Two poems by Dorothy Wordsworth in dialogic interaction with "Tintern Abbey".(essay)(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-05

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DOROTHY WORDSWORTH'S WORK HAS REVEALED ITSELF OF PARADIGMATIC value to feminist criticism seeking a more complete and truthful picture of Romanticism, thought by scholars working in the area to be possible only through a recapturing of texts hitherto not allowed into the canon, these being often texts by acknowledged or unacknowledged woman writers. Rectifying the traditional attitude to Dorothy Wordsworth's work, which treated it merely as a textual-biographical source illuminating William Wordsworth's life and work, Margaret Homans and Susan Levin drew attention to the value of her writing both in its own fight and as a part of Romantic literary activity/history. Evaluating her poetry mainly in terms of a negative or absent process of poetic identity-formation because of her subordination as a woman both within the masculine tradition and to her brother's creative selfhood, these critics chose to deemphasize that aspect of her writing in positive dialogue with Wordsworth's work and with Romantic literature at large. Responding in turn to Homans' and Levin's "polemical" (1) emphases, critics such as Susan Wolfson, Anne Mellor and James Soderholm have drawn attention to that quality of her poetry in relation to Wordsworth's poetry which, I would suggest, can be properly termed dialogic because it involves a dialogization, in oblique and subtle ways, of Wordsworth's imaginative values and discursive practices.

This study attempts to examine the dialogic interaction of two poems by Dorothy Wordsworth mainly with "Tintern Abbey" in addition to some other poems by Wordsworth. Embodying a direct response to "Tintern Abbey," "Thoughts on my sick-bed" is the one, out of her twenty seven extant poems, that most explicitly and intensely enters into dialogue with Wordsworth's poetry. The other poem chosen for discussion is "Irregular Verses" because it offers the most explicit statement, among her poems, of her rejection of poetic identity, thus offering a negative writing of the prime theme of "Tintern Abbey" as well as other great lyrics by Wordsworth such as The Prelude, namely the formation of the poetic subject.

I will first present what is intended as a brief but sufficiently detailed dialogic reading of "Tintern Abbey" in order to prepare the ground for an intertextual/dialogic reading of Dorothy Wordsworth's poems in relation to "Tintern Abbey." This analysis will necessarily incorporate an incomplete summary of the contemporary critical discussion about the poem as far as a dialogic approach to it is concerned. (2) A focus on the dialogic elements of "Tintern Abbey" would reveal that in Wordsworthian lyric the poetic/masculine subject position constructed in and by discourse is far from a unified one, and that poetic mastery is achieved through a constant struggle to heal/reveal the divisions of language and consciousness. Such a perspective would in turn shed light on the already dialogized quality of Dorothy Wordsworth's poems as direct and indirect responses to "Tintern Abbey." I say "already dialogized" because as utterances addressing "Tintern Abbey" they do not simply dialogize its discursive elements, but to the degree that they adopt certain of its discursive features as a totality of stylistic and thematic elements in the Bakhtinian sense, they are colored and influenced by its language and internal dialogization. Furthermore, the internal dialogization of "Tintern Abbey" is in a fundamental sense constructed around notions sustained by the implicit definition of Dorothy as the other of the masculine/poetic subject in the poem, which inevitably and dialogically determines how we read the selected poems written by her insofar as they are responses to "Tintern Abbey."

I will then proceed with "Irregular Verses" because as a "myth of negative vocation" (Wolfson, "Dorothy Wordsworth" 142) it relates more immediately to the myth of poetic origins in "Tintern Abbey" than "Thoughts." I will next discuss "Thoughts," where the theme of spiritual compensation is developed in intertextual relationship mainly with "Tintern Abbey." I will try to demonstrate the dialogicality of "Tintern Abbey," "Thoughts" and "Irregular Verses" and the dialogic relationships among them by utilizing the Bakhtinian notions of internal dialogism, double-voiced discourse, hidden dialogue, interior dialogue, parody and hybridization. I will argue that Dorothy Wordsworth's poems basically share the internal dialogization of discourse which characterizes "Tintern Abbey" and Wordsworthian lyric in general, while at the same time dialogizing some of the key concepts and tropes that shape it.

