IV.vi.Conclusion
If we agree that it is by the 1730s the new discipline of aesthetics begins to displace the traditional rhetoric[172], it is at the end of that century, as in the case of William Wordsworth, that a saturated print media culture brings a new degree of mediation between subjects and their representations.The subjects of female sentimentality in the oral become mediated through a male sympathizer in the seemingly transparent work of writing.John B.Bender argues that the British realistic novel between 1719 and 1779 has developed a technical convention of transparency whereby “character and reflective conscience are isolated”(Bender 3).For Bender, that realistic pretension of being “a transparent, unmediated form of knowledge”(8) about the process of daily life is epitomized in the social system by the penitentiary of the novel[173].In Wordsworth, as this writing argues, we have a representation of female sentiments processed as form of knowledge mediated through print and writing.This Wordsworthian poiesis of the modern print culture contains, confines, and encloses female sentiment, from which it is nurtured at the first place.Thus, it produces the print media through sympathizing in a scopic regime, or the experience of quasi-seeing, which is called aesthetic illusion in the eighteenth century[174].Indeed, the poetic texts of Wordsworth’s induce that subjective absorption in the represented world by inviting modern readers to re-oralize female sentimentality through reading(like Miss Helen Maria Williams or the Blessed Babe), which is true of the representational aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century[175].Rei Terada points out that “the existence of emotion reflects not just the content of mental representations but the fact that they are representations”(Terada 18).In Wordsworthian poiesis, female emotions and sentiments are theatrically represented through the words of worth in the emergence of a historical print media culture.If theatricality is medium[176], we have a medium of manufactured interiority in the print media of Romantic poetry through the male words of worth.Sympathy with feminine sentimentality is produced into theatrical situations through representing print media culture with its oral and oralizing properties as realized in the British Romantic poetic medium.In other words, Wordsworth’s economy of feminine sentimentality is a variety of what Bourdieu calls “officializing strategies, the object of which is to transmute ‘egoistic,’ private, particular interests … into disinterested, collective, publicly avowable legitimate interests.”And it enables him to augment the “capital of authority necessary to impose a definition of the situation, especially in the moments of crisis when the collective judgment falters [and] to be able to mobilize the group by solemnizing, officializing, and thus universalizing private incident[177].”Paula McDowell points out that in the eighteenth century, “the dramatic proliferation of print and the specter of future mass literacy generated widespread consideration of the nature and implications of media shift”(McDowell 246).Wordsworth manufactures his poetic medium in making over feminine sentiments into the emergent literary medium of print, which anticipates a political economy of consciousness / unconsciousness and emotions in the nineteenth century.It is through this that an officialized medium of literature, and print mediation becomes possible in the British Romantic period[178], and the middle-class audience—who, in Coleridge’s terms, “dieted”at the “two public ordinaries of Literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press[179]”—come into historical being in the early nineteenth century of Western modernity, when a “society”begins to be “something other than human.”
【注释】
[1]Also see David E.Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”pp.9-42.
[2]See my discussion on the making of a literary representation of an identity in the previous chapter on David Hume.Also see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory, p.18.Words like “emotion,”“passion,”“feeling,”“affect,”“sensibility,”“sympathy,”and “sentiment”are used in an impressionistic fashion unless noted otherwise.This is done intentionally.Historically speaking, as Adela Pinch remarks, “the many names for emotion travel as freely as the emotions themselves”(16) and these terms are almost interchangeable in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing.What these terms have in common is much more significant than what differentiates them from each other in this current writing.Theoretically, I follow Rei Terada’s methodology:“I try to steer a middle course between imposing a single vocabulary on all discussions of texts and giving up on terminological discussions altogether”(4).For a brief discussion on the shades between “emotion,”“feeling,”“passion,”and “pathos,”see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory, pp.4-5.
[3]See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, pp.41, 86.
[4]As they are also examined by Raymond Williams in his Culture and Society, especially pp.xiii-xx.
[5]Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p.88.
[6]Sheldon Pollock, “Indian in the Vernacular Millennium:Literary Culture and Polity, 1000—1500,”p.41; “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,”p.9.Also see Michael Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function,”especially p.38.
[7]See James Raven, “The Book Trades,”p.1.
[8]See Richard Bauman and Charles L.Briggs, Voices of Modernity:Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality, p.16.Also see Maureen N.McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, p.251 and Susan Stewart, “Notes on Distressed Genres,”p.7.
