IV.iii.Political Economy of Romantic Literary Labo...
Here it claims the author and the first person “I”as the authentic producer of literary value—words’ worth.It does not address Miss Helen Maria Williams as a writer at all but as a sentimental reader distanced from a reading audience.Interestingly, in the eighteenth century, the novel-addicted reader in Britain is usually gendered female[82], and “this figure of the woman reader can function as an admonitory figure for men as well as for women:because novels render readers sensitive and erotic, they menace men with feminization”(Warner 141).Miss Helen Maria Williams, the actual woman writer, is poeticized into a prevalent figure of a popular female reader but admonitory for men who perform as the producer of literary work.The actual pedagogical process—Wordsworth the young learner, Miss Williams the established poet to be learned from—is reversed:the women reader as the pedagogical subject[83].And a first-person narrative, unlike the thirdperson narratives in early fictions by Behn, Manley, and Haywod[84], would not take the reader into an affect-laden, supercharged sympathy with the thoughts and sensibilities of the characters, but with that of the author à la the observer.It is a fully self-conscious authorial response to that media culture eroticized and feminized by womanizing consumption and women production:the body of the author is instrumentalized along with his pleasure and experience through an act of voyeurism.His power comes from standing apart but nevertheless watching, the classic gesture of the anthropological participant observer, through which we can see an embryonic structure of narrator, audience, and victim complicated in later poems of Wordsworth’s.This exteriority to the scene he contrives offers an evidential “I,”with which the reader is persuaded to identify.It lies outside any overwhelming and sentimental consumption of reading, and is thus able to produce work for readings.This “I”—a figure of what Geoffrey Hartman has called “the ocular man in Wordsworth[85]”—develops an ethos that facilitates the serialization of the life of a reader into a sequence of absorbing adventures:it could be about Miss Helen Maria Williams or anyone else that takes the role of textualized characters weeping and reading.From this a sense of steady, cost-free accumulation of experience becomes possible, and a print media becomes addictive.
This sentimental sympathy in Miss Helen Maria Williams’s reading scene—NOT in her writing scene—as watched with an erotic tinge by a Wordsworthian “I”becomes a necessary condition for the visibility of her virtue in print[86].It helps situate the literary value of a Wordsworth, whose work keeps readers free from the contagious feminizing readingtale activity.Womanizing reading and writing women are resolved with this strategy of the “containment of the contagion,”to use a phrase by Paula McDowell used in a different context[87].Writing here indeed structures simultaneously poison and cure[88].The rift is at once temporal, epistemological, and ethical.An implicit as well as complicit contract is formed between “I”in the poem and its reader.Thus a hierarchy of writing and reading, literary producer and consumer is established along the gender axis to reassure the distancing authority of the author in the reader that enters the sentimental scene and goes away unscathed.There lies the whole possibility of a carefree absorption of the reader in transition between reading, weeping and listening.It is reminiscent of a similar gesture that we see in Francis Bacon’s experimental philosophy of the British Enlightenment:
For as yet we are but lingering in the outer courts of nature, nor are we preparing ourselves a way into her inner chambers.Yet no one can endow a given body with a new nature, or successfully and aptly transmute into a new body, unless he has attained a competent knowledge of the body so to be altered or transformed.(Bacon 7)
In Bacon’s method, nature is subjected to our will to transform it, under a penetrating gaze of a knowledge gendered male.The feminine nature enables a possibility of knowledge in a sexualized cartography, which, in turn, grants an aggressive masculinity and male dominion over nature many times identified as modernity[89].
In the same way, Wordsworth takes the imitation-inducing powers ascribed to an absorptive reading with an emergent feminine sentimentality, and then harnesses them to the cause of virtue through the authorial mediation of print in the sestet of the poem:
That tear proclaims—in thee each virtue dwells,
And bright will shine in misery’s midnight hour;
As the soft star of dewy evening tells
What radiant fires were drown’d by day’s malignant pow’r
That only wait the darkness of the night
To cheer the wand’ring wretch with hospitable light.
