SOURCE: Tyler, Lisa. “Big Brother Is Watching You: Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals.” University of Dayton Review 23, no. 2 (spring 1995): 87-98.

[In the following essay, an abbreviated version of which was presented in 1993, Tyler reads Wordsworth absence from her journals as a narrative strategy of self-protection designed to prevent her brother from appropriating her personal observations.]

The chief observation—and critique—that virtually everyone makes regarding Dorothy Wordsworth's journals is that they display an alarming absence of subjectivity. Critics use almost identical terms to describe this quality in the journals: Bruce Bawer notes that “perhaps what is most arresting about them is their utter unself-consciousness” (30); Ernest de Selincourt describes her journals as “entirely without self-consciousness” (78). Margaret Homans notes “Dorothy's tendency to omit a central or prominent self” (Women 73). Richard Fadem comments, “If Dorothy is notable, as every biographer agrees, for her utter selflessness, she is also remarkable for the absence of a clearly discernible self” (17). Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy's most recent biographers, add, “The paradox of her unique style is that it is no style. … The acute observation by Dorothy is there, but no Dorothy herself” (77).

Why is Dorothy Wordsworth so mysteriously absent from her own journals?

Dorothy had reasons to absent herself from her text. She explicitly declares, in the first entry of her Grasmere journal, that she began writing her journals to “give Wm Pleasure” (15-16). William clearly has access to her journal, whether he mines it for ideas or not, and he clearly tends to appropriate whatever he wants from the people—and especially the women—in his life. Moreover, he defines himself by the distance he has come from the childlike simplicity she represents for him.

To phrase Dorothy's textual problem in the harshest possible terms then: If Big Brother (literally!) has access to what she writes, and Big Brother is known to have appropriated both her presence and her experiences as raw material for his poems, Dorothy has every reason to limit herself to writing solely of objective observations. No matter how dearly she loves her brother, surely she has a right to protect her inmost self from his encroachments. She has every reason, then, to prefer the impersonal to the personal, the objective to the subjective, the verifiable to the intangible.

Such a textual strategy, whether consciously or unconsciously adopted, would not only protect Dorothy from William's appropriations—but would also protect William from the threat her subjectivity would pose to his construction of self. For this hypothesis to be correct: 1) Dorothy would have to have demonstrated an ability to use other writing styles before she began living with William, writing styles she abandoned once she joined her brother's household; 2) William would have to have had access to her journal; 3) William would have to have displayed a tendency to appropriate, and Dorothy would have to have been aware on some level of that tendency; and 4) William would have to have demonstrated a construction of his own subjectivity which did not permit subjectivity in others, more specifically in women and particularly in Dorothy.

Dorothy's letters quite easily prove the first contention, that Dorothy did indeed make use of other, more subjective writing styles before she set up house with William. Curiously, Dorothy's biographers Ernest de Selincourt and the team of Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, as well as Alan G. Hill, who edited a selection of her letters, all note an improvement in Dorothy's writing style that they unanimously attribute to William; oddly, none suggests that the dramatic change from subjectivity to objectivity in her writing could also have resulted from William's influence.

Dorothy read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa at the age of 14 (Gittings and Manton 11); not surprisingly, she is moved to imitate Richardson's style. Her letters to her best friend, Jane Pollard, sound suspiciously similar to those of the novel's heroine, as the following self-dramatizing excerpt reveals:

Neither absence too Distance nor Time can ever break the Chain that links me to my Brothers. But why do I talk to you thus? Because these are the thoughts that are uppermost in my Breast at the moment, and when I write to the companion of my childish Days I must write the Dictates of my Heart. In our conversations so full of tenderness I have never constrained my Sentiments; I have laid open to her the inmost Recesses of my Heart then why should I impose a Restraint upon myself when I am writing to her?

(Hill 14)

Ironically, in her life with William, Dorothy rapidly learned to constrain her sentiments, impose restraints upon her writing, and cease writing the dictates of her heart.¹ Rarely, after joining her brother, would she even use the first-person pronoun in her journals (Homans, Women 71).

