SOURCE: Cole, Lucinda and Richard G. Swartz. “‘Why Should I wish for Words?’: Literacy, Articulation, and the Borders of Literary Culture.” In At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, edited by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson, pp. 143-69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, the authors recognize the role that Wordsworth and other women writers of the eighteenth century played in the struggle to “police, protect, and promote the bounds of literariness itself.”]

LITERACY, GENDER, AND THE WRITING OF CULTURE

Near the end of his life William Wordsworth argued that the humbler ranks of society could not “benefit” from the natural landscapes of the Lake District because “the perception of what has acquired the name of picturesque and romantic scenery is so far from being intuitive, that it can be produced only by a slow and gradual process of culture …” (Guide, 157). Significantly, he does not say that the poor would fail to enjoy the impressive prospects of this area, but that because they lack the ability to “name” what they see, the positive effects of picturesque and romantic (as well as sublime) scenery would be lost on them. Underwriting Wordsworth's comment, then, is first a view of the aesthetic as a carefully refined vocabulary, as a system of classifications which identifies certain phenomena as objects of a particular knowledge. From this perspective, the cultivated spectator or tourist who gazes luminous with sensation at a striking view is doing nothing more than reading back the cultural significations which produce the aesthetic object, scene, or sight in the first place. The humbler ranks, alternatively, who have not had access to this aesthetic vocabulary, can neither interpret nor articulate the meanings invested in romantic or any other kind of scenery. Second, implicit in Wordsworth's remark is a nascent and ideologically loaded theory of acculturation that complicates this view. On the one hand, he represents aesthetic discourse as an official language, as a sort of national wealth to which anyone may potentially have access, if only “through a slow and gradual process of culture.” On the other hand, Wordsworth's representation of culture as the process of passionate and long-continued attention to the forms of nature advances the idea that aesthetic competency is more a product of private experience than of the technical vocabularies toward which he previously gestured. The symbolic appropriation of sublime or picturesque landscape, in other words, now seems to take place largely at the level of consciousness, unconditioned by any specific, socially and historically situated cultural idiolect. Any apparent contradiction between these two dimensions of aesthetic acculturation disappears, however, when one recognizes that for Wordsworth the possession of the aesthetic idiolect is above all a form of distinction: as such, it confers prestige on those who have acquired it precisely because it appears to be a form of natural experience available to all who can see, feel, and imagine. In this quiet promotion of what, altering a phrase from Bourdieu, one might call the illusion of aesthetic communism, William Wordsworth represents aesthetic competency as a universal possibility available to all, but only by obscuring the concrete, socially conditioned forms of dispossession that such an aesthetic education necessarily implies. Much like certain theories of language, then, he converts “the immanent laws of legitimate discourse into universal norms of correct … practice” but, in so doing, deftly avoids addressing questions of the economic and social conditions under which “acquisition of the legitimate competence and of the constitution of the market” take place, and in which, according to Bourdieu, any such definition of “legitimate and illegitimate” language is necessarily “established and imposed” (44).

Taking seriously the idea that aesthetic communism—like Bourdieu's linguistic communism—is in fact an illusion, or, more precisely, an imaginary construct with real social effects, we attempt in this essay to expose some of the conditions of its production, reproduction, legitimation, and potential disarticulation during the romantic period. Although Wordsworth raises the issue of aesthetic competency, the conditions we seek to isolate here are, perhaps not surprisingly, most visible in the comparatively marginalized work of late eighteenth-century women. Critics have noted in the writing of Dorothy Wordsworth and others a double-edged appropriation and subversion of aesthetic discourse, an apparently gender-specific ambivalence that has been valued in different ways. Our essay turns on the assumption that any such discomfort or resistance is less a sign of gender, as such, than it is a symptom of gender-specific (pre)occupations that eighteenth-century women both inherited and helped to promote. Readers of Nancy Armstrong will recall, for example, that certain “cultural functions” increasingly attributed to and promoted by women were “instrumental in bringing the new middle classes into power and maintaining their dominance” (26). Among these was the role of teacher, particularly, teaching that contributed to the moralization of the laboring poor. As we shall see, Hannah More, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley—the uneducated “milkwoman poet” of Bristol—share with William Wordsworth an understanding that aesthetic discourse is a specialized vocabulary that is “far from being intuitive.” But because that awareness is coupled with a concern—indeed, a moral duty—to moralize the laboring poor as well, they will often differ from him in contesting the value of particular literary idiolects. Their attempts to negotiate the relationships among literacy, aesthetics, and literariness can therefore tell us more about the forms of dispossession involved in a romantic aesthetic education than, arguably, can “purely” romantic writing itself.

This is particularly true in reference to the sublime, which, by the late eighteenth century, has become an index of one's position in the market of official aesthetic and literary discourse. This market is organized to a considerable degree by gender- and class-inflected strictures governing who could and who could not assume the voice of sublime grandeur. Women writers were thus compelled to situate themselves in relation to an increasingly consolidated, if increasingly contested, set of literary practices. Hannah More, in response to this challenge, argued in 1799 that the sublime, properly speaking, was a mode of writing (and feeling) best practiced by men. In her “comparative view of the sexes,” she claims that women are endowed with distinct conceptual, moral, and aesthetic capabilities: they “do not so much generalize their ideas as men,” she writes, “nor do their minds seize a great subject with so large a grasp” (Works, VI:146). Given this, she continues, and because women are blessed by Providence with an “intuitive” penetration into character, they are naturally more suited to “polite letters.” Although this is a commonplace of eighteenth-century writing, More's attempt to institutionalize a doctrine of gendered literary practices is clearly related to her larger project, which is to contribute toward the moralization of the laboring poor. Thus elsewhere in her writings, More argues that because only the elite could grasp the sublime, poets who soared in its regions were evading their duty:

