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R. Fleming

WORDSWORTH'S «THE SOLITARY REAPER»: GENDERED SPACE AND THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE ROMANTIC LYRIC

In the article object of analysis is the literary work of the nineteenth century poet William Wordsworth «The Solitary Reaper», which is an example of romanticism literature. Researcher defines features of the way narator, or romantic lyric hero, comprehend surroundings, illustrated in the figurative picture of the poem, and his own place in it. Special attention is concentrated on the image of nature and lyric heroine, from the description of which by lyric hero author forms characteristics of the last one.

«Both of them [Wordsworth and Darwin] derive from history itself a sufficient reassurance about the value of the story they have to tell. They look back far into the past and suppose that if one can look back far enough the origin ceases to be of much concern.» D. Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance

«Being, as it were, under-mothered (early orphaned) and over-natured (living in the Lake District) may then have given Wordsworth far greater psychological dependence on the feminine than either himself or critics male and female have allowed for.» J. P. Ward, «Will No One Tell Me What She Sings?: Women and Gender in the Poetry of William Wordsworth»

In a lecture about the Italian Romantic poet, what the introduction of a consideration of gender, Giacomo Leopardi, Francesco De Sanctis, the a consideration of the nature of this frequent mar- nineteenth century literary critic, observed that in ginalization of women in Romantic poetry, does in many of Leopardi's poems we have a clear and this context is to suggest new ways to interpret both powerful sense of the poet's naeed to be affirmed the gender-shaped strategies of the male Roman- and loved, but what is not as clear is that the poet tic poet and that ideological distance between the is himself capable of giving the affirmation and love lyrical «I» and the woman in those typical Roman- that he seeks. De Sanctis goes on to say that in the tic lyrics in which the ostensibly affirmed or de- case of Leopardi we have a poet who would rath- sired woman is so often removed to the margins er be kissed than give a kiss. In a very concrete of the text. That distance or space between the and demonstrable sense the male Romantic poet, male poet and the woman in the text constitutes an whether in Italy, England, France, Russia, Germa- imagined but effective barrier enabling the poet to ny, Spain or elsewhere, more often than not, would make it highly unlikely for any demands to reach prefer to be the object rather than the dispenser of him across that ostensibly great divide between self genuine sympathy and affection. In his self-conscious and Other. This is a self-constructed abyss arising role as lyric poet his primary concern remains him- from the creative self-absorption that is at the very self and his own feelings and reactions, and this heart of the Romantic lyric. Demands from the concern frequently obliterates or minimizes the Other for recognition as a self, as opposed to an presence of women in Romantic poetry. For the object of discourse have the potential to divert the Romantic poet the universe revolves around his Romantic poet's attention from his concern in the ego, and his extreme self-consciousness often ex- poem with himself («the egotistical sublime», to use cludes the notions of genuine care and responsi- Keats's description of Wordsworth) and with his bility for others. Such an observation might easily own feelings. If the chasm or distance opened up be dismissed as another one of those facile con- in the poem between the poet and the female ob- tradictions that so frequently seem to define that ject of discourse prevents the poet from receiving revolutionary yet reactionary figure of the Romantic a kiss, it also allows him to avoid reaching out and poet whose love of nature is often not matched by risking himself to bestow a kiss. a generous love of his fellow man. I contend that It was no less a figure than William Word-

Fleming R., 2003 64 НАУКОВІ ЗАПИСКИ. Том 21. Філологічні науки