[9]Walter J.Ong, Orality and Literacy, chapter heading for pp.78-116.
[10]F.Yates, “Bacon and the Menace of English Lit.,”p.37.
[11]The letter was written from London:“The lower orders [who] have been for upwards of 30 years accumulating in pestilential masses of ignorant population.”Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 4 June 1812, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 3:21.Also see his The Prelude, Book VII.
[12]For the genre of British “novel”as institutionalized as a modern work of writing in the eighteenth century, see Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing, especially chapter 7 “The Novel, the Nation, and the Naturalization of Writing.”For how collection of ballads, “full of the majiestick Simplicity which we admire in the greatest of the ancient Poets”(as Joseph Addison ratifies its cultural value in The Spectator 74 [25 May 1711]), is both of an articulation of tradition-based cultural difference(thereby antiquarian) and a new construction of Britishness in the eighteenth-century Britain, see Susan Manning, “Antiquarianism, Balladry and the Rehabilitation of Romance.”
[13]“The Popular poetry of the day”includes portrays of the “species of unfortunates”in the 1780s and 1790s, among whom were also prostitutes.See Robert Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads.”The Susan figure from his “Poor Susan,”along with many others, may be one of the characters taken from there, as judged from the original poem’s last stanza, which was excised by Wordsworth.This leads to controversial debates about the ambiguous moral character of Susan’s, which Charles Lamb bothers to close by clearly assuming Susan as a prostitute.For interpretations of this poem against the developments of early industrial England—the capitalization of agriculture in the country and the growth of an urban underclass in London, and how a gendered discourse—whether late eighteenth-century poem or contemporary historicist criticism—maps the ideologies of country versus city onto the figure of a woman, see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp.98-106.
[14]An anthropological vision is at the core of Wordsworth’s poetry writing.See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment:Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry.
[15]Which is the prospectus to The Reclus(a “philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society”).
[16]Lucy Aikin in Annual Review, quoted in Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire:Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry, p.50.
[17]Quoted in Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire:Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry, pp.51-52.
[18]Samuel T.Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2:136.
[19]Quoted in James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.10.
[20]It includes the poems of Anne Finch, countess of Winchelsea, texts by Ann Killigrew and Laetitia Pilkington, clearly drawn from Poems by Eminent Ladies(1755), a popular anthology of women’s poetry.See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passions, chapter 3 “Female Chatter:Gender and Feeling in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry,”pp.72-110, especially p.72.
[21]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp.74-75.
[22]Harley’s encounters include a tableau of suffering, such as the mad girl, the beggar and his dog, the discharged soldier Edwards.See James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, pp.10-11.
[23]The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, XII, p.270; review of Poems in Two Volumes in Edinburgh Review 11(1807), rpt.in Elsie Smith, An Estimate of William Wordsworth by His Contemporaries 1793—1822, p.76.
[24]See Robert Miles, “Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation:The Case of the Inner Stranger,”in This Is Enlightenment.Especially Miles’s analysis of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.”
[25]Samuel T.Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Quoted in Biographia Literaria, p.150, note 1.
[26]Charles Altieri, “Wordsworth’s Poetics of Eloquence:A Challenge to Contemporary Theory,”p.372.
[27]William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol.3, p.26.
[28]William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol.1 , p.240.
[29]Lauren Berlant makes this historical argument, as she writes:“Realist novels that included sentimental-romance elements tended either to denigrate actively those modes of ‘feminine’ excess or to embrace those plots, motivated by a desire to speak female discourse better(technically and perceptually) than the woman herself.”See Berlant, “The Female Complaint,”p.244.
[30]Henry MacKenzie, Letter to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock on Literature, Events, and People, 1768—1815, p.16.
[31]For an American example, see Lauren Berlant, “The Female Complaint,”p.244.
[32]It is a phrase drawn from Bentham’s An Essay on Political Tactics, which was printed in 1791 but not published until 1816.According to Andrew Franta, it was Bentham who introduced “publicity”into the English language.See Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public, pp.1-2.
[33]Another illustrating example would be from American early cinema.See Miriam Hansen, Babel in Babylon.
[34]Friedrich A.Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, in particular the section “Untranslatability and the Transposition of Media,”in “Rebus,”pp.265-273.
[35]See Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New:Media, History, and the Data of Culture, especially “Introduction:Media as Historical Subjects,”pp.1-24.
