, “in works such as The Dunciad and A Tale of a Tub, Pope and Swift reflect on and register threatening oral practices as part of their extended meditation upon the problems and possibilities of print[66]”, orality including the readerly activity of reading, in a later period of the century, is sanctioned and revivified by its acquisition of an imaginary feminine scene.Penny Fielding, in her Writing and Orality, notes that when the “romance of orality”is “constructed by a dominant ideology it begins to look suspiciously like writing”(10).It would be fixed, authoritative, monologic, and culturally hegemonic.Some forms of orality are better than others.In a “graphocentric society”(10), it is the elite literati who sift and determine the values and meanings of the oral.Or what Friedrich A.Kittler claims that “all the passion of reading consisted of hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines:the visible or audible world of romantic poetry”(40).
The poetic subjectivity perceives, hears of, and even(possibly) physically approximates the weeping female poet, and presents all through the actual work of his writing on the somatic details.This agrees with the picture of the Enlightenment anthropology, which, though guided by an ethnocentric belief that all cultures are on the way to becoming European, nevertheless assumes a greater degree of reciprocity in this relationship[67].Wordsworth, strongly influenced by moral philosophical texts[68], follows the moral philosopher constructing his “science of man.”He remains far removed from the societies that provided the raw materials of his theories, and presents philosophical speculations in the form of textual activities[69].In this poem, it is partially true that “it is not clear how many characters people the sonnet”(Averill 35).It is also partially true that
the speaker’s detachment from his object, his leaving her spontaneously and immediately to retreat into his own response, is balanced by a blurring of the boundaries between his body and hers, as if his feelings were physically propped upon hers, rather than reflecting or imitating them.(Pinch 77)
That is, a possibility(or ambiguity) of ventriloquism exists in the poem.All of this, however, may be read more broadly as an index of “mediality,”a term proposed by Friedrich A.Kittler, of which David Wellbery amplifies as “the general condition within which, under certain circumstances, something like ‘poetry’ or ‘literature’ can take shape[70].”Wordsworth takes this occasion of “SHE wept”to stage himself as that person of feeling, and doing the work of writing.The female vocal activity is used to conjure a sense of “orality”in modern literature, which is made possible by a “general”medium of print.Regarding the historical relation between literacy and orality, Celeste Langan argues, in the case of Walter Scott:
Once print has achieved its would-be transparency—once literacy has become general(I use “general”rather than “universal”here to signify that literacy had become both an acknowledged goal and a norm though not an actuality), the storage system of ‘oral literature’ would seem to be obsolete.But precisely for that reason, it becomes available as the ostensible content of the broadcast medium of print.(Langan 70)
This is also true of this first poem of Wordsworth’s, in which the oral is configured in an artifactualized Miss Williams weeping.Sentimentalism’s orientation toward response, which fastens attention exclusively upon a sympathetic economy of the emotions of the perceiver[71], is made into a dialectics between orality(weeping), literacy(reading), and viewing(“I”and the implicated reader) in this “transparency”economy of the print medium.This process of transmission is exactly what Friedrich A.Kittler calls “the transposition of media,”through which the male writer—as words’ worth—of the poem becomes what might be aptly captured as the “participant observer”in the parlance of cultural anthropology [72] in the discourse of sentimentality.The weeping female(poet or not) is positioned as that of an anthropological object[73].If, indeed, it is that “an imperative issues from the realization that the transposition of media is always a manipulation and must leave gaps between one embodiment and another[74],”here we have the gaps between the male observer and the female sentiment, reading, watching and writing.Alan Bewell argues that
Wordsworth’s anthropology is distinct from most of the work done prior to the twentieth century in that it is grounded on direct observation and participation in fieldwork, not on the distanced synthesis of ethnographic documents ...denies any neutral form of observation or description ...continually draws our attention to the place, function, and intellectual limits of the observer in anthropological narratives.(Bewell 91)
Indeed, this more complex and self-conscious manner of anthropological discourse in the poem establishes a staging situation, where the poetic narrator’s body must be of meticulous somatic details so as to be authentic and sincere:not merely the authenticity and sincerity of the authorial “I,”but also that of the female weeping reader.This accords well with the century’s attempt to represent honest feeling honestly, as suggested through the critical work of Michael Fried on French eighteenth-century painting and David Marshall on Shaftesbury, Defoe, and Rousseau[75].It suggests a mode of excess in sensibility, when the “society”is saturated of mass media.What the conservative poet Robert Southey names “the sentimental classes, persons of ardent or morbid sensibility”in 1823(qtd.in Williams 282) already has its historical precursors in the eighteenth century.It exists as an undefined antagonist, for which Fried designates “theatrical”—what Jon Klancher defines as “the stances of both radical rhetoric and mass-cultural display,”and “it is worth pointing out that theorists of this kind of reader/spectator nearly always fabricate a hybrid antagonist, composedly equally of radical discourse and mass culture”(Williams 191)[76].What draws Wordsworth’s reforming impulse in his preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads is prominently the prevailing taste of the gothic novels—what Wordsworth calls “frantic novels[77].”The exemplar of this taste is “an implicit endorsement of a mindless but entertaining practice of absorptive reading that requires a willing suspension of disbelief”(Warner 291) in Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto(1764).For Wordsworth and Coleridge his collaborator, an authentic-deep-self has to be established for accessing the substance of interiority[78].This might be also the primary reason why the first generation of English Romantic poets finds “simulation”—the creation of virtual realities, through panoramas, billboards, or phantasmagorias—especially noxious[79].The strategy of blurring the boundaries between his body(and consciousness) and hers is a shrewd camouflage of projecting the textual media of poetry-writing as male and the oral form of weeping as female[80].In other words, Wordsworth seems very aware of what de Certeau summarizes as the pedagogical function of the book at the heart of the Enlightenment:a certain concept of education as mimicry, with a “scriptural system”that assumes:“[that] although the public is more or less resistant, it is molded by(verbal or iconic) writing, that it becomes similar to what it receives, and that it is imprinted by and like the text which is imposed on it”(167)[81].In this way, Wordsworth accomplishes the emotional authenticity claim as realized in the somatic details of the writing poet through mimicry, while distancing the oral reader of Miss Williams into an anthropological object.