sworth's friend, collaborator, and fellow poet, premise of the poem, its claim to be privy to the Samuel Taylor Coleridge who (echoing De Sanc- sight of a woman who is absorbed in a presum- tis on Leopardi) observed of Wordsworth: «Word- ably involuntary experience... is intimately linked sworth is by nature incapable of being in Love, tho, with the poem's erotic tinge» (80). We note that in no man more tenderly attached». Wordsworth's «The Solitary Reaper» the «Maiden» is removed «The Solitary Reaper» is one of the most antholo- physically from where the poet stands. We know gized of his poems. Two, by now, classic exami- that she is to be seen at work and singing in the nations of Wordsworth's poetry, Geoffrey Hart- field. At the very beginning of the poem then the man's Wordsworth s Poetry 1787-1814 and Frede- distance opened up between observer and observed, rick Garber's Wordsworth and the Poetry of En- between subject and object, is the safe space (for counter, begin with extended discussions of this the poet-narrator) established by and through the poem. By their choice of «The Solitary Reaper» to poem, a buffer zone that the poet has the capacity introduce their investigations of the Wordsworthian or power to diminish, though he does not have the poetic opus they point to the exemplary character desire to diminish that distance or space between of this poem as a guide to understanding many of himself and the female object of discourse. This the concerns of Wordsworth's poetry as a whole. same distance serves to define, in part, what it «The Solitary Reaper» is a more accessible and means to be a male, Romantic poet, since that space representative poem of European Romanticism than represents the sense of absence that defines the task even the acknowledged major poems such as «Tin- of the poet, namely, to find figures for the absent tern Abbey», The Immortality Ode, and The Pre- referent. In this endeavor the poet makes that gen- lude. In «The Solitary Reaper» the poem is present- dered space, that distance or separation in which ed almost as a painting, a brief and fleeting land- the woman's difference is situated, resonate with scape meditation captured by the imagination. It substitutions for the literal. It is the literal - sym- does not present itself as having those didactic or bolically represented by the solitary reaper - that aggressive «palpable designs» to which Keats ob- remains outside the figurative re-presentations of jected. Nor does it call attention to itself as having the poem. From a Lacanian perspective the use of a profound or subtle message to convey about the figurative language itself may appear to be both the great truths or insights associated with those «spots admission and the demonstration that the object of of time». As such, for what it excludes as well as desire, the fascinating woman created in the poem for what it includes, it has been admired as one of exclusively through the two senses of sight and the more successful examples of the transforma- hearing, is fmally,/rom the poet's perspective, dis- tive power of Wordsworthian, i. e., Romantic, tanced and never substantially there even in the memory and imagination. imagined landscape. If this solitary laborer is the In «The Solitary Reaper» there is an obvious creation of the visual and auditory, then she stands physical and not so obvious psychic distance be- in a long line of spiritual or non-corporeal women tween the poet and the «Highland Lass.» The in Western poetry who fail to achieve a substantial poet-narrator speaks about the young woman, but presence in poems they seem to occupy. Just as not to her. The poem functions as a deceptive rhe- vision situates the Other at a distinct remove from torical strategy that holds out, initially, the implicit the observer, so too does hearing establish a space promise of a focused view of an idealized female, or distance across which sound moves to a receiv- but it delivers instead a view of the poet's own er, and these particular senses, sight and hearing, sensitivity. This poem was written in 1805 and are traditionally regarded as the more spiritual as published in 1807. Wordsworth's first published opposed to corporeal senses - touch, smell, and poem, «On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep taste - that activate our «knowledge» of the object at a Tale of Distress», had appeared in 1787 and, as a verifiably concrete, physical entity. One of the similarly, his apparent concern with a young woman ironies of Romantic creation (and a source of its revealed itself as primarily concerned with himself tension) is precisely this fact that the process of and with his own reactions and feelings. What these idealizing the woman through senses that, at least two poems, separated by twenty years, share is the since Provençal and Dolce Stil Novo poetry, are experience of the voyeur on the part of the poet. associated with the more spiritual or ethereal sens- Much of what Adela Pinch observes about Word- es, also serves patriarchy's need to assert her prox- sworth's youthful 1787 poem has resonance for imity to nature. The exaltation and idealization of «The Solitary Reaper» as well: «The voyeuristic the woman serve to differentiate her status as lit- Fleming R. Wordsworth's «The Solitary Reaper»... 