[36]See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp.158-164.
[37]Raymond Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production.”
[38]He follows Charles Taylor’s argument on secularization in A Secular Age.
[39]As Robert Miles, following Taylor’s argument, situates Romanticism between Providential Deism and modernity.
[40]Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp.153-154.
[41]Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which have been commonly call’d Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric, p.105.
[42]Robert Whytt, Observations, p.118
[43]For how feminine sensibility or sentimentality is promoted largely because of the influence of civic humanism in the first half of the eighteenth century(like in Addison and Steele), and how it begins to be a factor in a commercial society in the second half of the century(in Richardson, for instance), see E.J.Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England, pp.1-12, and chapter 5-6, pp.95-170.For a brief analysis on the apprehension of “effeminacy”in the eighteenth-century England that covers the traditional ideology of civic humanism to the innovative ideology of sensibility, see Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy:the Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660—1760.”
[44]The voyeuristic pleasure for an absorbed reader, long before Wordsworth, is well constructed in the amorous fictions by Behn, Manley, and Haywood, such as Love Letters, The New Atlantis, and Love in Excess.See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684—1750, pp.216-217.
[45]See James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.33.
[46]Esher Schor claims it is.See Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead:The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria, p.69.
[47]See James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.38.
[48]Perhaps this could explain why the British Romantic poets are the six males.This is especially obvious in the work of Thomas De Quincey—as the author of both Confessions of an English Opium-Eater(1822) and The Logic of the Political Economy(1844), who is a Romantic aspiring to be something of a political economist.See Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic, pp.29-31.
[49]See James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.34.
[50]See James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, pp.28-29.
[51]As a matter of fact, Wordsworth did not have chances to meet Williams until 1820.See James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.40.
[52]“… incidents are among the lowest allurements of poetry,”as Wordsworth writes to Coleridge, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:The Early Years, 1787—1805, p.234.Also see Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, pp.157-162.
[53]On which James Averill comments:“Its suffering is silent, and its narrative without ‘bodily form,’ ‘scarcely palpable,’ ill adapted ‘to the grosser sense’”(Averill 1980:200).
[54]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.77.
[55]Samuel T.Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p.38.Also see Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead, p.70.
[56]See Earl R.Wasserman, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,”passim.
[57]Samuel T.Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:81.
[58]For an illustration of a dynamic relation between reader-like expectations and the structure of the poetic experience, and how a psychology of writing, reading and response is established, specifically in “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman,”see James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, pp.162-166.Also see Andrew L.Griffin, “Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story:The Case of ‘Simon Lee.’”
[59]See Maureen N.McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, chapter 7, “British Romantic mediality and beyond:reflections on the fate of ‘orality,”pp.212-251.Also see her “Ballads and Bards:British Romantic Orality.”
[60]William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol.1:139.
[61]The “science of MAN”as David Hume termed it.David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p.xv.Wordsworth was writing at exactly the moment when the field of moral philosophy was about to “break up into the modern disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophical ethics, economics, history, and political science”(Bewell 13).
[62]As is suggested by Walter Scott’s comment upon Henry Mackenzie, whose work is to represent “the effect of incidents, whether important or trifling, upon the human mind”and “to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature,”see Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists, p.298.For a detailed analysis on the relation between empiricism and Romanticism, see Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions, pp.2-4.
[63]Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience.
[64]Celeste Langan, “Understanding Media in 1805:Audiovisual Hallucination in the Lay of the Last Minstrel.”
[65]This is also why in the works of Maupassant, Peter Brooks identifies “an urban literature, self-consciously a commodity in a marketplace, which nonetheless returns again and again to fictive situations of oral communication.”See Brooks, “The Tale vs.the Novel.”
[66]Paula McDowell, “Mediating Media Past and Present:Toward A Genealogy of ‘Print Culture’ and ‘Oral Tradition,”in This Is Enlightenment, p.238.
[67]See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.22.
[68]See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp.13-17.
[69]See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.22.
[70]See David E.Wellbery’s “Foreword”to Friedrich A.Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, p.xiii.
[71]As Northrop Frye suggests, “Where there is a sense of literature as process, pity and fear become states of mind without objects, moods which are common to the work of art and the reader, and which bind them together psychologically instead of separating them aesthetically”(“Toward Defining an Age of Sensibility,”p.316).
