SOURCE: McCormick, Anita Hempill. “‘I shall be beloved—I want no more’: Dorothy Wordsworth's Rhetoric and the Appeal to Feeling in The Grasmere Journals.” Philological Quarterly 69, no. 4 (fall 1990): 471-93.

[In the following essay, McCormick argues for a more complex analysis of Wordsworth's rhetoric in the Grasmere Journals.]

Traditionally the readers of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, from Virginia Woolf to her recent biographers Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, have seen her writing as transparent and Dorothy as transparently selfless. Such influential scholars as Ernest de Selincourt and Mary Moorman portray Dorothy Wordsworth as an ideally supportive and self-sacrificing sister, utterly devoted to her brother's welfare.¹ For such readers her later madness is an inexplicable development in a personality whose traits altered radically and without warning, since according to her nephew by marriage it demonstrated that Dorothy was “all self.”² Richard Fadem has written that such critics

were made uncomfortable by her insanity, for it implies a nature that was neither as stable nor as perfect as they insist … They contend, therefore, that for over sixty years Dorothy was not only altogether happy but also healthy, leaving us to assume that in hardly more than a few days she disappears without warning through the trap door of her mind.³

But the traditional approach which characterizes the young Dorothy Wordsworth as a happy young woman motivated solely by selfless love for her brother has simplified a complex and troubled personality. In old age she was full of anger and passionate longings which her relations saw as selfish, and she expressed these emotions directly and vigorously. But as a young woman she had also been deeply concerned by her own needs and her insecure situation, particularly during William's courtship of Mary Hutchinson, when she feared losing the place she had found in William's life and in the community at Grasmere. Then she revealed her anxieties and anger indirectly, through recurrent illnesses with psychosomatic components and through a journal which she made available to her brother. Her frequent illnesses and her sense of fellowship with the poor women vagrants she encountered suggest her anxieties and her dependence, and her Grasmere Journals enable her to reveal her dismay at William's approaching marriage in ways which would not threaten her place in his heart and home.

De Quincey was the first of many critics who have hinted that William selfishly allowed his sister to sacrifice herself, sublimely confident that his own personal and poetic needs must be catered to. But Dorothy had deliberately chosen to live with and care for William, and it may well have been the best choice open to her. Her mother had died when Dorothy was six and she had been sent to live with a distant relation; her father never sent for her or saw her again, and when he died during her twelfth year she was uprooted again and sent to live with her elderly, unsympathetic grandparents. Throughout her adolescence she longed for the company of her four brothers, and particularly for William, who wrote her long letters and eventually sought her out. When they decided to take a house together she was living with an uncle and taking responsibility for the care of his children, his wife during her frequent pregnancies, and of the local school; Stephen Gill writes that at this time her letters reveal that she was “miserable” and longed “to escape from the domestic round … with an eagerness that became painfully intense.”⁴ Living with William, on the other hand, would symbolically reintegrate her into the family she had been exiled from at her mother's death. It also offered her the emotional and intellectual excitement of witnessing and aiding the composition of great poetry: it is no small thing to be addressed in “Tintern Abbey,” or to have William Wordsworth credit you with saving his sanity. So Dorothy eagerly embraced the chance to live with William and act as his cook, housekeeper, scribe, and companion. Her willingness to arrange the business of living made it possible for him to write poetry but also gave her an important role in her household and in the community. For the first time she was the mistress of her own house; she was also central to William's emotional and creative life.

So living with William offered Dorothy considerable social benefits. Had she other motives for devoting herself so entirely to him? F. W. Bateson has claimed that William and Dorothy were drawn together in an incestuous relationship.⁵ There are certainly indications of a naive infatuation on Dorothy's part. In letters to her friend Jane Pollard written shortly after Dorothy and William first met as adults, Dorothy describes him with ardorous praise and looks forward to a time when Jane can visit them and “find me united to my dear William,” a phrase which suggests a marital rather than a sibling bond.⁶ Once she knew him better and they had made their home together her tone became more sober, but she often used rhetoric more commonly reserved for the romantically entwined, repeatedly referring to him as “my Beloved” in her Journals.

I would argue, however, that Dorothy's dependency is a more certain clue to explaining her character and her love for William than her incestuous feelings. Her intense desire to be loved and valued was at least as significant in fostering her attachment to William as her unconscious attraction to him. Though her letters of adolescence and early adulthood barely mention her parents, they convey a strong sense of her hurt, bewildered exile; they often mention her brothers, and she longed for the reassurance of their love. She saw them rarely, and when they reached adulthood William was the only one of them who was eager to offer her a home. Her letters to Jane Pollard make it clear that Dorothy warmly welcomed his affectionate and flattering companionship at this stage. Cinderella-like, she had for years been an overworked poor relation living in the households of distant relatives, and the fact that her young, educated, well-travelled brother sought out her company and valued her conversation flattered her and endeared him to her. Soon her dearest wish was to be with William, the brother who most valued the memory of their childhood days together and who assured her of their affinity for one another. In the letters she writes about him before they were able to keep house together the fantasies she shares with Jane are not sexual but domestic, and emphasize her hope of having her own secure home. She foresees the “Day of my Felicity” as “the Day in which I am once more to find a Home under the same Roof with my Brother” (1:30) and describes the cozy parlour where she will preside over tea. Her letters which describe her hopes of escaping from her uncle's house to see William again after his first visit there are painfully eager, for her dearest wish was to live with this deus ex machina forever. In doing so she hoped to escape a life of drudgery for a life of relative freedom with the brother who loved her best. She would have to keep house for him, and they could hardly afford servants, but she would be keeping house for one adult instead of a family full of children. Besides, William longed for her company, not just for her help. He needed her labor but valued her love, and they looked forward to a good deal of companionable leisure: in their early years together they would spend endless hours walking and reading.⁷

So she looked forward to the day when her brothers would relieve her of being dependent upon others; William's plan of finding a home where they could live together assured her that she would be central to someone's life and plans. She had been on the periphery for most of her life, unimportant and unloved. Her longing to live in a home of her own with the man who valued her most in all the world inevitably sounds like the fantasies of romantic love. But however charged with sexuality her emotions were, her desires to be made much of and to be taken care of seem at least as significant as her unconscious sexual desires. The journal entries written in Grasmere which describe William as being particularly affectionate—resting his head on her shoulder or kissing her in greeting—are proud evidence that Dorothy, who had never inspired much affection before, was at last loved and valued.

