IV.v.Nurturing Economy of Feelings, and Phobia of ...
Indeed, William Wordsworth draws an eighteenth-century myth of origins in which feelings are learned from women[154].An example of this myth would be Richard Steele describing how he learns to feel by seeing his mother weeping in a 1710 entry of The Tatler:
There was a Dignity in her Grief amidst all the Wildness of her Tranport, which, methought, struck me with an Instinct of Sorrow, which, before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized my very Soul, and has made Pity the Weakness of my heart ever since ....Having been so frequently Overwhelmed by her Tears before I knew the Cause of any Affliction, or could draw Defences from my own Judgement, I imbibed Commiseration, Remorse and an unmanly Gentleness of mind.(qtd.in Pinch 81)
The transmission of emotion is taken “as a spontaneous, precognitive process that seems to preclude the possibility both of ever deriving a feeling directly from a real ‘cause,’ and of ever making feeling itself an object of reason”(Pinch 81).This is very reminiscent of what Wordsworth defines as “good poetry”in his “Preface”to Lyrical Ballads:“for all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”(230)[155].It helps create an image of Romanticism in general:im-mediated, natural, sincere, and authentic.This kind of transmission of affect taken as “having the continuity of bodily substances”(Pinch 81) also happens to Wordsworth’s famous account of origins of feelings in The Prelude, the Blessed Babe passage of book II:
...the Babe,
Nurs’d in his Mother’s arms, the Babe who sleeps
Upon his Mother’s breast; who, when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul,
Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!(Wordsworth 1979b:79)
James Averill points out that scenes of this kind might come out as consequences of Wordsworth’s reading of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia[156], its chapter on “Diseases of Increased Volition.”For Darwin, in cases of acute puerperal depression, for instance, the doctor suggests that “the child should be brought frequently to the mother, and applied to her breast, if she will suffer it, and whether she at first attends to it or not; as by a few trials it frequently excites the storgè, or maternal affection, and removes the insanity[157].”And in Wordsworth’s “The Mad Mother,”previous to The Prelude, the woman is given a relieved poetic voice:
Suck, little babe, oh such again!
It cools my blood; it cools my brain;
Thy lips I feel them, baby! they
Draw from my heart the pain away.(Wordsworth 2006:82)
This could almost be read as a paraphrase of Steele’s periodical essay.Here Paul de Man’s seminal analysis in his The Rhetoric of Romanticism may be helpful to dismantle the Romantic myth of immediacy.Considered “Wordsworth’s essay on the origins of language as poetic language”(de Man 90), this is indeed a place expressive of “an active verbal deed, a claim of ‘manifest kindred’ which is not given in the nature of things”(91).Contrary to the myth of immediacy in Romanticism, however, here lies a case of “the enigmatic phrase:to ‘gather passion,’”which refers to “a process of exchange”that goes much beyond “continuity of bodily substances.”It is
the possibility of inscribing the eye, which is nothing by itself, into a larger, total entity, the ‘same object’ which, in the internal logic of the text, can only be the face, the face as the combination of parts which the mind, working like a synecdoche trope, can lay claim to—thus opening the way to a process of totalization which, in the span of a few lines, can grow to encompass everything, ‘All objects through all intercourse of sense.’(91)
Wordsworth’s epistemology of passions, as also observed by Cathy Caruth, is “governed by the figure of passage, present here in the word passion as a sort of original movement”(Caruth 50).Passion is like milk and the eye like the breast in this nursing scene, in which the word “‘eye’… displace[s] ‘breast’ where one would most naturally expect it”(de Man 90).It is merely one of Wordsworth’s references to “maternal passion”(either “connubial or parental[158],”as he later notes) and its “subtle windings.”This is against a historical media shift from the patronage system into a commercial market—alienating to Romantic poets, as Jonathan Arac suggests:
Once poetic authority was lost, once the previously existing social demand for poetry had been transformed, once the writer was no longer producing on direct demand by patrons, or even subscribers, but was isolated in the marketplace producing for unknown readers whose taste could not be predicted but might with luck be formed, once, in other words, a certain condition of alienation prevailed, then the possibility of literary autonomy also came into existence.The process of internalization by which Wordsworth not only defended but also formed a new literary human nature—the human nature that makes psychoanalysis possible—cannot be understood apart from such externalities.(Arac 49)
This “process of totalization”“underlies all perception, beginning the assembly of a world,”and “the infant metaphor grows up to be a [Romantic] myth”(Terada 54), which enriches an individual into a mature moral and affective being so that an otherwise barren sublimity could be made fertile and beautified:
But joy to him,
Oh, joy to him who here hath sown, hath laid
Here, the foundation of his future years!
