SOURCE: McGavran, James Holt, Jr. “Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals: Putting Herself Down.” In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, pp. 230-53. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, portions of which were presented in 1982, McGavran explores William Wordsworth's impact on Dorothy's perceptions and representations, especially of herself.]

The “beauteous forms” of the Wye valley, which William Wordsworth simultaneously describes, remembers, and idealizes for his sister Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey,” enable him through sense, emotion, and thought—blood, heart, and mind (28-29)—to discover the enlarged, powerful self, the “living soul” that can reciprocally “see into the life of things” (46, 49) and subsequently record its vision in poetry. No longer is the external world “a landscape to a blind man's eye” (24); indeed, “All which we behold / Is full of blessings” (133-34), he assures her, thus further emphasizing the crucial importance of perception in his attempts to marry the mind and nature, subject and object, in his writings. Wordsworth realized that his readers, in turn, must see his poems imaginatively if they were to behold the blessings there. Thus he succinctly challenges the reader in “Simon Lee,” “Perhaps a tale you'll make it” (72), while in “Tintern Abbey” he hopes that “in after years” Dorothy may find “healing thoughts / Of tender joy” from her continuing experience of “these my exhortations” (137-46). But what tale can we make of the interlocked perceptions and expressions of the two Wordsworths, the poet of the “egotistical sublime” and the self-sacrificing diarist of the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals? And what effect did this conflation of “eyes” and “I's,” these cross-readings of nature and selves and texts, have upon Dorothy Wordsworth's powers of seeing and knowing and writing?

On Christmas Day 1805, her thirty-fourth birthday, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote of her time at Grasmere, “I think these years have been the very happiest of my life” (Letters 1:659). She had made a choice more than a decade previously, and clearly she was pleased with it. During an adolescence spent with various, mostly sympathetic relatives, Dorothy was exposed to several of the more important religious and social conflicts of her day: the open-minded religion of the Congregationalists and Unitarians and the fervent evangelical Anglicanism of the Clapham sect; the antislavery campaign of William Wilberforce, whom Dorothy knew and with whom she was once teasingly accused of being in love; and, through Wilberforce, the eloquent moralistic writings of Sarah Trimmer (Gittings and Manton, 6-12, 22-27). Women of her time had few choices, to be sure, but nevertheless Dorothy—bright, energetic, creative—could have opted to pursue the people and the issues she had encountered, perhaps through marriage to a man active in public or ecclesiastical affairs, perhaps through work as a teacher, governess, or writer among people of sympathetic views. Instead, she eagerly chose to share her life and her talents with her brother William. First at Windy Brow, then at Racedown and Alfoxden, then at Goslar in Germany, and finally at Grasmere, the orphaned siblings tried to make up for the years of childhood lost as a result of their parents' untimely deaths. Dorothy expresses some of what she felt in another letter of Christmas 1805:

The Day was always kept by my Brothers with rejoicing in my Father's house, but for six years (the interval between my Mother's Death and his) I was never once at home, never was for a single moment under my Father's Roof after her Death, which I cannot think of without regret for many causes, and particularly, that I have been thereby put out of the way of many recollections in common with my Brothers of that period of life.

(Letters 1:663)

Not only were they trying to be children again; they were also reenacting their parents' sheltering and nurturing roles, since at Racedown and Alfoxden they were guardians of young Basil Montagu. If Dorothy's resentment at her father's excluding her from the family was ever transferred to William—as one of the boys who rejoiced without her, or as father-substitute in the relationship with Basil—she never gave a sign.

Besides reestablishing their interrupted family romance, there was another reason, both more compelling and more problematic, why Dorothy chose life with William—why, as Pamela Woof has written, “Dorothy's early Journals … offered to Wordsworth, and still offer to us, … a world accepted” (107). Susan Levin has wisely speculated, “Perhaps she stayed in her brother's house because of the participation in art that was allowed her there” (353). Levin continues: “The country walks, the reading and discussions, the emotional tensions which formed her life with William formed the subject of her art. Dorothy Wordsworth lived far more intensely than most of her female contemporaries” (354). It was a life of creativity. Though she remained unconscious of the reason, I believe Dorothy chose life with William less for his literary gifts and aspirations than for her own, which were sufficient, with help from Coleridge, to create the most powerful male poet in England since Milton and still enable her to produce the haunting beauties, sorrows, passions, and reticences of her Alfoxden and Grasmere journals. However, for all the selves that Dorothy became for William—child, parent, servant, observer, recorder, amanuensis—a terrible price was exacted: the loss of any firm sense of personal identity. Unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy seems never to have realized that not all the enslaved of her age were American blacks. Motherless from the age of six, lacking the ebullient self-assertiveness of contemporaries otherwise as different as Wollstonecraft and Trimmer, Dorothy could not develop the collective, interdependent identity that Susan Friedman outlines earlier in this collection. Giving up her sensory perceptions, her feelings, her thoughts, and her words to William, how and where could she formulate and articulate a self?

In her introductory essay to this volume, drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, Shari Benstock points the way to an answer when she states that “language itself … is a defense against unconscious knowledge. … But it is not an altogether successful defense network,” because messages from the unconscious try to break through the fence of language—just as Dorothy's conscious choice to live with William could not entirely obscure her awareness of the possibility of other ways of living. Lacan's association of language with repression applies to people of both sexes; but, as both Benstock and Friedman suggest, if one is a woman there is the enormous additional problem of having to speak or write in a society whose forms—including literary forms—systematically threaten to violate or even annihilate female selfhood. Working with these feminist concepts, and with the help of Virginia Woolf (who regarded both Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft as foremothers) as well as phenomenological insights derived from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I intend to show that Dorothy's repressed perceptions and knowledge of herself, her literary ability, and her great sacrifice do appear, most often indirectly, in her early journals. In the very act of “putting herself down”—which for Dorothy involved both self-deprecation and self-transcendence as methods of self-avoidance—she cannot help also putting down on paper traces of the beautiful, relinquished psyche she never fully recognized.