Still, though escaping from her uncle's household promised Dorothy freedom and happiness, life with William was not to be uninterruptedly fulfilling. There were times when Dorothy, like the rest of us, felt regret, anxiety and anger. Her place in the household and the self-esteem it afforded her were threatened when it became apparent that William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson was becoming likely. She had long anticipated that William might marry, and had written warmly to Annette Vallon, the mother of William's illegitimate daughter; but the long war which separated William and Annette seemed to secure Dorothy's position in the household, and she had never had to confront what it might mean to welcome a sister-in-law into her home. Gill records Coleridge's frank indication of the change in social status she could expect from their friends.

For so long in everyone's eyes it had been “Wordsworth & his exquisite Sister”. But … Coleridge wrote: “It is absolutely necessary, that I should have one spare Room always ready for Wordsworth & his Wife / and tho' Dorothy would, of course, always accompany them. …” Dorothy was realistic enough to know that this would be the order of precedence from now on.

(p. 205)

She might have feared being an awkward encumbrance in her own home, as well as in society. Dorothy's role in the house would change drastically; Mary would become its mistress and William's principle source of affection and emotional sustenance. Presumably Mary's wishes and desires would supersede Dorothy's. Dorothy would, in effect, duplicate the situation which had made her so unhappy at her uncle's before her escape to Grasmere: she would be a poor relation living in the household of a young married couple, making herself useful by helping around the house and raising their children. So despite their long friendship, Dorothy may not have wholeheartedly welcomed Mary's advent, particularly as it made her confront the fact that she was economically as well as emotionally dependent on William.⁸

Both Kurt Heinzelman and Susan M. Levin argue that William's marriage is the major organizing principle for the Grasmere Journals. Levin writes that “if we wish to find a narrative structure for this text, we may say it is Dorothy's story of William's engagement and marriage to Mary Hutchinson. … Once the wedding occurs, the journal has for all important purposes run its course, and it is soon left off;” Heinzelman claims that the Grasmere Journals show how Dorothy came to reimagine the household as containing a new member.⁹ What has not been clear, however, is how she bends the first-person narrative of the Grasmere Journals to rhetorical purposes—not to affect the general reader, but to express her anxieties to her brother. In so using the Journals, she could not afford to protest against the marriage which threatened her for fear of alienating William or Mary and losing both her home and her brother's love.

Dorothy's critics often comment that she resists analyzing the significance of the images she records: Elizabeth Hardwick writes that “she could not, would not analyze,” Susan M. Levin writes that “she refuses to make connections,” and Pamela Woof writes that “there is almost no analysis” in the Journals, that when Dorothy reports that she and William “melted into tears” on reading Book XI of Paradise Lost, “the tears are not analyzed.”¹⁰ Both Hardwick and Rachel Brownstein comment on Dorothy's unwillingness or inability to analyze symbols which seem to represent her own situation. But as these critics suggest, analysis would show that she often unconsciously chooses details which demonstrate that she felt vulnerable, or that hint at her pain and anger. Having lost both her parents and her home in childhood, and a second home in adolescence, she might well find that her brother's approaching marriage reawakened fears of exile and betrayal. As Hardwick writes,

We cannot imagine that she was incapable of thought about character, but very early, after her grief and the deaths, she must have become frightened. Her dependency was so greatly loved and so desperately clung to that she could not risk anything except the description of the scenery in which it was lived.¹¹

Analysis might have shown all too clearly that the events which moved Dorothy to anguish or tears often revealed her own threatened position. Would William and Mary have welcomed Dorothy's continued presence in their home if Dorothy's Journals had made her anxieties explicit? Analysis of her fears would hardly have helped to retain his love.

Most journals are written for the author's eyes alone, and provide a private cache for memories and reflection or for the release of energy and imagination. But it appears that Dorothy made her Journals available to William.¹² In fact, the first entry of the Grasmere Journal records that Dorothy began it, in William's absence, “because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again” (pp. 15-16). Her awareness of William as a potential audience is likely to have influenced what she chose to write about and the attitudes she took. As she wrote her Journals Dorothy anticipated sharing her work with a specific audience—William Wordsworth—and reading the Grasmere Journals with this in mind changes our understanding of them.

Dorothy's entries vividly describe the natural phenomenon she noticed in her frequent walks and record the cooking and cleaning, walking and visiting that went on as William wrote some of his greatest works. But in the Grasmere Journals she also composed a document which has palpable designs upon William Wordsworth, the person whose love and concern she most needed. In her journal entries she endeavors to show William that she loves him and that she is willing to sacrifice herself for him. But, recognizing that he was falling in love with Mary Hutchinson and worried that the emotional intimacy she shared with him would be lessened, she also uses them to tell him of her fears. She conveys her worries with considerable, though unconscious, rhetorical sophistication. She shows William that his courtship troubles her, that she fears she will be abandoned, and that her feelings are intense and painful, but she avoids expressing anger towards either William or Mary—whose love she cannot afford to lose. Still, even though she avoids analysis herself, the covert suggestions of unhappiness in her prose call out for interpretation. She employs rhetorical strategies which hint to her reader that she feels anger, anxiety and dismay, and yet allow her to preserve the household's harmony by simultaneously insisting on her continuing, intense concern for William's own happiness.

