SOURCE: Vlasopolos, Anca. “Texted Selves: Dorothy and William Wordsworth in The Grasmere Journals.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14, no. 1 (summer 1999): 118-36.

[In the following essay, Vlasopolos considers The Grasmere Journals in the context of late-twentieth-century notions of gender and authorial integrity.]

OFFERING AND TAKING DOROTHY'S TEXTUAL SELF

Anyone undertaking a reading of The Grasmere Journals will be going over much traveled terrain, especially in regard to the relations between Dorothy and William during those crucial years that confirmed Dorothy as William's lifetime companion and William as a poet. To the able and subtle exegeses of Dorothy's Journals, I add late-twentieth-century interrogations about authorial integrity, about resistance to domestication and complicity with it in the construction of gendered textual personae. The Grasmere Journals is the production of an intellectual, audience-driven author who succeeds in creating a textual self so convincing as to have been taken for the “real” Dorothy Wordsworth. In the Journals we see an elaboration of a persona that is different from the Dorothy of the letters, from contemporary accounts of the Dorothy that greeted visitors to Dove Cottage, and no doubt from the way in which she was seen by those mendicants to whom she gave as much as, sometimes more than, she thought she could afford. Moreover, the Journals creates the materiality of the male poet's body, thus destabilizing William's concurrent self-fashionings as a solitary, originary, disembodied masculine genius. In this Wordsworthian paper, I would like to begin with a recollection of Grasmere in the summer of 1986, illustrative of the uses we still make of the domestic writing of women and of our residual resistance to early-nineteenth-century women's conscious manipulations of the medium.

The Wordsworth Summer Conference holds an auction of books and prints as a fund-raising event. The auction takes place in the cavernous, mildewed hall of the Prince of Wales Hotel, which stands on the edge of Grasmere Lake. That August 1986, the objects held up for auction predictably varied in value and interest, from unremarkable prints to rare manuscripts. Among the latter was a leather-bound, handwritten artifact looking for all the world like a journal. It turned out to be Joanna Hutchinson's cookery book, filled with recipes and prescriptions passed on down the line of female generations and culled from women friends. It struck me as a charming entry to a world of women for whom cooking and curing were often the same, an essential sustenance very unlike Derrida's supplemental pharmakon, the interfering drug about whose circulation among the Wordsworth circle we have come to know so much.

Of course, I could not afford to own an early-nineteenth-century manuscript written by someone even marginal to the Inner Circle, but as I watched the bidding, my desire for the little book made me feel a completely unwarranted anxiety about the price going higher and higher, until it reached over £900—surely not the price of an Impressionist painting, but sizable nonetheless for the pocket of an American academician of middling status. After the auction was over, I was told that the two men bidding for the Hutchinson book had bid on behalf of two libraries, Cornell and Dove Cottage. I asked the eminent Cornell editor, who was most kind and accessible and who besides had won the book in the auctioneering contest, why he had bid so much for Joanna's book. He showed me photocopies of a Wordsworth poem in manuscript that he was editing at the time and suggested how hard a task he had before him. A number of individual letters, both consonants and vowels, were indistinguishable in the handwriting. William had had so many amanuenses: Dorothy, Mary, Sara, Joanna. Determining whose woman's hand had copied William's poems was a decisive step in figuring out the peculiarities of that particular script. Having a larger sample of the woman's writing, especially one which in its prosaic simplicity had no ambiguous words, became indispensable for comparison. So Joanna's book would be mined for b's and d's and g's and f's in order to determine, for those times when she had served as scribe in the Wordsworth household, the exact wording of William's poetry.

This memory forces reflections on the generally unacknowledged space of domesticity in the production of the High Romantic texts. This space seems even more burdened by the complications of offerings, obligations, borrowings, slips of the pen, oral exchanges, appropriations when constructed and inhabited by housemates whose level of literacy and literary sensibility involves them intimately in textual production. The Wordsworth siblings' domesticity was not atypical of nineteenth-century writing families (the Lambs, the Shelleys and their circle, later the Brownings and the Rossettis), in which collaboration, affection, and competition supported and, at times, strained structures of power that cannibalized the experience of one or more members of the household in order to create and uphold the Romantic myth of the original, originary, solitary genius, expressed in a variety of accounts of poetic composition: Wordsworth's 1800 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's chapters on the Imagination in Biographia Literaria, Shelley's Defence of Poetry.

Yet I will resist here going over the ground broken by feminist predecessors, who have so convincingly argued for a repositioning and reappraisal of Dorothy as a writer inhibited by the limitations of her gendered education and familial history and frustrated by the lack of psychic and even physical space within which to create (Homans, Alexander, Levin, McGavran). Far from disagreeing with these critics, I build on their perceptions and indicate ways in which my questionings have been prompted by their interpretations. If I quarrel with D-Wordsworthians, it is with biographers Gittings and Manton, with the fine editor Pamela Woof, and with Mellor in her recent reappraisal of Dorothy, all of whom persist in maintaining a cultivated obtuseness to the cris de coeur, the bullying tenacity, the sly calculations of the less-than-ideal, -transparent, -naive Dorothy that exude from the textual evidence of journals and letters. What I will argue for is a reading of The Grasmere Journals as biographically a record of resistance to accommodation and, more significantly, as textually a triumph of self-representation. Dorothy converted generations of scholars to faith in her modesty, ordinary aspirations, immediacy of perception, transparency, and the propriety of her sensibility, and she convinced her primary audience, William, of the wisdom of giving in to his “pleasure”—her textual self.¹

