[In the following essay, Ehnnen considers Dorothy Wordsworth's authority as a writer within the context of the intricate issues of female subjectivity found in the Romantic movement.]

In the past few years I've taught selections from Dorothy Wordsworth's journals to undergraduates several times—both in introductory surveys and in seminars on British Romanticism. This paper is motivated partially by my students' reader responses to Dorothy's work. Each time I assign the texts without introductory statements. And each time, the students' journal entries and class participation invariably present the same thought—a good percentage are convinced, as F. W. Bateson suggested over forty years ago, that an incestuous relationship existed between Dorothy and her brother, William.

Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden and Grasmere journals (1798-1803) pose a problem for readers because her work does not fit late twentieth-century paradigms of sibling relationships or intersubjective power dynamics. In the 1990s' age of empowerment, the students feel, it's not normal for the individuated subject to efface the self. The students want a motivation for Dorothy's selfless devotion to William, and find that motivation in rationalizing that the siblings must have shared an incestuous love relationship. After reviewing some of the cultural differences between early nineteenth-century Britain and late twentieth-century America, the students reluctantly agree with my suggestion that their interpretation is, in part, due to historical differences in gender roles and Dorothy's use of a romantic rhetoric that is now forgotten. They concede that Dorothy's affection for William and her related daily activities are not necessarily an indication of sexual activity/desire, but they still maintain that she was unhealthily obsessed with William, and often shift their “diagnosis” to one of “codependence.” Her outbursts continue to mystify and exasperate them: “O the Darling! Here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find in my heart to throw it into the fire;”¹ and they remain deeply troubled that Dorothy doesn't attend William's wedding after sleeping with his ring on her forefinger (GJ 154). Dorothy remains deviant any way you look at her—she is either a pervert, a martyr, or in need of intensive psychotherapy.

What's at stake in wanting to insist on incest, or the other unhealthy labels that Dorothy gets assigned? It seems that the students' discomfort with Dorothy is the result of a power dialectic that doesn't fall within recognizable models: they want to view Dorothy and William as unitary selves; and they want a binary that explains the power relationship between the two writers. Therefore, the students do not easily come to the interpretation suggested by most feminist critics: that instead of the notion of the aggressive ego, or appropriating self, which best articulates its perception of self and world through linear narrative, we should consider Dorothy's journals vis-à-vis models of fragmented, embedded subjectivities and non-linear experience.

This essay uses contemporary theories of women's writing and gendered subjectivity to discuss Dorothy Wordsworth's work in and for a domestic and writing community centered around her brother. My study examines what Judith Butler describes as “the conditions of the subject's emergence and operation” (10)—Dorothy's relationship to the Grasmere community—which is, I believe, the site of Dorothy's oppression and empowerment, as a writing, and as a female, subject. My essay begins to interrogate the power dialectics surrounding that relationship, as represented in selections from her diaries, poetry, and letters, and asks two questions: What does it mean for Dorothy to write for William, and what does it mean for Dorothy to write at all? Although my study draws upon recent theories of Feminine and Masculine Romanticism, it also problematizes this opposition, by showing the interdependence of Dorothy's and William's subjectivities, writing processes, and artistic vision. Exploring this interdependence allows us to read Dorothy's texts as they reflect a non-unified sense of subjectivity, as critics have previously argued. However, my reading also suggests that while she renounces Authorship, Dorothy nevertheless sees herself and negotiates authority as a writer.

Finally, after conjecturing about what the difference between “authoring” and “writing” might have meant to an early nineteenth-century woman, I must acknowledge my own position as a “postmodern subject” and thus, my argument's debt to postmodern ideas about subjectivity and writing. My students' resistance to perceiving Dorothy as a “fragmented subjectivity” suggests that perhaps it is problematic to “read the story backwards;” thus my study will conclude by considering the implication of applying post-structuralist theories of writing and subjectivity to a Romantic figure. Ultimately, I would like to suggest that a self-consciously ahistorical reading of women's writing is a responsible and productive position from which to begin to negotiate conflict between feminist and post-structuralist theory, and to interrogate the always already ambiguous position of female subjectivity and writing within the academic canon.