The relation of the oral to the literate within literature is projected as a theatrical performance and medium in print, a type of theatricality exploitative to female sentimentality and female writers, which at the first place, provides a means of entering the poetic arena.The transmission relays established through Wordsworth makes the poem an open social channel for readers to internalize.It serves an intermediary linguistic bridge between Williams, “I,”Wordsworth and the reader that link between “soul”and “self”in the unusual figure of the “stranger within”of the eighteenth century[90].Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation”(1773) presents a case of an inner self, or “soul”of providential deism projected across the heavens in an act of imaginary interstellar level[91].The sublime “God”from within in “this dead of midnight”as “a spark of fire divine”—to which the transported “self-collected soul”turns inward—is replaced by the inter-subjective and inter-medial sentimental and virtuous(and vivifying) tear of either Williams, “I,”Wordsworth and the reader, with its cathartic affect achieved upon each.It is this mediating practice in between subjects and media that performs cultural work for words’ worth.The earlier inward turn to Providence in the “self-collected soul”converts to a more buffered zone of medial space for representation, reflection and response.The vertiginous effects, which the eighteenth century typically gained by contemplative projection into outer space[92], is achieved by Wordsworth as about interiority and consumptive reading.By absorbing the older(female) forms of sentimental scenes(weeping, as well as writing for Williams) into the new(male) buffered zone as its content, the print media both contain the older forms and draw strength from it as it develops into new practices[93].In this characteristically Wordsworthian transparency[94], he lays it bare his own history of received transmissions—the voyeuristic gesture—and his profound, painful internalization, the agonized power he himself invests in his work.The poet’s body is made internalized textual—weeping as a consequence to reading activity—possibly a silent solitary reading[95], with Williams’s as the oral.The narration itself works the change.The transmission relays work to invite a re-oralization from the actual readers of that historical period[96]—what Coleridge realizes as “the devotees of the circulating libraries[97]”and “the luxuriant misgrowth of our activity:a Reading Public![98]”Don H.Bialostosky even argues that Wordsworth does not view the poet as “a maker in the medium of language but a maker of poems representing speaking persons[99].”If the eighteenth century had access to interpretation of catharsis likening the effect of tragedy to physical purgation, the expulsion of what Samuel Johnson calls “impurities of tragedy from the human body[100],”the “darkness of the night”is enlightened or refined into “hospitable light”in the practice of writing and reading.It is another place where Wordsworth situates his poetics in eighteenth-century philosophy and “conjectural history[101],”which “takes up a specific stance toward marginal individuals, viewing them as keys for unlocking otherwise insoluble problems about human origins”(Bewell 25).Sentimentality gendered as feminine is used to lend support for textual speculation and production.The meticulous somatic details of the poet’s body in the octet are not for nothing but the sake of individual—as well as textual—sincerity and authenticity, pure and hygienic.This is what Wordsworth suggests as the labor of a poetic genius in his 1815 “Essay”:
Of genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature.Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe:or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown.What is all this but an advance, or a conquest, made by the soul of the poet?Is it to be supposed that the reader can make progress of this kind, like an Indian prince or general—stretched on his palanquin, and borne by his slaves?No; he is invigorated and inspirited by his leader, in order that he may exert himself; for he cannot proceed in quiescence, he cannot be carried like a dead weight.Therefore to create taste is to call forth and bestow power, of which knowledge is the effect; and there lies the true difficulty.(Wordsworth 1974, 3:82)(https://www.daowen.com)