Their taste and their pursuits have familiarized them with the vast, and the grand, and the interesting: and they think to sanctify these in a way of their own. … These elegant spirits seem to live in a certain lofty region of their own minds, where they know the multitude cannot soar after them; they derive their grandeur from this elevation, which separates them with the creatures of their imagination, from all ordinary attributes, and all associations of daily occurrence. In this middle region, too high for earth, and too low for heaven; too refined for sense, and too gross for spirit; they keep a magazine of airy speculations, and shining reveries, and puzzling metaphysics; the chief design of which is to drive to a distance, the profane vulgar. …

(Works, IV: 328)

In comments that are derived from Anglican precepts but that nevertheless seem to mirror the insights of Bourdieu, More exposes the notion of distinction upon which practitioners of the official literary language must depend. In her words, poets attempt to “sanctify” matters of “taste” and habit from which the “multitude” are excluded. Indeed, she represents this “distance” from the “profane vulgar” as the source of “their grandeur.” Taken together, these passages demonstrate that More willingly abdicates the sublime to men, but not without challenging the value of both the practice and its practitioners. Her conflicted relationship to the sublime thus appears as a by-product of the socially sanctioned, class-based gender roles that More advocates with other late eighteenth-century women, a list that includes Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Trimmer, and Anna Barbauld.

It also includes Ann Yearsley and Dorothy Wordsworth, the subjects of our essay. Both were deeply interested in the particular mode of social reform and moralization that sought to bring benefits of literacy to the laboring poor. Dorothy Wordsworth, for example, established a Sunday school in 1789, where she taught her young charges to read and spell and to memorize hymns and their catechism. Years later she continued to uphold the charitable ideal of limited education for the laboring poor, as evidenced by her actions on behalf of the orphaned children of John and Sarah Green, a poor family from Grasmere.¹ This ideal is also manifest in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803), which not only remarks on scenes of touristic interest, but continually inquires into the status of literacy and literary education in the Lowlands. She writes, for example, of children who “went to school and learned Latin, Virgil, and some of them Greek” (Journals, I: 206); of proud miners whose village has acquired a library “that had all sorts of books—‘What! Have you Shakespeare?’ ‘Yes, we have that …’”—(I: 209); of a young guide who “said she would buy a book” with the sixpence Dorothy gave her (I: 220); and, with uneasy satisfaction, of some young children apprenticed to a cotton factory who, she was told, “were well instructed in reading and writing” (I: 225). Although Yearsley's active promotion of the Sunday school movement is perhaps less overt, it surfaces throughout her works, partially through frequent references to members of lower ranks in terms often borrowed from educated literary culture. “Untaught, unpolish'd is the savage mind,” she writes in “Brutus: A Fragment,” but such “error will decay,” allowing edifying “Visions” to “arise from interchange of thought, / With dear refinement and instruction fraught.”² To this end Yearsley praises Sunday schools for giving aid to the “race” of illiterate poor, who, oppressed by circumstances, “sink in vulgar toils” and therefore neglect the soul.”³ Without such learning, Yearsley avows in a poem in favor of the establishment of such institutions, the “savage,” working world will be a morally and socially incapacitated one, a “poor unlettr'd tribe” (68) wandering in its own darkness (24-25). As writers themselves, however, Dorothy Wordsworth and Ann Yearsley were also participants within a peculiarly intellectual culture whose specific values they both internalized and partially reproduced. Yearsley's poetry and Dorothy's Journals are partially organized around episodes in which, as poet or tourist, they gaze at scenes, sights, or objects of aesthetic interest. These embedded moments belie their efforts to define themselves as possessors of the cultural capital that, for them as for William Wordsworth, aesthetic knowledge increasingly affords.⁴ In this sense, Ann Yearsley and Dorothy Wordsworth occupy a complicated, if familiar, subject position. They are members of literary culture, but members (like most of us) who have internalized a culturally given imperative to regulate and control the practices of reading and writing itself.