BACKGROUND: MASCULINE VS. FEMININE ROMANTICISM

As Anne Mellor asserts, the “Romantic ego is potently male, engaged in figurative battles of conquest and possession, and at the same time incorporating itself into whatever aspects of the female it desired to possess” (7). Now that the canon of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British literature has begun to include the writings of women, critics have identified a “Feminine” Romanticism in which “texts by romantic women writers explore the powers of domestic, passive, natural continuities in the context of the powerful, assertive male revolutionary consciousness that we characterize as the High Romantic Vision” (192). My (predominantly white, Western) students largely elide the voice of Masculine Romantic writers with view of subjectivity they feel now applies to all subjects, male or female: a view of subjectivity composed of Cartesian tenets filtered through the values of the 1980s and 1990s “me-generation.” Their sense of confusion and dissatisfaction with Dorothy, I assume, reflects the observation that female Romantic writers' depiction of themselves in relation to the natural world and the social community does not project such a masculine consciousness, and thus does not reflect what they perceive to be the “normal” dialectic of Self and Other (Levin, “Romantic” 193).

Traditionally, female Romantic texts, with their unique style and concerns, have been assessed as inferior to other contemporary, male-authored literature, and relegated to the margins of academic study. This has been particularly true of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, which have been negatively critiqued for her self-denigration, servitude, excessive cataloguing of quotidian activity, and minute natural detail. However, recent discussions of Masculine vs. Feminine Romanticism urge us not to read women writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth in relation to masculinist norms, which render the women's texts mere representations of a crippling self-abegnation in service to or dependence upon others. Instead, literary criticism influenced by the object-relations studies of Nancy Chodorow, and the related feminist psychoanalytic theories of Carol Gilligan, suggests that Dorothy's non-narrative, detail-oriented journal is not evidence of inferior artistic vision and/or arrested development, but should instead be read as evidence of her radical departure from William's view of self and world. In this reading, as Susan Levin glosses, Dorothy identifies with her environment, and processes the world and her position within it through attachment, not separation (“Romantic” 180). Thus she sees herself primarily in relation to the multiple roles she plays for William and her community, and not as an individuated self. Dorothy, then, provides an example of women's identification through a multi-faceted continuation which develops from the female child's identification with the mother—a continuity our phallocentric culture has chosen to devalue. Thus Dorothy's behavior can be analyzed in terms of female developmental models which challenge not only the masculinist Freudian and post-Freudian conceptions of development and subjectivity, but also challenge notions of the unitary assertive self of Romantic writers.

Certainly, there are merits to setting up such an opposition between male and female developmental narratives, and male and female Romantic texts. Indeed, the work and life of Dorothy Wordsworth was radically different from that of her brother. Dorothy's journal, critics have noted, presents a “seeing eye”—not a “subjective I”: she rarely uses the first person or talks about how she feels; instead her emotions are reflected in the details of nature as she catalogues her surroundings. For example, when William travels, the lake looks dull and melancholy, and when his letters are long in coming, Grasmere appears “so solemn in the last glimpse of twilight” that she cries (GJ 15). When she is happy walking with William in the wood, Dorothy notes “the Gleams of sunshine and the stirring trees and gleaming boughs, chearful lake, most delightful” (GJ 35). Dorothy painstakingly records her daily duties and the world around her—she orders her world through her writing and makes connections between things, creating sense from her life and her world. Thus, like her journal written “To give Wm pleasure” (GJ 15), Dorothy's writings and life show a concern for the individual within a community and the lessons and pleasures of life to be gained from connections to such a community, while William's writing and life show a concern with the individual mind of the Poet, and with lessons and pleasures to be learned from solitude.

Critics who study the voice of Feminine Romanticism usually make claims like: “women find in the traditional concerns of women's discourse the positive power of seeming feminine passivity” (Levin, “Romantic” 178). As accurate as labels of Feminine and Masculine Romantic writing seem to be, however, I find this kind of reading problematic because it encourages perception of culturally constructed difference as essential difference. If we valorize these differences—inverting the binary terms masculine and feminine—for the sake of claiming women writers' concerns, moderation, modesty, continuity, nonlinearity, and so forth as equal or better in value than those textual characteristics associated with Masculine Romanticism, I believe we fall prey to the kind of thinking critiqued by the feminists who point out that “there is nothing liberatory in claiming as virtues, qualities that men have always found convenient.”² As Susan Levin acknowledges, “these suggestions about the structure of a female Romantic imagination can be construed as a cliché statement of passive feminine dependence” (“Romantic” 193). Feminist critics must question the responsibility of making assessments which reproduce the kinds of “ancient clichés” Levin is concerned about—to what ends, in what contexts are these observations being used—so that we ourselves do not contribute to essentialist ideologies which, traditionally, have furthered women's oppression.