This male literary laboring scene from the Romantic genius is a trope prevalent in Romantic anxiety upon literary value.Jerome J.McGann observes it as “A Romantic Agony”:“Imagination and poetry do not offer a relief and escape but a permanent and self-realized condition of suffering”(McGann 131)—efforts of Romantics to identify their work as labor in the coming of political economy[102].This political economy is conditioned upon feminine and female sentimentality, through which the musing male’s settling into the vivifying virtue and hospitable light is primarily a response to mediation and the process of writing.Wordsworth poeticizes this sentimental scene in the tradition of eighteenth-century empirical philosophy, through the writing of which “a specific group of marginal and otherwise anonymous people entered into writing and history ...structured to meet the demands of these texts and to function as an idiom or working grammar within the language of empiricism”(Bewell 28).Elsewhere Wordsworth writes:“Poetic excitement, when accompanied by protracted labour in composition, has throughout my life brought on more or less bodily derangement[103].”This “bodily derangement”—as a form of what Robert Whytt identifies as “the hypochondriac”—needs the feminine sentimental virtue to vivify, as the baby is wanting the motherly eyesight.It provides a virtue of pleasure and productivity[104].Different from Richardson, who engages what Madeleine Kahn calls “narrative transvestism”—hiding himself behind an alluring story of a sexually embattled fifteen-year-old girl[105], Wordsworth presents a relational mediality between the sentimental feminine reading, the authorial “I”seeing, and the readerly experience, drawing a space represented as individualistic and private into the public sphere of print.This poetic strategy throughout his career locates the poetic subjectivity in the isolated as well as sharing position, in similar cases of which Walter Benjamin sees in the novelist in his “The Storyteller:Reflections on the Work of Nicolai Leskov”:
The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others.And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.The novelist has isolated himself.The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual ....(Benjamin 87)
For instance, The Prelude, the great unread poem—unread because published posthumously—of the Romantic period, emphasizes the necessity of literacy needed, the ability to read, to be able to discover human emotional subjectivity, which is the object of a poetic epistemology.In a sense, this suggests the emergence of a lonely male writer and reader in the bourgeoning textual culture:
When I began to enquire,
To watch and question those I met and speak
Without reserve to them, the lonely roads
Were open schools in which I daily read
With most delight the passions of mankind,
Whether by words, looks, sighs, or tears, revealed;
There saw into the depth of human souls,
Souls that appear to have no depth at all
To careless eyes.[Wordsworth 1979b:160-168]
The need to “inquire / To watch and question”these individuals—as an act of silent reading, the means by which the “passions of mankind”and the “depth of human souls”can be “daily read”—is a process of education and socialization for the poetic subjectivity.The observer, rather than the observed, is educated with a literacy of reading deep into souls.And this is conducted in a domestic context, restricting a knowledge formed from observations to and conversations with people, with whom he held “familiar talk[106].”The solitary poetic voice(as suggested by travelling on “the lonely roads”) technologizes an oral tradition—part of “low and rustic life”—into that of literacy:a specifically oral medium to be eventually supplanted by the more efficient technology of reading.Through the oral, an interior subjectivity—“the depth of human souls”—is produced as a consequence of literate reading.It is what a process of “glamor”—the way Walter Scott defines it in The Lay of the Last Minstrel(1835):“Glamour, in the legends of superstition, means the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of the spectators, so that the appearance of the object shall be totally different from the reality”(Scott 1835:41).Penny Fielding points out that, in Scottish culture, “the association of writing with magic is preserved, as ‘grammar’, or booklearning, became ‘glamour’, or magical power”(Fielding 66) [107].It is as if the Scottish does work upon Wordsworth in a figural sense.In the case analyzed here, this poetic strategy is realized in the beginning of his literary career in a virtualized familiarity with Miss Williams through Wordsworth’s reading of and learning from women sentimental poems in the 1780s.The magic of literacy makes possible the somatic reactions of the poetic subjectivity from “She weeps.”It could be identified as what Kittler calls “alphabetism”in a larger context of historical media:“Around 1800, the book became both film and record simultaneously—not, however, as a technological reality, but only in the imaginary of readers’ souls.General compulsory school attendance and new technologies of alphabetization helped to bring about this new reality”(Kittler 1997:39).