[72]Johannes Fabian suggests that the “denial of coevalness”of actually coexisting peoples is a “constitutive phenomenon”of the modern discipline of anthropology, a discipline whose origins he traces to this period.See Matti Bunzl, “Foreword”to Fabian’s Time and the Other:How Anthropology Makes Its Object, pp.x-xi.Indeed, as Maureen N.McLane observes, “the late eighteenth-century problem of representing ballad informants—indeed, whether to represent them at all—forecasts the kinds of debates scholars like Johannes Fabian, Edward Said, James Clifford, and others have animated regarding twentiethcentury ethnography and more broadly the representation of ‘others.’”See Maureen N.McLane, “Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760—1830:The Invention of Oral Tradition; Or, Close Reading before Coleridge”in This Is Enlightenment, p.251.
[73]This anthropologist attitude is also expressed in Wordsworth’s acknowledgement of the existence of a peasant’s written culture, for instance, in a letter to Francis Wrangham, 5 June 1808:“I find, among the people I am speak of, half-penny Ballads, and penny and two-penny histories, in great abundance; these are often bought as charitable tributes to the poor Persons who hawk them about(and it is the best way of procuring them); they are frequently stitched together in tolerably thick volumes, and such I have read; some of the contents, though not often religious, very good; others objectionable, either for the superstition in them(such as prophecies, fortune-telling, etc.) or more frequently for indelicacy.I have so much felt the influence of these straggling papers, that I have many a time wished I had talents to produce songs, poems, and little histories, that might circulate among other good things in this way, supplanting partly the bad; flowers and useful herbs to take place of weeds.Indeed, some of the Poems which I have published were composed not without a hope that at some time or other they might answer this purpose.”And yet rustics themselves do little reading, and there does not exist a public sphere of letters in the bourgeoisie sense:“The labouring man in agriculture generally carries on his work either in solitude, or with his own Family, persons whose minds he is thoroughly acquainted with, and with whom he is under no temptation to enter into discussions, or to compare opinions.”The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2:247-248.
[74]As proposed by Friedrich A.Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900,p.267.
[75]While Fried and Marshall’s arguments are more textually based, the current analysis tries to situate this proliferation of sentiments into a saturated history of media and mediation.See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy.
[76]For Klancher, this “kind”of theorists includes Samuel T.Coleridge, see chapter 5 in The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832 for his discussion.This tactic is indeed—as Jon P.Klancher points out—throughout media culture, whether literature or otherwise, see Jon P.Klancher, p.191, note 46.For a Chinese case regarding the historical development of a musical medium Qin, see Ronald Egan, “The Controversy over Music and ‘Sadness’ and Changing Conceptions of the Qin in Middle Period China.”I thank Professor Ling Hon Lam for this reading.
[77]Also see Martha Woodmansee, Author, Art and the Market, p.114.
[78]Also see Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, pp.11-13.
[79]See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real, passim.
[80]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.78.
[81]John Locke’s theory of the mind as a tabula rasa presents the mind of the marginal people in the British Enlightenment—idiots, children, savages and illiterates, who are also recurrent figures that Wordsworth observes and writes about—as in its natural state, where innate ideas could possibly be written.See de Certeau, Michel, Practice of Everyday Life.Also see James Ross Holstun, A Rational Millennium:Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America, pp.34-39 and 110-115, for an insightful discussion of the political uses of the tabula rasa metaphor in seventeenth-century utopian texts.
[82]See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684—1750, p.140.
[83]This corresponds to Wordsworth’s politics of a poetic language in general, about which Jon P.Klancher argues that the poems of 1800 “compose the textual countermove against that vast social transformation that since Wordsworth’s birth has been turning one(full) culture into another(empty) culture, as the peasants who speak ‘the very language of men’ become historically the future urban readers who, at further and further textual removes, can at best read only about such a language in the poems the poet offers them.Thus the increasingly bleak strategy of a writer who casts the act of reading against ineluctable historical development itself”(Klancher 144).
[84]See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684—1750, p.151.
[85]Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787—1814, p.148.
[86]This reminds of the way Samuel Johnson introduces Samuel Richardson to the readers of the Rambler as the writer who “has taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.”See Johnson, Rambler, head note to Richardson’s guest appearance in no.97, Feb.19, 1751.
[87]See Paula McDowell, “Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral:Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year.”
[88]See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,”in Dissemination, pp.61-172.