Their works, correspondingly, directly pertain to the historical problem that we examine here: how literary culture is formed in relationship to struggles over the meaning and value of literacy, linguistic competency, and cultural distinction. Such relationships, we maintain, are most visible in the vastly overdetermined trope of inarticulation. At one end of an implicit cultural continuum of meaning this trope signifies a basic linguistic incompetence, and at another, a moment of sublime genius. William Wordsworth's poetry, for example, often dramatizes a “higher” linguistic breakdown—a poetic failure of language—which marks the poet's access to truths that cannot be spoken. (Kant defines this provisional failure in cognitive terms as a “negative presentation” which “expands the soul” [127].) Yet William often merges the two aspects of inarticulation into a single narrative in which another's silence marks, by a kind of transfer, the poet's access to a sublime beyond of language. One thinks, in this regard, of the Blind Beggar and Discharged Soldier episodes of The Prelude; or, more immediately, of “Tintern Abbey,” where Dorothy's expressive silence serves simultaneously as a mode of distinction (for William) and dispossession (for his sister). It is not surprising, given this situation, that Yearsley and Dorothy Wordsworth both attempt to demystify the idealizing impulses implicit in the literary culture by which, in different ways, both were dispossessed: in Dorothy's case, as a decorous and therefore often self-censoring woman, and in Yearsley's, as a servant whose improvised education marks her as a member of the inarticulate laboring poor. This demystifying tendency, moreover, is intimately related to their interest in the discourses of literacy, where articulation and inarticulation are, it would seem, more pedestrian and “purely” descriptive terms. At the same time, however, as we shall see, both writers partially replicate the tendency of aesthetic discourse to create an inarticulate and sometimes savage other, subject to and subject of their reformist discourse. Yearsley, for example, compares her own, presumably innate aptitude for aesthetic vision to the coarse pleasure of a “noisy crew” of working men, whose “clumsy music crowns the rough delight” they seem to prefer. Let “Yours be the vulgar dissonance,” she writes, “while I … stretch the ardent eye / O'er Nature's wilds. …”⁵ This negative description of laboring-class speech dramatizes the ways in which aesthetic discourse, with its increasing emphasis upon the civilizing power of the printed word, created “new lines of demarcation within the working classes” (Vincent 1982, 36, 42). Dorothy Wordsworth's unflattering descriptions of Gaelic speakers in her Scottish Tour of 1803 serve a similar function (although one pressed in the service of extending the borders of Englishness itself). Such dividing practices, we suggest in our conclusion, are often simply replicated in an American critical industry that, having inherited a purified notion of literariness, continues to maintain it in splendid isolation. From our perspective, alternatively, to explore articulation in its full range of meanings during the romantic period is to map the internal and external borders of romantic writing, and therefore to begin to explore the constructive limits and constitutive exclusions of romanticism as such.

.....

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH'S ENGLISH(NESS)

The moralizing ideal that both animates and confounds much of Yearsley's poetry was the basis of Dorothy Wordsworth's own considerably more official form of education. Having learned the cultural function of the charitable and sympathetic woman at an early age, Dorothy came virtually to embody it, or at least to practice the cultural functions of true womanhood that More worked so hard to construct. Upon meeting Dorothy, William Wilberforce (a crucial supporter of More's philanthropic enterprises) was so impressed by her activities that he gave her a copy of Trimmer's The Oeconomy of Charity, plus ten guineas a year to distribute to the poor.⁶ Wilberforce recognized in the young Dorothy a kindred spirit who would seek to bring the benefits of learning to the multitude. And without embracing More's version of Tory evangelicalism, Dorothy did seem to accede to this vision. Not only does she demonstrate throughout her life a commitment to the spread of literacy, she seems to have internalized the corresponding prohibition against women writing poetry as well. “I have no command of language, no power of expressing my ideas,” Dorothy wrote of herself (MY, I:25). She did not, however, accept this lack of power without occasional shows of resentment. In a poem of 1829, for example, she writes that although she “reverenced the Poet's skill,” as a child she “had Stifled ambition” of this kind out of a combination of “bashfulness,” “shame,” and regard to domestic authority, or the “fear that elder heads might blame—Or something worse.”⁷ Dorothy's near-ironic portrayal of her own intimidation (in Bourdieu's sense of the term)⁸ expressed in the very mode of writing that, she admits, she was not supposed to practice, attests to both her intense and sometimes uneasy attachment to precepts defining the proper role of middle-class women who, bolstered by a keen sense of duty that directed them to “the paths of usefulness,” also abdicate poetry to men. Given this complicated reaction, it is surprising neither that Dorothy Wordsworth turned to prose nor that her journals display another kind of ambition.

In addition to providing expected descriptions of striking scenes, sights, and incidents, these also deliberately explore the discursive idioms and practices of the aesthetic. So well do they perform this task that her highly coded nature descriptions often appear as instinctive expressions of her soul, and thus as signs of a “natural” genius. Indeed, for reasons that shall be explored later, this is a representation of Dorothy Wordsworth that her brother and others were eager to promote. But if one recognizes, with Ian Hunter, that the aesthetic is a “special kind of ethical work,” then it is possible to see how Dorothy's descriptions contribute to “shaping a distinctively aesthetic self through the successive intensification and neutralization of capacities for feeling and thought” (Hunter 1992, 353). Whatever their immediate intention, then, Dorothy's skillful descriptions of persons and places attest to her internalization of a specific set of disciplinary practices and the vocabularies which shape them, and, in so doing, have the added effect of normalizing the presumably “natural” basis of her aesthetic responses. Yet Dorothy does more than “naturalize” the practices, protocols, and vocabulary of aesthetic self-cultivation; she relies on these practices to normalize the ideas of feminine duty and polite letters that More felt compelled to assert. As we have mentioned, in her 1803 Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland Dorothy searches for signs of literacy and reading habit among the Scottish working class. This interest in the civilizing function of reading and education accompanies Dorothy's equally pervasive interest in reaffirming the value of an increasingly national literary tradition: Chaucer, Spenser, Drummond, Jonson, Milton, Thomson, Ossian, her brother's poetry. Such authors provide Dorothy with a tissue of intertextual and cultural associations to construct a given sight as an object of aesthetic interest, even as they signify her possession of a linguistic treasure that, according to Trimmer and others, both enabled and obligated women to spread the benefits of limited literacy to the poor. Dorothy's frequent citations, in this view, are not simply allusions or ornamental references but constructive tropes in her ongoing efforts to refine the articulation of the aesthetic self in ways that reinforce both the social function and values associated with literary culture.

