Wordsworth and His Adversaries

470 Pages·2010·0.97 MB·English

by  Lisa Spiro

Wordsworth and His Adversaries:
A Study in the Hermeneutics of Disparagement

Alan Grob
Rice University
Abbreviations
Citations
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from
Wordsworth’s poems, apart from The Prelude, are from
William Wordsworth. Poetical Works. ed. Ernest de
Selicourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1940-49. Citations from poems are
initially identified by title and line number, and after
that by line number. Manuscript variants and editorial
commentary are identified as PW, followed by volume and
page number. Quotations from The Prelude are from William
Wordsworth, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind. ed.
Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed., rev. Helen Darbishire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). All quotations
from The Prelude are from the 1805 text, unless otherwise
indicated. Citations from The Prelude are identified in
the text as Prelude and by book and line number.
Quotations from the prose writings of Wordsworth are
from The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. ed. W. J. B.
Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, (3 vols). (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974). Quotations from The Prose
Works are identified in the text by the abbreviation Pr.W
followed by volume and page number.
Grob ii
Quotations from the letters of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth are from The Letters of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 7 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1967-88): The Early Years, 1787-1805. 2nd ed.
rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967).
(Identified in the text as EY, followed by page number.)
The Middle Years, Part 1. 1806-1811. 2nd ed. rev. Mary
Moorman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. (Identified in the text
by the abbreviation MY1 followed by the page number.) The
Middle Years, Part 2. 1812-1820. 2nd ed. rev. Mary Moorman
and Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970. (Identified in
the text by the abbreviation MY2 followed by the page
number.) The Later Years, 1821-1853. 2nd ed. rev. Alan G.
Hill. 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-1993).
(Identified in the text by the abbreviation LY followed by
the part number and the page number.)
Quotations from the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth are
from Dorothy Wordsworth. The Grasmere Journals. ed. Pamela
Woof. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1991. Identified in
the text by the abbreviation GJ followed by the page
number.
Grob 1
Introduction