[89]This is also manifested in what Wordsworth identifies as a universal “music of humanity”—or “we have all one human heart”—in his language politics, as Jon P.Klancher’s analysis suggests:“To ‘select’ from, ‘adopt,’ or ‘adapt,’ above all to ‘imitate’ a ‘real language’ of the peasant poor, is to assert that such a language exists ontologically apart from the language of the urban middle class, that the very framework of representation—where one language ‘imitates’ another—will at last reveal yet a third language.Neither peasant nor middle-class, this language is the very ‘music of humanity.’Here the ambitious, profoundly moral act of writing produces an audience that may escape its unacknowledged prison house of language, its own class-limited cultural position, and gaze into the far freer realm of a humanity that ‘suffers’ rather than ‘craves’”(Klancher 140).For Bacon’s sexualized epistemological cartography, also see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature; Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science.(https://www.daowen.com)
[90]For a more detailed analysis of this “stranger within”in Edward Young and Samuel T.Coleridge, see Robert Miles, “Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation:The Case of the Inner Stranger,”in This Is Enlightenment, pp.173-188.
[91]… is there not
A tongue in every star that talks with man,
And wooes him to be wise; nor wooes in vain:
This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,
And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.
At this still hour the self-collected soul
Turns inward, and beholds a stranger there
Of high descent, and more than mortal rank;
An embryo GOD; a spark of fire divine,
Which must burn on for ages, when the sun,
(Fair transitory creature of a day!)
Has clos’d his golden eye, and wrapt in shades
Forgets his wonted journey thro’ the east.See Robert Miles, “Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation:The Case of the Inner Stranger,”p.177, p.186.
[92]See James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.92, and especially note 8 on that page.
[93]This performative and anthropologist gesture also exists in Wordsworth’s politics of language, what Jon P.Klancher calls his “metalanguage,”—“a framework of highly qualified ‘poetic’ language that carefully ‘selects,’ ‘adapts,’ ‘adopts,’ or ‘imitates’ a ‘real language of men’ as its object”:“Deprived of the real by the corruption of his own language, the self-conscious poet must now hypothesize another language—the language of the peasant poor—that preserves all the crucial referentials the poet can no longer summon himself”(Klancher 139).
[94]Also see Maureen N.McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, p.231.
[95]Chartier warns that the distinctly modern shift toward silent solitary reading was far from complete or unidirectional, see Chartier, Order of Books, p.20.
[96]Also see Maureen N.McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, p.230.
[97]In his Biographia Literaria.Quoted in Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public, pp.4-5.
[98]In his “The Statesman’s Manual:A Lay Sermon.”Quoted in Paul Keen, Revolutions in Romantic Literature, p.19.Of course, Coleridge’s history of the book as part of the emergent nineteenth mass media is rather dreary, which retrogrades from “religious oracles”to “venerable preceptors,”“instructive friends,”“entertaining companions,”and finally “culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge”(57).He claims in Biographia Literaria that “[t]he same gradual retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which authors themselves have assumed toward their readers”(58):“Poets and philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to ‘learned readers;’ then, aimed to conciliate the graces of ‘the candid reader;’ till, the critic still rising as the author sunk, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as THE TOWN!And now finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism”(59).For a convincing historical argument on Coleridge’s attitudes towards a reading public, see Jon P.Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832, pp.150-170.
[99]Bialostosky, Making Tales, p.19.
[100]James Boswell, Life of Johnson, III, 39.Quoted in James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.131, note 24.
[101]“Conjectural history”is also called “stadial theory”of history, elaborated through Scottish Enlightenment historiography—a model summarized by Adam Smith thus:“The four stages of society are hunting, pasturage, farming, and commerce”(Smith, Lecture on Jurisprudence 1).Other exponents of this theory include Adam Ferguson in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, William Robertson in A View of the Progress of Society and History of the Discovery and Settlement of America, and Henry Home, Lord Kames in his Sketches of the History of Man.
[102]A typical case of in between Romanticism and political economy would be Thomas De Quincey, whose The Logic of Political Economy(1844)—whose significance lay “in its impulse to draw out and examine the issue of subjective desire in political economy.In doing so, he [De Quincey] anticipated the political economy of the end of the century...”(30), as Catherine Gallagher points out.See Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic, p.30.
[103]William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol.3, p.542.