"Tintern Abbey" had traditionally been defined as a soliloquy, or a monologue uttered in the poet's own voice. Recent New Historicist and dialogic criticisms have demonstrated how various cultural discourses intersect in this poem with issues of personal faith and doubt that divide its so-called single voice. In answer to Alan Liu, who sees in the lyric discourse of the poem "no true interlocutors, only the locution that is the self and certain mute circumlocutions (e.g. Coleridge, Dorothy)," Don Bialostosky asserts the validity of a Bakhtinian notion of addressivity as the true criterion of dialogicality: "other people's words or responses or lacks of response of the self's own internalized others--provoke lyric utterances, too ... the dialogic conception of the lyric ... reads lyric monologue precisely for signs of the dialogic tensions that have provoked and shaped it." (3) With its reflective consciousness--in the dual sense of "meditative" and "reflecting," or rather refracting other consciousnesses as they are filtered through the "I" of the poem--"Tintern Abbey" is seen as a typical example of Romantic poetry, in which "outer voices appear to be internalized," (4) and "a given speaker engages not only fellow characters but his or her own past, present, and future as well." (5)

In "Tintern Abbey" one plane of discursive tension has been seen as constituted by the suppressed conflict between social reality and affirmation of faith in the transcendent mind. From a New Historicist perspective, whose main preoccupation is to explore the ways in which "contexts affect texts, both in their presence and (in the case of "Tintern Abbey") by their absence," (6) the poem appears to evade the conflict by ignoring social/ historical reality through various omissions and displacements. Marjorie Levinson argues that Wordsworth located his setting "a few miles above Tintern Abbey" to be able to overlook the industrial activity going on near the river--displaced, for instance, into "wreathes of smoke" presented as a sign of the ambivalent, oxymoronic "vagrant dwellers"--the resulting pollution in the river below the abbey and a whole class of marginalized people, of charcoal-burning beggars and vagabonds who sheltered themselves in and around the abbey--poeticized into "vagrant dwellers"--that were a product of wars and of the dissolution of a feudal society which had given way to an expanding capitalist structure. (7) Significantly, as Levinson points out, the only "part" of the poem that names its concrete setting is its title (14-15). The famous abbey is entirely absent from the text both as the physical embodiment of a dead institution and as a ruin symbolizing the disappearance of a whole way of social life organized by feudal transactions. To the question, why this urgency to suppress changes that were too visible to ignore, Levinson replies by writing that "Wordsworth had himself abetted those forces [which created the new socio-economic structure], consciously and unawares" as an Enlightenment liberal humanist who supported the protestant values of individualism and progression (35). Against Levinson, Fred Randel argues that if Wordsworth had wanted to suppress historical reality incongruous with the personal vision of transcendence with which he needed to supplant such reality, he would not have included the place and the date most reminiscent of those painful associations in his title. (8) David Simpson mediates these two conflicting approaches by suggesting that the poem is an act of displacement typical of Wordsworth's art: "But it is entirely Wordsworthian that what is 'excluded' or displaced is also covertly admitted and signified, both by the location and date signified in the title, and in the language of surmise ('as might seem / Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods') that enters into the description of the scene. " (9)

The debate about whether "Tintern Abbey" is an ideologically charged or an ahistorical poem that evades social issues ultimately has turned into a question of the dominance of dialogic versus monologic discourse in the text. For instance, although Wolfson does not define herself as a dialogic reader of the poem, she outlines its discursive framework in decidedly dialogic terms:

Tintern Abbey [is] a poem of declaration under stress, a drama of contrary vocal moods interplaying with an argument that proceeds by fits and starts, as if responding to an undertow of questions denied a full voice and hearing. We might describe Tintern Abbey as a radically lyricized version of interrogative dialogue: not a monologue but half a dialogue with a questioning voice that, though silent, affects the way the poet speaks--as if he were answering, or answering back. (10)

Wolfson's description above is an echo of Bakhtin's definition of "hidden dialogicality," or dialogue:

Imagine a dialogue of two persons in which the statements of the second speaker are omitted, but in such a way that the general sense is not at all violated. The second speaker is present invisibly, his words are not there, but deep traces left by these words have a determining influence on all the present and visible words of the first speaker. We sense that this is a conversation, although only one person is speaking, and it is a conversation of the most intense kind, for each present, uttered word responds and reacts with its every fiber ... to the unspoken words of another person. (11)

In light of this definition it becomes possible to read "Tintern Abbey" as a hidden dialogue in which the suppressed impressions and thoughts formally function as the implied but not articulated part of a dialogue with the speaker's internal other, or inner addressee representing implied others.

In such a framework the transcendentalizing step from the world to "the life of things," seen as the central spiritual displacement of the poem by Jerome McGann, becomes further complicated by otherness, or division within the speaker's consciousness. McGann asserts that "between 1793 and 1798 Wordsworth lost the world merely to gain his own immortal soul" in the sense that he gave up all radical political faith and instead sought refuge in escapism. (12) Bialostosky reacts to this by arguing that McGann "ignores all evidence of resistance in the poem and reads it as if it consummated a wish to erase or displace other voices that it repeatedly acknowledges and struggles to answer" (76). Bakhtin's definition of the internal dialogism of discourse applies to the speaker's attitude toward his own words in this poem: "Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates." (13) Therefore,

dialogic relationships are possible toward one's own utterance as a whole, toward its separate parts and toward an individual word within it, if we somehow detach ourselves from them, speak with an inner reservation, if we observe a certain distance from them, as...

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