That Dorothy possessed unusual gifts of observation, sensitivity, and intellect was recognized by many who knew her. De Quincey, for instance, comments, “Her manner was warm and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her” (114). Coleridge, in an early letter, seems to have formed much the same impression:

Her manners are simple, ardent, impressive—.
                    In every motion her most innocent soul
                    Outbeams so brightly, that who saw would say,
                    Guilt was a thing impossible in her.

Her information various—her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature—and her taste a perfect electrometer.

(1:330-31)

Much later in his life, Coleridge blends reminiscence with evocative surmise to describe Dorothy as “a Woman of Genius, as well as manifold acquirements, and but for the absorption of her whole Soul in her Brother's fame and writings would, perhaps, in a different style have been as great a Poet as Himself” (6:959). De Quincey comments more extensively on the visible effects of this discrepancy between her apparent abilities and her accomplishment, noting that her intellect,

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.

(114-15)

But if De Quincey gives more detail of what appeared to him to be Dorothy's outward embarrassment, Coleridge's phrases plunge more deeply to the core of the problem: “a Woman of Genius”; “as great as Himself.” Coleridge qualifies his contention carefully, but nevertheless he puts into words the socially and psychically unacceptable possibility that neither the “most innocent,” unselfconscious Dorothy nor the soul-absorbing William could ever directly confront. William's hearty poetic praise for Dorothy's abilities, and her generosity in sharing these with him, begs the question of what this continued giving does to the giver—or, to be sure, the taker—in such a relationship. From early childhood on, as William gratefully acknowledges in “The Sparrow's Nest,” Dorothy had given him her senses and sensibilities:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears:
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
                    And love, and thought, and joy.

(17-20)

As an adult, he makes clear, she gave him still more: after the “crisis” of his young manhood, recounted in The Prelude, she brought about his restoration to his younger self, to nature, and—most important—to poetry (Prelude XI [1850], 306, 345-48). Later, of course, while he gave her his poems to copy, she gave him her journals; even when he did not rely directly upon them for his own work, as in the creation of “A Night-Piece” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (Journals 2, 109), the journals regularly afforded him their abundance of perceptions of nature, people, and events. It was not that William undervalued Dorothy's gifts; indeed, the question seems rather to have been whether he thought he could do without her. We can hear a tone of desperation, even of envy, as well as loving gratitude in his “prayer” in “Tintern Abbey”: “Oh! yet a little while / May I behold in thee what I was once?” (119-20). Perhaps it would not be pressing speculation too far to see a shadow of Dorothy's own desperation, along with the joy, in the one place she could not see it for herself—“in the shooting lights / Of … [her] wild eyes” (118-19).¹ For William to wish, however subconsciously, to hold Dorothy's eyes and self prisoner in his own is not only to acquiesce in her arresting of her own development (Fadem 26), but also to seal her into the rural nature they both loved to read, entombing her there (Homans, Women Writers 20-23; Reiman 154-58).²

William does seem to have sensed that Dorothy was suffering and would continue to suffer, however obscurely, and that she would need “healing thoughts” “in after years”; perhaps, suffering himself, he thought he would need them too. In any case, his prophecy of “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief” (“Tintern Abbey” 143) for her future came terribly true. It is difficult to imagine that in the near-total physical and mental eclipse of her later life Dorothy could have found in William's “exhortations” sufficiently abundant recompense for all she had relinquished. But she herself had willed and executed this relinquishment, directed by her love, but also “in obedience”—as De Quincey put it—“to the decorum of her sex and age, and her maidenly condition.” And thus the other part of William's prophecy also came true. Through those long, dark years, nodding and fretting by the fire, she still could hear or recite William's poetry with great feeling and joy; indeed, his words, or his presence at her side, were almost the only means by which the family was able to wake her to any semblance of her former loving, giving self, the “most innocent soul” who had so moved Coleridge years before (De Selincourt 397-98; Moorman 515, 607; Gittings and Manton 276).

Exactly how great was Dorothy's literary ability? Do her journals contain poetry “in a different style”? What were the literary costs, and what the literary profits, of being William's “dear, dear Sister” (“Tintern Abbey” 121)? Sensing that to open Dorothy Wordsworth's journals is to reenact the loving but appropriating role of her brother, yet recognizing that Dorothy herself, like William in “Simon Lee,” presupposes the existence of a strong reading presence, I will look for help to perhaps the strongest revisionary reader and writer of our own century. Virginia Woolf, who hauntingly described the inevitable destruction of the sister she imagined for Shakespeare (A Room of One's Own 48-51), has read the journals of Wordsworth's sister with such acuteness and empathy that one must believe she saw and felt a parallel to exist, in self-destructive frustration, between Dorothy and “Judith Shakespeare.” And yet, in her essay on Dorothy, written in 1929, Woolf also credits her with a literary achievement she could not even dream of for the sixteenth-century “Judith.” Woolf confronts us with the central paradox at which I have already hinted: that Dorothy Wordsworth's relentless self-crippling of her powers of perception and composition is inseparable from the near-mystical self-sublimation of her best lyrical descriptive passages:

… if she let “I” and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get between her and the object, she would be calling the moon “the Queen of the Night”; … she would be soaring into reveries and rhapsodies and forgetting to find the exact phrase for the ripple of moonlight upon the lake. It was like “herrings in the water”—she could not have said that if she had been thinking about herself. …

… But if one subdued oneself, and resigned one's private agitations, then, as if in reward, Nature would bestow an exquisite satisfaction.