Binaries such as “Masculine” and “Feminine” Romanticism are useful insofar as they provide alternative spaces that may be used to discuss previously ignored texts. Such generalizations are also useful, of course, for introducing material to undergraduates who are eager for “rules” by which to categorize groups of authors. However, now that women authors begin to be reclaimed as subjects of serious study, we may do well to consider that the ideological boundaries that divide “Feminine” from canonical “High” Romantic texts may be as permeable as the separate and gendered spheres that failed to contain their female authors. Therefore, I believe it would be useful to explore and problematize the theory of Masculine vs. Feminine Romanticism in order to emphasize the ways the differing artistic visions are interdependent.³ A power dynamic exists which is the locus of production of both William and Dorothy's writing subjectivities, and thus we can examine how Dorothy Wordsworth, as a woman writer of this time period, came to be who she was—and how her writing reflects that process of coming into being, and its relation to William, a “masculine writer.” I believe we will find that not only are William's and Dorothy's respective Romanticisms interdependent, but that Dorothy's writings testify to a power and a subjectivity not traditionally associated with “feminine qualities” or for that matter, with Dorothy at all.

NEGOTIATION: INTERDEPENDENT, OPPOSITIONAL, AND MEDIATED SUBJECTIVITY(IES)

The community at Grasmere, comprised of the Wordsworths, Coleridge, and Southey, and often visited by prominent artists, including Charles Lamb, was a community in nature, language and writing. Dorothy's domestic work greatly enabled the business of everyday living, while she also played the part of muse, secretary and editor. Her journals and letters deftly record the rhythms of the natural and the writing life for those within the community, and vividly report them to friends and colleagues outside. Yet, Dorothy, as an embodied subjectivity, largely disappears from concrete representation of life at Grasmere: it is mostly the results of her labor, that are seen and felt, in the tangible products of food, laundry, shoes, and of course, William's poetry. Dorothy embraces a seeming selflessness, and her letters and journals modestly protest that she will not be able to live up to her friends' high opinions of her. Her self-proclaimed life choice, as a single woman living in her brother's household, is merely to find fulfillment in the love and appreciation that come from useful service to others.

In immediately obvious ways, Dorothy's relationship to William, through the writing community at Grasmere, represents a power dialectic where she, the female amanuensis, or subordinate term, serves and enables him, the male Poet, or dominant term. Thus, Dorothy in many ways typifies the woman who facilitates a Masculine Romantic ego which achieves subjecthood through appropriation and transcendence. Through the service of his sister and colonization of a female Nature, William “sees into the life of things;” he “half creates and half perceives”⁴ not only his world, but his very sense of self. In many of William's writings, Dorothy becomes alternately a disembodied natural or hearth spirit, “wild eyes,” or is projected into the past and future, albeit lovingly, as figment or memory. In more general terms of panhistorical gender politics, as Judith Butler has pointed out in her recent reading of Luce Irigaray on Plato, Dorothy and William thus provide an example of Man coming into being by asserting a non-material soul which can exist only through dematerialization of the female body (35-55).

Clearly, the interplay between William and Dorothy works well for William. Through her, he receives support, and achieves subjectivity and Authorship; through symbolic troping of her in his poems—the fruits of his vocation—he expresses, via her physical or disembodied presence, his ideas about poetry, mind, memory, and the selfhood of an artist. In this relationship, usually perceived as Dorothy's willing servitude for William, he both profits from and depends on her service. But what does Dorothy gain? (What does she want?) And can we say, and if so, how, does Dorothy negotiate her situation in order to make her coming into being a locus of a mediated, if not a completely individuated, subjectivity and power?