65 erary statuary - in harmony with the garden, with constructed from the various linguistic cues. Even the landscape, and with nature-from the self-rep- if one were to construe the poem's commands and resentation of the male protagonist whose model questions as merely rhetorical - the poet address- of perfection is the more admired, heroic (and thus ing himself- then one is compelled to conceive of hierarchical) notion of a quester whose final or the poetic voice as having a double valence, namely ultimate development is always yet to be, and thus that of lyrical «I» and auditor or first reader of the never really final, and whose identity, as a conse- text. If the poem then is conceived of as a quint- quence, is intimately associated with the notions of essentially Romantic gesture, the record of the poet progress and growth. communing with himself, then what M. H. Abrams In the opening lines of the poem we have dis- identifies as the traditional «audience» must, of tance or space presented not as a condition, but necessity, be seen as second readers of the text; rather as a defining characteristic of the relation- the poet as confidant (receiver) of his own mes- ship between the poet-narrator and the woman he sage being the first reader. Regardless of our rhe- sees: torical or non-rhetorical reading of those impera- Behold her, single in the field, tives and interrogatives in Wordsworth's poem, we Yon solitary Highland Lass! are invariably confronted with multiple presence in Reaping and singing by herself; the very act of actualizing the poem. It is this quan- Stop here, or gently pass! dary to which Maurice Blanchot alludes when he Alone she cuts and binds the grain And sings a melancholy strain points to the manner in which the poet necessarily calls into question the text's assertion of solitude. If distance is established at the beginning of Since, Blanchot implies, the text can never be sin- «The Solitary Reaper», then the text is even more gle or alone: emphatic about the isolation that characterizes the It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by woman's disposition in the text: it is asserted that addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent she is isolated, alone in the landscape. The first five the individual from being alone. verses identify her through the terms, «single», The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of «solitary», «by herself», and «alone». In order for everything the word excludes .... the poet-narrator to seduce the reader to enter his How can a person be alone if he confides to us that he perspective and vision of the poem's experience he is alone? sets the scene for us; the problem in the poem is He summons us in order to drive us away; he muses on that, to reverse Lacan's formulation, the male poet us in order to persuade us that he is not musing on us; he speaks the language of men at the moment when does not know what he is saying. A feminist per- there is no longer, for him, either language or man. It is spective on the poem clearly reveals that, contrary easy to believe that this person, who ought to be to the poet's declarations, the reaper is not, in any separated from himself by despair, not only retains meaningful sense, distant, since that space between the thought of some other person but uses this solitude the poet and the woman in the text will be a func- to create that obliterates his solitude. tion of gender, and not an unambiguous, objective Herbert von Einem's comments about Fried- description. rich's famous painting, Zwei Manner in Betracht- Aside from the suspect and slippery notion of ung des Mondes are quoted by Wieland Schmied being alone that informs this landscape, there is in his book on Caspar David Friedrich, and points another and equally perplexing qualification that out that the depiction of solitude by the artist cre- textuality itself interposes here. The actual situa- ates a bond with those who would enter that expe- tion or reality of isolation or being alone is that rience and paradoxically, qualifies that notion of «alone» cannot position or conjure up another pres- solitude: «Der Erfahrung der Einsamkeit enspricht ence or consciousness and still be understood as die Erfahrung der Bindung durch das gleiche «alone». Once the poet-narrator speaks, once lan- Schicksal» («The Experience of solitude leads to guage is directed to an auditor, then another pres- the experience of bonding through a sense of a ence is implicated by and through the text. This shared destiny»). I shall return to this painting lat- audience may also be «ideal», but it is nonetheless er in my essay in order to show how gender con- «real» as it functions within the linguistic parame- siderations shape the nature of the narrator's tex- ters and literary conventions established by the tual invitation to share his perspective and experi- poem. Just as reading requires the narrator to be ence in the work of art. constructed, so, too, does the auditor have to be In the poetic