I also argue for a shift in the investigative ground of W-Wordsworthians' recent concentration on the mote in the poet's eye, namely William's failures to include the economic conditions of his time in his poetry (McGann 84, 90; Levinson 37). The rather large beam in many a materialist and new-historicist's eye is their complete indifference to other glaring erasures in William's poetry, such as the materiality of women's participation in poetry-making, not merely in terms of his own household but the British literary marketplace.² William's contestation of the literary territory acquired by women poets publishing concurrently with the High Romantics is only recently receiving due attention (Page 29-53). The new-historicist indifference or under-reading, in Nancy K. Miller's terms, is preferable to the complicit erasure of femininity in such deconstructive, or rather reconstitutive, exercises as J. Hillis Miller's reading of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”;³ in Hillis Miller's scrutiny of the text, the female presence metamorphoses from sister to mother to father, so that we end up not with a sense of Dorothy's participation in William's psychic life, but with “the occidental drama of the lost sun,” the Oedipal dyad of “the father sun as logos” and the poet-son who laments his loss of mastery. Thus we are relieved once more of the embarrassing supplemental presence of the unstable, infinitely substitutable, female (109).

In this paper I ally myself with those critics who examine the writing process from the traditional stance of the rhetorician; they not only give us a less phantasmic grounding than psychoanalysis, but their studies provide for the legitimacy of marginal literary genres like journals and letters. A critic like John Willinsky, who keeps both Dorothy and William in mind as he examines William's writings, concludes: “If the ideology in these literary acts is indicated by its silences … then the displaced political in Wordsworth is also the missing depth of the domestic life which forms a part of what his poetry only mentions in passing, even as it draws so directly from it. … The Romantic ideology which William worked was built over a domestic abyss he was not ready to fully explore” (42). Conversely, or perhaps complementarily, Willinsky offers this analysis of the Journals: “The Journals were not private, but were along with William's poetry an integral element in the domestic life of the Wordsworths” (42).

Anita McCormick anticipates my own reading of The Grasmere Journals as a “first-person narrative” deployed “to express [Dorothy's] anxieties [about being displaced by Mary] to her brother” (473). Yet, while she grants Dorothy “considerable, … rhetorical sophistication” (476), she argues that the rhetorical effects are largely the result of an unconscious process. I, however, will eschew psychoanalytic speculation in favor of arguing that, apart from automatic writing, textual production, far from being effected unconsciously, is the product of labor, so that while I agree with McCormick's analysis of the rhetoric of The Grasmere Journals, I will be looking at them in the context of domestic praxis, art, making.⁴ Like Ingeborg Kohn, I read the Journals as a love story, but I differ from her Barthian description of such writing as “a solitary project” (569), and I regard the text as a qualified triumph of self-representation rather than a record “spelling defeat” (572).

Recognizing Dorothy as an integral, though largely unnamed, part of William's writing and her emotional investment in him as an integral part of her writing dishonors neither of these writers. What I will do here is once again put into question a chief construction of the Romantic ideology—the myth of the solitary genius, a myth which obscures the shared textual production in a household of literate people whose social and gender status may not make them equal but whose sensibility and acuteness to each other's intelligence make them inextricable participants in the process of creation.⁵ This myth served to isolate Romanticists' analyses first from the economic and material conditions so emphatically recovered for us by the new historicists and present-day critics, then from the tenor of a domesticity in which housemates (generally women) were not wholly victims but often willing participants in a ritual sacrifice that elevated their own existence beyond the fulfillment of gender-determined and approved duties. I will, however, set aside such ungenderings of the Journals as those performed by Liu, for whom a male obsession for origins gets projected onto Dorothy's recordings of housekeeping and illnesses.

In my reading of the Wordsworth siblings, I take my cue both from the bracing recent formulations about subjectivity by Gagnier and Gilmore, as well as from my knowledge of writerly households, in which no copyrights, no patents are issued as conversation and texts flow, merge, and resuface—appropriated, “borrowed,” alluded to—not infrequently amid shouts of “That was my idea,” particularly from the members of the household least secure in their status. Gagnier writes, “Since the nineteenth century, professional writers and literary critics have attempted generic definitions of autobiography, encouraging readers to take some forms of self-representation as proper autobiography and others as life, perhaps, but not Art. Such determinations were concurrent with developments in literary professionalism” (31). It is therefore salutary to our own interrogation of “professionalism” and to a revaluation of the nineteenth-century notion to read The Grasmere Journals as Art, the art of autobiography, conscious self-representation, for an audience of the kind that, after all, few of us are likely to have, for good or ill: the chosen life companion, the closest blood relative, and one expected to become the foremost poet of the age. The audience is primarily William, in the same exclusive yet public sense in which a love lyric is addressed to the beloved. Yet the self-construction at work in a love lyric is as artful, as artificial, as created as Dorothy's Journals self.