(Collected Essays 3:200, 203)

Woolf saw that Dorothy had so repressed her awareness of her own role as observer that she could actually believe it was Nature that bestowed the satisfaction. But further, Woolf must have found in Dorothy a precursor with regard to her own attempts in her fiction to escape the social, sexual, and psychic boundaries of personal identity. “But how describe the world seen without a self?” asks Bernard, Woolf's hero of expanded consciousness in The Waves, during his final epiphany (287); this is Woolf's authorial problem in the descriptive interludes of that fiction and in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse as well. Whether or not Woolf had Dorothy's descriptive style consciously in mind while writing The Waves,³ seeing “without a self” was Dorothy Wordsworth's dilemma long before it was Virginia Woolf's. As we shall see, following Woolf's lead, Dorothy's self-repression leads to some profound self-revelation; conversely, Dorothy's lyricism in its finest flights attains the superpersonal, anonymous creative energy that Woolf admired in A Room of One's Own (102) when she echoed Coleridge's statement from the Table Talk that “a great mind must be androgynous.”

Dorothy's unwillingness to look at herself is revealed on several levels in the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals (1798, 1800-1803), in passages that stand out against the matter-of-factness of her writing about ordinary activities. The first of these levels concerns Dorothy's use of the first person. De Quincey notes that Dorothy sometimes stammered in her speech when agitated (Recollections 115), and Woolf speaks of her stammering pen (Collected Essays 3:203). The journals show a repeated stammering use of “I,” and of other first-person-singular pronouns, when Dorothy is experiencing painful feelings deriving from William's absence; she not only misses William, she misses the way he distracts her from thinking about herself.⁴ Near the beginning of the Grasmere journal, for example, praising the restorative beauty of the lake, she writes:

Grasmere was very solemn in the last glimpse of twilight it calls home the heart to quietness. I had been very melancholy in my walk back. I had many of my saddest thoughts and I could not keep the tears within me. But when I came to Grasmere I felt that it did me good.

(17)

“I had,” “I could,” “I came,” “I felt”: Grasmere does Dorothy good, it seems, because her glimpse of it distracts and thus quiets the heart agitated by an unwanted self-consciousness. Ten days later, still missing William and still drawn against her will to sad introspection, she writes: “I sate till I could hardly drag myself away I grew so sad” (21). She finds relief when she continues, not in her own voice, but rather by alluding to William's “Lines Written in Early Spring” and “that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind” (3-4). Nearly two years later, when William has left for a visit with Coleridge at Keswick, she still must find some distraction, something to do to fight off the melancholy self-awareness that struggles toward articulation: “Now for my walk. I will be busy, I will look well and be well when he comes back to me” (97). But then for a long moment Dorothy's eye is held by the core of an apple William had eaten before his departure—surely a symbol not just of William's absent self but also, subconsciously, of her own relinquished self. “I can hardly find in my heart to throw it into the fire,” she remarks pathetically; but then, apparently, in it went, and she breaks away and flees: “I must wash myself, then off.” Later, returning to her journal, she suggests once again that nature and thoughts of her brother have diverted her from self-contemplation: “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” (97).

Of course no mere temporary separation from the self she preferred to her own could threaten Dorothy so much as William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson in October 1802. Once again in the journal the stuttering “I” struggles in pain, and finally in vain, to assert itself:

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.

(154)

As if she were acknowledging her identity with the dead Lucy, and again echoing her brother's words, Dorothy “neither hears nor sees” in the terrible moment when some act of self-perception or of self-assertion, however painful, should occur. Brownstein feelingly praises the “moving self-control” of this passage (61);⁵ but what moves us here is precisely the impression that Dorothy is exercising a repressive power far more drastic than what is usually meant by “self-control”—almost a kind of psychic suicide. The conflict and torment in the wedding passage subside only when Dorothy, after welcoming “my dear Mary,” can once again subordinate “I” to “eye,” recording nature and events for William as the three of them start on the wedding trip: “It rained when we set off. Poor Mary was much agitated when she parted from her Brothers and Sisters and her home. Nothing particular occurred till we reached Kirby. We had sunshine and showers, pleasant talk, love and chearfulness [sic]” (154). In this way, time and again, Dorothy honored the generous and yet terrible commitment with which she had begun her task: “I resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and J. [ohn] 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” (15-16). Refusing to quarrel with herself, to let “eye” look at “I,” she sublimates that self, in a sense dying for William into the descriptions of nature, or of people and events, that so greatly pleased them both.

In Dorothy's perceptions of nature, however, as in her use of the first-person pronouns, there frequently appear further suggestions of a repressed awareness of herself, her gifts, and what she was doing with them.⁶ But because the self-awareness is buried in the natural images, Dorothy can confront and describe the images themselves without the distress implicit in the jittery “I's” just noted. Repeatedly the sky above the Lake District becomes for her a dome, an image of enclosure with sepulchral implications. Early in the Alfoxden journal—in the passage that William later used for “A Night-Piece”—she describes the night sky, after the clouds have parted, as a “black-blue vault” (2). Another evening, four years later, she almost seems to pun as she writes, “it was a grave evening—there was something in the air that compelled me to serious thought. The hills were large, closed in by the sky” (104). In another entry, Dorothy uses the image of the sky-dome in revealing combination with a bird's flight and its echoing sound:

we saw a raven very high above us—it called out and the Dome of the sky seemed to echo the sound—it called again and again as it flew onwards, and the mountains gave back the sound, seeming as if from their center a musical bell-like answering to the bird's hoarse voice.