The first entry in the Grasmere Journals records the events of May 14, 1800, when William and John Wordsworth set off to visit Mary Hutchinson, who was living in Yorkshire. Dorothy and William had known Mary since the two girls had been childhood friends in Penrith; all three had spend time there together in the summer of 1787. William and Mary had become reacquainted as adults in 1796, when Mary paid them a long visit to Racedown, but at that time William was hardly in a financial situation to consider marriage. In any case he was all too aware of his obligations to Annette Vallon and their child. But as the years went by and it became more and more obvious that William and Annette would never marry William became free to think of Mary. He had been attracted to her since the summer of 1787,¹³ and though Stephen Gill writes that “it is not clear when Wordsworth decided that he wanted to marry Mary Hutchinson,” his eagerness to visit her in Yorkshire suggests that their romance was becoming serious.¹⁴ Before, William had seen Mary at long intervals; he had never before sought out her company. But now William and John set off to visit her only weeks after she had paid an extended visit to Grasmere.

And they left Dorothy behind. Mary had originally been Dorothy's friend, but now William left Dorothy alone while he went to visit her. Dorothy's unhappiness at parting with William indicates how painful it was for her to confront the changing relationship between William and Mary, which threatened to exclude her.¹⁵ On the day William and John left, Dorothy opened her new journal and recorded her reactions, which make it clear that what troubled her particularly was William's farewell; she records no response at all to parting from John.¹⁶ Her distress at seeing William leave suggests that it is the nature of his errand—a visit of courtship, as well as pedestrian pleasure—which brought about her tears, and her projection of her own unhappiness upon the nearby lake.

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, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier. The lake looked to me I knew not why dull and melancholy, and the weltering on the shores seemed a heavy sound.

(p. 15)

She continues by describing her walk home from their parting, recording that “I resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and J. return, and I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again” (pp. 15-16).

What reaction was this entry meant to evoke in William? Dorothy clearly intends him to understand that their parting grieved her, without directly saying why. Her resolution not to “quarrel with myself” hints at her anger—which she directs toward herself, rather than toward William. She also reminds him that she—or her journal, at least—gives him pleasure.

The Journals allow Dorothy to document her own devotion, but they also demonstrate how desperately she needs and values her brother's love. During his absence, Dorothy notes the household tasks she accomplishes, and also records the walks she takes to get the mail in Ambleside. William writes far less frequently than she hopes, and she walks out for the mail at reasonable and unreasonable times. Her preoccupation with his letters shows us—and might have shown her—that William was far more concerned for his romance than for Dorothy. If he read her Journal when he returned, he would see exactly how anxiously she awaited his letters, and how not hearing discomposed her. He would read entries like these:

May 14 1800. … Oh! that I had a letter from William! … Friday morning [16th]. … No letters! … I had been very melancholy in my walk back [from Ambleside]. I had many of my saddest thoughts and I could not keep the tears within me. … Tuesday Morning [20th]. … The post was not come in. I walked as far as Windermere, and met him there. No letters! … I was sadly tired, ate a hasty dinner and had a bad headach. … Tuesday 27th. I walked to Ambleside with letters—met the post before I reached Mr Partridge's … only a letter for Coleridge—I expected a letter from Wm. … I was warm in returning, and becoming cold with sitting in the house—I had a bad head-ach—went to bed after dinner, and lay till after 5—not well after tea. … Friday [30th]. In the morning went to Ambleside, forgetting that the post does not come till the evening. How was I grieved when I was so informed. I walked back resolving to go again in the evening. … Sunday June 1st. … The post was not come in; waited in the Road … Tuesday [3rd]. No letter, no William.

(pp. 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23)

If William read these entries, he would see that his letter-writing schedule did not satisfy Dorothy, and would see how this perceived neglect affects her: she becomes sad, she weeps, her fruitless walk exhausts her, she develops a headache. Surely such passages, and her lists of work accomplished and devotions undergone, have a function: she describes her sufferings so that the one who caused them will understand that she suffers, and that he causes her suffering. And surely, too, such entries are meant at least unconsciously to induce guilt.

One way of expressing misery and anger which one dares not voice or cannot consciously admit is to take to one's bed, conveying the resentful message: look at the state to which you have driven me. The Grasmere Journals show that Dorothy often felt ill during the years of William's courtship. Significantly, during the four month course of the Alfoxden Journal Dorothy never once mentions being ill, though she mentions several indispositions of William's; in Grasmere, by contrast, she often records her ailments. Is it possible that recording these events is a passive-aggressive means of directing a reader's attention to her suffering?

Modern medicine claims that psychological troubles often trigger physiological pain, and vice versa. So, psychological ailments often contribute to physical symptoms such as nausea, chronic pain, migraine, and stuttering, while physical illness can trigger such psychological illnesses as depression.¹⁷ A physician who has studied Dorothy Wordsworth's symptoms closely, Dr. I. I. J. M. Gibson, confirms that her illnesses in the period of the Grasmere Journals had both psychological and physical origins when she posits that Dorothy was “a particular type of migrainous personality;” that she had anorexia, a disease recognized to have psychological causes; and that her attacks were “multifactorial in origin, due to considerable physical and mental activity, to the stress of William's problems and struggles with composition, and her undue anxiety about him.”¹⁸ At this time, in addition, Dorothy had begun to lose her teeth; the pain she suffered, and the consequent difficulties in chewing and digesting food, would certainly have added to her miseries. If Dorothy feared that she would lose her social role and self-esteem when Mary became William's prime companion, such stress could well have contributed to existing illness, and her physical illnesses could certainly have contributed to her stress.

Alan Liu has advanced a different explanation for the illnesses Dorothy mentions in the Grasmere Journals, arguing that her notation of incapacitating “headaches” could be a euphemism, and may “often cloak menstrual pains.”¹⁹ But Dorothy never mentions that she is ill in the Alfoxden Journal, and her health improves dramatically by the end of the Grasmere Journals. It is possible, but unusual, for severe menstrual pain to begin suddenly during a woman's late twenties or early thirties; by that time, any pattern is usually well established. But if a woman does begin to suffer from such pains, they are unlikely to diminish or cease suddenly. This would suggest either that Dorothy's “headaches” were actually headaches, or that during the writing of the Grasmere Journals Dorothy made the decision to, however euphemistically, record the menstrual pain she had heretofore suffered silently. And if this is the case, she decided to record it in a way that would suggest to her reader that she suffered severely.