landscape described in the poem 66 НАУКОВІ ЗАПИСКИ. Том 21. Філологічні науки not only is the solitary reaper not alone, she is, as cepted. We discern that within that context of I suggested earlier, only marginally there, having gender-shaped poetic strategies distance itself be- been eased aside by the powerful subjectivity of the comes a relative term. If the reader is commanded poet and through the series of images to which her to imaginatively «Behold ... Yon solitary Highland voice and song are compared in the second and Lass», then we are encountering contradiction from third stanzas of the poem: the very beginning of the poem. From the poet's No nightingale did ever chaunt perspective, the solitary woman is «yon», «out More welcome notes to weary bands there» or distant, a distance that increases through- Of travellers in some shady haunt, out the poem, yet she is not so far away from the Among Arabian sands: poet that she cannot be seen performing a specific A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard task, i. e., reaping. If the precise visual details («she In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas cuts and binds the grain») call into question just Among the farthest Hebrides how far away she is, then the fact that she is close enough for the poet to not only hear her singing, Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow but also near enough for him to identify the strains For old, unhappy, far-off things of that song as «plaintive» or sad further qualifies And battles long ago: that notion of distance. He does not guess about Or is it some more humble lay, the character of her specific actions in the field. Familiar matter of to-day? There is no ambiguity, no suggestion of other pos- Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain That has been, and may be again? sible tasks that she might be performing given the distance emphasized. Conjecture does occur in the These figurative substitutions serve to mark a poem, but not in the context of her physicality. What shift in focus from the woman to her voice and the perspective and unstable meaning of «distance» song, but, just as important, they mark the con- allow is the identification of this notion of separa- tours of a space between subject and object in tion as - in this poem - a peculiarly male space: it which the observer or subject remains a person is apparent that while the poet-narrator sees him- who retains his status as a particular conscious- self QÏ wishes to see himself as significantly re- ness to which we relate the concerns and affirma- moved from the woman, he also regards her as near tions of the poem. This consciousness serves to enough to be available for his own purposes. The establish the poetic identity in the poem as a man pleasures of drinking in the physicality, real or aware of himself, as the speaking subject distinct imagined, of the «Maiden» from the safe distance from both the natural landscape and the solitary occupied by the poet as subject and the woman as reaper. Concomitantly, in this same space, the ap- object is a classical description of voyeurism. He parent object of initial «concern» or interest is no is arbitrarily and imaginatively distant (his fiction- longer a person - the «Lass» - but rather a thing, al distance being also dependent upon maintaining the voice and its song. While the integrity of the her ignorance of his presence) while she is suffi- male subject is constant, the woman progressive- ciently proximate for him to discern those specif- ly (!) loses her specificity in being transformed ic, almost minute, details about her physical activ- from active agent to a voice and, finally, to a song. ity and her song that further qualify our under- The surface simplicity of the poem belies the com- standing of the space separating poet-narrator and plexity of the numerous fictions (male fantasies) Scottish peasant (We learn later in the poem, when that support its structure. A fiction created by the the narrator is «physically» even more distant, that poet is that the woman is at the center of the po- she uses a «sickle»). Once a gender perspective is em's focus and concerns, but, as in truth it is a introduced into our reading of the poem we dis- poem about the emotional experience of the poet, cover that the distance opened up by the we see that this assumption helps to ground an poet-narrator between the subject (himself) and the ideological structure or fiction whose parts depend object (the reaper) is a space that is manipulated upon that distance the poem would have the read- and contradictorily defined by the poet. This gen- er believe the poet would overcome. dered space, understood in terms of an ultimately With this outline in mind of the ideological struc- problematic separation from the woman, finds it ture of the Romantic lyric we may begin to re-in- meaning as «distance» defined by the particular terpret the most basic assumptions under which needs of the poet. Primary among these is the need the poem has been traditionally presented and ac- to present his song - the poem - rather than her Fleming R. Wordsworth's «The Solitary Reaper»... 