“The earliest extant letters are, admittedly, somewhat mannered,” Hill politely observes; “she tended to dramatise her predicament in novelistic terms. The phase did not last, however …” (xiv). Gittings and Manton, in maintaining that Dorothy “has not yet found her individual touch for natural description,” note instead that she both quotes and imitates the style of Thomas Gray's Journal in the Lakes (44). Only after she and Wordsworth set up house together at Racedown does she begin to write differently: “Her earlier letters describe with a ready pen her delight in the country and country life, but show few traces of her peculiar genius. But this, two years of close companionship with her brother had quickened and brought to birth” (de Selincourt 78). Hill proffers a less sanguine view of the transformation: “Thereafter, she rarely speaks of herself, her own hopes or expectations. If she had any deeper longings, she kept them entirely to herself.” (xiv).

Given, then, that her style changed when she began living with William, was it directly because of William? Did he have access to Dorothy's Alfoxden and Grasmere journals? He copied the first four sentences of the first journal she wrote into his journal (Moorman xii and I), so she must have known from the first that the text was a shared one, and not hers alone. He clearly feels himself entitled to tell her what to write. She notes on Saturday, January 30, 1802: “He asks me to set down the story of Barbara Wilkinson's Turtle Dove” (Wordsworth 81-82). She could not even call the notebooks her own. According to Moorman, the notebook which contains the second volume of the Grasmere journal also contains “drafts in W. W.'s hand of ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Emma's Dell’” (55n). Moorman later notes another such encroachment: “The fourth and last volume of D. W.'s Grasmere journal is written in a notebook already containing at the beginning drafts of ‘Michael’ and ‘Ruth,’ and at the other end extracts from Descartes, in W. W.'s hand” (120n).

Gittings and Manton insist that it is impossible to determine whether Dorothy's journals inspired William and the Wordsworths' mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or vice versa. The consensus of most of her other critics, however—including Mary Moorman, Susan Levin, Ernest de Selincourt, Margaret Homans, and James Holt McGavran, Jr.—is that William did gather ideas and images from Dorothy's journals; certainly the correspondences are too startling to dismiss as coincidence.

The evidence suggests that William considered some of Dorothy's later journals to be as much his as hers. During their trip to Germany, the Wordsworths kept a joint journal, according to Gittings and Manton (92). Certainly at least one entry is identifiably William's experience, written in William's handwriting (de Selincourt 92). Susan Levin suggests that Dorothy acted as communal secretary and that William then took over the responsibility when Dorothy fell ill (78). On their continental tour years later, taken with William's wife, Mary; the Monkhouses, a honeymooning couple; the bride's sister; and the family's maid, everyone but William kept a journal (Gittings and Manton 224). Why did William, the publishing author, fail to write anything down during the trip? Certainly, these were settings he had visited 30 years before and written about in the Prelude—but surely he also knew he had no need to keep a journal when if he wished he could easily avail himself of the extensive (300-page) one kept by his wife or the positively voluminous (750-page) one kept by Dorothy (de Selincourt 324).

That Dorothy's journals were not the personal, private document that journals are now generally assumed to be is also evident from her own behavior. She sent transcripts from her journals with her letters to Catherine Clarkson, one of her closest friends (Gittings and Manton 149), and Dorothy mentions one occasion on which she shared her journal with her brother: “After tea I read to William that account of the little Boys belonging to the tall woman” (Wordsworth 101). A later travel journal, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, was evidently intended to be passed around among Dorothy's friends; in fact, the poet Samuel Rogers urged her to publish the work (Gittings and Manton 146). Moorman notes that an incomplete manuscript copy of an excerpt, “perhaps intended to be lent to members of the family,” is still extant (153n).