Gilmore argues that autobiography “can be seen to exploit the metaphorical resonance of reality, a metaphor that functions as a trope of truth beyond argument, of identity beyond proof, of what simply is.” Such thinking leads us into the error of neglecting “the narrative dimension of the text, neglect [ing] autobiography's textuality as anything other than a transparent view onto reality” (67). What is remarkable about The Grasmere Journals is the extent to which this text, which does not even claim the status of autobiography, nevertheless presents us with a “narrative dimension,” with a reality functioning as trope of truth, so that neither the daily scenes nor Dorothy's identity are examined for their metaphoric, constructed selectiveness. The Grasmere Journals represents Dorothy's surrogate offering of self for William's consumption, for his “pleasure,” but not, in line with cultural taboos, for his jouissance. In order to please William, she must offer as whole, as pleasing a self as she can muster under the circumstances, and the circumstances are trying indeed. The Grasmere Journals begins with an anticipation of loss: “My heart was so full that I could hardly speak to W when I gave him a farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, & after a flood of tears my heart was easier. The lake looked to me I knew not why dull and melancholy, the weltering on the shores seemed a heavy sound” (1). An ominous beginning, which in fact is as much of a beginning as the opening scene of a Sophoclean tragedy: everything has already happened, and the rest shows us how the hero accommodates her/himself to dire knowledge. It is useless for the purposes of reading the Journals to invoke Dorothy's affection for Mary Hutchinson. Nowhere is there a glimmer of happy anticipation of the marriage, nowhere does Dorothy describe her joy at preparing the house for Mary's arrival. The Journals moves toward a change that must deprive Dorothy of her place as the woman of the household and as her brother's chief companion. As such, its textual power derives from Dorothy's successful representation of herself as indispensable both for the maintenance of the household—from its narrowest sense, washing linen and picking beans, to its widest, providing a living link with the human community of the valley—and for an inscribed sensibility sufficiently different from, yet complementary to, William's so that his poetic practice might profit from it.

It has been remarked that the plot of the Journals centers on William's engagement and marriage, but the narrative allows these momentous events to enter only on the slant if at all. The Journals is Dorothy's construct of her own vulnerable, sensitive, sensible, ever-busy self, offered to William along with the numberless pies and tarts and tea and broth whose baking and preparation and serving she records. She fashions herself in contrast to the portrait she draws in letters of Coleridge's wife Sarah as “a sad fiddle-faddle” whose “radical fault is want of sensibility” but who also fails in all domestic duties but suckling her children (Letters 331.)

If the Journals swerves from this ritual offering renewed almost daily, it does so after the Wordsworths leave first for Calais and then for Gallow Hill. After the marriage, on the journey home, Dorothy shifts her address to the new audience, the newlywed couple; she insistently presents the return to Grasmere as an anticlimax, as an afterthought, as containing emotional force only from its being a less felicitous re-enactment of the journey made by herself and William in the first place. In the space of one printed page we are offered the following account of primacy and togetherness (note the pronoun we, which Dorothy explicates almost without exception as “Wm & I”):

Every foot of the Road was, of itself interesting to us, for we had travelled along it on foot Wm & I when we went to fetch our dear Mary, & and had sate upon the Turf by the roadside more than once.

We were not shewn into the same parlour where Wm & I were.

Mary was very much delighted with the view of the Castle from the point where we had seen it before.

(127)

Dorothy continues in the same reminiscent vein with the same insistence on her having been there first and on her union with William:

I was pleased to see again the little path which we had walked upon, the gate I had climbed over, & the Road down which we had seen the two little Boys drag a load of wood. … We had felt compassion. …

(127-28)

We went to a new built house at Leyburn, the same village where Wm & I had dined with George Hutchinson on our Road to Grasmere 2 years & 3/4 ago.

My heart was melted away with dear recollections, the Bridge, the little water-spout … They are among the most vivid of my own inner visions, for they were the first objects that I saw after we were left to ourselves, & had turned our whole hearts to Grasmere as a home in which we were to rest.

(129)

It was a dear place to William & me.

We were in the same Room where we had spent the Evening together in our road to Grasmere.

(131)

Stavely … is a place I dearly love to think of—the first mountain village that I came to with Wm when we first began our pilgrimage together.

(131-32)

Dorothy fails to characterize the journey à trois in any way, whereas she consecrates her journey with William as a “pilgrimage.” This latter journey at last reaches the holy place, and “We went by candle light into the garden & were astonished at the growth” (132). On holy ground as well, the we stands for William and Dorothy, for Mary could not measure the growth of the garden against recollections of how it had been when Dorothy and William made their farewell. Dorothy, however, could intervene only temporarily either textually or bodily between the spouses: “I prevailed upon William to go up with me to the ruins we left Mary sitting by the kitchen fire” (127); “Wm fell asleep, lying upon my breast & I upon Mary” (130). After she concludes the narrative of the marriage and return, Dorothy attempts to restore the journal to its genre—daily entries, but she has less and less to record. McCormick, Heinzelman, and Mellor regard the gradual diminution of writing and the subsequent silence as good signs in a text that reaches a satisfactory resolution. The protagonist has made the necessary accommodation to the inevitable and has made it happily. While McCormick, mistakenly as far as I can see, detects a lessening of Dorothy's symptoms after the marriage and reads in the apparent absence of illness Dorothy's sense that she has not been displaced, Heinzelman and Mellor interpret the end-story of the Journals as an untroubled happy closure (McCormick 489; Heinzelman 52-78; Mellor 162, 166). We might regard the infinite deferral of promises in the last entries, “will for the future write regularly &, if I can legibly,” with some suspicion. Some writers write themselves out through a crisis, but Dorothy continued to correspond with vigor and at great length. Was it the threat of a different domestic circulation of the Journals, its changed audience, that required of Dorothy the construction of a self that she could or would not muster? Why the curious addition, “if I can legibly,” since up to this moment in the textual life of the Journals no complaint of illegibility is registered from the reader to whom it brought pleasure, for whom it preserved the incidents and encounters that, stripped of the materiality of local knowledge, would be transformed into the stuff of High Romantic poetry?