Dorothy's journals and letters repeatedly indicate that she wants to be loved, useful, and needed. Thus, Alan Liu provides an accurate account of Dorothy's self-perception, I think, when he quips, “I work therefore, I am” (116). In a characteristic statement, made prior to their move to Alfoxden, Dorothy writes of their plans to care for young Basil Montague: “it will greatly contribute to my happiness and place me in a situation that I shall be doing something; it is a painful idea that one's existence is of very little use, which I really have always been obliged to feel” (DW to Jane Pollard Marshall, 2 Sept. 1795, her italics). Here, Dorothy elides her difficulty gaining a sense of her existence—a problem of subjectivity—with her lack of a useful vocation. Furthermore, the feminist critic suspects Dorothy's frustration with uselessness—of lacking a vocation—is linked to her limited opportunity as a woman, especially one who sees herself in comparison to her brother's productivity in a vocation which is both authoritative and valuable. Dorothy's life with William creates a solution to her complaint: he needs her, is dependent upon her, and consequently, she feels needed, loved and appreciated. As Levin notes, “women writers challenged central notions that have achieved canonical status in our standard account of Romanticism, while at the same time they depended upon those notions” (“Romantic” 179). Clearly, Dorothy's world and self-view contrasts notions of the Romantic egotistical sublime; yet her selfhood and vocation is ironically and inextricably linked to and dependent upon a service which enables, while it opposes, the Masculine Romantic vision.⁵

When friends suggest that she publish her own writings, Dorothy rejects “setting myself up as an Author” (DW to Catherine Clarkson, 9 Dec. 1810).⁶ Yet she does write, continually and passionately; her writing catalogues her environment, and fosters her own and William's work and sense of self. And while Dorothy denies she is an Author—the position occupied by William—she nevertheless does negotiate authority, not only through the importance of her service, but as a writer. As Dorothy's writing orders and enables the world around her, her writing self and the act of writing legitimates and orders her other selves and actions, and makes possible a set of discourses within which she can define and defend her subjectivity(ies).

For instance, many critics have persuasively argued that Grasmere Journal's organizing principle is William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson (Levin, DW & R [Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism]; Heinzelman). Dorothy's frequent depictions of abandoned, homeless women have been interpreted as betraying her own fears and feelings of abandonment during William's absences and courtship of Mary (Levin, DW & R 41). She records her unhappiness at William's infrequent letters and her efforts to remain busy and to look well—things she knows William will appreciate. Dorothy's writings about herself and her female body document the labor that body provides for others; even frequent traces of physical pain—headaches, bowel disorders—significantly, are often directly or implicitly attributed to emotional conflicts with others in the community. Through displacement of her negative emotion onto natural scenes which she refuses to analyze, and by constant reference to physical ailments, the journal she knew William would read thereby reveals encoded dissatisfaction—a mode of writing the self which allows Dorothy to express concern with William's impending marriage in ways that do not threaten her place in his heart and home (McCormick 472). It seems likely that in creating a discourse of abandoned women and of physical pain, Dorothy unconsciously expresses emotion, strives to induce guilt, and to negotiate authority and power, and she does it specifically through her use of language—as a writer.

Dorothy rejects phallocentric language, culture and subjectivity in renouncing Authorship, but does not reject writing. Instead, Dorothy's texts indicate that she makes a vast distinction between Authoring and writing. Her texts indicate she does see herself as a writer—one of a different sort than William—but nonetheless a person with a complex vocation in which writing, not just amanuensis, plays a central and pleasurable part, in addition to sisterhood, friendship, and domesticity. For example, Dorothy indicates that she values her communal/domestic roles; however, she sometimes expresses resentment against these roles which bring her the love and utility she craves, especially when her duties interfere with her personal writing, which she explicitly says she enjoys. Thus Dorothy exhibits ambivalent emotions about the relationship between writing and other forms of work. Throughout her life, she apologizes to correspondents, bitterly complaining when work interferes with letter-writing; especially in her early letters, she worries that her friends will become angry or forget her. In letters to her childhood friend, Jane Pollard, Dorothy apologizes for wandering, circularity, and detail, but says that she knows Jane will forgive and understand her manner of writing, because, “I write what springs from the heart,” and “what is uppermost in my mind I must write” (10 July 1793). Just as Dorothy's letter about Basil Montague, above, links her perception of self with a useful occupation, here, Dorothy clearly connects an awareness of self with writing, although, as I will show, this connection is very different from the way she perceives William's relationship to writing.