Whether William gleaned ideas from her journals or not, then, the evidence suggests that he had access and that Dorothy knew it. Whether he actually read her journals or not becomes largely irrelevant; if he had the power to do so and she recognized that power, she would inevitably have had to compose her journals with that knowledge in mind: “Dorothy … presupposes the existence of a strong reading presence” (McGavran 235). She knew, after he copied her first four sentences, that William tended to consider what she wrote as his for the taking—not, presumably, because William lacked scruples, but because William was the poet and Dorothy, by William's definition, was not. Notes Susan Wolfson: “Writing himself as the center, he assumes all as his imaginative property, a resource ordained for his use” (148). Certainly Dorothy had to realize, in her life with William, that he appropriated her, both literally and literarily.

Dorothy documents his literal appropriation in her journal: She cleans, cooks, sews, paints the house, does the laundry, copes with servants, and cares for children. (She and William took in four-year-old Basil Montagu, evidently as a paying proposition, to provide the boy with a country childhood; later, of course, it is William's children she cares for.) Anne K. Mellor states the case more explicitly: “Borrowing from Dorothy's journals, dictating his compositions to Dorothy, Mary, or Sara Hutchinson, relying on their admiration and devotion, William fully appropriated their female identities into his own male egotistical sublime” (“Teaching” 146). That Dorothy finds great pleasure in serving William none of her critics question.

That he also appropriates Dorothy literarily is equally self-evident. Whether he borrows ideas from her journal or not, he frequently writes in his poetry of experiences they shared, but identifies himself as the only consciousness in the experience (for example, in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”); just as in her journal, Dorothy disappears. In March 1802, Dorothy tells William that she used to chase butterflies but “was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, and did not catch them” (101): he promptly turns the conversation into a poem, “To a Butterfly.” In April 1802, Dorothy notes, “I happened to say that when I was a child I would not have pulled a strawberry blossom. … At dinner-time he came in with the poem of ‘Children gathering flowers‘” (Wordsworth 116-117). Wordsworth's facility for seizing upon casual comments and making of them a lasting poem demonstrates his literary genius. Surely, however, it also had to disconcert the individual whose words he so unexpectedly took up and transformed.

At least once—in the case of the encounter with the begging mother and her two sons, which became the poem “Beggars” (Wordsworth 26-27, 100-101)—he describes an experience of Dorothy's at which he was clearly not even present. Whether he learned of it through her journals or in conversation with her is moot, since the use he makes of the incident clearly demonstrates his tendency to appropriate.

He appropriates her presence as well: During their time at Grasmere, he again and again writes poems in which he refers to Dorothy but gives her either the name he chooses or no name at all: Dorothy is presumably the “she” of “Point Rash-Judgment” (Moorman 187n), the “Emmeline” of “To a Butterfly,” and “my Love” of “The Glowworm” (Gittings and Manton 91). Certainly she is present in the Prelude and “Tintern Abbey.”

Finally, William appropriates Dorothy's own literary output: He includes three of her poems, attributed in some editions to “A Female Friend” and in others identified as “By My Sister,” in a volume of his poems published in 1815. He changes the names of the characters in the poems to make them less identifiable with specific persons (Levin 112-113). He even adds two stanzas to a poem that she calls “To my Niece” and he calls “A Cottager to her Infant,” stanzas which Susan Levin notes that “Dorothy vigorously crosses out in the Rydal notebook” (115). Moreover, William refused to let Dorothy publish independently: “The Recollections (a travel journal) never appeared during Dorothy's lifetime; William finally decided public authorship would be too much of a strain on his sister's delicate health” (Levin 79).

No wonder, then, that Dorothy consciously or unconsciously creates a text that Levin describes as “characterized by refusal: refusal to generalize, refusal to move out of a limited range of vision, refusal to speculate, refusal to reproduce standard literary forms, refusal to undertake the act of writing (4). No wonder that Dorothy emphasizes distinction in her work, that she writes, for example, of “our favourite birch tree” that “The other Birch trees that were near it looked bright and chearful, but it was a creature by its own self among them” (Wordsworth 61). No wonder that she singles out a columbine to describe: “It is a graceful slender creature, a female seeking retirement and growing freest and most graceful where it is most alone” (Wordsworth 129). Levin quotes three more such instances (18, 21). Dorothy is trying to maintain distinctions that William fails to perceive. Implicit within her descriptions is a concept of individual integrity within a community—integrity that does not demand the appropriation or subjugation of that which is other.