For all that friendship, all that love can do,
All that a darling countenance can look
Or dear voice utter, to complete the man,
Perfect him, made imperfect in himself,
All shall be his:and he whose soul hath risen
Up to the height of feeling intellect(https://www.daowen.com)
Shall want no humbler tenderness; his heart
Be tender as a nursing mother’s heart;
Of female softness shall his life be full,
Of humble cares and delicate desires,
Mild interests and gentlest sympathies.(Wordsworth 1979b:471)
However, as de Man writes, “this same face-making, totalizing power is shown at work in a process of endless differentiation,”a “sea of infinite distinctions in which we rush to drown”(de Man 92).In other words, it is here we have the work “by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply”(230), to use Wordsworth’s own words in his “Preface.”Several pages later in his “Preface,”Wordsworth returns to this subject in a more elaborate way:
It [poetry] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility:the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.(Wordsworth 239)
Thereby, it is less of “emotion recollected in tranquility”than of the development and evocation of sentimentality during the act of writing and producing.The Romantic myth of immediacy could be dismantled through finding passages of what de Man terms as “endless differentiation”and “infinite distinctions,”passages in between mediated moments of the infant gathering passions and his mother’s eye.In other words, it is in the passages of what Rei Terada captures as “the transmission of substance”where errors and mistakes could happen:“The child could mistake what he believes he sees:if the mother’s eye is reflective, the face he lends his mother may be his own”(Terada 54), for instance.Exactly in order to avoid this kind of failures in the transmissions of substance poetic or emotional, Wordsworth writes poems as he does in “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress”and “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”It is a work of writing, separating and manipulating feminine sentimentality by the means of language and representation in which “a fictive transfer of properties occurs”but more than in the metaphorical sense[159].It could be read partially as a concern with a “figural survival of the traditional medical discourse on hysteria”(Bewell 143).
For centuries, as Alan Bewell suggests through a reading of William Harvey—a seventeenth-century English physician:[I]n highly metaphoric descriptions of female physiology, medicine had explained the disease in terms of ‘unnatural states’ of the womb—the hungry up-and-down wanderings and complicated windings of the uterus, or the poisonous and corrupt ‘vapors’ rising from a diseased womb.Hysteria(or the Mother, the Incubus, spleen, vapors) was usually accompanied by a sensation of ‘suffocation,’ pressure felt on the chest or a choking feeling in the throat.(143)
Hysteria becomes an exemplary disease of the imagination.The powers of the imagination and bodily imitation are made visible to the eye, not as abstract principles, but as forces “monstrous and terrible to behold,”which are palpably operating on women’s bodies, behavior, and speech[160].The possibility of “suffocation,”“poisonous and corrupt ‘vapors’”and the forces “monstrous and terrible to behold”are contained, domesticated, mediated into a Romantic myth in a safedistancing work of writing.It permeates in the production of literature to such a degree that decades later in a Brontë novel Wuthering Heights, Lockwood has to defend himself from Cathy’s terrifying oral ghost by piling up books against the broken window, which is a gesture of “enacting an episode of special importance to the construction of social morality in the nineteenth century”(Fielding 19).The eye-contact of the Romantic child with maternal feeling, like the “erotic touch of earthly years,”finds in women figures a medium of speculative argument.It is a means for observing and forcefully delineating, like Wordsworth writing at a historical time “when a knowledge of medicine was understood as a prerequisite for empirical speculation[161]”(Bewell 145).Aware of the possibility of pollution from the physiological hysteria and its imagination, Wordsworth writes, while commenting on George Crabbe’s poetry in 1808, that “the Muses have just about as much to do [with ‘mere matters of fact’] as they have with a Collection of medical reports, or of Law cases[162].”Noting in connection with Lyrical Ballads, the manner in which “language and the human mind act and react on each other[163]”—a key to understanding the mysteries of “a mind beset / With images, and haunted by itself”(Wordsworth 1979b:195)[164], Wordsworth deploys a differentiating poetic strategy[165]to present a mode of writing designated for a poetic argument, which is well suited to the observation, dramatic display, and interpretation of the workings of the imagination.