67 song: all that we know about the nature of her song passionate love of nature. In «The Solitary Reap- consists of his emotional reaction to it. er» there is no male figure other than the poet- Distance itself is a central device in the West- narrator himself in the pastoral landscape, and there ern tradition of the pastoral, to which genre Word- is no real identification made between the narrative sworth's poem belongs (I am not using pastoral in voice and his female object of discourse. the strictly classical sense, but rather in the more In spite of all the evidence to the contrary in the modern, inclusive sense of the term that comes poem, some critics of Wordsworth see this poem through Frank M. Chambers, Geoffrey Hartman, establishing a relationship with the solitary reaper. M. H. Abrams, and Stuart Curran). Indeed, it is If as Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and Marg- Curran who suggests that we should regard Word- aret Homans contend, masculine identity is forged sworth «as the greatest of England's pastoral po- in terms of separation, then it should not surprise ets». The idylls of Theocritus and Moschus, Vir- us that a masculinist reading of the poem sees in- gil's Eclogues, Tasso's Aminta, and Milton's «Ly- timacy and relationship precisely where a feminist cidas» are speaking pictures, artworks in which view of the fearful distance constructed or alleged distance or an established space between narrative by the poet-narrator implies an inability to enter into voice and the pastoral scene is understood as a relationship with the woman. Though the poet- defining element of the poem's decorum, a deco- narrator never addresses the woman nor overtly rum that is sometimes only precariously maintained. makes his presence known to her, masculinist crit- In Romantic art the distance between artist and the icism of this poem does, nevertheless, as I have scene presented is seen as diminished or largely indicated, assert a relationship between the two. non-existent since in Romantic aesthetics the work Once again we are confronted the reality that within of art is seen as the expression of the feelings or the context of a phallogocentric culture it is suffi- inner life of the artist. Whether one examines dur- cient for the male to assert or assume relationship ing the Romantic period the paintings of Consta- or a degree of intimacy with the woman regard- ble, Turner, and Caspar David Friedrich, the mu- less of her disposition towards him: within the sic of Beethoven, or the poetry of Wordsworth, masculine economy of the poem relationship - Môrike, Coleridge, Keats, Becquer, Leopardi, Push- which is implied by the reaction of the poet-narrator kin, Lamartine, or Mickiewicz, one discovers that to her voice and song - becomes the prerogative the artist is a participant in the scene, in that the of the authoritative male voice and, like «distance», feelings of the artist color and inform that scene. its meaning is also defined by the desires and needs Certainly Constable's TheHaywain, Friedrich 's Der of the poet. The poet-narrator's admiration and Einsame Байт, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, Tchaik- rapture in the presence of the woman's song, and ovski's Sixth Symphony, and Leopardi's pastoral his subsequent claim to have captured that music poem, «Canto notturno di un pastore errante are sufficient warrant for patriarchal culture to dell'Asia» are feelings and emotions that have all assume that there is now a bond or relationship taken the form of art. In Romantic art the depth of between poet-narrator and woman in the poem, as the artist's personal feeling is usually assumed to if her disposition in the text were of no importance. be translated into a bond with the subject matter That the notion of the validity of the masculine claim or object of discourse. This, in fact, does happen to relationship could go unchallenged in literary even in Romantic «nature» and pastoral poems in culture means that the poem has usually been read those instances in which the poet-narrator identi- from the masculinist perspective. This perspective fies with his male protagonist, as when Môrike in assumes that since the woman in the literary text «An eine Aôlsharfe» laments the death of his broth- is like tissue or Kleenex - insubstantial and easily er, or when Leopardi identifies his own anxieties discarded when used - there is no need to contex- and fears with those of his wandering shepherd in tualize her nor imagine that her disposition in