Levin, in explaining Dorothy's insistence on separateness, notes that “The infant discovers resistant objects that help her comprehend her own separateness from the external world” (15); she theorizes that Dorothy uses “resistant objects … not only to define herself but also to keep herself from feeling overwhelmed by what she calls ‘expansion’ in the Alfoxden journal” (15). Perhaps Dorothy uses resistant objects to keep herself free from feeling overwhelmed by William, and perhaps it is William for whom she is trying to establish her separateness from the outside world.

Clearly, Dorothy had to recognize that William tended to appropriate; is it any wonder, then, that she tried to preserve a part of herself from such appropriation? If she wanted to share in the enterprise of William's poetry-writing, she did not necessarily want to be shared by it. She does seek to help her brother by supplying him with detailed descriptions of the two subjects he most often uses in his writing: nature and country people. Homans argues that Dorothy “turns the possibility of a creating self back toward nature” (Women 75) and “prefers to have nature be the poet” (Women 88)—but is it nature, or William, to whom Dorothy defers?

Dorothy's journal functions more or less as prewriting for William—“a sketch book for descriptive exercises,” to use Pamela Woof's phrase (29), in which each incident described is “offered without comment and lovingly remembered in its exactness for Wordsworth's use” (Woof 49). Elizabeth Hardwick concurs: “The journals are not so much an ambition as a sort of offering. Dorothy seems almost to be making a collection of sights, storing away moments and memories for his poetry” (Hardwick 148). But Dorothy is ultimately not as self-sacrificing as she seems, for it is her self that she finally refuses to sacrifice. She refuses—perhaps, given Dorothy's love for William, not altogether consciously—to write explicitly about her self in her journals.

Such a refusal presupposes a strong sense of self to begin with. This presupposition conflicts with Levin's suggestion that Dorothy has an “unsatisfactory” sense of self (11); it also conflicts with Bawer's assertion that “Dorothy had an extraordinarily weak sense of identity—or, to put it otherwise, a chameleon-like ability to adapt herself, at the most fundamental level, to suit whomever she happened to be living with at the time”27). Certainly, as Bawer notes, she switched religions without hesitation. With the Threlkeld cousins, she became a Dissenter; with her Uncle William, she became an Evangelical. With her brother, she stopped attending church altogether; when he resumed attendance, so did she.

Like Elizabeth Hardwick, Bawer attributes Dorothy's behavior to fear:

[H]aving been removed twice from homes that she loved, she doubtless was so afraid of being sent away once more, and so desperate for a happy and truly permanent home life, that she would make the most profound accommodation in order to secure her desired end.

(27)

Certainly his argument makes some sense—but to accept its validity is to deny the very real pressures exerted on women, pressures that specifically encouraged this kind of malleability. Dorothy Wordsworth is in this respect a textbook case of the “Proper Lady,” a socially constructed ideal of feminine behavior that Mary Poovey describes in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. As Poovey points out, “women were encouraged to display no vanity, no passion, no assertive ‘self’ at all” (21). Self-effacement constituted the culturally mandated “norm” for women of Dorothy's generation: “[T]he ideal woman,” observes Poovey, “cannot be seen at all” (22).

As Gittings and Manton note, William represented for Dorothy a paternal as well as fraternal figure; given the role of the Proper Lady, Dorothy had little choice, then, but to accommodate herself to him. Thus while her chameleon-like behavior may indicate her social adjustment, it reveals little about her sense of identity. As Carl Ketcham notes in discussing Dorothy's “satiric spirit” in her later journals, “so much has been made of Dorothy's devotion to her brother and his family that there is some danger of our forgetting this other Dorothy—keen-minded, rather easily affronted, and thoroughly capable of self-defense” (5).