In a telling passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont (4 May 1805), Dorothy reflects upon a young girl whose poems she recently read:

Above all take care that her productions are not printed and published as wonders. Should this be done, farewell all purity of heart, all solitary communion with her own thoughts for her own independent delight. She will never do good more.

Here, Dorothy seems to identify with the young girl and imagines a potentially endangered writing selfhood. In this passage, “do[ing] good” elides writing well and doing good for others with feeling well, or writing in a way that is “good” for oneself. “[S]olitary communion,” “independent delight”—these phrases support a strong sense of subjectivity that is enriched and perhaps made possible by writing, but one that is also threatened by public, or masculine, authorship. Thus, Dorothy rejects the life of an Author, perhaps wiser for observing that William is often ill when he writes—especially when he revises his works for publication. She again distances herself from the office of Poet in another letter to Lady Beaumont (1806): “I have no command of language, no power of expressing my ideas, and no one was ever more inapt at molding words into regular metre.” Apparently, Dorothy perceives her writing in different terms than William's—rejecting power, command, use of meter—the things she associates with being a Poet, an Author.

Thus, Dorothy writes for William, as observer, scribe, and editor, while her poems and private writing show that she writes against him as well, experimenting with ideas that clearly subvert her brother's notions of subjectivity, poetry and of what it means to be a writer. Dorothy's radical departure from traditional content and form features characteristics now associated with French Feminism's l'ecriture feminine: her semiotic style invokes repetition and spasmodic separation from male writing and power;⁷ and thus her journals can be said to exhibit multiple (libidinal) energies which cannot be expressed or understood within ego-identified discourse. Furthermore, Dorothy's position within and for the Grasmere community indicates a diffuse understanding of subjectivity and experience. The way she represents Nature, for example, when read against the theories of Hélène Cixous, demonstrates a feminine⁸ ability to perceive and relate to objects in nurturing rather than dominating ways. Dorothy's conflation (without appropriation) of Nature and her emotions, and her focus on her emotions and her often physically ill female body, suggest that her body's connection to Nature and Community is a direct source of female writing, as compared to the phallic, unitary tropes of masculine subjectivity found in Western writing by men. Seen in these terms, her writing thereby resists—even directly opposes—William's notions of subjectivity, writing, and art.

Can we say that Dorothy derives pleasure and empowerment not only in her subordinate position as William's scribe and helpmate, but also in seeing herself and her writing in his? Given evidence of Dorothy's discomfort with Authorship, but her pleasure in writing, I disagree with the suggestion that Dorothy's resistance to publication “may reflect a discomfort with notice she had gained as a figure in William's poetry” (Wolfson 140). On the contrary, traces of Dorothy in William's work suggest that, even as he writes through her, Dorothy's mediation of his writing facilitates a power dynamic in which she can write herself through him. William fulfills a function for her writing self: he gives her a job as inspiring muse and helpmate. Dorothy—a women who desires to be useful—sees tangible results of her employment through his published poetry, some of which contains lines actually composed by her. Furthermore, she becomes immortalized through his writing, which often mentions her, such as “Tintern Abbey,” the Lucy poems, “Glowworm,” and “Home at Grasmere.” Thus she is written, through his writing, in a much more concrete way than many other women of her time. Consciously or not, this must have afforded her pleasure, (at least there seems to be no evidence to the contrary) especially considering that, in his poetry, she comes into being through public affirmation of her brother's love and need for her. Most importantly perhaps, to this line of thinking, William's portrayal of Dorothy stresses those loving and selfless qualities that, within dominant ideology, would have been admirable feminine traits, in short, a conservative and acceptable reason for public acclaim.

Writing against or writing through William, Dorothy's position as writer is relational to his, yet it is central to her sense of self, and grounds that self in a vocation which her community considers both useful and authoritative—that of a writer. If we assume for a moment that Dorothy did have a sense of herself as writer (among other things), we then can reinterpret much of her work which has been overlooked or only discussed as a curious example of a writer who claimed she had no desire to become one. For instance, consider the poem, “Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the schemes of Nature” (c. 1820):⁹