Dorothy's is therefore an exercise in practical aesthetics inescapably tethered to ideological assumptions foundational to that late eighteenth-century cultural formation. Not surprisingly, these assumptions emerge most forcefully around the tropes of inarticulation, tropes that become particularly common when, in the Scottish tour of 1803, the Wordsworths approach the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. We quote from the following episode at length:

It rained, but not heavily; the mountains were not concealed from us by the mists, but appeared larger and more grand; twilight was coming on, and the obscurity under which we saw the objects, with the sounding of the torrents, kept our minds alive and wakeful; all was solitary and huge—sky, water, and mountains mingled together. While we were walking forward, the road leading us over the top of a brow, we stopped suddenly at the sound of half-articulate Gaelic hooting from the field close to us. It came from a little boy, whom we could see on the hill between us and the lake, wrapped up in a grey plaid. He was probably calling home the cattle for the night. His appearance was in the highest degree moving to the imagination: mists were on the hillsides, darkness shutting in upon the huge avenue of mountains, torrents roaring, no house in sight to which the child might belong; his dress, cry, and appearance all different from anything we had been accustomed to. It was a text, as William since observed to me, containing in itself the whole history of the Highlander's life—his melancholy, his simplicity, his poverty, his superstition, and above all, that visionariness which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature.

(Journals, I: 286)

On first glance, it appears that Dorothy is simply providing a staple of travel literature, the picturesque image, which, as critics have long since noted, often figures the poor laborer in the landscape as an object of aesthetic interest for the consumption of onlookers, tourists, and readers (Barrell 1972; Bermingham).⁹ Dorothy, in this view, seems simply to embellish and reinforce the more poetic vision of her brother for whom, she reports, the boy represents “the whole history of the Highlander's life,” where the unfortunate signs of “his superstition” are presented in dynamic counterpoint with the signs of his “visionariness” and “communion with the unworldliness of nature.” William's retrospective response to the Gaelic boy is, one notes, highly reminiscent of a much-discussed episode of The Prelude, Book V where the Boy of Winander sings “mimic hootings to the silent owls” who answer, “responsive to his call.” When the natural world no longer repeats his cry, “sometimes in that silence, while he hung / Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise / Has carried far into his heart the voice / Of mountain torrents.”¹⁰ Like the Gaelic boy above, then, and like the Gaelic singer in “The Solitary Reaper,” the Boy of Winander provides yet another instance of moments in which a pre-linguistic cry or incomprehensible voice becomes a figure for the meaning beyond words, language, or any worldly form of articulation. As Mary Jacobus writes, the “mimic hootings” of the Boy of Winander fulfill William's claim to know “a language more profound than that of books” (128).¹¹ In Dorothy Wordsworth's case, however, it would appear that this Highland boy's “hooting” does not qualify as a sign of inexpressive sublimity. Thus even as she acknowledges William's interpretation of the scene and therefore seems to approve the spirit that William brings to poems such as “The Solitary Reaper” or to the Boy of Winander passage, Dorothy provides details that work against it. Although Dorothy states that the boy's appearance is “in the highest degree moving to the imagination,” his voice strikes her as strangely inhuman: while the “cry” of the boy arrested them both and led to William's commentary on the “visionariness” of the scene, Dorothy represents this sound, somewhat unpoetically, as a “half-articulate Gaelic hooting.” In contrast to the Boy of Winander, then, Dorothy's Gaelic boy does not hoot in sympathetic imitation of natural sounds. For her, this half-articulate hooting is in fact an expression of near-animality, and therefore closer to Yearsley's “vulgar dissonance” than it is to “the voice of mountain torrents.”

What interferes with the aesthetic moment is Dorothy's view of Gaelic, which is tinged by an ambivalence that elsewhere erupts in contempt. This perception of Gaelic was based upon, and in its own negative way acknowledged, the social and historical conditions that led to a severe decline in literacy rates throughout the Highlands. As an effect of what has been called internal colonialism, the increasing anglicization of the Highlands reinforced a situation in which the local economy became dependent upon the economic, social, and legal institutions of the south while it also deprived native Gaelic of any social or cultural prestige (Hechter). A literate Highland culture ceased to exist as such, replaced by a world in which Gaelic came to represent to outsiders a barbarous language of an uneducated, economically backward people.¹² Although in 1766 the Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge—one of the great institutional engines driving the Highlands toward anglicization—again allowed Gaelic texts to be taught in Highland schools, this was not done to promote Gaelic but to facilitate the spread of English (Withers, 125-26). Indeed, the Highlands were increasingly identified as a region of savage illiteracy. In contrast, the highest literacy rates among the laboring poor were found in the Scottish Lowlands and northern England, including the Lake District. In terms of educational provision and the prevalence of the reading habit, then, the English north and the Scottish Lowlands “may have formed a zone distinct from both southern England and Highland Scotland” (Houston 1985, 265).¹³ Given this situation, upon leaving the Lowlands—where, as we have observed, Dorothy found numerous signs of the reading habit, and a cultural environment not unlike the one she knew from Penrith and Grasmere—Dorothy entered another, and to her savage, world.

Throughout her Scottish tours, accordingly, Dorothy portrays the Highlands as everything the Lowlands and northern England are not—primitive, foreign, at times repelling—thereby reproducing the structures of internal colonialism mentioned above. While these cultural differences sometimes become the basis of an objectifying and essentializing picturesque, that aesthetic is punctured and often shattered when, in her accounts, Highland speech intrudes. Dorothy's Tour reports on young women “gabbling Erse” (Journals, I:280); a group of boatmen who “shouted to each other in Erse—a savage cry to our ears” (I:294); children “laughing, screaming, and chattering Erse” (I:302); a woman “screaming in Erse, with the most horrible guinea-hen or peacock voice I ever heard (I:317); a group of “stout” working men “who could speak very little English, and stared at us with almost a savage look of wonder” (I:340). Her reference to the boy's “half-articulate Gaelic hooting,” within this context, implies yet another moment of Othering in which the primitive native becomes a sign of excess, an inhuman beyond of culture that culture is compelled either to reclaim or to disown. Dorothy's half-articulate boy, that is, fits into the mingled “sky, water, and mountains” not as one image among others, but as a savage Other whose alien tongue cannot be absorbed into the aesthetic moment. From this perspective, Dorothy's turn to William for an aestheticizing frame argues that, for her, the Gaelic boy's inarticulation represents a form of impropriety that works against the constructive design of the aesthetic response.