Her journals do offer some suggestion, in their emphasis on singularity and distinction, that a sense of self-identity existed despite the constraints of her role.² She may identify with nature, as Margaret Homans suggests, but as Virginia Woolf writes, “Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky” (164). As Susan J. Wolfson observes of Dorothy's poetry. “Though the tone and stressed first-person pronouns … affect modest self-appraisal, the name still gets inscribed, and the rhyme—‘irregular’ though it is deemed—gets written …” (143-44).

It is this underlying and insistent sense of self—and a poet's self, at that—that suggests Dorothy's second, darker reason for writing as she does. Unconsciously, Dorothy refuses to present herself as a subject because she refuses to confront William with a subjectivity that would threaten his. As Margaret Homans argues, “She represents the least ambiguous case of a woman reader's acceptance of the female role specified by Romantic poetry, for she overgoes [sic] even William's expectations for her” (Bearing 65). William characteristically silences the women in his poems, Homans further notes (41). He identifies women, especially Dorothy, with nature, object, Other. If, then, Dorothy unquestioningly accepts the whole ethos of the Romantic movement (as she seems to), how can she write of herself as subject? There is no place for the subjectivity of woman in the Romantic aesthetic, as Margaret Homans has so amply demonstrated.

Moreover, it is the distance between himself and Dorothy by which William defines his consciousness. He identifies Dorothy with childhood and himself with adulthood: “Although attached to his childhood by a sort of lifeline … he is distant from it. The distance is a measure of his growth” (Fadem 27). What happens to William's whole conception of himself as a poet if that distance disappears?³

William repeatedly demonstrates his uneasiness with Dorothy's subjectivity:

As William and she were both aware, his poems owed her numerous verbal and imaginative debts, and he reflects his quiet agitation over this in strategies that suppress, disguise, or deny her influence—usually by representing experiences they shared as solitary ones or, if not, acknowledging her influence with statements that seem as condescending as they are affectionate.

(Wolfson 147)

McGavran, too, senses Wordsworth's dependence and resulting “tone of desperation”: “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” (234). Dorothy notes in her journal that after she reads William her “account of the little Boys belonging to the tall woman … he could not escape from those very words, and so he could not write the poem” (Wordsworth 101). Her words render him unable to write.⁴

Dorothy herself seems to recognize the danger of revealing a self other than the almost nonexistent one permitted to a Proper Lady. In January of 1802, she retells the following anecdote about a clergyman's wife that her friend Mrs. Clarkson knew:

Her husband was very fond of playing Backgammon and used to play whenever he could get any Body to play with him. She had played much in her youth and was an excellent player but her husband knew nothing of this, till one day she said to him ‘You're fond of Backgammon come play with me’. He was surprized. She told him that she had kept it to herself while she had a young family to attend to but that now she would play with him.

(Wordsworth 78)

Dorothy goes on to note that “Mr. C. told us many pleasant stories” and proceeds to list the subjects of several of them. That she took the time to retell this one suggests that it had meaning for her—perhaps the poignant suggestion that being a Proper Lady requires the denial of even the most trivial capabilities and aspects of the self.

Given this context, then, Dorothy must deny her subjectivity unless she wishes to jeopardize William's. Psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray explores the general question of women's subjectivity in an essay entitled “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine.’” As she points out, “Once imagine that woman imagines and the object loses its fixed, obsessional character. As a bench mark that is ultimately more crucial than the subject, for he can sustain himself only by bouncing back off some objectiveness, some objective” (133). She expands upon this idea in a later paragraph:

… at stake here somewhere, ever more insistent in its deathly hauteur, is the risk that the subject (as) self will crumble away. Also at stake, therefore, the “object” and the modes of dividing the economy between them. In particular the economy of discourse. Whereby the silent allegiance of the one who guarantees the auto-sufficiency, and autonomy of the other as long as no questioning of this mutism as a symptom—of historical repression—is required. But what if the “object” started to speak? Which also means beginning to “see,” etc. What disintegration of the subject would that entail?