(31)

Dorothy too may yearn, however subconsciously, to escape—in an act of self-assertion or, more likely, of self-transcendence—to fly as high as the raven and send her voice, her words, echoing back; but that enclosing dome—the limit of the rural world to which, for her brother's sake, she has dedicated herself—seems to circumscribe her flight while simultaneously providing, along with the mountains, a necessary sounding board.⁷ Other images of flight abound in the journals, regularly linked with a limit or impediment to flight: “As I came past Rydale in the morning I saw a Heron swimming with only its neck out of water—it beat and struggled amongst the water when it flew away and was long in getting loose” (22). At this point, early in the writing of the Grasmere journal, still missing her absent brother, Dorothy is trapped not only spatially but temporally as well; she sees the heron while hurrying to Ambleside, hoping to intercept a letter from William, but “forgetting that the post does not come till the evening. How was I grieved when I was so informed” (22). Did Dorothy ever wish, even subconsciously, to rebel, to strike out, to break away from the orbit of her solitary life with William? The journals reveal very few moments of overt violence on Dorothy's part; once, however, moved by beauty and a show of bold independence, she performed an impulsive act of removal—only to repent of it immediately afterward:

I found a strawberry blossom in a rock. The little slender flower had more courage than the green leaves, for they were but half expanded and half grown, but the blossom was spread full out. I uprooted it rashly, and I felt as if I had been committing an outrage, so I planted it again. It will have but a stormy life of it, but let it live if it can.

(83)

In an act of relinquishment, refusing to murder and dissect, Dorothy replants the strawberry, just as it seems she reconciled herself to her situation in life without ever directly confronting it; the empathy of her final comment, “let it live if it can,” is all the more touching for its show of toughness and bitterness.

Dorothy's journals suggest the presence of this subconscious empathy not only with the natural images of her entrapment—hills and sky, birds and plants—but also with other women she meets, especially poor women, whether Lake Country residents or travelers and beggars. Her portrayals of these women confirm Dorothy's awareness of the precariousness of her own social and economic position as a single woman, an orphan, living a rather irregular life in a remote district; they also hint at a deep-buried feeling of sisterhood. If we assemble them in order of the ascending age of the subjects, these descriptions provide an indirect, but still very sharp and moving, reflection of Dorothy's sense of the course of her own life—her childhood, her young womanhood, the disturbed years of her later maturity, and even her death. Early in 1802 she sees on a road a group of travelers led by a carman “talking to a little lass about 10 years of age who seemed to make him her companion.” She sees the girl run ahead to fetch a large stone for blocking the wheel of the cart:

She was a beautiful creature and there was something uncommonly impressive in the lightness and joyousness of her manner. Her business seemed to be all pleasure—pleasure in her own motions—and the man looked at her as if he too was pleased and spoke to her in the same tone in which he spoke to his horses. There was a wildness in her whole figure, not the wildness of a Mountain lass but a Road lass, a traveller from her Birth, who had wanted neither food nor clothes.

(91)

Dorothy apparently has no conscious thought, as she describes the carman's tone of voice, that the child may be ill used or exploited for her generous spirit; instead she sees freedom, spontaneity, and courage in the girl, and perhaps she envies her nomadic existence. Her thoughts are totally different, however, upon meeting a woman traveling with her two daughters, one in her arms and the other, a four-year-old, walking with difficulty at her side in second-hand shoes:

Alas too young for such cares and such travels. The Mother when we accosted her told us that her husband had left her and gone off with another woman and how she “pursued” them. Then her fury kindled and her eyes rolled about. She changed again to tears.

Next, clearly expressing her sense of relationship to this victimized woman, Dorothy reveals a peculiar coincidence: “She was a Cockermouth woman 30 years of age—a child at Cockermouth when I was. I was moved and gave her a shilling—I believe 6^d more than I ought to have given” (121). What complex feelings must have moved Dorothy to what she subsequently regarded as too great a generosity! As we read the two passages, it almost seems as if the “road lass” chattering with the carman had grown up to become this desperate, deserted wife and mother. Did Dorothy, as the time drew nearer for William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson, unconsciously feel that her own childlike wildness of eye and spirit had been ill used, and that she too was being deserted for another woman? And what lay ahead? Though Dorothy could not have been aware of it, her long years of serving in her brother's house were foreshadowed in the behavior of an old woman who served tea to William and her one day in June 1800: “[She] was very happy to see us and we were so in the pleasure we gave. She was an affecting picture of patient disappointment, suffering under no particular affliction” (30); Dorothy herself is affectingly quick here to diagnose “patient disappointment.” Perhaps a poor woman whose funeral Dorothy subsequently attended and described had also suffered under “no particular affliction” other than to have been a dependent woman living in England at the turn of the nineteenth century:

The dead person 56 years of age buried by the parish. The coffin was neatly lettered and painted black and covered with a decent cloth. They set the corpse down at the door and while we stood within the threshold the men with their hats off sang with decent and solemn countenances a verse of a funeral psalm. The corpse was then borne down the hill and they sang till they had got past the Town-end. I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children. When we got out of the dark house the sun was shining and the prospect looked so divinely beautiful as I never saw it. It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, and yet more allied to human life. The green fields, neighbours of the churchyard, were as green as possible and with the brightness of the sunshine looked quite gay. I thought she was going to a quiet spot and I could not help weeping very much.