At the same time, her highly refined aesthetic sensitivity leads her to portray in cultural and therefore more concrete terms not only her own class and regional prejudices but, as we shall see, the structures of inarticulation upon which William's apparently more generous figurations of the foreign rustic are based. This point can be demonstrated by looking, briefly, at a scene from Dorothy's Journal of a Tour on the Continent (1820) where, once again, the aesthetic is disrupted, but this time in more radical and apparently self-conscious ways. In the entry for August 10, Dorothy describes how she and her party follow a stream to “the gray torrent of the Lutschine” until they arrive at the basin of a cataract “where two women,” Dorothy writes, “appeared before me singing a shrill and savage air”: “their tones were startling, and in connection with their wild yet quiet figures strangely combined with the sounds of dashing water and the silent aspect of the huge crag that seemed to reach the sky!” (Journals, II:118). Like the image of the Gaelic boy, the figures of the two women combine with the sounds of a torrent and “the silent aspect” of surrounding eminences of rock to form what is for Dorothy an unforgettable scene. And just as the boy's Gaelic cries had disturbed the composition of the aesthetic moment, here the women's “shrill and savage air” combines “strangely” with the torrent and the sublimely silent crag.

The further significance of the passage emerges in a lengthy footnote she appends to it. The note includes a sonnet by her brother written in memory of the occasion, and an excerpt from Robert Southey's journal of 1817 describing a similar encounter at the falls. William's sonnet, in the version Dorothy quotes, represents the women's “notes shrill and wild” as being more supernaturally musical than the fabled songs of mermaids or witches. The poem ends by declaring that it is a shame that this compelling music should come from the lips of mendicant women. While their song seems to echo the enthralling power of the waterfall, their pitiable appearance does not:

Tracks let me follow far from human kind
Which these illusive greetings may not reach,
Where only Nature tunes her voice to teach
Careless pursuits and raptures unconfined.
No Mermaid warbles (to allay the wind
That drives some vessel tow'rd a dangerous beach)
More thrilling melodies! no caverned Witch
Chaunting a love-spell ever intertwined
Notes shrill and wild with art more musical!
Alas! that from the lips of abject Want
And Idleness in tatters mendicant
They should proceed—enjoyment to enthral
And with regret and useless pity haunt
This bold, this pure, this skyborn WATERFALL!

(Journals, II:118)¹⁴

In his later commentary on the poem, William writes that “this wild and savage air” (an unacknowledged quotation from Dorothy's account) “seemed to belong in some way or other to the waterfall and reminded me of religious services chanted to streams and fountains in Pagan times” (Poetical Works, III:373-74). This commentary indicates the ways in which the poem occludes the social meaning of poverty so that William may follow the play of imaginings that the poor women's song elicits. The song, a reminder of the supernatural, pagan ritual, and oral culture, belongs with the waterfall; the women, who conflict with the scene by raising a “useless” feeling of “pity” for the idle poor, do not. The poem thereby shows how the speaker associates the song with Nature's voice. It is this imaginative distance from “human kind,” William implies, that once again allows him to hear in this song, in spite of the barriers of language and social position that separate him from the singers, a significance that belongs to imagination alone.

The excerpt Dorothy includes from Southey's journal proceeds in much the same way as William's poem: “‘While we were at the waterfall, some half-score peasants, chiefly women and girls, assembled just out of reach of the spray, and set up—surely the wildest chorus that ever was heard by human ears—a song, not of articulate sounds, but in which the voice was used as a mere instrument of music, more flexible than any which art could produce,—sweet, powerful, and thrilling beyond description’” (II: 118).¹⁵ William's poem and Southey's prose account, in spite of their obvious differences, both assign these voices a musical power beyond that of ordinary human sound. William may assert that the women, tattered and idle mendicants, interfere with the value and interest of their own song, but he shares with Southey the urge to disembody their voices, and therefore to idealize, dehumanize, and supernaturalize their music in one gesture. Thus in Southey, the song becomes something beyond anything “heard by human ears”—a figure he repeats when he later uses the same journal as the basis for his own poetic appropriation of the wild singers in Canto III of his poem A Tale of Paraguay (1819). In that poem, the wild music reappears in the voice of an unself-consciously beautiful but also pointedly inarticulate expression of a natural poetess who sings in the midst of the South American wilds beside a lonely and sublime waterfall. This “songstress wild” is overheard “Rejoicing in her consciousness of power,” as her “unexpressive lay,” fashioned from “inarticulate and long-breathed sound,” holds her listeners “spellbound” in “mute astonishment.”¹⁶

Dorothy's note, in contrast, which claims that these two accounts are similar, includes an interesting disagreement with them both:

I was close to the women when they began to sing, and hence, probably it was that I perceived nothing of sweetness in their tones. I cannot answer for the impression on the rest of the party except my brother, who being behind, heard the carol from a distance. …

(II:118)