[104]A pleasure and productivity perhaps not unrelated to the brief surge of sales in poetry during the first decades of the nineteenth century, which was an anomaly attributable to the inflated price of paper during the Napoleonic wars.As Lee Erickson argues in The Economy of Literary Form, the consequently inflated cost of books increased the value of condensed language, and temporarily encouraged the rereading that Wordsworth and Coleridge had both proposed as the particular pleasure of poetry and as the demand it places on consumers.See Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form.
[105]See Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism.
[106]For how Wordsworth’s employment of the language of moral speculation as a domestic anthropology is different from the prevalent discourse of an eighteenth-century anthropology—where ethnographic descriptions of other peoples are provided by travel narratives(which were Wordsworth’s favorite reading), see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.30.
[107]Walter Scott, as the editor of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, “in seeming to mediate between oral texts and a literate readership ...maneuvered himself into a position which kept orality and literacy firmly apart”.See Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality, p.66.For how the necromantic or etymological relation between “glamour”and “grammar”is situated in a historical transition from orality to literacy by Walter J.Ong in the case of Walter Scott, see Celeste Langan, “Understanding Media in 1805:Audiovisual Hallucination in the Lay of the Last Minstrel,”p.59.
[108]Also see Maureen N.McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, p.231.
[109]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.79.James Averill writes:“Certainly the genre flourished in the poetry section of the European Magazine.In 1786, six such poems appeared, five of them addressed to poetesses.There are ‘Stanzas to Mrs.Barbauld,’ a ‘Sonnet, Addressed to Miss Seward,’ three sonnets to Mrs.Smith, and an ‘Ode to the Author of the Triumph of Benevolence’”(Averill 33).In the American context, it was not until the 1830s, an intimate public sphere of femininity “constituted the first subcultural, mass-mediated, market population of relatively politically disenfranchised people”(Berlant 2008:xii).Berlant’s pessimistic optimism, as “located in the centrality of aesthetics and pedagogy to shaping fantasies, identifications, and attachments to particular identities and life narratives”(xii), is shared in this current writing.See Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint.
[110]“Orgasms that had been common property were now divided.Organs that had been seen as interior versions of what the male had outside—the vagina as penis, the uterus as scrotum—were by the eighteenth century construed as of an entirely different nature.Similarly, physiological processes—menstruation or lactation—that had been seen as part of a common economy of fluids came to be understood as specific to women along”(Lacqueur viii).See Thomas Lacqueur, Making Sex:Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.
[111]Especially in Robert Anderson’s “Lucy Gray of Allendale”(1798) and Percy’s Reliques, specifically “The Children in the Wood,”see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.204.
[112]Thomas Percy, Reliques, p.140.
[113]Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Part I(1792), reprinted in William Hamilton, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 2:391.
[114]Dugald Stewart situates this in a progressive conjectural history of communications development:“[T]the means of communication afforded by the press, have, in the course of two centuries, accelerated the progress of the human mind, far beyond what the most sanguine hopes of our predecessors could have imagined”(10:54).
[115]“The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis:Riffaterre’s Interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees,’”p.169.For Wordsworth’s simultaneous critique and appreciation of the conventions of the gothic, also see, for example, Karen Swann, “Public Transport:Adventuring on Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain,”ELH, 1988, 55(4):533-553, and Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic:Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation.
[116]Geoffrey H.Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787—1814.
[117]Also see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.167.
[118]Wordsworth did not have chances to meet Williams until 1820.See James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.40.
[119]Quoted in Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.74.
[120]See Alan Bewell, p.74; also see Hans Aarsleff, “Wordsworth, Language, and Romanticism,”in his From Locke to Saussure, pp.372-381; and James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, pp.216-234.
[121]Charles Taylor, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights.
[122]Of course, Wordsworth “found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there”(Wilde 173), as Oscar Wilde remarks.
[123]See, for instance, Hugh Blair’s “Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian”(1763), where he explicitly links the characteristics of Ossian’s oral poetry to his “very remote area”:“there are four great stages through which men successively pass in the progress of society.The first and earliest is the life of hunters; pasturage succeeds to this, as the ideas of property begin to take root; next agriculture; and lastly, commerce.Throughout Ossian’s poems, we plainly find ourselves in the first of these periods of society”(qtd.in McDowell, 2010, p.245, note 23).
[124]Like language, which is believed to have been born “among Arabian sands,”her song moves northward, breaking “the silence of the seas / Among the farthest Hebrides.”See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 177.
[125]This is suggestively discussed by Geoffrey Hartman, “Blake and the Progress of Poesy,”in Beyond Formalism.
