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Wordsworth and His Adversaries 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 Grob 2 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 Grob 3 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 Grob 4 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. Grob 5 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 Grob 6 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.
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