(38)

Dorothy continues this account by turning critical attention upon the officiating clergyman: “The priest met us—he did not look as a man ought to do on such an occasion—I had seen him half-drunk the day before in a pot-house. Before we came with the corpse one of the company observed he wondered what sort of cue ‘our Parson would be in’” (38). Dorothy's indignation, following her great personal distress at the spectacle of the poor woman's funeral, suggests that she was very close to knowing and articulating her psychic kinship with the deceased as another victimized woman. No wonder, then, that “the prospect looked … more sacred … and yet more allied to human life” than ever before: in terms of Dorothy's personal involvement, her own inner need for what Virginia Woolf called an “exquisite satisfaction,” it was more divinely beautiful—it had to be.⁸ Nevertheless, as Woolf perceived, Dorothy could never have attained the peculiar intensity of passages like this one had she thought or spoken directly of her own feelings or of women's problems generally, as her more assertive contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft did. The self-sublimation that kept her from becoming a strong authorial presence or a crusading feminist also produced these reticent, painful beauties in the journals.

We have found evidence of Dorothy's struggle not to see or quarrel with herself in her agitated use of personal pronouns, her repeated use of certain images from nature for which she has an unconscious affinity, and her empathic descriptions of some of the women whose lives crossed hers. But there is another, in a sense more positive, aspect of her art of repression: it is the way her rigorous denial of self can lead, as it did sometimes for Woolf and a few of her fictional characters, to an almost mystical expansion of self—the outpouring of her personal identity, with all its pain and fear, into the greater vessel of nature itself. This is the power one reads in Dorothy's most rapturous descriptions—for example, the opening entry in the Alfoxden journal:

The green paths down the hillsides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams. The garden, mimic of spring, is gay with flowers. The purple-starred hepatica spreads itself in the sun, and the clustering snow-drops put forth their white heads, at first upright, ribbed with green, and like a rosebud; when completely opened, hanging their heads downwards, but slowly lengthening their slender stems. The slanting woods of an unvarying brown, showing the light through the thin network of their upper boughs. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin.

(1)

Dorothy herself is not numbered as part of the rural population; she has succeeded so well in effacing herself that the sunbeams and flowers have more individual identity than she does. The reader, excited by the strange but irresistible energy of the passage, the androgynous balance of channels and sunbeams, of flowers and lengthening stems, returns to a more contemplative mood in the final image of the tree shafts, “like the columns of a ruin,” with their suggestion of temples and worship. It is almost as if Dorothy had built Kubla Khan's pleasure dome in Somersetshire; as in Coleridge's dream-poem, this depersonalized but not dehumanized energy is intensely physical and sexual as well. A similar passage, written more than two years later, again contains this energy: “The air was become still the lake was of a bright slate colour, the hills darkening. The Bays shot into the low fading shores. Sheep resting all things quiet” (108). The air, the lake, the hills, and even the sheep are all quiet and yet as if electrically charged with an inner life and power that are felt all the more strongly for the surface of tranquility. “The Bays shot into the low fading shores”: one feels the same sort of energy in Woolf's interludes in The Waves, in many of D. H. Lawrence's descriptions of rural nature, and in the remarkable early sepia paintings of the nineteenth-century British artist Samuel Palmer. Dorothy's best-known description, that of the daffodils (109) which served as the basis for William's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” similarly moves the reader with its selfless synthesis of “simplicity and unity and life.” Her expostulation, “I never saw daffodils so beautiful,” like an earlier one in the Alfoxden journal (“I never saw such a union of earth, sky, and sea” [5]), acquires a strangely literal new dimension: the troubled and troublesome “I” really is not seeing the flowers, for Dorothy is beyond herself. In another unusual passage of self-transcendence, however, she and William lie “unseen by one another” “in the trench under the fence,” as if “in the grave”; this passage indicates that there may be the stirrings of another sort of awareness in Dorothy, a consciousness of the power of words over passion, over change, over mortality: “There was no one waterfall above another—it was a sound of waters in the air—the voice of the air” (117). It is as if Dorothy were overhearing herself, for surely “the voice of the air,” crying from nowhere and yet everywhere at once, like the echoing voice of the raven in the passage quoted earlier, is the voice Dorothy herself achieves in such moments.

Dorothy's journals seem nowhere so full of visionary literary potential, yet so pathetically unable fully to realize that potential, as in passages where the self-sublimating motion, after taking her beyond the limits of individual identity, reverts her to herself again, but with the beginnings of a stronger, more assertive power of perception and creation. In a well-known sarcastic comment on a rich man's garden, from the Alfoxden journal, Dorothy says, “Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy” (13), but there are indications elsewhere in the journals that she may have come close to recognizing her ability as an artist to do just that. “O thought I!” she bursts out, after two days of unseasonably cold weather in mid-May 1802, “what a beautiful thing God has made winter to be by stripping the trees and letting us see their shapes and forms. What a freedom does it seem to give to the storms!” (125). She seems not quite to realize that she too, her “eye” and “I” reconciled in the medium of language, has the godlike power, the freedom, to shape nature. Instead she seems to associate the basic “shapes and forms” of nature and the wind with a more dominant, masculine force, and to regard her own powers as secondary, comparable to the beautiful but relatively insubstantial leafing out of trees in summer. Another entry, written late in 1802, seems to confirm the presence of a constricting sense of masculine and feminine in Dorothy's view of her relationship with nature:

I could not help observing as we went along how much more varied the prospects of Wensly Dale are in the summer time than I could have thought possible in the winter. This seemed to be in great measure owing to the trees being in leaf, and forming groves, and screens, and thence little openings upon recesses and concealed retreats which in winter only made a part of the one great vale The beauty of the summer time here as much excels that of the winter as the variety, owing to the excessive greenness of the fields, and the trees in leaf half concealing, and where they do not conceal, softening the hard bareness of the limey white Roofs.