[126]From here, we can see that Walter J.Ong is not right when he comments that “Popular ballads, as the Border ballads in English and Scots, develop on the edge of orality,”whereas “the novel is clearly a print genre, deeply interior, de-heroicized, and tending strongly to irony”(Ong 1982:156).For how landscape is relevant to a rise of individualistic possession-ship, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
[127]The fact that Wordsworth worked up this poem not from an actual encounter recalled from his and Dorothy’s 1803 tour of Scotland but more directly from “a beautiful sentence”in his friend Thomas Wilkinson’s manuscript—Tours to the British Mountains—offers another case of poetry-writing as an inter-textual production, always already mediated and in the process of mediation, which dismantles the Enlightenment and Romantic myth of origins.See Peter Manning, “Will No One Tell Me What She Sings?:The Solitary Reaper and the Contexts of Criticism,”chapter 11 of his Reading Romantics:Texts and Contexts, pp.241-272.
[128]See his note to the poem in Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, p.415.Jared Curtis, the editor of Poems, in Two Volumes, identifies the friend as Thomas Wilkinson, and adds that his “Tours to the British Mountains(London, 1824) circulated among friends in MS.for years before it was published; the passage reads:‘Passed a female who was reaping alone:she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard:her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more’(12)”(415).See Maureen N.McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, p.231, note 25.
[129]Friedrich A.Kittler, “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,”in Literature, Media, Information Systems.This argument is elaborated in Discourse Networks, 1800/1900.
[130]Also see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.94.
[131]For a narratological interpretation of this poem, see J.H.Miller, “Narrative.”
[132]See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.204.This comment addresses another “Lucy Poems”—“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower,”but well to our discussion here.
[133]Lindenberger uses this phrase to describe the recurrent imagery of transference and mirroring.See On Wordsworth’s “Prelude,”pp.41-98.
[134]This pantheistic tendency has long been noticed, for instance by H.W.Piper, The Active Universe; E.D.Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling:A Typological Study of Romanticism; and Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, pp.184-232.See James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.135, note 31.
[135]“The Ruined Cottage”and “The Pedlar,”p.181.Quoted in James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.135.
[136]Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter:A Reading of Lacan, pp.22-23.
[137]Penny Fielding historicizes this in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which “saw the emergence of the sign as an object of scientific scrutiny first in the anthropological obsession with the totem as a sign of social groupings, and then with the beginnings of psychoanalysis,”and “if the speech / writing opposition is recast in the terms of psychoanalysis, the visual sign(writing or the phallus) becomes associated with the creation of the conscious while the oral is repressed into the unconscious and is unable to bear the same symbolic function as writing”(17).It could have started from The Dunciad in the early eighteenth century:“It is to The Dunciad,”McLuhan pronounces, “that we must turn for the epic of the printed word ....For here is the explicit study of plunging of the human mind into the sludge of an unconscious engendered by the book.See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, pp.147, 255.
[138]The poem’s relation to the picturesque tradition has often been noted, especially on how Wordsworth has learned from William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye.See Meyer Howard Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric;”and Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems:Four Essays, pp.16-18.
[139]James A.W.Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape:A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner, pp.16-18.
[140]Elizabeth L.Eisenstein 1979, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p.184.
[141]Samuel T.Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 37-38.
[142]John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814—1821, 1, p.387.
[143]Also see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.140.
[144]Another place of this realization of the sublime in nature would be in Peter Bell:
The moon uneasy look’d and dimmer,
The broad blue heavens appear’d to glimmer,
And the rocks stagger’d all around.[518-520]
[145]The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 3, p.95.
[146]Herbert Lindenberger, in On Wordsworth’s “Prelude,”sees the dichotomy between “violent emotions”and the “calm and gentle”as a betrayal of Wordworth’s learning in the ancient Quintillian’s rhetorical distinction of pathos and ethos:“… when Wordsworth speaks of ‘a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents,’ he refers to pathos and its various attributes under the term ‘passions,’ to ethos under ‘characters’ and ‘incidents’”(25).“Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress,”and “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”might be seen respectively as cases of pathos and ethos in this way.However, as throughout this analysis, the distinctions of these two rhetorical practices might not hold rigidly in Wordsworth’s poems, the cross-fertilization between which makes possible a work through writing.
[147]William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol.1, p.334.