It is perhaps surprising to see this presumably self-effacing writer go out of her way to object to poetic accounts of this much-written image of the Staubbach singers. (If you count Southey's Paraguay and William's later prose description of the scene, the Staubbach episode gives rise to five different renderings.) Added to this is that Dorothy's apparent appeal to the empirical is simply beside the point in regard to Southey's description, since his account is based upon a separate event. What seems to be happening here, however, is not simply a local contest over descriptive accuracy, but a far more important struggle over how the women's inarticulation is to be valued. Dorothy's underlinings reinforce this view. Her intervention is based not only on her proximity to the scene—“I was close to the women when they began to sing”—but, more importantly, on her ability to comment upon the negative aesthetic quality of their speech: “I perceived nothing of sweetness in their tones.” In remarking upon the affective appeal of a particular enunciation, she is, of course, reassuring her cultural function, to preserve and extend the grounds of articulation itself. Apparently, Dorothy is so completely assimilated to this function that she does not have to take the poets to task for indulging in the “lofty regions of the mind,” or for allowing their poetic ambitions to divert them from their duty. But in her appeal to the real—that is, to the social imaginary—and in her otherwise inexplicable exposure of the poets' “mistakes,” Dorothy implies that William Wordsworth and Southey, rather than being too immersed in the (merely) aesthetic, are failing to demonstrate aesthetic sensitivity enough. In Dorothy's more socially grounded vision of inarticulation, “vulgar dissonance” cannot be redeemed as a figure of the listening poet's imaginative access to the beyond of language.

CONCLUSIONS

In distinguishing between Dorothy's account of the Staubbach singers and those of her male companions, we mean neither to suggest that Dorothy's is a morally superior vision nor to deny its obvious political problems but merely to identify a form of power that, as Nancy Armstrong puts it, “does not seem to be power because it behaves in specifically female ways” (26). Indeed, our argument as a whole has the effect of calling in question the still prevalent notion that women were necessarily “silenced” by romantic aesthetic discourse. Thus throughout this essay, we have focused, first, upon the positive efforts of two women from different social ranks to appropriate, subvert, and otherwise negotiate the idioms of what we have been calling official literary culture. Much like William Wordsworth, as we have seen, Dorothy Wordsworth and Ann Yearsley appropriated the peculiarly romantic trope of inarticulation in their writings and, given their commitment to aesthetic discourse, occasionally applied it to themselves. Among writers of the early romantic period this trope is vastly overdetermined, we have insisted, precisely because it stands on the (shifting) borders between literacy and literariness, and therefore of vulgar dissonance and cultured articulation. It is, in other words, not only a descriptive but a value term, an exceptionally powerful variable that enables the sublime, marks the borders of proper speech, and helps to constitute prestigious literary production. In this view, the real grounds of articulation are not ontologically given in the essence of the (imaginary) linguistic community but are effects of the value systems which produce and reproduce a cultured disposition, where the forms of that acculturation are variously organized by middle-class men and women alike.

Within literary culture proper, however, it also is true that men had more power than women in formulating and monitoring the rules and strategies of the cultural wars that we now identify as romanticism as such. And because inarticulation was such an unstable and mobile term in those skirmishes, women who put this trope into discourse did so at considerable risk. The most famous example of this phenomenon is, of course, William Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” where Dorothy appears as a supplementary and therefore confirming repetition of William's own vision: “in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart, and read / My former pleasures in the shooting lights / Of thy wild eyes” (117-20). Dorothy's relatively complex aesthetic sensibility is here cast as a natural stage of human development that William has surpassed. In a more prosaic version of the same tendency, Thomas De Quincey describes Dorothy as a woman of profound feelings and perceptions that she could not articulate because she was too acutely aware of her station in life: “Her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which, being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irrepressible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked, in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age … gave to her whole demeanour and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment and even self-conflict” (131). Even if this were an accurate description of Dorothy's condition, it is so clearly shaped by romantic figures that it is impossible not to assume that De Quincey, like William, is writing Dorothy into a myth that both he and Dorothy had inherited. “Even her very utterance and enunciation often, or rather generally,” he continues, “suffered in point of clearness and steadiness, from the agitation of her excessive sensibility” (131). Strangers, he concludes, might think her to be plagued with an “infirmity of speech” (132). Thus despite her many volumes of letters and travel writing, Dorothy Wordsworth enters into the texts of publicly successful male writers as a woman who was thoroughly emblematic of an aesthetic response she does not herself voice.

One can see a similar mode of dispossession at work in Ann Yearsley's reputation. That many of Yearsley's moments of sublime inarticulation can support two apparently contradictory meanings marks them, we have argued, as the products of a particular and even fleeting moment in the history of literacy and literary culture, when the rhetoric of sublime silence was thought to indicate that which is beyond words. Yearsley seemed to take advantage of this situation to demonstrate the competencies that, according to any number of cultural imperatives, she was not supposed to have had. Yet the same equivocation that enabled Yearsley's poetic distinction was easily collapsed back into the cultural logic of those reformers for whom, one recalls, literacy is concomitant with Anglican reform. A friend of More, for example, commenting upon Yearsley's “curious” descriptions of the “state of her own mind,” writes: “The consciousness of extraordinary powers, unable to exert themselves (as she seems to conceive) from the insuperable barrier of ignorance, with which her mind is surrounded, and which it is perpetually struggling to surmount, is a new and very interesting representation.¹⁷ This writer seems to suspect a gap between Yearsley's aesthetic performances and her almost obsessive claim that she is unable to perform at all. But his apparent suspicion is quickly explained away, as Yearsley's sublime inarticulation is cast into a myth of self-development, one quite different from her own. A similar kind of primal inarticulateness may be “observed in a child,” he continues, “who has been conscious of more mind than might be expected from its years, and who seemed to feel that it was only withheld by the imbecility of its age from saying or doing something above the reach of a child's capacity” (Roberts, I:217). This remark, of course, is meant to be sympathetic, but it effectively and completely erases the complex social, cultural, aesthetic, and literary imperatives with which this particular poet was compelled to contend. Indeed, it mirrors the efforts of William Wordsworth to literalize and reify his sister's tropes of inarticulation, to represent them as a stage in a presumably universal condition, and to offer that scheme, in turn, as proof of his own distinction. In this sense, Yearsley's seemingly generous reader does more damage than the oft-cited ravings of the equally condescending More against her “ungrateful” charge. In naturalizing Yearsley's carefully crafted inarticulate sublime, More's correspondent effectively guarantees that Yearsley, however artful her poetic performances, could never achieve the kind of cultural capital that, apparently, she so desperately desired. Given this context, Yearsley's question—”why should I wish for words?”—is not only unanswerable but bitterly ironic.