(135)

Dorothy, who loves her brother, has no intention of threatening William's whole Weltanschauung. Her writing is, to use Meena Alexander's term, “non-confrontational” (15). “I startled Wm with my voice,” Dorothy writes in April 1802 (Wordsworth 113). Consciously or unconsciously, Dorothy refuses to so startle him on any other than this concrete, literal level.

Further confirmation of this hypothesis comes from Dorothy's poems. Written for the most part after William's marriage (e.g., when he was primarily someone else's responsibility), they do not show the same peculiarities of style: “Unlike her journals, her poems are determined, at times even aggressive,” Levin observes. “Her poems do not refuse the ‘I’; they are as interested in self as William's, as they carry on the self-definition of her other work” (110). Levin is here echoing Homans (Women 86).

Dorothy's poem entitled “Thoughts on My Sick-bed” (published in Levin 219-20) suggests that she was in fact consciously aware that she had downplayed her subjectivity in her journals. She refers, for example, to “the hidden life,” “my hidden life,” and “consciousness no longer hidden” (11. 5, 39, 40); once consciousness is no longer hidden, the poem's speaker, identified as Dorothy herself by her niece Dora, experiences “a Power unfelt before” (1. 41). In the past, the speaker had set out in search of “known and unknown things” (1. 14), all of them genderless, voiceless figures of nature and perhaps tropes for her own experiences in her life with William: “The silent butterfly spreading its wings / the violet betrayed by its noiseless breath” (11. 16-17). It is particularly telling that the final figure has both a voice and a gender: “The carolling thrush, on his naked perch, / Towering above the budding trees” (11. 19-20; emphasis added). The question of voice hardly seems accidental, given the reference in the next stanza to “The Stirring, the Still, the Loquacious, the Mute” (1. 23) and the mention in the penultimate stanza of William's “prophetic words” (1. 47). Dorothy is here describing the sexual economy later analyzed by both Homans and Irigary, in which men's voices are authorized and women's are not, in which women and nature are silenced and subjugated so that men may speak and dominate. The speaker does after all open the poem asking if Spring's “own prelusive sounds / Touched in my heart no echoing string” (11. 3-4)—thus questioning her right to compose this very poem. As Levin implies, Dorothy's use of the word “pilfered” in the poem (1. 2) may represent a veiled reference to the fate of her writings (136), but it may also represent a more comprehensive reference to what her life with William has cost her.

Susan Levin and Margaret Homans have argued that Dorothy eventually transforms her journals into her own project and that as a result, her writing critiques or even subverts William's writing and, more generally, the masculine literary tradition. But given the circumstances under which these journals were composed, surely her style of writing represents not so much a critique of William's as a means of defense for both herself and her brother.

Richard Fadem notes that “both her journals and letters … lack the intimacy and reflectiveness one assumes of such specifically autobiographical forms” (20). Fadem, like most of her critics, assumes that Dorothy's journals are personal, private documents, written for reasons that have to do with the individual: self-expression, self-revelation, self-analysis, self-knowledge. Given these assumptions, the failure of Dorothy's journals to even acknowledge the self suggests to Fadem that she had profound psychological difficulties (repression, inhibition, a lack of self-identity, arrested development). To more progressive critics, it suggests much more positive alternatives (a questioning of the male Romantics' emphasis on self, or a proto-“ecofeminism” which respects nature without seeking to appropriate).

If the initial assumptions are revised, however, the picture changes: After all, most people (let alone a relatively impoverished, unmarried nineteenth-century Englishwoman) would sound repressed in a diary to which their older brother had access.⁵ Dorothy's journal represents her deliberate effort to encourage and stimulate (and thus contribute to) what she considered to be her brother's superior poetic genius without completely sacrificing her own identity to his work. Her awareness of her audience—an idea-hungry poet not infrequently afflicted with writer's block—makes her self-avoidance neither a symptom of psychopathology nor a questioning of Romanticism but an intelligent, logical, and understandable rhetorical choice.