This reading leads us to see William's marriage as the end of the great experiment of “home at Grasmere.” We look to the experience of artists in their youth in the great metropolises of London or Paris for the vie de bohème, the rebellion against middle-class strictures about the organization of family life and gendered spheres, but we have not yet looked for it in the hills and valleys of the Lake District. Yet Dorothy's life with William deviated from bourgeois respectability in both English and German eyes. To a 1794 letter from an aunt questioning the propriety of Dorothy's behavior at a time when Dorothy was just beginning her rambles in William's company, she replies tartly, not unstung: “I affirm that I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection” (Letters 1: 117). This period approximates the one in which a fictional character, Eliza Bennet, becomes the subject of scandalized censure for merely walking alone three miles from home to be with a sister taken ill. In Germany, as Coleridge makes clear in his correspondence, Dorothy and William are regarded as an illicit couple, the word “sister” being code for “mistress.” Even in England, the relationship does not escape censure. Gittings and Manton go to great lengths to vindicate the couple's innocence by ascribing the gossip surrounding them “beside an English fire” to the sensation caused among rustics by “visiting intellectuals” among them (106), but the very impulse to vindicate shows unease even among twentieth-century critics about the less than regular and regulated life at Dove Cottage.

Despite relatives' and strangers' disapproval, Dorothy and William lived their idyllic bohème in Grasmere. The Journals records walks taken at all times of day and night in all weather, by Dorothy with her brother or alone, and her hospitality to men, such as Coleridge, in her brother's absence. She disdained the need for masculine protection on moonlit nights, although she remained terrified of cows. She and William seemed to stay up, sleep in, take meals in an enviable freedom from ordinary schedules. Of necessity, William's marriage alters this bohemian existence. The exigencies of middle-class propriety begin to make themselves felt, and the inalterable need for a well-regulated life, at least for the women, begins with the expectation of Mary and William's first child. Not much of these changes appears in the last entries, although Mary is already pregnant. The emotional temperature, however, like the physical one that Dorothy records, drops considerably, in the sense that Dorothy confesses herself less and less able or willing to go on with her journal: “Monday was a frosty day, & it has been frost ever since. … It is today Christmas-day. … I am 31 years of age.—It is a dull frosty day.” “Still as mild as Spring … but before morning the wind rose & it became dreadfully cold.” “Furiously cold.” “The blackness of the Cold made us slow to put forward & we did not walk at all.” “Very cold, & cold all the week.” “Intensely cold” (135-37). In the last entry, Dorothy has to borrow the servant's cloak to run an errand in order to satisfy William's “fancy for some gingerbread.” The errand proves not entirely successful, the Newtons having but a “little stock” in their cupboard and no thick to go with it. William's craving, at the time of his wife's first pregnancy, spurs domestic production of the said item in the Wordsworth kitchen, and the entry ends with an account of the extra “2 pennyworth” spent for cream after the “6 pennyworth” spent for the gingerbread that William couldn't wait for. That final count of exertion on a cold day, domestic labor, and expense concludes Dorothy's offering of her writing for William's pleasure.

The scope of this paper does not permit me to move from offering to consumption in a thorough analysis of William's poetry that would eschew exaggerated emphases and seemingly arbitrary selections. However, I intend at least to be suggestive since I cannot begin to be exhaustive. In relation to William, whether we accept or reject F. W. Bateson's suggestions about the incestuous love between brother and sister or Matlak's stranger assertion that since William resented Dorothy he could not have at the same time desired her, we must recognize that they and other psychoanalytic critics have rescued the Wordsworth siblings from Victorian pieties and have focused our attention on conflicted familial relations. However, what should prove of greater interest is the socioeconomic-emotional dependency of one writer on another and the way in which tensions on both sides produce texts. The Journals is a domestic production that, like the poet's monogrammed sock under glass at the Dove Cottage Museum, has outlived its domestic use and remains the extravagant inscription of love's excess. In a literal sense, we may not have our cake, but figuratively, like William, we continue to consume it. Like Joanna Hutchinson's cookbook, Dorothy's has been mined too long now for what it tells us about William rather than what it tells us about herself. Conversely, William's poetry has not been sufficiently examined for Dorothy's authorial and editorial contributions as well as for his yielding and resistance to the pressure of her much-beloved, intrusive, undismissable presence. More importantly, Dorothy's representation of William in the Journals and its effect on his own resistance to feminization, have not begun to be examined.