[148]The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I, 1616.Though in general this Wordsworthian tendency to sympathize with things and objects was denounced by Coleridge, as pointed out by Averill.See James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.135.
[149]Albert O.Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime, p.79, p.81.Quoted in James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.107, note 24.
[150]See Margaret Homans, “Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sister’s Instruction,”in Writing and Sexual Difference, p.53.
[151]“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”was published in 1799 or 1800—one or two years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads as a collaborate enterprise between Wordsworth and Coleridge, as identified by Harold Bloom.See The Best Poems of the English Language:From Chaucer through Robert Frost, p.332.
[152]William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol.1, p.319.For an analysis of the same movement from sentimental to topographical verse in “A Ballad”and “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Williams Weep”to An Evening Walk, see James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, pp.47-51.
[153]Meyer Howard Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp.376-377.
[154]Also see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.81.
[155]Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, p.230.
[156]In a historical time “when a knowledge of medicine was understood as a prerequisite for empirical speculation,”it probably would not have been unusual for a poet, seeking material for The Recluse, to have turned to Erasmus Darwin’s Zoönomia, as pointed out by Alan Bewell.See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.145.
[157]Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, II, p.360.Quoted in James H.Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.156.
[158]William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth.The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:The Middle Years, vol.1, p.336.
[159]Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory, p.54.And this leaves a history hidden from a progressive history of modern literature, a history that covers hysterical women sentiments(or represents “hysteria”as feminine and thereby abnormal), similar to Mrs Hogg’s rebuke of Scott for having “spoilt”her ballads by printing them:“[T]hey were made for singin’ and no’ for readin’”(qtd.in McLane 2010:254).
[160]Edward Jorden, A Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother, p.26.
[161]“Locke’s Essay,”as Alan Bewell points out, “by combining ethics and physiology, had placed medical theory at the center of philosophical debate so that, by the end of the eighteenth century, as Han-Jürgen Schings has shown, the ‘philosophical doctor’ had become a popular literary type”(Bewell 145).Also see G.S.Rousseau, “Nerve, Spirits, and Fibres,”p.151.
[162]The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:The Middle Years, 1, p.268.
[163]William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol.1, p.120.
[164]In a genealogical sense of the future of the unconscious in the technology of writing—the proliferation of the sign, this is linked to Freud’s turning to “hysterical women”as a scientific point of departure for psychoanalysis a century later—another close reading upon the body, that is, especially on his “A Child Is Being Beaten,”“The Uncanny,”“A Case of Paranoia”along with Jacques Lacan’s “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.”The next chapter will elaborate upon this point.
[165]Or “anxiety of influence,”to use a catchy phrase from Harold Bloom.
[166]Indeed, Wordsworth’s anthropological concerns lay behind his turn to autobiography, as Alan Bewell argues throughout his book Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, especially p.45, p.86.
[167]See Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public, p.6.
[168]Cited in Edna Aston Shearer, “Wordsworth and Coleridge Marginalia in a Copy of Richard Payne Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste.”
[169]Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man:considerably enlarged by the last additions and corrections of the author, 1:1.
[170]In the nineteenth century, J.S.Mill’s dictum “that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard”explicitly epitomizes the Victorian identification of poetry with the privacy of lyric expression.J.S.Mill, “What Is Poetry?,”p.109.Also see Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public, p.12.
[171]William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Additions of 1802, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, p.259.
[172]As David Wellbery argues:“In one and the same movement, art becomes the subject matter of theory and aesthetic experience is transformed into something that takes place between subjects and their representations, without the mediation of inherited bodies of erudition and independently of a locally defined cultural site”(Wellbery 232).
[173]John B.Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary.
[174]David E.Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”p.72.
[175]For this aspect of the representational aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century, see David Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”p.72.
[176]See Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium.
[177]See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p.9.Also see Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.87.
[178]In a way, as Andrew Franta points out:“It is not too much to say that ‘Wordsworth’ and ‘Romanticism’ are interchangeable”(Franta 55).Jerome McGann, for instance, also makes a version of this claim in The Romantic Ideology:“The patterns I shall be marking out are widespread in the works of the period.I shall concentrate on Wordsworth, however, because his works—like his position in the Romantic Movement—are normative and, in every sense, exemplary”(82).For a powerful argument about the critical tendency to “[subsume] Romanticism under Wordsworth,”see Robert J.Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope:A Study in Literary Historiography, p.1.
[179]Samuel T.Coleridge, Lay Sermons, p.38.