Notes

1. When I presented this essay, one member of the audience perceptively suggested that, in mimicking Richardson, Dorothy's self was equally absent—that Dorothy adopted different, perhaps specifically gendered writing styles to suit whichever audience she was addressing at the time: the language of sensibility for her young female friend, the relatively disinterested descriptions of nature and the folk for her older brother. Thus, the “real” Dorothy is perhaps equally inaccessible in both kinds of writing.

2. Anne Mellor has suggested, in Romanticism and Gender, that Dorothy did not possess the same kind of self that William did, that in her journals Dorothy is constructing a different kind of self, a self-in-relation with permeable ego boundaries—the kind of self that object relations psychologist Nancy Chodorow has postulated as culturally normal for middle-class women in Western societies. It is quite possible. I think, that Dorothy possessed a different kind of self; what I am saying is that Dorothy's self—whatever it was like—is not easily recoverable from her journals because she absented herself from her text, refusing for the most part to write about herself.

3. Unfortunately, as Rachel Mayer Brownstein observes, “Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals have been read mostly by William Wordsworthians” (48); as a result, most of the critics who address Dorothy at all describe her much as William does in the Prelude. Richard Fadem is perhaps the most outspoken of such critics: “[A]t twenty-six she is what William was at seven. She is splendid but rudimentary and incomplete” (28). Complains Elizabeth Hardwick: “She could not, would not analyze” (156). Even James Holt McGavran, Jr., who writes relatively sympathetically of Dorothy, writes of her “loss of any firm sense of personal identity” and refers to “the beautiful, relinquished psyche she never fully recognized” (232-33).

4. For a fascinating discussion of this incident, see Thomas R. Frosch's essay “Wordsworth's ‘Beggars’ and a Brief Instance of ‘Writer's Block.’” Frosch contends that William's writer's block may have resulted from his conflicting emotions about his upcoming marriage—his desire to marry on the one hand, and his guilt about forsaking Dorothy on the other:

   Dorothy herself typically played a role for Wordsworth akin to that of the genius in the cave, a spirit that refreshed and released his creativity … It was exactly this figure—who generally helped him in his dialectical transactions with the external universe, going before him, as in her journal, encouraging his inner poetic strength, providing within her sensibility and her written entries a place where phenomena, as it may have seemed, could undergo a slow, gestating passage from nature to the verge of imagination—it was this mediator who now suddenly turned against him, overpowering him with the sensations and words of that universe. The liberating influence became the impediment.

   (628-29)

5. Curiously, while Levin repeatedly acknowledges William's role as audience for the journals (13-14, 30-31, 34-36) and further asserts that he must have intimidated Dorothy's poetry (155), she nevertheless attributes the stylistic peculiarities in Dorothy's prose to sexual difference rather than to her awareness of her brother as a potential audience. For example, Levin describes Dorothy's avoidance of first-person pronouns as “characteristic of her vision” (36).

   Anita Hemphill McCormick is the only critic whose analysis of the journals reflects an awareness of Dorothy's consciousness of an audience. In an intriguing and convincing essay, she argues that through the journals, Dorothy appeals to her brother's tenderness for her.

   Dorothy Wordsworth's writings are the jottings of a dependent as well as supportive sister, a sister who deliberately if indirectly informs her brother that his absences cause her far more anguish than they cause him, that his intended marriage will threaten her peace and health, and that he has been thinking of himself and not of her. To be more direct, to reveal naked anger, might be to risk his rebuke or rejection.

   (487)

An abbreviated version of this essay was presented at the Second Annual Conference on 18th- and 19th-Century Woman Writers of Britain, hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle, May 7 and 8, 1993.

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———. “Teaching Wordsworth and Women.” Approaches to Teaching Wordsworth's Poetry. Ed. Spencer Hall with Jonathan Ramsey. New York: MLA, 1986. 142-46.

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