WILLIAM DETEXTUALIZED: GENIUS AS LABORING, SUFFERING HOMEBODY

The Grasmere Journals is a constructed text by a highly self-conscious and able literary person living in a household in which she is about to lose her position as the only woman (notwithstanding the presence of working-class village women) and the single partner. Dorothy uses rhetorical means and tropes both to represent her own anxieties and to convey them without danger to herself to the person directly responsible for her continuing existence at Grasmere. Dorothy's anxiety about her soon-to-be-diminished domestic position leads her not only to construct herself as indispensable to William, to the household, and to its connection with Grasmere and environs, but to construct a William hardly able to survive without her finely calibrated ministrations. Ultimately, whether the real Dorothy was happy is of no importance to us. What is of importance to us as readers of texts is Dorothy's creation of a text that through its representation of threatened domestic safety and of a self that fights for her centrality in her brother-keeper's life offers a masterly critique of male Romantic, especially Wordsworthian, figurations of poetic identity at the very time when Wordsworth himself was still in the process of articulating the identity that we now regard as fixed. To some extent, our reading of the Wordsworth of the 1800 “Preface,” of the 1798 and even of the 1805 Prelude,of the memorable lyrics whose production coincides with William and Dorothy's ménage à deux is an after reading, a hindsight organized by a canonization of the poet in the pantheon of the Great Six that began in William's own mid-life and continues, though not unchallenged, to the present day.⁶ In reading Dorothy's Journals, we must remind ourselves that William at that period was in possession of a far-from-established poetic identity and was deeply insecure about most aspects of his life from his poverty to the reception of Lyrical Ballads, to Coleridge's inhibiting hopes for his genius, to the enormous popularity of the very women poets into whose lyrical territory he and Coleridge had encroached with disastrous results in terms of reviews and financial consequence.

What I suggest is that Dorothy was far closer to William's state of mind in the years 1800 to 1802 than we can be, that she played upon his insecurities as well as undermined their culture's image of masculinity, and that she in this sense collaborated, unwittingly or not, with William toward his increasingly strident identifications of poetic genius with singular, originary, solitary masculinity. In the first part of the paper I have examined the ways in which Dorothy creates a literary, autobiographical persona for specific domestic (and the term is far more inclusive in the Grasmere of 1800-1802 than now) uses in the Journals. Here I will look at the way in which Dorothy captures William in her journal observations. The first point I made about an author creating a textual self different from the actual may seem self-evident, but in Dorothy Wordsworth studies, it is a point still disputed. The Dorothy of The Grasmere Journals is still being marketed as late as the most recent Oxford edition (1993) as the uncomplicated, transparent, ardent being whose unmediated emotions give us direct access to the places and the people of 1800-1803 Grasmere and, more importantly, as a context for her brother's and sometimes for Coleridge's poetry: “Dorothy evoked things and people, and let them be. One of our pleasures in the Journal stems from our belief that things were as she says they were” (Woof, Introduction xiv).

Dorothy begins The Grasmere Journals with an explicit statement of purpose: She writes so as to put herself on display for William, “to give Wm pleasure,” but also for herself, “so as not to quarrel with myself” (1). This double exposure should not obscure the third, more subtle but by far more subversive exposure of the Journals, namely that of William as the masculine body scrutinized by the female gaze and inscribed by her pen. In her article on Frankenstein, London suggests that “feminism might do well to alter its perspective, re-examining the structure of spectacle and the positions spectacle engenders,” so as to challenge the “voyeuristic mechanism” that, even in recovering the female author, “leaves criticism fixed on the self-display of the woman” (258). London regards the specular position of the woman writer versus the male body as an act fraught with transgression of a psychoanalytic kind.

Rather, the transgression is a sociopolitical subversion that is deeply embedded not just in the psychodynamics of family life, but in power politics within the family, which, as Virginia Woolf reminded us on the eve of World War II, replicates and sustains politics at large. In Dorothy's Journals, William at times becomes emphatically a spectacle, one that moreover contradicts his own deliberate and anxious self-constructions that precede and continue concurrently with and beyond the writing of the Journals. The Journals, then, serves as a break, a chink in the armor of masculinity for which William struggles in the years following the publication of Lyrical Ballads. It is beyond my scope here to do more than outline my perception of William's anxiety about his masculine poetic persona in the wake of the critical reception of Lyrical Ballads. His progressive elimination of Coleridge's poems and culling of his own, together with the “Preface” of 1800 in which the recurrent phrase is “real men,” point to William's realization that by poaching into the lucrative sensational and sentimental poetry written almost exclusively by women and in his collaboration with Coleridge, whose masculinity is not his most salient characteristic, he has damaged his own stance. He has departed from his inherited place in the line of English poets, the “strong” poets, as Bloom calls them, and has fallen in with a bunch of women, thus endangering his own connection to literary tradition. The “Preface” is not only a document either manifesting the Romantic Ideology or making room for Wordsworthian poetics by negating Augustan poetic achievements but a document whose author cries out, again and again, “I am not a woman” (Page 29-53).