(158)

This summery aspect of nature pleases Dorothy consciously for its delicate variety, and unconsciously, it would seem, for the female energy, the hidden spatial potentiality of its “little openings,” “recesses,” and “concealed retreats.” But the thrice-repeated use of “conceal” suggests that she associates something less admirable, something false or deceptive, with it as well, possibly relating to those images of entrapment—sky, hills, lakes—discussed earlier. It may be that her own female sexuality, imaged in these elements of nature, serves as a source of both pride and shame—as if she were both the agent and the victim of her own creative power. Later in the same passage, she complains that “even the Banks were less interesting than in winter” (159). She regrets that “Nature”—that is, this softening, beautifying, but concealing power—“had entirely got the better in her struggles against the giants who first cast the mould of these works”; continuing this surprisingly evocative passage, she writes:

for indeed it is a place that did not in winter remind one of God, but one could not help feeling as if there had been the agency of some “Mortal Instruments” which Nature had been struggling against without making a perfect conquest. There was something so wild and new in this feeling, knowing as we did in the inner man that God alone had laid his hand upon it that I could not help regretting the want of it, besides it is a pleasure to a real lover of Nature to give winter all the glory he can, for summer will make its own way, and speak its own praises.

(159)

Why is nature “less interesting” in its summer greenery? Are beauty, variety, and potentiality, or the complementary qualities of concealment, deception, and entrapment, so lacking in interest? How will summer “speak its own praises” if no one speaks for it? Dorothy seems here to be reiterating the familiar dichotomy of the Beautiful and the Sublime, but in conjunction with a sexual stereotyping, possibly based on an unconscious sexual envy, that robs her of power over both nature and language. Who are these “Mortal Instruments,” “the giants who first cast the mould of these works,” whose shaping power seems to Dorothy to rival or excel God's? If they are mortal, and not pagan gods, are they then Titans? the thinkers or prophets or poets of the past? or, closer to home, William and Coleridge? Apparently, Dorothy must stop short of considering herself one of these larger-than-life beings. She cannot imagine speaking summer's and winter's praises simultaneously, synthesizing the female and male aspects of nature and creativity into the sort of androgynous psychic unity that Virginia Woolf, following Coleridge, envisions in A Room of One's Own—even though, as we have seen, she sometimes achieves it in totally unselfconscious moments. Dorothy moves toward this exciting awareness of a gigantic power of creation that is both primitive and visionary, but she feels debarred from actively tapping it and using it to grow as woman and writer; she ends self-defeatingly by leaving summer to “make its own way,” and lending her words “to give winter all the glory.”

There is one more remarkable passage, however, in which Dorothy does appear about to effect a conscious resolution of this conflict through androgynous creativity. Walking with her brother and Coleridge under Nab Scar, she sees and then describes mountain scenery whose male images of upward thrust—peaks and trees—and female images of seats, bowers, and enclosing hills seem not opposing but complementary, to be shared equally by all:

It was very grand when we looked up very stony, here and there a budding tree. William observed that the umbrella Yew tree that breasts the wind had lost its character as a tree and had become something like to solid wood. Coleridge and I pushed on before. We left William sitting on the stones feasting with silence—and C. and I sate down upon a rocky seat. … He was below us and we could see him. He came to us and repeated his poems while we sate beside him upon the ground. He had made himself a seat in the crumbly ground. After we had lingered long looking into the vales—Ambleside … Rydale …, and our own dear Grasmere first making a little round lake of nature's own with never a house never a green field but the copses and the bare hills enclosing it and the river flowing out of it. Above rose the Coniston Fells in their own shape and colour. Not Man's hills but all for themselves the sky and the clouds and a few wild creatures. C. went to search for something new. We saw him climbing up towards a Rock. He called us and we found him in a Bower, the sweetest that was ever seen. … Above at the top of the Rock there is another spot—it is scarce a Bower, a little parlour on[ly] not enclosed by walls but shaped out for a resting place by the rocks and the ground rising about it.

(114-15)

All here seems familiar yet strangely changed, re-created out of itself like the yew tree William first notices. The bowers or seats in the hills are clearly not women's prisons in any sense, nor are the hills themselves “Man's hills.” The freedom, the exhilaration of this long passage are very rare in the journals. It seems that here, with the male presences of William and especially Coleridge not threatening her but supporting her, and with fond wishes for her absent female friends Mary and Sara Hutchinson as well, Dorothy is for a moment in command of her powers; she is creating the scene, making it a seat, a parlour, a containing vehicle for her self-transcendent but self-assured imagination. Her final comment suggests a moment of reconciliation with her own femininity as well: “We resolved to go and plant flowers in both these places tomorrow” (115).

These flowers are not mentioned again,⁹ but as we have seen others bloom throughout the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals: flowers of beauty and fear; flowers of sympathy and repression; flowers of self-denial and occasionally of self-transcendence. Like that of the wild strawberry she first snatched up and then replanted, Dorothy Wordsworth's hold on life was uncertain, tenuous. Serving nearly all her life in dependent roles, subject to social and economic as well as psychological pressures, Dorothy had too many constraints upon her vision. In spite of her unusual gifts of observation and composition, she could not, as Virginia Woolf saw, fully assert a creative self without risking the delicate grasp of life and language she already possessed. Although he did not intend it to be so, William's seeing and writing could disastrously interrupt or interfere with her own self-creative acts of perception. One evening, Dorothy wrote in March 1802, “I looked before me and I saw a red light upon Silver How as if coming out of the vale below” (103); attempting no further description herself of this unusual light, she instead interpolates into the journal three lines her brother had written about a similar appearance:

There was a light of most strange birth
A Light that came out of the earth
And spread along the dark hill-side.