If these two examples may be taken as representative of a gendered economy of prestige, the value of romantic women's writing is determined in advance, not by the words they use, but by the words they meet. It is subject to a kind of symbolic violence through which social and cultural differences are not mitigated, but (re)produced. Thus women writers may seem to occupy a similar position as Dorothy's Highlanders who, as we have seen, mark the necessary border of literary culture, the place at which the other's language must be domesticated, disowned, or repossessed. Felicia Hemans, for example, epitomizes her ambivalence about the literary marketplace when she comments that writing is defined by an impossible struggle with language: “do not words faint and fail?” she asks. In a massive displacement of—and highly conventionalized protest against—a cultural predicament, Hemans decides that the aspiring soul will find its voice only in heaven, where, “Powerless no more,” “Vainly it shall not strive … on weak words to pour a stream of fire. …”¹⁸ Such ambivalences leave feminist critics of romantic writing in a somewhat precarious position. It is possible, of course, to revalue the usually didactic, devotional, or sentimental writing of many women writers of the period, to insist, with Hannah More, that they constitute a separate (and perhaps more socially valuable) realm of letters than that practiced by men. It is possible, alternatively, to refuse that imaginary community and to focus, instead, on how “woman” is a necessary figure of inarticulation in the (more legitimate) productions by William Wordsworth and his literary allies. Yet it is worth remembering that Ann Yearsley, Dorothy Wordsworth, and other late eighteenth-century women are neither Dorothy's Highlanders nor her singers at the Staubbach falls. Instead, their works are symptomatic of struggles within literary culture to police, protect, and promote the bounds of literariness itself. The specific social character of these struggles is often obscured, albeit in different ways, by contemporary neo-formalist and feminist analyses that reify the figure of inarticulation in attempts to identify, define, or revalue romantic writing. We hope to have suggested, alternatively, that to enter into debates about the moral or literary value of women's writing while using the sublime as a norm, even when that norm is challenged, could be simply to reproduce, yet again, the notion of an official literary language, and with it the ideological tensions that such an effort undoubtedly implies. As Bourdieu puts a similar idea, the struggles among writers—and critics, one assumes—over the protocols of literariness “contribute, through their very existence, to producing both the legitimate language, defined by its distance from the ‘common language,’ and belief in its legitimacy’ (58). Given this, one wonders what would happen if we simply stopped playing the game of aesthetic mastery in relation to the sublime and focused, instead, on the social relations that the notions of mastery and competency both imply and help to reproduce.

Notes

1. See Wordsworth, George and Sarah Green—A Narrative (1808). The Narrative indicates something of Dorothy's interest in literacy and popular education, and demonstrates the ways in which this interest intersects with the gendered ideology which states that it is the (educated) woman's duty to become a moral guardian of social stability by educating the poor. Not surprisingly, the Narrative also expresses many of Dorothy's misconceptions of the rural poor and popular literacy. To offer a suggestive example, while she is delighted that the Greens had encouraged the children “in the love of learning” (79), Dorothy inventories their various reading skills and decides that, as orphans to be put under the care of the more fortunate, they are now “likely to be better instructed in reading and writing” (87). It is as if being orphaned, and becoming servants or wards of the parish, suddenly gives these children an unexpected opportunity to be domesticated to the written word. Dorothy believes that the children can now be “instructed,” not that they will be “instructed” differently than they would have been had their parents lived. On the relationship between woman's authority of the heart and her role in consolidating middle-class economic and cultural hegemony, see Armstrong. On the reading habits of the laboring classes, see Vincent 1989. On Wordsworth's Narrative, see Levin, 41-52; and Wolfson, 154-62.

2. Yearsley, “Brutus: A Fragment,” in The Rural Lyre: ll. 291, 293, 295-96. The poem is an unfinished epic about an encounter between the Trojan Brutus and British “savages.” It is also an obvious allegory of contemporary England and the civilizing influence the literate must exercise over the “savage” poor.

3. “To Mr. Raikes, on His Benevolent Scheme for Rescuing Poor Children from Vice and Misery, by Promoting Sunday Schools” (Poems, on Several Occasions, ll. 131-32, 130).