Within this context, Dorothy's construction of William in the Journals transforms William into a feminized presence. This is not to deny both Alexander and Levin's points about William's mobility and the restrictions on Dorothy's ability to leave the house, his need to get away to walk on his own in order to compose while leaving Dorothy in the midst of daily duties or even household crises. Nevertheless, Dorothy's lovingly possessive eye takes in a William who has bodily existence and whose mental life afflicts his well-being. She creates a counter narrative to the poetics we have been taught to associate with Romanticism, namely the inspired moment, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity.” William approaches composition as hard labor, spirit- and body-breaking work. Dorothy's anxiety is two-fold: for the brother who wearies himself with overwork and upon whose good health depends their economic future and for the struggling poet to whose vocation she has dedicated herself. Here are several of the most telling and frequent instances in which William is weak, prey to his body and its infirmities, worn to the point of breaking by his labor. The first deals with the composition of the aforementioned “Preface”: “Wm & I were employed all the morning in writing an addition to the preface. Wm went to bed very ill after working after dinner—Coleridge and I walked to Ambleside” (5 Oct. 1800, 24). The next describes the early draft of “Michael”:

William worked in the morning at the sheep-fold. … William was disturbed in the night by the rain coming into his room, for it was a very rainy night.

(20 Oct. 1800, 28)

Wm had been unsuccessful in the morning at the sheep-fold.

(21 Oct. 1800, 28)

W composed without much success at the Sheep-fold.

(22 Oct. 1800, 29)

Wm was not successful in composition in the Evening.

(23 Oct. 1800, 29)

He was afterwards only partly successful in composition.

(24 Oct. 1800, 29)

Wm composed a good deal—in the morning.

(26 Oct. 1800, 29)

Wm could not compose much fatigued himself with altering.

(28 Oct. 1800, 29)

William working at his poem all the morning.

(29 Oct. 1800, 30)

W very sick & very ill.

(31 Oct. 1800, 30)

William better.

(1 Nov. 1800, 30)

Wm sadly tired, threatening of the piles.

(4 Nov. 1800, 30)

Wm not well.

(5 Nov. 1800, 30)

Wm somewhat better.

(6 Nov. 1800, 31)

Wm still unwell.

(7 Nov. 1800, 31)

Wm slept tolerably—better this morning. … W burnt the sheep-fold.

(9 Nov. 1800, 31)

William had been working at the sheep-fold.

(11 Nov. 1800, 31)

Wm finished his poem.

(9 Dec. 1800, 35)

The next entries concern a number of poems in progress, “The Pedlar,” “The Ruined Cottage,” and the poem to Coleridge—what we now know as the 1805 Prelude:

Wm sate beside me & read the Pedlar, he was in good spirits & full of hope of what he should do with it.

(21 Dec. 1801, 49-50)

Wm composed a few lines of the Pedlar.

(22 Dec. 1801, 50)

William worked at The Ruined Cottage & made himself very ill.

(23 Dec. 1801, 52)

William tired with composition.

(25 Jan. 1802, 58)

William had tired himself with working—he resolved to do better … Wm wrote out part of his poem & endeavoured to alter it, & so made himself ill.

(26 Jan. 1802, 58)

William worked at the Pedlar all the morning, he kept the dinner waiting till 4 o clock.

(30 Jan. 1802, 60)

William had slept very ill, he was tired & had a bad headache.

(31 Jan. 1802, 60)

Wm slept badly … William worked hard at the Pedlar & tired himself.

(1 Feb. 1802, 61)

William wished to break off composition & was unable, & so did himself harm.

(2 Feb. 1802, 62)

William had had a bad night & was working at his poem. We sate by the fire & did not walk, but read the pedlar thinking it done but lo, though Wm could find fault with no one part of it—it was uninteresting & must be altered. Poor William!

(7 Feb. 1802, 63)

William worked at his poem.

(8 Feb. 1802, 63)

William had slept better. He fell to work, & made himself unwell.

(9 Feb. 1802, 65)

After Molly went we read the first part of the poem & were delighted with it—but Wm afterwards got to some ugly places & went to bed tired out.

(10 Feb. 1802, 65)

William sadly tired & working still at the Pedlar … he got to work again & went to bed unwell.

(11 Feb. 1802, 65-66)

I almost finished writing the Pedlar, but poor William wore himself & me out with Labour.

(12 Feb. 1802, 67)

Wm very ill, employed with the pedlar … no walk—disaster pedlar.

(28 Feb. 1802, 73)

Wm got to work & was worn to death, we did not walk.

(3 Mar. 1802, 74)

Dorothy demystifies poetic composition as spontaneous inspiration in these passages and shows the poet made weak by mental struggle in a series of almost clinical observations that anticipate the scientific discourse which, later in the century, will associate bodily decay with intellectual activity in women. Not only is William the victim of his vocation—he is shown as fearful, tearful, and subject to a number of psychosomatic attacks. Here is William in a storm: “William walked to John's grove—I went to meet him—moon light but it rained. I met him before I had got as far as John Batys he had been surprized & terrified by a sudden rushing of winds which seemed to bring earth sky & lake together, as if the whole were going to enclose him in—he was glad that he was in a high Road” (24 Nov. 1801, 41). William gets tired walking and misplaces his belongings: “After we had left John Stanley's Wm discovered that he had lost his gloves he turned back but they were gone. We were tired & had bad head aches. We rested often—once Wm left his Spenser & Mary turned back for it & found it upon the Bank where we had last rested” (28 Dec 1801, 53). William is subject to morbid sensibility, against which Dorothy tries to guard him:

After tea I read aloud the 11th Book of Paradise Lost we were much impressed & also melted into tears. The papers came in soon after I had laid aside the Book—a good thing for my William.