Harmonious Powers with nature work
On sky, earth, river, lake and sea:
Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breeze
All in one duteous task agree.
Once did I see a slip of earth,
By throbbing waves long undetermined,
Loosed from its hold;—how no one knew
But all might see it float, obedient to the wind.
Might see it, from the verdant shore
Dissevered float upon the Lake,
Float with its crest of trees adorned
On which the warbling birds their pastime take.
Food, shelter, safety there they find
There berries ripen, flowrets bloom;
There insects live their lives—and die:
A peopled world it is:—in size a tiny room.
And thus through many season's space
This little Island may survive
But Nature, though we mark her not,
Will take away—may cease to give.
Perchance when you are wandering forth
Upon some vacant sunny day
Without an object, hope, or fear,
Thither your eyes may turn—the Isle is passed away.
Buried beneath the glittering Lake!
Its place no longer to be found,
Yet the lost fragments shall remain,
To fertilize some other ground.

Dorothy's image of the “slip of earth” is largely interpreted as a metaphor for herself—tied to Nature, obedient, supporting a little community, a “tiny room.” But Dorothy's sense of self, as represented by the floating island that can sink beneath the surface of the water, is not only communal, it is also evasive, elusive, and thus it negotiates control. Particularly since no one knows how it floats, only that it does, the island seems to function and is empowered through its relationship with Nature, which cannot be described or understood within traditional phallogocentric thought. Furthermore, despite its seeming fragility, the island fragments, we are told, endure and are fertile—like Dorothy's creative/poetic ideas, which exceed the (traditionally) limited speaking space of a journal and assert her voice/self for anyone who reads it (or William's poetry). Dorothy creates a metaphor for a perception of subjectivity, vocation and writing that cannot be expressed within the confines of patriarchal language—rather, her description of the island draws upon something more akin to Julia Kristeva's idea of a (feminine) semiotic language. In departing from her brother's way of writing, she creates her own—one that not only serves, but has a strong sense of self for the reader who looks for it, as the island can be seen by the traveler who looks carefully enough.

Throughout this section, I have called attention to Dorothy's relationship to her writing community—and specifically to William—as the site from which subjectivity springs and is oppressed. If Dorothy perceives herself, in part at least, as a writer, what happens when that writing self is imperiled? Anxious moments in her text, usually attributed to emotional dependence on William, need to be reevaluated in terms of a concern for a writing vocation as well as for preserving a domestic situation. Thus, future studies need to reread passages like William's wedding morning, not only in terms of a fear of emotional abandonment or replacement, but also in terms of a fear of losing her role as William's collaborator, as that role specifically contributes to the notion of a working, if fragmented, self.

THE VIOLENCE OF THE DEATH OF THE (FEMALE) AUTHOR

In some ways, reading and interpreting Dorothy Wordsworth's work exemplifies the difficult and perhaps inevitable conflict between feminist and post-structuralist theory. My discussion of Dorothy's distinction between “Authoring” and “writing” seems both particularly germane to, and simultaneously a product of, a postmodern critical sensibility influenced by Foucauldian theories of “the death of the author.” Dorothy's rejection of Authorship both embodies and problematizes post-structuralist realizations that, ultimately, the Author's claim to control over the text and its reception is false. On the one hand, she seems to prefigure the Derridean notion that “there is nothing outside of the text,” including the subjectivity of the author, which is, itself, a fiction, and therefore, negligible. Thus, when Dorothy downplays her subjecthood within the Grasmere community, we can elide her stance with the post-structuralist realization: I have no subjectivity, I am merely a product of multiple discourses which penetrate and circulate within my environment.

Given the post-structuralist debunking of subjectivity, the postmodern speaker cannot naively claim to speak from the stance of a unified subjectivity, authoritatively speaking of the self and Other as if they are knowable, stable entities. Gayatri Spivak acknowledges this dilemma inherent in becoming a speaking subject, and concedes that, with the “ground shifting under [one's] feet,” the very act of speaking is merely a strategic performance one must (self-consciously) adopt in order to effect political change (53). Following Spivak, the speaker must instead recognize that while she may not essentially and unproblematically be “a subject,” she nevertheless functions as if she is; we may all be products of various discursive economies, but, especially at the level of the day-to-day, we do think, feel and act in a way that is very real to us. Thus, even when we fully acknowledge that global politics and post-Enlightenment philosophy render an essentialized subjectivity a naïve or nostalgic fiction, we can still adopt a position of strategic essentialism that permits us to speak as subjects-with-agency. But within a patriarchal hegemony, how does any woman find such a voice and position from which to speak?