However, though Liu argues for the periodical nature of her “headaches,” he disregards the headaches she records which occur at times which would not reflect a cyclical or menstrual pattern, and disregards the fact that Dorothy's days of recorded illness increase during the course of the Grasmere Journals. As the wedding looms, she describes her health as becoming more and more fragile. So, after her apparently perfect health in Alfoxden, she is ill during three or fewer days a month in May through October of 1800 in Grasmere; by 1802 she is often ill six to nine days (and not always consecutive days) in a month, till the wedding, when she writes that she was ill “during most of the time of our [eleven day] stay” (p. 154). After the wedding, her health improves rapidly. True, she suffers from motion sickness on the honeymoon, and has a toothache from October 23 to 30; she scalds herself badly on November 4. But aside from these dates, when her illnesses have very specific physical causes, in the three months that the Journals continue after the wedding there are only three days when she is “not well,” “not quite well,” “not very well.” If her illnesses had psychosomatic rather than physical roots, this sudden access of comparatively good health would confirm that Dorothy's anxieties diminished after the wedding, when it quickly became apparent that she still had a valued place in the household.

Sometimes we can see the apparent source of an illness in one of those juxtapositions of apparently arbitrary facts which Dorothy's use of the journal form makes possible. On April 25, 1802, she records that she and William “spent the morning in the orchard. Read the Prothalamium of Spenser—walked backwards and forwards. … I was not well before tea.” Spenser's poem celebrating marriages might well have pained Dorothy, especially since in it Spenser uses a pair of swans—birds that mate for life—as figures for a happily wedded couple: William had earlier compared himself and Dorothy to two swans in Home at Grasmere.²⁰

In late May or early June 1802 the Wordsworths learned that they would be paid a substantial legacy—a legacy which would certainly leave William better prepared for marriage. After this time, Dorothy's journal entries sometimes connect her illness and her anxieties explicitly, as when she writes that “I had a woful headache, and was ill in stomach from agitation of mind” on June 18, or in her entry of July 4. The day before, letters had come “from M. H. and Annette;” subsequently, Dorothy “was sick and ill had been made sleepless by letters.” We do not know what those letters contained, though of course William would have. But one eventual result of the turmoil of this time was William's plan to see Annette and wed Mary, and Dorothy's dramatic reaction of distress may have arisen because they indicated how inexorably his plans advanced. These days of illness, and the entries which explicitly connect them to Dorothy's worries, would again tell William very directly of her unhappiness. However, even receiving a letter from William during one of his absences disturbed her; on May 24th, 1800 Dorothy reports that she “found a letter from Wm and from Mary Hutchinson … I went to bed soon with a bad head-ache.” Her Journal would also flatter him by showing how much she longed for his return: “No William! I slackened my pace as I came near home fearing to hear that he was not come. I listened till after one o'clock to every barking dog” (p. 24).

Dorothy originally wrote to please William with her detailed observations and to demonstrate her usefulness by listing the homey tasks she had accomplished, but gradually and less consciously she wrote to show him that he had distressed her. Often a single passage will demonstrate considerable ambivalence. Just after William departs for another visit to Mary, for instance, Dorothy finds an apple core he has tossed aside.

Wm has a nice bright day [for his journey]. … Now for my walk. I will be busy, I will look well and be well when he comes back to me. O the Darling! Here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find in my heart to throw it into the fire. I must wash myself, then off—I walked round the two Lakes crossed the stepping stones at Rydale Foot. Sate down where we always sit. I was full of thoughts about my darling. Blessings on him.

(p. 97)

She resolves to “be busy,” to resist a collapse into the indolence or illness that she apparently might expect in his absence; and she resolves to “look well,” to resist the illnesses his absences seem to provoke. These promises may be means of complimenting William by suggesting that in his absence she is too depressed to bother with her tasks, health, and looks. Or they may be threats: threats that if he abandons her she will wither into illness. But Dorothy immediately disarms any such readings by describing her unambiguous rapture at finding his apple core. This entry is perhaps designed to show her reader exactly how pervasive and forgiving her love is, for the bitten apple is, after all, a piece of rubbish left for Dorothy to pick up and discard, though it is so redolent of William that she can hardly bring herself to do so. She continues by describing how she then uses other means to awaken memories of William: revisiting a favorite walk, sitting “where we always sit.” Perhaps this inscription of memory will awaken his memory, too, reminding him of their walks, of his sister's love, and of their happiness.

One of the ways Dorothy expresses her concern for her own situation is by describing women who are homeless. Susan M. Levin has written that “in Dorothy's work [such women] become a means of focusing ideas about … her own center at Grasmere and the possible disintegration of her chosen manner of life”; she also points out Dorothy's identification with these women.²¹ Dorothy had cause to fear that when William married she would be exiled from William's love and from the roles that gave her life meaning. The vagrant women Dorothy describes in her Journals are projections of Dorothy's worst anxieties: of losing her home, her role and her sense of self. Their sad stories also become means of focusing William's attention upon her needs and concerns.

William was famously interested in solitaries and the homeless, and with the emotions which such figures evoked in him. As James H. Averill suggests, contemporary sentimental literature may have encouraged his interest, and led him to admire those who, like Miss Helen Maria Williams, wept “at a Tale of Distress,” for, as William's sonnet to Williams insists, her “tear proclaims—in thee each virtue dwells.” Living with William and reading the books he favored, Dorothy may have learned that he admired displays of pity for the poor. But, as Averill suggests in reference to William, such sentimental responses are “liable to turn into self-pity; the basically inward concerns, the focus upon one's own response, make the sentimentalist particularly vulnerable to a kind of solipsistic pathos.”²² Dorothy recorded her responses to vagrant women with one eye on her audience—after all, William more than once used such descriptions to generate poetry. Further, though, writing about vagrant women allowed her to pity her own vulnerability, and simultaneously to impress William with her own virtue and compassion.