4. Our emphasis differs from that of critics who insist that when women writers recoil from the sublime, it is a symptom of their preoccupation with domesticity, community, the material, the near at hand, and the literal. These arguments reflect Carol Gilligan's continuing influence on romantic studies (see for example Homans, 40-67; and Alexander, 167-192). Anne K. Mellor makes a similar argument in Romanticism and Gender: women writers, she writes, contest “Burke's and Wordsworth's representations of the sublime as a moment of masculine empowerment over female nature” by “offering an alternative definition of the sublime as an experience that produces an intensified emotional and moral participation in a human community” (105). In contrast, our focus is not on romantic ontologies of nature, gender, and community but on the relationship among gender, class, and the cultural (re)production and circulation of literariness in texts by women, for whom the sublime is variously rendered and valued.

5. “Clifton Hill” (Poems, On Several Occasions, ll. 195-99).

6. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, 27, 30. Dorothy's interest in Sunday schools continued intermittently throughout her life. In 1811, for example, she gladly finds time to “encourage” local Sunday schools by lending her “occasional presence” in the classroom (Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part I: 1806-1811, 492 [cited hereafter in the text as MY, I]). To remark another, related illustration of her interest to educational schemes, in 1814 Dorothy remarks approvingly that Mary Hutchinson, the wife of Tom Hutchinson, is running a private school “on Dr. Bell's plan” (i.e., Dr. Andrew Bell, the educational reformer whose system also appealed to William Wordsworth). Significantly, Dorothy adds that Mary Hutchinson is “well fitted for the duty of instruction by Books, and all other cares belonging to children,” thereby indicating the close ideological association between concepts of femininity, women's social function, and their duty to educate poor children (Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part II: 1812-1820, 162).

7. “Irregular Verses” (“The Collected Poems of Dorothy Wordsworth,” ll. 60-69).

8. For Bourdieu, “intimidation” is a “symbolic violence which is not aware of what it is.” Since it “can only be exerted on a person predisposed (in his habitus) to feel it,” its cause lies not in an individual but “in the relation between the situation or the intimidating person (who may deny any intimidating intention) and the person intimidated, or rather, between the social conditions of production of each of them” (51). To analyze the “intimidation” of a particular female writer, from this perspective, is to replace considerations of personal psychology with those of social structure.

9. Levin observes that Wordsworth's writing is “frequently in line with the attitudes and diction of writers on the sublime and picturesque” (13). See also Nabholtz, and Woof (24-25). For a valuable critique of Bermingham, see Michasiw. Of special interest here are Michasiw's remarks on the deliberate artificiality of Gilpin's picturesque. Gilpin, Michasiw insists, consciously produced a set of arbitrary rules of aesthetic practice, rules which could be reproduced by any literate person (92). Michasiw does not, however, consider the possibility that “literate” and “literacy” are themselves ideologically overdetermined terms.

10. The Prelude (1805), V:398, 401, 406-409.

11. “The text” Dorothy attributes to William in this passage—“containing in itself,” as she writes, “the whole history of the Highlander's life,” including “his melancholy, his superstition” and “visionariness which results from a communion with the unwordliness of nature”—is more than an example of William's propensity for transforming solitary Highlanders into emblems of sublime ideality. It is also an example of his penchant for interpreting Highland life on the basis of prior reading, since this “text” is in fact an inter-text based upon a note to the fourth book of Ossian's Temora. Here Macpherson explains that local methods of cattle tending often forced Highlanders to sleep in the open “amidst the whistling of winds, and the roar of waterfalls. The gloominess of the scenes around them was apt to beget that melancholy disposition of mind, which most readily receives impression of the extraordinary and supernatural kind” (quoted in Landon, 363). Many details of Macpherson's note are repeated in the “text” Dorothy records here, including the presence of cattle herders amid the “gloominess” of Highland nature, and the Highlander's predisposition to melancholy superstition, and a supernatural visionariness. As is well known, the “Solitary Reaper,” another of William's idealized emblems of Highland melancholy, is based upon a prior text, namely, the passage of Thomas Wilkinson's Tours to the British Mountains (London, 1824), where he describes a solitary Highland reaper singing in Erse: “the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more” (12). William of course knew Wilkinson and had read this text before writing the poem.

12. On schooling, literacy, and fate of Gaelic see Durkacz (1978, 1983), MacKinnon (127-29), Houston (1985), Stephens (555-57), and Withers (57-271).

13. See also Jones, who argues that in the later eighteenth century the largest numbers of book buyers among the Scottish laboring classes resided in the southwest and the Borders (35).

14. The revised poem “On Approaching the Staub-bach, Lauterbrunnen” was published in 1822. See Poetical Works, III:171.

15. The lines Dorothy quotes were published in 1819 in a note to A Tale of Paraguay, Canto III (Southey, Poetical Works, II:125). Southey's note includes the first (unpublished) version of William's sonnet in addition to William's brief prose description of the same event.

16. See A Tale of Paraguay (Poetical Works, VII: Canto III, stanzas 35-39).

17. Although her poetry was reviewed favorably (Tompkins, 89), writers far into the 1850s echo the view of her recorded here. Cottle remarks that had she been educated, “there is no limiting the distinction to which she might have attained” (I:70), while an anonymous reviewer writes in 1855 that her poetry presents the equally sublime and ridiculous spectacle of a “mind conscious of extraordinary powers vainly struggling to surmount the barriers of ignorance” (Chambers Journal 24 [1855]: 302. This source has not been previously located; it is reprinted in the Eclectic Magazine 37 [1856]: 396). Southey suggests that she died “deranged” by this conflict (Uneducated Poets, 134). For similar estimates of Yearsley's poetry, see, for example, Tompkins (69), Curran (199), and Waldron (319).

18. Hemans, “A Thought of the Future,” from The Complete Works, II: 296, 297.

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