Dorothy's work provides a partial answer to this question when read through the feminist critique of post-structuralism such as that of Barbara Christian, who ironically observes that late twentieth-century philosophies which erase claims to subjectivity arose just at the moment in history when women were finally beginning to assert a sense of self and to find a voice to make themselves heard. To nullify notions of subjectivity on theoretical grounds is to deny women a speaking voice, and a position for praxis; and as her 1805 comment about the promising young poet indicates,¹⁰ Dorothy's work does not condone such a violent theft of self. From this point of view, Dorothy's resistance of Authorship circumvents what we now perceive as the postmodern dilemma of constructed subjectivity and the death of the author. Without claiming that she should be identified as a feminist, or even a protofeminist, I believe that Dorothy's work reveals a strategically negotiated stance between what is perceived today as the conflict of post-structuralism vs. feminism: as an Author she will disappear, as a writer her voice(s) can be heard, if only sometimes, it seems, by herself. As this nineteenth-century writer tries to find a “space between”—realizing that she cannot exist outside of the text, writing herself into the text—she gains ground for herself as a woman within a specific community. Dorothy's negotiations of power—working within the community, rejecting Authorship, writing against and through her male contemporaries—situate herself in positions from which to speak and act. Thus Dorothy's work (textual and otherwise) provides an example of “strategic essentialism” which justifies, in my eyes, a seemingly ahistorical attribution of late twentieth-century philosophy to an early nineteenth-century woman.

The stance of strategic essentialism is useful for the postmodern feminist critic who is wary of privileging a fictive “outside” of the text, yet does not want to perpetuate the violence traditionally done to women writers whose ideas and (dare I say?) intentions have been discounted by the “gatekeepers” of the English literary canon. Thus, I think it is productive to create a momentary or functional “outside” of the text which opens a space for women to speak-as-subjects through biographical artifacts—as long as critics are conscious that this is only one of many ways of reading. Such critical interpretations may only add to the always ambivalent reception of writing which falls outside of phallocentric norms, but as women have been denied a position from which to speak for so long, perhaps it is time for their voices to be considered in tandem with, instead of opposition to, high theory. Ahistorical/transhistorical readings are problematic then, only from the point of view that they analyze texts using a discourse that was not available to the author in her historical context; they cease to become problematic, and perhaps are better labeled metahistorical, when underlying strategies and (conscious or unconscious) motivations can be identified which resonate with those of today's writers and thinkers.¹¹

Finally, much for the same reason I have problematized the labels “Masculine” and “Feminine” Romanticism, I am troubled by those critics who feel it is not “good feminist politics” to state that Dorothy Wordsworth saw herself as a writer. Kurt Heinzelmen argues:

Homans and many prefeminist critics want to assess Dorothy's writing as an end-in-itself—as task-specific. But that is to throw too strong a light on the idea of task or vocation as such, an idea that Nancy Chodorow and others have argued is a culturally learned and male way of viewing responsibility.

(55)

Contra Heinzelman, I do not believe that interpreting Dorothy's work in terms of a writing subjectivity or vocation necessarily endows her with a culturally masculine task-specificity or a “male” vision of responsibility. Instead, I question the feminist politics in refusing to consider, in the name of essentially gendered difference, that women like Dorothy might have believed that they did posses something akin to subjectivity or vocation. It seems more plausible to argue that Dorothy's embedded subjectivities within the Grasmere community of writers involved dynamics that can be seen to have been both fulfilling and oppressive, but were above all, negotiable; and that the terms of negotiation were often played out in the ‘language of the community, that is, in writing.

Dorothy's struggle to imagine her position and value in relation to a phallocentric literary tradition invokes many theoretical questions—authorship, subjectivity, negotiating the limitations of language—which are still of concern today, although they resonate differently after two centuries. Given such contextualization, does Dorothy Wordsworth's life provide a liberatory example for feminism? Maybe not. Her passivity, self-sacrifice, and constant self-denigration, even when cleared of charges of “codependence” and attributed to societal expectations or false modesty, suggest that if her writing does indicate a subtle negotiation of oppressive gender roles, she simultaneously performed that negotiation with a certain degree of guilt and ambivalence. Yet, as Susan Levin notes, her “writing contains a certain rage at the limitations imposed on the life of the woman artist, as well as recognition of the glory of that life” (DW & R 4). I believe it is Dorothy's action (conscious or otherwise) against such limitations that is important. Through her negotiation of the interdependence between dominant and subordinate, traditional and revolutionary, masculine and feminine subject positions, Dorothy Wordsworth's work resists a masculinist authorial tradition, and instead can be seen to contribute to an alternate mode of perceiving and recording experience.