When Dorothy mentions these vagrants is out of her hands; the journal form compels her to describe a specific day's events in that day's entry. But Dorothy sometimes significantly juxtaposes a passage suggesting her own needs with a description of a woman who is homeless or who has lost her family. So, the first entry in the Grasmere Journals—describing William's departure for Gallow Hill and Dorothy's resolve to remain active and cheerful—continues by noting a beggar who stopped by that evening.

A young woman begged at the door—she had come from Manchester on Sunday morn with two shillings and a slip of paper which she supposed a Bank note—it was a cheat. She had buried her husband and three children within a year and a half—all in one grave—burying very dear—paupers all put in one place—20 shillings paid for as much ground as will bury a man—a stone to be put over it or the right will be lost—11/6 each time the ground is opened. Oh! that I had a letter from William!

(p. 16)

The letter—unreasonable though it is to expect it on the very day he has left—would reassure Dorothy that though he has gone, William still values her, and that she will not lose her secure home, her financial support, and her family, as this woman has.

Later, on September 3, 1800, Dorothy's attendance at the funeral of a female pauper also moves her to consider her own plight, at least unconsciously. “I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me,” she reports. A detail that might seem unnecessary to us but was crucial to Dorothy follows: “There were no near kindred, no children.” There was no one to pay for a more dignified funeral or a tombstone, no one but Dorothy to grieve. We can understand all too well why Dorothy “could not help weeping very much” for the death of this poor lonely woman, whose situation is so like what her own might be; as Alan Liu writes, she is “a spectre-self embodying Dorothy's worst fears.”²³ And while Dorothy was genuinely moved, she may have sensed that William Wordsworth, surely a sensitive reader, would understand her tears and would be moved by the fact that it was—to paraphrase a later poet—Margaret she mourned for.

Later, another juxtaposition further dramatizes Dorothy's concerns. Just after she describes her anguish at William's wedding, she mentions a sight which she thinks important enough to record: two tombstones she noticed as she accompanied William and Mary on their honeymoon. She records the event in the Journal, for William to read and remember.

Nothing particular occurred till we reached Kirby. We had sunshine and showers, pleasant talk, love and chearfulness. We were obliged to stay two hours at K[irby Moorside]. while the horses were feeding. We wrote a few lines to Sara and then walked out, the sun shone and we went to the Church-yard … We sauntered about and read the Grave-stones. There was one to the memory of 5 Children, who had all died within 5 years, and the longest lived had only lived 4 years. There was another stone erected to the memory of an unfortunate woman (as we supposed, by a stranger). The verses engraved upon it expressed that she had been neglected by her Relations and counselled the Readers of those words to look within and recollect their own frailties. We left Kirby at about 1/2 past 2.

(pp. 154-55).

The sight of these tombstones are odd memories of a honeymoon, though they are perhaps appropriate and significant memories for Dorothy Wordsworth. Her notice of the first headstone indicates that she was moved by these children whose chance to form happy, sympathetic bonds was cut short; they did not live to achieve the sibling relationship which had been so crucial to William's art and sanity, and which Dorothy now feared she might lose. The second headstone reproves those who might neglect their helpless, lonely female relations; its importance to Dorothy is obvious. Unlike this unhappy woman, Dorothy does not leave her own inscription to chance and the passing stranger: her inscription of this entry requires William to remember the headstone and “look within and recollect [his] own frailties” if his new happiness leads him to forget and abandon his sister. Of course we know that William was interested in the contents and composition of epitaphs; recording this tombstone's message may have been intended to please him by echoing the interest that eventually resulted in the Essay upon Epitaphs. But certainly Dorothy's record of it is made “for the common benefit of the living”: for William's eyes, and in hopes that its message would benefit Dorothy. If, as William argues in the Essay, a “village church-yard” is “a visible centre of a community of the living and the dead,” then the epitaph itself can be expected effectively to have admonished a reader as thoughtful as William Wordsworth to insure that his community and home still afforded her a significant place. But Dorothy reemphasized its message by reinscribing it; the nearly naked self-reference here is meant to draw William's attention to her deepest concerns.

The Grasmere Journals as a whole are intended to serve the same function as this stranger's tombstone: to record an existence, no matter how transitory and humble, and to remind those who read that they ought to consider a lonely woman's plight. Because we are not Dorothy's brother, because she is dead, the demand is for us less peremptory, but for her original audience this inscription was both a reminder and demand. Dorothy's letters to her brother Richard sometimes suggest that she could be both imperious and demanding, and Richard Matlak has claimed that though he needed and loved her, William sometimes resented Dorothy: Matlak argues, for instance, that the poems describing Lucy's death arise from William's repressed hostility at “the serious inconvience of [Dorothy's] presence” at the time of their writing.²⁴ Carl H. Ketcham has written that Dorothy was “keen-minded, rather easily affronted, and thoroughly capable of self-defense”; Molly Lefebure interprets many of Dorothy's actions towards Coleridge's wife as hostile or malicious.²⁵ Perhaps, after all, the apparently entirely selfless Dorothy of Victorian biography was capable of hinting of her resentment even to William.

William and Dorothy travelled to Mary's home at Gallow Hill for the wedding. Dorothy described her anticipation of the approaching ceremony and her longing to return to Grasmere in a letter of 29 September 1802 to her old friend Jane Marshall.

If this letter reaches you before next Monday you will think of me, travelling towards our own dear Grasmere with my most beloved Brother and his Wife. I have long loved Mary Hutchinson as a Sister, and she is equally attached to me[;] this being so, you will guess that I look forward with perfect happiness to this Connection between us, but, happy as I am, I half dread that concentration of all tender feelings, past, present, and future which will come upon me on the wedding morning. There never lived on earth a better woman than Mary H. and I have not a doubt but that she is in every respect formed to make an excellent wife to my Brother, and I seem to myself to have scarcely any thing left to wish for but that the wedding was over, and we had reached our home once again.²⁶

Though she accepted the future, she expected that the wedding morning might be an emotional ordeal, and it was. How might Dorothy have expected William to read her reactions to his wedding in her journal? She records their arrival at Gallow Hill for the wedding with characteristic ambivalence: “I looked at everything with tranquillity and happiness—was ill on Saturday and on Sunday and continued to be during most of the time of our stay” (p. 154). And she describes her reactions to the wedding with considerable frankness.