(2 Feb. 1802, 62)

William still poorly—we made up a good fire after dinner, & William brought his Mattrass out, & lay down on the floor I read to him the life of Ben Jonson & some short Poems of his which were too interesting for him, & would not let him go to sleep.

(11 Feb. 1802, 66)

Apart from these passages, there are many instances in which Dorothy records William's headaches, fatigue, poor spirits, chest colds, hemorrhoids, in which she allays his fears, his nervous excitement, his insomnia. While she performs according to gender type by ministering to her brother, her minute, unforgiving recordings of his nearly daily indispositions revise the traditional view of masculinity as mind above the materiality of the body. We are offered a William prostrate by his efforts at poetry, frightened by storms, fatigued by walks and the cold, irritated by the unannounced visits of neighbors and by Coleridge's presence or his own complaints, uneasy and edgy about his impending marriage.

In addition to the spectacle of male genius as physical body and nervous sensibility, we hear a Dorothy who insists upon her collaborative function in the household, not only in the traditional role of seamstress, laundress, errand runner, baker, cook, decorator, shoe-maker, mattress-maker, etc., but emphatically as contributor to William's poetry. How are we to interpret such assertions as “Wm & I were employed all the morning in writing an addition to the preface” (5 Oct. 1800, 24)? We can dismiss the double subject by taking Dorothy to mean that her brother composed and she took down dictation, perhaps. But the collaborative instances are many: “I was so unlucky as to propose to rewrite the Pedlar” (3 Mar. 1802, 74); “I stitched up the Pedlar—wrote out Ruth—read it with the alterations” (7 Mar. 1802, 75); “William finished Alice Fell, & then he wrote the Poem of the Beggar woman taken from a Woman whom I had seen in May. … After tea I read to William that account of the little Boys belonging to the tall woman & an unlucky thing it was for he could not escape from those very words, & so he could not write the poem, he left it unfinished & went tired to Bed. In our walk from Rydale he had got warmed with the subject & had half cast the Poem” (13 Mar. 1802, 77). William's appropriation of Dorothy's sight does not occur without a struggle, a rivalry of voices, or Dorothy's sly insistence on her primacy of vision and language despite her stated reluctance to set herself up as a poet and be in overt competition with her brother: “I had many many exquisite feelings when I saw this lowly Building in the waters among the dark & lofty hills, with that bright soft light upon it—it made me more than half a poet. I was tired when I reached home I could not sit down to reading & tried to write verses but alas!” (18 Mar. 1802, 81).

In the entry following the record of her words' influence on William, March 14, she records William's composition of “To a Butterfly,” based once again on a discussion the two had and on her remembrances of childhood (78). Dorothy makes explicit the domestic nature of poetry making and its communal origin in a writerly household: “He [William] met me with the conclusion of the poem of the Robin. I read it to him in Bed. We left out some lines” (88). Here, clearly, Dorothy is no mere amanuensis—she participates in the creative process. At a time when William is once more injuring himself by composing poetry, Dorothy writes, “When I came home I found William at work, attempting to alter a stanza in the poem of our going for Mary which I convinced him did not need altering” (17 June 1802, 110-11). In an era in which we interrogate the existence of the unitary self and, more significantly in this case, the process from initial draft to publication as the property and single intention of one author, it is nothing short of astonishing that a revaluation of the Romantic Ideology within the domestic economy of Dove Cottage still meets with resistance, particularly given Dorothy's insistent recordings of her critical intervention in the composition of what would become Wordsworth's most famous lyrics.

How did William react to such a representation of himself? We do know that, according to Dorothy, he reacted rather brusquely to her open display of feeling about Coleridge: “C had a sweet day for his ride—every sight & every sound reminded me of him dear dear fellow—of his many walks to us by day & by night—of all dear things. I was melancholy & could not talk, but at last I eased my heart with weeping—nervous blubbering says William. It is not so—O how many, many reasons have I to be anxious for him” (10 Nov. 1801, 37). Does Dorothy feel that William resents her attention turning, however briefly, from him to another? Dorothy nowhere records similar instances of impatience with her constant surveillance of William's every mood and state of being. In fact, after the marriage and Mary's taking up permanent residence at Dove Cottage, William and his bodily needs continue to drive the expanded household.

The last entries of the Journals serve as an ironic display of William's self-absorption, which is beginning to strike even Dorothy as excessive (in letters of 1804 she will complain about his not doing the manly thing, working at the important poem instead of the less significant lyrics). At the time Dorothy lets The Grasmere Journals trail off, Mary is already pregnant. Yet it is William whose cravings must be satisfied, despite the cold, despite obvious lacks in the Grasmere economy. Like the gender reversals recorded by Dorothy in her description of her brother, the Journals ends, in a dash and an entry left blank for Monda[y], with an account of William's “fancy” and the household's efforts to appease it.