Notes

1. Grasmere Journal 97. Further references will be abbreviated GJ and are included in the body of the text.

2. Perhaps the earliest instance of this sentiment would be Virginia Woolf's famous invective for the woman writer to “kill the angel in the house” (237). Similarly, among others, Monique Wittig argues, “What the concept ‘woman is wonderful’ accomplishes is that it retains for defining women the best features (best according to whom?) which oppression has granted us” (105).

3. In the sense that this interdependence permits an alternative perception of dominant and subordinate terms, Jonathan Dollimore's term “sexual dissidence: a resistance, operating in terms of gender, [that] repeatedly unsettles the very opposition between the dominant and the subordinate” might be appropriate here (21). However, I hesitate to label Dorothy and William's interdependence in such fashion, because sexual dissidence, in Dollimore's reading at least, functions as a conscious strategy for rebellion. I am uncomfortable attributing that kind of motive to Dorothy, although I certainly think that her work illustrates negotiations for power that were perhaps subconsciously “intentional” or rebellious.

4. William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” lines 48 and 105-6.

5. For more on intertextuality and interdependence between Dorothy's and William's texts, see also Elizabeth Fay's excellent book Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics; chapters 3 and 4, especially, focus on Dorothy as a partner in her brother's project, and her role in the framework which brings the persona of “William Wordsworth” into being.

6. In her discussion of the context surrounding this often-cited quote, Susan Levin (DW & R) points out that Dorothy's reluctance to publish the sad narrative of George and Sarah Green reflects fear of personal publicity that might bring unwanted attention to the Greens: “I should not object on that score as if it had been an invention of my own; it might have been published without a name and nobody would have thought of me. But on account of the family of the Greens I cannot consent” (same letter).

7. Ann Rosalind Jones uses such descriptors in talking about l'ecriture feminine (358).

8. My citation here of French feminist theories regarding femininity and women's writing needs to be qualified: I agree that such observable trends between male and female behavior, and men's and women's writing can be traced, but I do not mean to suggest they are innate—I believe they are constructed, albeit so strongly that they often function as though they are innate.

9. This poem is reprinted from Susan Levin's Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 208.

10. “farewell all purity of heart, all solitary communion with her own thoughts for her own independent delight,” cited previously.

11. I use the word metahistory here to emphasize that I am not implying that women have “universal experiences;” instead I am referring to experiences/texts which retain rich differences based on situated knowledges while they are also linked, to varying extents, by elements which are similar, although not essentially the same.

Works Cited

Bateson, F. W. William Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation. London: Longmans, 1954.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Making Race, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua. San Francisco: Aunt Lute P, 1990. 335-45.

Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.

Fay, Elizabeth. Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics. Amherst: U of Mass. P, 1995.

Heinzelmen, Kurt. “The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth at Grasmere.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'Ecriture Feminine.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 357-70.

Levin, Susan. “Romantic Prose and Feminine Romanticism.” Prose Studies 10.2 (1987): 178-95.

———. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987.

Liu, Alan. “On the Autobiographical Present: Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals.” Criticism 26.2 (1984): 115-37.

McCormick, Anita Hemphill. “‘I shall be Beloved—I want no more’: Dorothy Wordsworth's Rhetoric and Appeal to Feeling in The Grasmere Journals.” Philological Quarterly 69.4 (1990): 471-93.

Mellor, Anne. Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Marginality in the Teaching Machine.” Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993. 53-76.

Wittig, Monique. “One is Not Born a Woman.” 1981. Rpt. in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 103-09.

Wolfson, Susan. “Individual in Community: Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. 139-66.

Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: HBJ, 1942.

Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. 1798-1803. Ed. Mary Moorman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

———. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1967-1993.

Wordsworth, William. “Tintern Abbey.” Lyrical Ballads. 1798. Ed. Michael Mason. London: Longmans, 1992.