At a little after 8 o'clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the Church. William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring—with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before—he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently. When they were absent my dear little Sara prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer and threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing any thing, till Sara came upstairs to me and said ‘They are coming’. This forced me from the bed where I lay and I moved I knew not how straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William and fell upon his bosom.

(p. 154).

This entry certainly shows any reader how strongly she responded to the wedding itself. The entry which describes her reactions was written with the knowledge that William might see it. Understandably, then, it does not reflect any overt hostility towards “my beloved William” or “my dear Mary” (154); to do so would hardly serve her need to ensure herself a place in the household and William's continued love. Instead Dorothy describes the transfer of the wedding ring as though this moment has a symbolic import—and it does; she is formally turning her title as William's closest relation over to another, and the transfer, as well as Dorothy's willingness to give and receive blessings, symbolizes her overt acceptance of the marriage. As Gill comments, “Perhaps in this little private ritual Wordsworth had meant to comfort Dorothy and reassure her of her continuing place in his life, but it was such a potent gesture that it is hardly surprising that Dorothy succumbed completely to hysteria” (p. 211). For shortly after returning the ring Dorothy's body objected; she “could stand it no longer,” both literally and figuratively, and she entered what Gibson diagnoses as a hysterical fugue.²⁷ This state allowed her to avoid her own immediate unhappiness but also symbolizes Dorothy's fear that the marriage reduces her to a nonentity: “I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing any thing” (p. 154). This momentary loss of self must have been terrifying for her. William's marriage had the potential to destroy her reason for being and her very identity. Recording her experience for William's eyes allowed her to show him how frightened she was, and appealed to him for continued love and pity, just as her revitalized body automatically propelled Dorothy towards the one person who had consistently loved her, praised her in his poems, and provided her with comfort and a sense of self-worth. The entry's original intent was to show William how desperately she continued to need his love.

Dorothy's rhetorical presentation of herself in the Grasmere Journals parallels De Quincey's description of the way she presented herself in person. In person and in her prose style, fervent emotion is held in by an awareness of her gender and condition. De Quincey claimed that she was “checked” by the conflict between what she felt and believed, and what she felt it was socially appropriate to say.

Some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which, being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irrepressible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked, in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age, and her maidenly condition, gave to her whole demeanour, and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of self-conflict, that was almost distressing to witness.²⁸

This is exactly the conflict we witness in the rhetoric of the Grasmere Journals: the conflict between the quick, sharp perception of need and grief, and the impossibly constricted vocabulary available to the woman who felt them and yet who needed to retain her dignity and her audience's sympathy. This self-division is duplicated in the rhetoric of the Journals, which allows her to demonstrate her talent and pleasure in writing, in capturing the beauty of nature and living in felicitous words, but which also checks her strong but unacceptable feelings of anger and anxiety so that she expresses them only in ways that are socially acceptable for a woman who wished to and needed to please others. Even if she consciously understood her own unhappiness, no positive purpose would be served by manifesting it overtly. She had no place to go; she was not wanted elsewhere; she had little money of her own.

Dorothy Wordsworth's writings are the jottings of a dependent as well as supportive sister, a sister who deliberately if indirectly informs her brother that his absences cause her far more anguish than they cause him, that his intended marriage will threaten her peace and health, and that he has been thinking of himself and not of her. To be more direct, to reveal naked anger, might be to risk his rebuke or rejection. But her need to show how his romance threatened her is understandable, especially granted the lonely exiles of her youth. The anxieties and hostilities Dorothy occasionally reveals in the Grasmere Journals and in her letters throughout her life manifested themselves overtly when Dorothy lost her many responsibilities: when she had no productive work to do, when the children were raised and the household work could be done by servants. Then she was overtaken by physical illness and madness, and voiced the anger and selfishness which arose in her as it arises in most of us, but which the younger woman had denied and disguised.²⁹ Certainly physical illness played a crucial role in causing the sad mental disturbances of Dorothy Wordsworth's final twenty years; Gibson, in fact, diagnoses her as suffering from “senile dementia.”³⁰ But the struggle to deny her anger and to fulfill the role of self-sacrificing sister may also have contributed to the miseries of her old age; as Richard Fadem claims, her insanity “can be interpreted to mean that self-sacrifice on the order of Dorothy's may have unhappy consequences” (p. 18). And certainly the troubling emotions which she manifested in her later illness were not entirely unexampled in her youth. It is possible to see Dorothy Wordsworth's madness and selfishness in her last years as congruent with her earlier personality, without denying her talents and her sensitivity.

In a poem entitled “Grasmere” Amy Clampitt describes one of Dorothy Wordsworth's recurrent migraines as a “packed ganglion's / black blood clot” symptomatic of “attachment's uncut knot—so rich, so dark, / so dense a node the ache still bleeds, / still binds, but cannot speak.”³¹ On the contrary: in the Grasmere Journals, the ache finds a voice. Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals speak circuitously, but they speak about her pain. And certainly her persona here, so matter-of-factly recording that she put up curtains, made a shoe, or received a letter, can also surprise a reader into wrenching compassion by suddenly revealing that such details are the context for her own losses, bliss and needs: “My tooth broke today. They will soon be gone. Let that pass I shall be beloved—I want no more” (p. 129). Traditional views which idealize her as naive and entirely selfless do her a disservice; her Grasmere Journals are the work of an intelligent writer of considerable, if unconscious, psychological and rhetorical sophistication. Her use of the journal form, the apparent irrelevance of her juxtapositions, and her slow, culmulative creation of a needy persona dramatize her anxieties and sufferings and appeal to her reader's—her readers'—tenderness.