Was William oblivious, pleased, made uneasy over these lingering examinations of his chest, his piles, his headaches, his coughs, his appetites? In their minute inspections of the bodily and psychic wreck from which genius rises, Dorothy's Journals eerily foreshadow Leonard's diaries on Virginia Woolf's well- or ill-being. Is William, so scrutinized, so closely looked upon, so often subject of pity, “poor William,” not becoming the very poet he resists becoming in his “Preface,” a poet who does not live exclusively in his mind, immersed as his sister sees him in the materiality of the body and its discontents, a poet for whom the overflow of powerful feeling is not spontaneous, not even recollected joyfully in tranquility, but painstakingly and painfully resurrected, a poet for whom the effort at recall produces such upheavals that he needs to take to bed to recover from composing?

And what of Dorothy's motives in exercising the “power of the gaze,” this writerly control over William's construction as the presence in her Journals? We might ourselves speculate that it gave Dorothy intense satisfaction to present William as weak, as dependent on her ministrations for his continued success in his vocation. That role would indeed make her more than half a poet. On the other hand, given Dorothy's emotional and economic dependence upon William, seeing him overcome and ill must have given her a great deal of anxiety. It also surely brought them closer together in their concomitant moments of illness, fatigue, and depression, of which we know there were many. Irrespective of gender, they suffered and consoled one another, although it becomes clear from the later records of life at Grasmere that as more women entered the household permanently or for long periods of time, their concerns began to revolve around William and his comfort, despite their ills. But in the window of the Journals, we are allowed to see the Poet in his bodily existence, an existence as resistant to control and mastery as that of the “weaker” sex and as dominated by the unceasing demands of everyday living as that of ordinary men and women.

Although we have no record of William's reaction to his own appearance under Dorothy's pen in the Journals, some measure of this scrutiny which, though affectionate, nevertheless arrogates to itself the power to see and to assess, must have stung. Hypotheses about the kind of love Dorothy and William harbored for each other and about William's irritation with her have been in print for some time. The intensity of love first mentioned by Bateson is quite compatible with the resentment detected by Matlak in William's attitude toward Dorothy. Just as Dorothy writes of William's corporeality and gives him a decidedly earthly substance, so in his poetry William seeks to present a Dorothean presence that erases his sister's most disturbing, destabilizing traits (her sexuality, her mental strength, her “competition” with him for acuity of observation and expression). I am working backward in the sense that these traits, arguably present in Dorothy's character as recorded in her writings and the writings of unusually acute observers such as Coleridge and De Quincey, are the ones ruthlessly excised in William's representation of the sister/beloved of the Lucy cycle, “Nutting,” “Tintern Abbey,” and others.

That William's version of Dorothy has only recently begun to be questioned and that Dorothy's version of William has not, to my knowledge, been hitherto examined are testimony to the credibility of discourses, to the authority of genre, and to the domination of male-gendered accounts over female-generated ones. If we begin to unravel the assumptions underlying the conventions that make us acquiesce to the Lucy-Dorothy equation put forward by William and endlessly replicated by biographers and critics, if we begin to wonder why the portrait of William in Dorothy's Journals exerted so little influence in our reading of the poet's persona or even his life, we might wonder whether the most unexamined aspect of the Romantic Ideology is not precisely the gender struggle informed by household economies, as well as the economics of the publishing market, rather than the class struggle in the long eighteenth century. Perhaps the Wordsworths' vie de bohème might lead us to revaluate the illusion of separate spheres in the uses of domestic spaces not just in writerly families, but for conducting business and carrying on trade (as Wollstonecraft's Maria makes explicit), for labor agitation and organization, for army family accommodations and their problematics, for credit disbursed and debit counted in the family parlor, long into the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Even Ross, in Contours of Masculine Desire, regards Dorothy as atypical of women writers in her “literary and intellectual modesty,” in her “concern … defined more as devotion than as friendly rivalry” (4).

2. While domestic relations and concomitant textual production are not the primary focus of these recent revaluations of Romanticism, they provide us with the wide historical, material, and cultural background of the High Romantics in a literary world dominated by successful women writers (See Higonnet, xvii-xxxiii, Ross, Curran, Favret and Watson, Feldman and Kelley).

3. Nancy K. Miller defines the practice of under-reading, exemplified among Wordsworthian new historicists by Barrell, who in his deceptively titled “The Use of Dorothy: ‘The Landscape of the Sense’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’” devotes three pages of 29 to Dorothy's presence in William's poem.

4. Vogler, for instance, argues that Dorothy and nature are mother surrogates and that Dorothy's entries are a transparent narrative of events.

5. Note William's erasure of Dorothy from the scene of poems such as “Resolution and Independence“and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” despite the evidence of Journals that Dorothy's own prose (even if we were to leave aside speculation on her participation in the actual event) contributed to the formation of the poems.

6. Note, for instance, the continuing hunt for the absent mother and Lacanian paradigms in Collings's Wordsworthian Errancies and Laura Claridge's Romantic Potency, despite the challenges to de-materialized psychoanalytic readings by Curran, whose contextualizing male Romanticism in a gendered literary market opens the way for a whole new set of cultural and socioeconomic anxieties than those of Oedipal and pre-oedipal phantasms, and by Page, who examines closely William's adult struggles with the guilt of his abandonment of Annette Vallon and of their daughter as well as with his domestic scene of rivalry, possessiveness, and rebellion in relation to sister, wife, sisters-in-law, female friends, and especially daughter.

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