She concludes this paradigmatic passage, “Thus I was going on when I saw the shape of my Beloved in the Road at a little distance—we turned back to see the light but it was fading—almost gone” (103). Indeed, the shape of her beloved—and his words, which it was so often her duty to copy—must have appeared everywhere in Dorothy's remote rural world, coming between her and the light, casting their shadows over the pages of her book. Yet the journals were expressly written for her brother's eyes, to “give Wm pleasure by it when he comes home again” (15-16). Nor can there be any question that Dorothy herself found pleasure in her life with and for her brother, in spite of all the difficulties they experienced. She describes a terrible, bone-chilling walk in January 1802 near Grisedale Tarn, through hail, snow, and disorienting mists: “We were long,” she writes, “before we knew that we were in the right track but thanks to William's skill we knew it long before we could see our way before us.” Having thus admired William's power of reading nature, she continues by writing of the feelings they shared upon returning home: “O how comfortable and happy we felt ourselves sitting by our own fire. … We talked about the Lake of Como, read in the descriptive Sketches, looked about us, and felt that we were happy” (79). True contentment could hardly be made more explicit than this.¹⁰ Still, more than the warm fire, more even than the twenty-five pounds sterling lying on the table (she had just received her yearly allowance from her brother Christopher and five pounds from the Beaumonts), Dorothy's happiness derives from being able to write here in the first person plural, to direct her thoughts to William's travels to Como and to William's poetry, and thus once again to avoid confronting herself as a single perceiver, a subject. Without her brother, as we have seen, she could not feel free, only desolate.

Nevertheless there were moments, however brief and half-understood, of strong self-assurance. “God be thanked,” she exclaims, “I want not society by a moonlight lake” (23). The moon, with its richness of mythic association, its show of power and authority, and its continuous motion and changes of appearance, seemed always unusually evocative and restorative to her. Of another experience she writes: “O the unutterable darkness of the sky and the earth below the moon! and the glorious brightness of the moon itself! … When I saw this lowly Building in the waters among the Dark and lofty hills, with that bright soft light upon it, it made me more than half a poet” (104). Dorothy subsequently went home and tried to write verses, about which she could say only “alas!”—but we can find poetry in the journal itself; its images of moonlight, waters, and the island house richly suggest a metaphor for the interaction of imagination, nature, and art in the creative processes of the mind. In one other moonlit passage, Dorothy is anxious for Thomas Wilkinson to leave her and let her walk home alone so she can finish reading a letter from William and Mary:

I was glad when he left me. Then I had time to look at the moon while I was thinking over my own thoughts. The moon traveled through the clouds tinging them yellow as she passed along, with two stars near her, one larger than the other. These stars grew or diminished as they passed from or went into the clouds.

(108)

The moon here seems to dominate not only the clouds but the two stars that appear to be following in its wake—just as Dorothy, holding the letter, seems to be controlling her world and her words at this moment. But of course the moon, even when reflecting splendor, cannot move the stars, nor can it break the bond of the earth's gravity or free itself from its orbit—any more than Dorothy, reading the words of William and Mary, is completely free to think her own thoughts even after Wilkinson leaves her in the road.¹¹

One of the most eloquent modern writers on the powers and limitations of perception has been the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In a key statement, which the writings of both Wordsworths seem strongly to support, Merleau-Ponty asserts that “perception will … appear as the paradoxical phenomenon which renders being accessible to us” (“The Primacy of Perception” 52). But if perception, with its potential for both “immanence and transcendence” (51), enables us to grow both within and beyond ourselves, there is always, he tells us, also a “hidden side” (48-49): of objects only partially seen from a particular point of view; of words only partially comprehended; or perhaps, as in the case of Dorothy Wordsworth, of a creative self repressed and yet at times articulating itself in the very terms of that repression—putting herself down. Merleau-Ponty concludes a remarkable essay on Cézanne with a haunting commentary that seems in many ways applicable to Dorothy Wordsworth, in spite of the gender difference:

Cézanne's observers did not guess the transmutations which he imposed on events and experiences; they were blind to his significance, to that glow from out of nowhere which surrounded him from time to time. But he himself was never at the center of himself: nine days out of ten all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts. … Yet it was in the world that he had to realize his freedom, with colors upon a canvas. It was on the approval of others that he had to wait for the proof of his worth. That is the reason he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas.

(“Cézanne's Doubt” 251)

Of course, apart from her brother's, few glances—approving or otherwise—were ever directed at Dorothy's journals in her own lifetime. And unlike Cézanne, who continued to develop as a painter all his life, most of Dorothy's best writing seems to have been done early, in the journals we have been studying. Still, both were artists deeply and repeatedly frustrated by the circumstances of their lives, although Cézanne was evidently more conscious of the frustration than Dorothy. Both possessed profound abilities to perceive their worlds and the powers to use their respective media—what Merleau-Ponty calls the ability to impose transmutations upon events and experiences—yet both failed to understand their relationships to their worlds or to see their crafts steadily or whole. But how many artists, and how many critics, can see that strongly? Merleau-Ponty's final comment in “Cézanne's Doubt,” with its shift to the first-person plural pronoun, implicitly links Cézanne's powers and limitations not only with Dorothy Wordsworth's, but with those of many others as well: “We never get away from our life. We never see our ideas or our freedom face to face” (251).