Notes

1. In de Selincourt's Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); and Moorman's William Wordsworth: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), “Wordsworth and His Children,” Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Cornell U. Press, 1970) pp. 111-41, “Dorothy Wordsworth, 1771-1855,” Contemporary Review (December 1971): 313-21, and “William and Dorothy Wordsworth,” Essays by Divers Hands 37 (1972): 75-94.

2. “Edward Quillinan to Henry Crabb Robinson,” 23 Apr. 1850, quoted in de Selincourt, Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 399.

3. Richard Fadem, “Dorothy Wordsworth: A View from ‘Tintern Abbey,’” The Wordsworth Circle 9 (1978): 18.

4. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 79.

5. F. W. Bateson, William Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation (London: Longmans, 1954). The question was debated at length, though inconclusively, in the letters columns of TLS in 1974. Donald Reiman has further argued that “several of Wordsworth's poems seem to reflect an emotional struggle to define his feelings toward Dorothy within a socially acceptable context,” and he draws the reader's attention to “the headaches and tensions that Dorothy's journals record as afflicting William and her during the years of their life together,” miseries he sees as “relevant” to what he reads as William's “subconscious struggle to avoid focusing his obviously strong sexual drive on the sister he lived with for seven years [before his marriage] (“Poetry of Familiarity: Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Mary Hutchinson,” in Romantic Texts and Contexts [U. of Missouri Press, 1987], pp. 189, 202). Pages have been torn from the Grasmere Journal and passages have been defaced, apparently to frustrate prying eyes; these facts lend credence to the incest theory, but in themselves prove nothing. There are several instances in the Journals which do suggest unusual physical intimacy, times when Dorothy notices that William's “mouth and breath” were unusually cold “when he kissed me” after a long winter's walk, or when she misses him so much during an absence that she sleeps in his bed; she records a time when she “petted him on the carpet” and times when he made “a pillow of my shoulder” before going to sleep. Entries like this, which record moments which seem to have been particularly moving to Dorothy, do suggest that Dorothy at least unconsciously had incestuous feelings for William, as does her emotionally overwrought description of her reaction to his wedding. But though incestuous feelings are relatively common, they are of course not always conscious, and certainly are not always acted upon. The fact that she allowed the journals to survive suggests that Dorothy did not recognize the occasional whiffs of incestuous feeling, and would not have been able to imagine that subsequent readers, including William's descendants, might regard the Journals as evidence that her love was incestuous.

6. Dorothy Wordsworth, “To Jane Pollard,” 4 June 1793, letter 29 of Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 91.

7. One of the luxuries Dorothy hoped William would provide her with was the time to read and study. Dorothy had clearly been disappointed in living with her uncle. When she met him, in 1787, he had begun teaching her French and arithmetic, and he promised to teach her geography “when I am a good Arithmetician” (Letters 1:3). Five years later she was living with him and his growing family, and he had less time for Dorothy; she wrote Jane Pollard that he did not “blend much instruction with his conversation, or enter much into my studies” (1:31). Her desire to learn may have been one of the motives which led her to live with William; during her first long stay with him, at Windy Brow, she was able to report that her French had improved greatly, and that William had begun to teach her Italian (1:117). Sadly, as William's family increased, Dorothy seems to have had little time for the studies she looked forward to. Her letters as an adult rarely mention her reading, and de Quincey, describing Dorothy when he first met her, claimed that “her knowledge of literature was irregular, and thoroughly unsystematic. She was content to be ignorant of many things.” Recollections of the Lake Poets, ed. Edmund Sackville-West (London: John Lehmann, 1948), p. 116.

8. Dorothy's altered financial situation indicates just how peripherally William now chose to consider her. Apparently Dorothy had, until the marriage, relied on William for financial support. In what must have been an extremely humiliating letter to write, she informs her brother Richard on 10 June 1802 that William has told her, or that she and William have agreed, that she is “obliged … to set him aside,” a strong expression of the sort then used customarily when a husband decided to separate from a wife. She writes that he, “having nothing to spare nor being likely to have,” cannot support her any longer; she must ask her other brothers to do so, so that William can afford her continued presence. Thereafter “I will consider myself as boarding through my whole life with an indifferent person” (1:171). The redundancy of “through my whole life” is piercing, as is the pain revealed in this new characterization of William as hereafter being, in one sense at least, like “an indifferent person.”

9. Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth & Romanticism (Rutgers U. Press, 1987), pp. 21-22; Kurt Heinzelman, “The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth at Grasmere,” in Anne K. Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (Indiana U. Press, 1988), p. 68.

10. Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: Random House, 1974) p. 163; Levin, p. 4; Pamela Woof, Dorothy Wordsworth, Writer (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 1988), p. 27.

11. Hardwick, p. 163.

12. Apparently William and Coleridge both had access to her Journals; both borrowed images from them. Coleridge, for instance, used several images from the Alfoxden Journal of January through March 1798 when he came to write Christabel and The Ancient Mariner, according to Mary Moorman's notes to the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: The Alfoxden Journal 1798, The Grasmere Journals 1800-1803, 2nd ed. (Oxford U. Press, 1971), pp. 2, 3, 6, 9, and 11. This edition indicates several specific instances in which William is indebted to Dorothy's Journals. Two important examples: the texts of “Resolution and Independence” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are at points close enough to Dorothy's descriptions of the leech-gatherer she and William talked with, and of the daffodils that delighted them on another walk, to suggest that William refreshed his memory by looking at Dorothy's Journal or asking her to read her entries describing these events when he wrote the poems years after the events had happened. One entry attests that William attended to Dorothy's words so closely as to be haunted by them. William based the poem “Beggars” on an incident which had actually happened to Dorothy on her own—a strong indication, in itself, that William was familiar with her journals. Two years after she met two young beggars, he decided to write a poem about the encounter, and asked Dorothy to read him her entry describing them; “and an unlucky thing it was,” Dorothy records, “for he could not escape from those very words, and so he could not write the poem. He left it unfinished and went tired to Bed” (p. 101). So we know that Dorothy sometimes read passages aloud to her brother and that he sometimes recollected them and tried to make poems on the basis of what he recalled. As Susan J. Wolfson writes, “his poems owed her numerous verbal and imaginative debts, and he reflects his quiet agitation over this in strategies that suppress, disguise, or deny her influence—usually by representing experiences they shared as solitary ones or, if not, acknowledging her influence with statements that seem as condescending as they are affectionate” (Wolfson, “Individual in Community: Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William,” in Mellor, p. 147). It is possible that William read her journals in some detail; her statement that she begins the Grasmere Journal “because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again” suggests that she intended to share it with him, and that her previous journal had pleased him.

