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Point of View in the Narrative Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron

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Point of View in the Narrative Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1980 Point of View in the Narrative Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron Helen Herber Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Herber, Helen, "Point of View in the Narrative Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron" (1980). Dissertations. 2107. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2107 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1980 Helen Herber POINT OF VIEW IN THS NARRATIVE POETRY OF vJORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, AND BYRON by Helen Herber A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 1980 G) Copyright by Helen Herber 1980 All Rights Reserved ACKNm"'LEDGEMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to Loyola University Graduate School for giving me the opportunity to continue literary study; to the Schmitt Foundation for providing funds for a dissertation fellowship; to Dr. James Rocks, Director of Graduate Studies in English, for his assistance in the formal process of submitting the dissertation; to my family and friends for their humor and goodwill; and above all to my committee: to Dr. John Nabholtz, the chairman, whose scholarship in the Romantics inspired my own interest and has ensured accuracy and depth in my comprehension of the poetry; to Dr. Eileen Baldeshwiler, whose expertise in narrative theory helped to make my thinking and writing more intellectually sound; to Dr. Thomas Gorman, whose availability and encouragement kindled my confidence as I completed the dissertation. I have been privileged in working with a committee whose critical challenges were consistently delivered in a kind and comradely spirit of tutorship. ii VITA The author, Helen Herber, was born May 20, 1946, in Dublin, Ireland, to Cyril James and Mary Frances O'Meehan. In 1963 she graduated from St. Louis' High School in Dublin and entered University College, Dublin, where she studied for the degree, conferred November, 1966, of Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature. She began graduate studies at Loyola University of Chicago in 1970 and was awarded the Master of Arts degree in English in February, 1974. In 1971, she was granted a four-year teaching assistantship at Loyola University and has taught at college or university in a part-time capacity during the past five years. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNO\'JLEDGEMENT S . .. ii VITA . iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION . 1 I I • WORDSWORTH . 19 The Salisbury Plain Poems 19 The Story of Margaret 32 Lyrical Ballads and Related Poems 56 III. COLERIDGE ..••••.•..••..•...• 102 IV. BYRON • . • . 141 The Oriental Tales . 142 Mazeppa and Don Juan . • • 173 V. CONCLUSION •.•....•.....•.••. 187 BIBLIOGRAPHY . • • . • . • . • 19 3 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The subject of this study is the posture of the narrator--in the criticism of fiction expressed as point of view--in a selection of narrative works by three major Romantic poets. While the Romantic period in England produced alarge and distinguished body of lyric poetry, it was also characterized by prolific narrative creation, and indeed many of the major Romantic texts are narrative works. Yet surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to these works in their essential character as narratives. Much has been written concerning the poems under consideration here, but the preponderance of this criticism addresses itself to matters of language and imagery, to theme and mythology, to historical and biographical commentary; the narrative procedures of the works have been frequently ignored or misconstrued, and critical bafflement and disagreement have been the result. But careful scrutiny of the essentially narrative elements in the works, the most central of which I take to be point of view, serves both to clarify the structural principles of individual poems and to reveal a hitherto unobserved continuity of formal intention among them, disparate as they are in style. l 2 This study focuses on point of view in the works for two reasons, the first a matter of principle, the other a response to the demands of the literature itself. Point of view is the crucial technical choice which faces the narrative artist--it is his exclusive domain, and distin- guishes him from the lyric and dramatic poet. As Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg assert: The problem of point of view is narrative art's own problem, one that it does not share with lyric and dramatic literature. By definition narrative art requires a story and a story-teller. In the relation­ ship between the teller and the audience, lies the essence of narrative art.l I conceive of point of view furthermore as comprehending the other narrative choices made by the artist: it is the structure through which, with the exception of metre and stanza form, all the other structures of the work are filtered. It provides the reader access to plot and character, shapes his attitudes and feelings toward them and varies the aesthetic distance. Point of view then is the chief technical means available to the writer of narrative for the control of the other narrative elements in his work. While questions of point of view are relevant to all narrative works, they command our attention with particular intensity in some works. Such a high proportion of the central Romantic narrative texts employ some form 1 The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 240. 3 of manipulation of their point of view, by the use of eccentric or unreliable narrators, narrators whose relation­ ships to their stories are fraught with ironies, and whose relationships with the reader characteristically go beyond the basic demands of getting the story told, that questions of point of view appear the most natural and compelling questions to ask. A great number of these poems are concerned, directly or indirectly, with matters of vision, with perspective, with the disparity that may exist between experience and recollections of experience, between the mind and the objects of its contemplation. In the ambivalence, unreliability, and multiform human fallibility that characterize many of these narrators, these concerns are dramatized. The ambiguous relationship of teller to tale becomes a metaphor for a central element in Romantic sensibility, that fluctuating uncertainty of the mind in confrontation with reality. In this sense, the techniques of these poems are their themes, the points of view they employ their subject matter. This study purports to offer examples of how a significant segment of Romantic narrative poetry manipulates point of view and it is only among the major Romantics that we find such manipulation of point of view. The poems of minor figures of the age--of Scott, Southey and Landor, for instance--are largely innocent of technical refinement, depending for the most part on conventional Editorial- or 4 2 Neutral-Omniscient narration. The poems treated here represent not one tendency among many, but a preeminent tendency in Romantic narrative. Certain major Romantic narratives, however, are not treated here, most notably Wordsworth's Prelude. Recent criticism has established the predominance of lyric and dramatic as opposed to narrative elements in that work, 3 and I have consequently regarded it as beyond the scope of my study. The works of Shelley and of Keats, both of whom are major figures, are also, perhaps conspicuously, absent, largely because Shelley wrote almost no narrative poetry, while the ambiguity of Keats's narratLves, although it is related to the effects with which I am concerned here, originates in style rather than in manipulation of point of view. The theoreticians whom I have found most useful and who have supplied me with most of the concepts to pursue this discussion are Norman Friedman and Wayne Booth. 4 Although they approach the question of point of view from very different directions, and their works on the subject are radically different in aim and scope, the descriptions 2 These terms are discussed below, pp. 5-8. 3 see esp. Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry: 1787-1814 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 208-59.- 4Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept," PMLA, LXX (1955), 1160-8 4; ~vayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 5 they provide of the working of point of view are largely complementary. The chief virtue of Friedman's treatment of point of view is that it provides a plausible descrip- tion of the kinds of narrators possible, of the position or angle of vision of each in relation to the story material, of the sources of information and the means of transmission available to each, and of the distance at which the narrator places the reader from the story. Points of view, which Friedman divides into eight kinds, are ranged along a scale of authorial visibility, from summary narrative, where the author's voice dominates, to immediate scene, where the focus is on a specific moment in the characters' lives and the author is unobtrusive or invisible: in other words, from telling to showing. Of these eight, only the first four have immediate application to the narratives under discussion here: Editorial Omniscience, Neutral Omniscience, "!"-as-Witness, and "!"-as-Protagonist. The latter four, Multiple Selective Omniscience, Selective Omniscience, The Dramatic Mode, and The Camera, 5 are derived from fictional styles that predominate in the twentieth century, and 5These four constitute further stages in authorial invisibility.
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