In another classic statement of the anthropological into the autobiographical[166], Wordsworth has his sister Dorothy performing the motherly figure in “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,”whose “wild eyes”(119, 148) link her directly to the “wild secluded scene”that Wordsworth can no longer adequately experience.Wordsworth claims that there are “conformities”between her present “wild ecstasies”(138) and what he once felt, when “like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains”(67-68).He has a way out of the impasse he had earlier reached, by reading her present experience as a “survival”of his past feeling:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister!(Wordsworth 1952—1959, 2:262)
The poem offers a mediation of two worlds—his and her—in “the meeting or ‘self-presence’”celebrated and documented in the poem.It is a “historical and educational framework linking them”(Bewell 38) through a reciprocal semiotic exchange:
If Dorothy has allowed her brother to recover an experience that he has passed beyond, Wordsworth offers his sister the possibility, when her ecstasy has ‘matured / Into a sober experience’, of recovering in his absence her own history, now in a textual form, in the poem.(Bewell 39)
The documentation makes possible a textual media of poetry.Instead of seeing this as a criticism of the exoticism of eighteenthcentury anthropology, more of interest to this writing is to examine the sense of familiarity and historical continuity—between the two worlds— domesticated into work of writing, which is consumed as a household activity.
Indeed, when Wordsworth urges Dorothy, in “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,”to “remember me, / And these my exhortations!”(144, 146-147), he imagines that his poems not only record his own ‘healing thoughts’ but will bring solace to its readers(145)[167].It is performed in a mediated anthropological way.A marginal comment on a passage in Richard Payne Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste dealing with the syntax of primitive speech makes Wordsworth’s “poetic mediality”quite clear:
What means all this parade about the Savage when the deduction as far as just may be made at our own firesides, from the sounds words gesticulations looks &c(sic) which a child makes use of when learning to talk.But a Scotch Professor cannot write three minutes together upon the Nature of Man, but he must be dabbling with his savage state, with his agricultural state, his Hunter state &c &c(sic)[168].
The anthropological methods of the Scottish Enlightenment, which often suggests a full-scale “history of the species, in its progress from the savage state to its highest civilization and improvement[169]”, is rather ridiculed.In its place, we have a primitive speech made available at home:“at our own firesides,”by observing “the sounds, words gesticulations, looks”that a child makes in learning to speak.A necessary mediation between the primitive(Dorothy’s “wild eyes”) and the domestic pedagogy(child learning) is established through poetry writing and reading, not grounded in the anthropological field but in the “lines”offered to Dorothy and, by extension, to his readers as a structured and shareable experience—a mode of engagement[170].That is placed into what Homi Bhabha calls “the location of culture”rather than the psychology or mentality of the author, through which sentiments, subjects and a seemingly transparent print as a “general medium”(to use Celeste Langan’s phrase) come into being in a structural way.In a famous passage in the revised Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1802, Wordsworth distinguishes between “the knowledge of the Poet and the Man of Science”in this way:
The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and inalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings.The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude:the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the present of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge:it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science ...In spite of soil and climate, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time[171].