Notes

1. According to De Quincey, Dorothy's eyes were “not soft, as Mrs. Wordsworth's, nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried in their motion” (114). Influenced by De Quincey's descriptions of Dorothy, Elizabeth Hardwick senses fright or panic in her manner and behavior (148, 156).

2. Richard Fadem speaks of Dorothy's arrested development; Fadem and I share many areas of concern, but I challenge his thesis that Dorothy's writing is not “in any sustained way interesting as literature” (17). Margaret Homans and Donald Reiman associate Lucy's death with Dorothy's ambivalent position in her brother's life and writing. Homans's approach to Dorothy Wordsworth in Women Writers and Poetic Identity is more compatible with mine than Fadem's; her thesis about “poetic identity,” however, requires her to concentrate on Dorothy's attempts to write in verse, and while this concentration produces some brilliant readings, the journals do not receive all the attention they deserve. In Bearing the Word, Homans argues—mistakenly, I believe—that Dorothy “self-consciously literalizes several of her brother's most important figures for sublimity and transcendence” (16); for me, Dorothy is prewriting, not rewriting, William. Donald Reiman essentially supports the argument about a “tragic intensification” in the relationship between William and Dorothy first advanced by F. W. Bateson (see 153-54). I have learned from these scholars and also from Rachel Mayer Brownstein, Susan Levin, and Pamela Woof. Susan Levin's much-needed book, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), appeared too late for me to use it in this article. Although I speak of Dorothy Wordsworth as a repressed person, it is her buried awareness of her own self as a writer, and how that buried awareness manifests itself in her journals, that primarily concern me, not the question of a passionate involvement with her brother.

3. See McGavran 276-77, where this possibility is explored.

4. Homans (Women Writers and Poetic Identity 71-73) has observed in Dorothy the converse tendency to avoid the use of the first-person pronoun and suggests there is more to this than the old custom of dropping “I” from hurried personal correspondence; but clearly both the stammerings and the omissions suggest Dorothy's discomfort at the prospect of self-contemplation.

5. Bateson (157) unaccountably describes this passage as having “level unemotional tones,” perhaps in reaction to the paralysis which was the result of Dorothy's terrible emotions; but surely her tone is “level” only in the sense that it is the tone of a mentally exhausted woman lying prostrate on a bed.

6. For some of the images of entrapment and attempted flight which follow, I am indebted to my former student, Susanne Felton, whose paper, “Dorothy Wordsworth: A Study in Contrasts,” won an award as the best undergraduate submission to the Carolinas Symposium for British Studies in 1981, and was read at the symposium at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., 10 October 1981.

7. She notes elsewhere William's much more strongly negative reaction to a similar sensation of enclosure in nature: “He had been surprized [sic] and terrified by a sudden rushing of winds which seemed to bring earth sky and lake together, as if the whole were going to enclose him in—he was glad he was in a high Road” (62). Evidently, Dorothy was more used to coping with such feelings than her brother.

8. Fadem recognizes the intensity of this passage, but we completely disagree on its significance. “Dorothy,” he writes, “is clearly not interested in death in general or even this particular death. … On the contrary, her weeping is really an excess of joy at the dauntless beauty of nature” (23).

9. Brownstein concludes her essay with a fine commentary upon the personal significance to Dorothy of a wild columbine she described as “a graceful slender creature, a female seeking retirement and growing freest and most graceful where it is most alone” (Moorman 129).

10. Woolf—evidently struck by this passage—chose the last part of it as a conclusion for her essay (Collected Essays 3:206); it may have seemed to Woolf that Dorothy's “eye” had finally triumphed over her “I.”

11. See Levin (349-50). Brownstein strongly argues that the moon here is William, the stars Mary and Dorothy, and that “Dorothy sketches her terrible, probably true perception of the shiftings and measurings that were going on as her brother made his choice” in April 1802 (52). Dorothy uses the feminine pronoun, however, and I feel that she had reason to identify herself, too, with both the powers and the limitations of the moon.

Parts of an earlier version of this essay were read at the Carolinas Symposium for British Studies, Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C., 10 October 1982. I am grateful to the Foundation of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and to the University of North Carolina for the grant which enabled me to write the essay. Parenthetical numbers following quotations from William Wordsworth's poetry are line references from the Stillinger edition cited below; numbers following quotations from Dorothy Wordsworth's journals are page references to the Moorman edition cited below.

Works Cited

Bateson, F. W. Wordsworth: A Re-Interpretation. 2d ed. London: Longmans, 1956.

Brownstein, Rachel Mayer. “The Private Life: Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals.” Modern Language Quarterly 34 (1973): 48-63.

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De Quincey, Thomas. Recollections of the Lake Poets. Ed. Edward Sackville-West. London: John Lehmann, 1948.

De Selincourt, Ernest. Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography [1933]. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.

Fadem, Richard. “Dorothy Wordsworth: A View from ‘Tintern Abbey.’” The Wordsworth Circle 9 (1978): 17-32.

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Hardwick, Elizabeth. Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature. New York: Random, 1974.

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———. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

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———. “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences.” Trans. James M. Edie. In The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Alden L. Fisher. New York: Harcourt, 1969. 47-63.

Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography; The Later Years, 1803-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Reiman, Donald H. “Poetry of Familiarity: Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Mary Hutchinson.” In The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions Between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature. Ed. Donald H. Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennett. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 142-77.

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———. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964.

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