13. Gill, pp. 35-36.

14. Gill, p. 204. Mary Hutchinson visited in Grasmere from late January to around April 6, 1800, and on May 14 of that year William and his brother John left Grasmere to visit Mary. In a letter of March 16, 1805, William wrote that at the time of Mary's visit to Grasmere “I had no thoughts of marrying.” He wrote this letter, which describes John's visit to Grasmere from late January to September, 1800, when his grief for John's death was still fresh. Sometime during his visit, John made William and Dorothy an astonishingly generous offer: he pledged that, from his earnings and investments as a sailor, he would support them, freeing William to write poetry. In his letter William writes that “we [that is, he and Dorothy] had at that time little to live upon and he went to sea high in hope and heart that he should soon be able to make his Sister independant [sic] and contribute to any wants which I might have. He encouraged me to persist in the plan of life which I had adopted; I will work for you was his language and you shall attempt to do something for the world.” Not for the first time, William had found a man confident enough in his abilities to offer financial support when William was poor and “when we had no hope about the Lowther debt” (“To James Losh,” Letters 1:256). This letter suggests that financial considerations, rather than disinclination, stood as the barrier preventing William from thinking of marriage at this time. Once John had made his offer, William might very well consider initiating a courtship; and three and a half months into John's visit the two men proceeded to visit Mary, who had left Grasmere a little more than a month before. John's promise of future maintenance was not, of course, enough to keep a wife on, and William prudently held off from marriage; but two years later the news that Sir James Lowther planned to pay the Wordsworth siblings the money the Earl of Lonsdale had owed them seems to have freed William to marry. The Earl died on May 24, 1802 (Gill, p. 207), and by October 4 William had learned of the death and of his heir's plan to pay his debts, arranged to claim his share of the money; travelled to Gallow Hill to see Mary, explained matters to Annette in France, returned to Gallow Hill, and married—all before he had actually received any of the money he was counting on. The promise of this money had galvanized him into action; in 1800, John's promise to offer financial support sometime in the indefinite future may have encouraged William to begin courting Mary seriously, long after his first attraction to her. William, despite his prudence and his resultant long courtship of Mary, was no reluctant lover, as their recently discovered love letters confirms; his eagerness to court Mary as soon as he had hopes of financial support may have shown his sister how much he wished to marry.

15. William's growing bond with Mary threatened to supersede the sibling relationship, which Dorothy seems to have valued above all others. Alan Richardson describes an ideal Romantic sympathy between brother and sister as typical of the Romantic poets, a sympathy “based on shared memories and … closely related to the Romantic valorization of childhood.” Such a bond promises brother and sister “a sympathetic love more intense and complete than either sibling could feel for anyone else.” Richardson, “The Dangers of Sympathy: Sibling Incest in English Romantic Poetry,” SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900] 25 (1985): 739.

16. There is reason to suspect that John Wordsworth, too, loved Mary, according to Carl H. Ketcham, who edited The Letters of John Wordsworth (Cornell U. Press, 1969), pp. 24-26. If Dorothy did notice any tender emotions which John felt for Mary in 1800, as he and William left to visit Mary, they did not disturb her enough to merit comment in her Journal. The first journal entry indicates that the prospect of William's absence concerned her much more, and it is only his absence, and the paucity of his letters, which the Grasmere Journal laments during both brothers' journey to Yorkshire.

17. Personal interview with Dr. Jay Schlumpberger, UCLA Family Health Center, August, 1985.

18. Iris, I. J. M. Gibson, “Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth,” British Medical Journal 285 (1982): 1813.

19. Alan Liu, “On the Autobiographical Present: Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals,” Criticism 26.2 (1984): 133.

20. I am indebted to Jonathan Wordsworth for directing my attention to the passage comparing William and Dorothy to two swans. William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere: Part First, Book First of “The Recluse.” Ed. Beth Darlington. (Cornell U. Press, 1977), MS. B, lines 323-42, 58.

21. Levin, p. 21.

22. James H. Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Cornell U. Press, 1980), p. 51.

23. Liu, p. 124.

24. Richard E. Matlak, “Wordsworth's Lucy Poems in Psychobiographical Context,” PMLA 93 (1978): 46.

25. Carl H. Ketcham, “Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, 1824-1835,” The Wordsworth Circle 9 (1978): 5; Molly Lefebure, The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986), pp. 15-16, 26, 93-94, 189-91. Stephen Gill's references to Dorothy in William Wordsworth suggest a rounded character; he makes it clear that she had many good and valued characteristics, but was often worried and anxious, sometimes bitter, and sometimes angry, as, for example, when she discovered William's resistance to publishing The White Doe of Rylstone and “snapped and reproached him fiercely” (p. 265).

26. Letters 1:178. Jane Pollard had by this time married John Marshall.

27. Gibson, “Illness of Dorothy Wordsworth,” p. 1815.

28. Thomas De Quincey, “William Wordsworth,” in Recollections of the Lake Poets, ed. Edward Sackville-West (London: Lehmann, 1949).

29. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, in Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), in fact, point out that Dorothy's first serious illness came about when she realized that her nephew John Wordsworth no longer needed her services as a housekeeper and companion, “tacitly admitting that her own long service to him must come to an end” (p. 256).

30. Gibson, “Appendix Two: Dorothy Wordsworth's Medical Condition,” in Gittings and Manton, p. 282.

31. Amy Clampitt, “Grasmere,” in Archaic Figure (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 52.

    My thanks to J. E. Grant, Anne Mellor, Ruth Yeazell, an anonymous reviewer, and the Editor for their comments on this article.