Of the convulsive changes that have worked their way
through the field of Romantic--and especially
Wordsworthian--studies during the postmodernity of the past
thirty years, none seems more truly ominous than the most
recent, the widespread adoption in the past two decades by
critics of those adversarial presuppositions that now seem
to shape and govern so many undertakings of real influence
in the field. While the term "adversarial" has become a
critical commonplace, its meaning self-evident, its
pertinence for my purposes derives from a casual remark by
Marjorie Levinson in her plainly seminal Wordsworth's Great
Period Poems, her observation that adoption by the new
historicism of feminism's "adversarial tactics" served as a
major point of affinity between the two movements,
movements that, I should add, were understood to be
essentially disparate when Levinson used the term in 1986,
but which now have increasingly coalesced.1 So great has
been the impact of these movements on current critical
practice that John Williams, discussing the new historicism
in his fine 2002 conspectus of modern Wordsworth
scholarship asserts no less a claim for new historicism
than that “no critical “school” or “movement,” apart from
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the Cornell project, has done more since the biographical
and textual work of the early twentieth century to breath
new life into Wordsworth studies in England,” crediting
“the progenitors of the new historicism”—-Jerome McGann,
Marjorie Levinson, David Simpson, and Alan Liu are those he
names—-with having managed (along with the Cornell editors)
to redefine the parameters of what it means to study
Wordsworth and his “Romantic” context.”2 Even more recently
Kenneth Johnston in his chapter on the new historicism in
the Oxford Guide to Romanticism of 2004 expands on
Williams’s judgment describing this “method of literary
interpretation” as, “at the present moment, the dominant
procedure for studying British Romantic literature in the
Anglo-American academy.”3 And moving in tandem with these
dominant new historicist procedures, and often subsumed by
them, is a vastly expanded body of feminist criticism,
engaged not just in the recovery of neglected and often
intrinsically interesting texts by women writers of the
period, but, more germane to our purpose, almost as deeply
engaged, more often than not with hostile intent, in
scrutinizing the attitudes toward women of the canonical
poets, with (as I hope to show in subsequent pages) no poet
more sharply and more hostilely scrutinized than
Wordsworth. As a consequence of the undeniable ascendancy
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of these critical schools, what has seemingly emerged in so
much of Romantic studies, almost by consensus, is an
interpretive community adversarially self-defined whose
quarrel, astonishingly enough for those of us who came
before, is not over but with the subject of its criticism.
In an earlier time, one gained entry to one's
interpretive community by taking sides on some time-honored
and well-worn point at issue: Milton's vexed conundrum of
the two-handed engine, for example, to cite a fairly minor
but familiar example, or, to bring matters closer to
Wordsworthian concerns, the question of whether William
Wordsworth is a poet of nature or a poet of consciousness,
a transcendentalist or an empiricist, a continuator of the
Miltonic tradition or its oedipally agonistic foe.
Moreover, in that long-ago time one presumably chose one's
community for the ostensible purpose of clarifying meaning,
getting it right (even if the practitioners of these older
traditions were not always as disinterestedly objective in
their search for truth as they believed themselves to be).
And one sought to clarify meaning, to get it right, because
in most cases the authors written about deserved no less--
or so it was assumed--or how else could one justify the
expenditure of attention and effort? Toward such authors
the critic voiced and presumably felt respect, indeed
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admiration, an admiration and respect no doubt
aesthetically grounded but often conveying something more,
and these respectful and admiring presuppositions the
critic knew to be the unstated givens not only of the
interpretive community to which the critic belonged but
also of those rival interpretive communities with whom the
critic quarreled. But obviously no such unstated givens of
tacit respect--and certainly not tacit admiration--figure
in the presuppositions of those who would claim membership
in an interpretive community adversarially conceived,
whether operating under the banner of new historicism or of
an increasingly historicized feminism. In either case the
principal requisite for membership in one's chosen
community would seem to be the new historicist or feminist
critic’s virtually a priori presumption of his
adversarially chosen subject's political and ethical
shortcomings, the adoption of a hermeneutics of
disparagement designed to find fault and assign blame, to
seek out and be assured of finding evidences of bad faith,
reactionary currying of establishment favor, class, and sex
bias of the most egregious kind on the part of the author
in question, or so doctrine and practice teach us in
Wordsworth studies.
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To be sure, in that celebrated early text, Levinson
herself disavowed any intention “to depreciate Wordsworth’s
transcendence or to trivialize profoundly moving works,”
but she claimed rather that she hoped to “renew our sense
of their power by exposing the conditions of their
success.”4 (Levinson 3). It is a goal seemingly respectful
of the writer in question, but, I must sadly add, that
avowed respectfulness is seldom realized in new historicist
or feminist practice, which rarely leads to enhanced
respect for the writer under discussion. Indeed, the
spirit in which even the earliest of these critics wrote
comes closer to what we read in Roger Sale, one of the most
viscerally adversarial of Wordsworth’s critics whose
summary judgment upon Wordsworth is a dismissively
derogatory condemnation of “Wordsworthian nonsense.”5 Nor
do these critics make any allowance for possible changes in
Wordsworth’s political attitudes or even in the radically
altered political circumstances within which he wrote
during the “golden decade.” After all, when McGann first
threw the ideological gauntlet down in The Romantic
Ideology of 1983, he made clear that no significant
distinctions were to be made between early and late, that
“Peele Castle,” a poem of 1805 that Wordsworth himself
subtitled a “palinode,” that is, a recantation of earlier
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beliefs, and “Tintern Abbey,” the great poem of 1798 that
critics understood to profess the faith that “Peele Castle”
recanted, “are only separated from each other,
ideologically and stylistically, by a difference in
emphasis.”6
In this regard the adversarially minded new
historicism and the feminist criticism with which it bears
affinities can be looked upon as representing a fundamental
paradigm shift in literary criticism, differing radically
from both an older historical criticism (even when
practiced by such seeming political unassailables as E. P.
Thompson and David Erdman) and a deconstructionist
postmodernism that new historicism and feminism would still
in essential respects claim as their theoretizing
forerunner. For Thompson, after all, the aim of his
classic essay of 1969 was to show that Wordsworth and
Coleridge at the time of Lyrical Ballads had kept the faith
and retained their Jacobin loyalties, that while perhaps
disenchanted they had not yet defaulted as their critics
had often charged.7 And for Erdman, of course, William
Blake was the very epitome of the politically committed
poet, committed in the right way and to the right cause.
Moreover, even Yale criticism in its deconstructionist mode
had gone to the Romantics for what its critics believed the
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Romantics offered, their strengths and insights--even if
occasionally these were the insights of blindness--rather
than for what could be exposed to an audience of
ideologically like-minded readers--the errors and failings
of these heretofore misguidedly respected and admired
poets. Thus, the writers who interested Paul De Man most
and those whom he clearly most respected and admired were
often credited with a rhetorical self-awareness by which
they had knowingly made available their work to the very
deconstructive practices that De Man himself pursued and in
which he would have us engage.
To be sure, in its initial emergence, new historicism
often saw itself in somewhat less radical terms, not as
proposing a paradigm shift but rather as building on
foundations laid down by a preceding generation's turn to
theory. Though Levinson told us in 1986 that "the trend in
Wordsworth criticism today--and I do mean today—-is
crystallized by the phrase, 'historical imagination,'"8
(11), a term she would apply to a practice she designated
"deconstructive materialism" (Levinson 10), she was still
careful to add in that seeming heyday of deconstruction the
qualifying stipulation that "one cannot unknow Derrida"
(11). And the new historicism did and does deal almost
unrelentingly with the absent or displaced, a seemingly