the the «Canto notturno...», or when Friedrich trans- text could be of any relevance in determining or lates his ever new wonder and surprise in the face complicating such aesthetic and ideological co- of nature's monumentality into his traveller in Wan- ordinates as «distance» or «relationship». derer Ober dem Nebelmeer. In none of these exam- Woman, as a solitary reaper, can have meaning ples is there an identification with nature, but rather, within that masculine economy of the poem only a feeling through nature, and, indeed, in these to the extent that she resonates with or corre- works there is more awe, almost a Burkean or sponds to masculine needs and priorities as artic- Kantian fear of nature, rather than an intense and ulated in and through the poem. Her imaginative 68 НАУКОВІ ЗАПИСКИ. Том 21. Філологічні науки

transformation in the poem, as well as that of her tivity of marginal importance, and that his work did song are indices that point towards Romantic imag- involve commanding, ordering, and controlling the ination as the manifestation of masculine desire Other. In this regard we should note that from the asserting itself in the text. Thus, that specific dis- very first stanza of «The Solitary Reaper» Word- tance between poet-narrator and woman is seen as sworth not only assumes that he knows enough a necessary distance, as it is that imaginatively about his audience or ideal reader to address him- manipulated space that enables the male subject to self (as narrative voice) directly to that reader with exploit the feminine as the site of desire. Nearness complete confidence, but he even dispenses with, or genuine intimacy would destroy that carefully as preparation, any captatio benevolentiae and constructed divide that allows the woman to func- begins, with the first word of the poem, to issue tion as an object. His rapture aside, intimacy is not orders to the reader: «Behold, «Stop here», «gen- what is being sought or bridged in the poem, as tly pass», and «O listen!» The presence of four genuine closeness or intimacy would represent a commands in the first eight lines (One might ven- threat to exploitation of the Other as represented ture that «O listen!» may be read as an exclama- by the woman, and the poet must exploit her as a tion that mutes the force of its character as an present absence, since as such she provides him imperative) is itself noteworthy in a lyric poem with both an occasion for the poem itself and a whose dominant intonation seeks to communicate built-in rationale for his ideal reader to sympathize rapture or enchantment. What is even more re- with the poet for the note of sadness or melancholy markable in the poem is the poet's assumption that in the face of her distance. This distance can also the narrator can command or persuade the reader imply indifference manifesting itself as a lack of to enter the poem exclusively from the angle or per- awareness on her part! The very conventions upon spective provided by the poet. Such audacity is which the poem depends in order to be understood possible in part because, as Raymond Williams re- within culture immediately place the woman in a minds us, the poet in early nineteenth century in- psychologically and morally dubious, if not com- dustrial society was regarded as «a special kind of promised, position. The result, consciously or un- person», with a special kind of sensitivity and consciously, for the poet's ideal reader, is a grad- knowledge. Terry Eagleton would later contend ual, almost imperceptible, transfer of interest and that the Romantic artist as a «special kind of per- sympathy from the solitary reaper to the son» also was performing a kind of mythical func- poet-narrator that begins with the seventh line of tion for an industrial society, supplying the myth the poem («O listen! for the Vale profound/ Is over- of unity and meaning in his poetry for an age that flowing with the sound».) in which the reader's saw itself as ever more fragmented and its labor attention for the first time in the poem is directed as alienated and meaningless. away from the physicality of the «Highland Lass», The male Romantic poet establishes his «met- and this transfer of interest is all but completed by tle», his credentials as artist, by his ability to ma- line twenty-seven («I saw her singing at her nipulate not only the woman in the text, but the ideal work».) when the poet-narrator asserts himself reader as well. If this ideal reader, who is assumed openly for the first time as the subject of the poem. to be male, shares the perspectives and values of As if to leave no doubt about the new locus of in- the male poet, then that same reader is, to a great- terest and sympathy in the poem «I» is repeated er or lesser extent, conceived of by the poet as a three times in the next four lines. By banishing the reflection of himself, a confidant, as Keats con- woman to the margins of the text Wordsworth in- ceives of his ideal, male reader in his «Ode on sures that the poet-narrator (easily identifiable with Melancholy» when he advises: Wordsworth himself), rather than the woman, be- Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, comes the true subject of the poem. Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, That the poet feels the need to banish her should And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. tell us something about the insecurities that the These lines clearly indicate that the audience is male poet often had about an activity that his age male («thy mistress») and shares Keats's perspec- did not always see as virile or real, «manly» work. tive that woman is stereotypically «soft», and that The male poet needed to demonstrate to a rapidly she, much as a child or a deranged person, raves. industrialized age that regarded his creative work Keats, just as Wordsworth in «The Solitary Reap- as just another commodity item that he, all appear- er», loads his gender inflected-rifts with ideologi- ances to the contrary, was not engaged in an ac- cal ore - to give a twist to Keats's 1820 letter to Fleming R. Wordsworth's «The Solitary Reaper»... 69

Percy Shelley. Just as Wordsworth constructed his an can be read as the fascinating object of aesthet- male bonding with his reader through a series of ic contemplation, but on the larger, non-idealized commands within a single, brief stanza, so, too, cultural and historical levels the Highland Lass be- does Keats establish his link with his male reader comes the prey of the all-male safari, a prey that through a series of virile commands, «Emprison», must be stalked and approached with caution, a «let her rave», and «feed deep», concentrated into caution that reveals a fear of the consequences of three lines. In both poems this concentration of her returning the spectator's gaze and thus uncov- imperatives gives a sense of urgency to the ering the spectator's own nakedness, his cloak of poet-narrator's voice, and it is this note of urgen- invisibility (and thus power). cy or anxiety that the male reader recognizes most The nearness between narrator and narratee readily - even if subconsciously - as the link that suggests an intimacy or solidarity between the poet connects him to the narrator. It is the recognition and the ideal, male auditor (an intimacy that is ul- of male solidarity ultimately grounded on a fear of timately a substitute for the intimacy with the fe- the female as Other, as she who can occasion and male object of discourse) who will symbolically uncover the vulnerability of the male Romantic poet share both the space and the perspective - in both as exclusive subject and hero in his «own» world. senses of view and values) of the poet. The shared Both «The Solitary Reaper» and «Ode on Melan- perspective also serves to define «us» as a confed- choly» serve to advance a relationship between poet eration of «we», poet and audience, who, in order and audience that subtly reinforces the poet's sta- to actualize the poem along the lines of phallogo- tus as teacher and guide through not only the «ex- centric vision offered by the narrator, must see the perience» represented in the poem, but also through maiden as not only Other, but different from «us» the masculinist values, presented as normative, pre- because she also lacks what the poem implies nar- scriptive, and universal, and which are embedded rative guide and narratee share, i. e., that secret in the poetry. In the case of Keats, his masterful (secret in the double sense of undisclosed and phal- control of language, the felicity of tone and rhyme, lic) vantage-point from where the woman in the text along with his precocious translation of cultural may be viewed and where the male viewers are codes into a reassuring literary articulation of tra- neither obstructed nor challenged in their positions ditional gender roles and attendant socially encour- as voyeurs. Consequently, the extent of the distance aged conduct and attitudes all serve to conceal the between narrative voice and the solitary reaper is appalling nature of the advice he offers his male also a function of difference, a difference between audience in his poem. the speaking-viewing subjects and their object. While Wordsworth's commands and implied The referentiality of the familiar or what seems notions of appropriate conduct towards the maid- to be familiar also establishes a common point of en do not directly exclude women readers from his reference or sharing that can become a kind of bond audience of ideal readers, it is nevertheless true that encouraging identification between the narrator and Wordsworth's poem requires women to read the narratee, an identification that enables the ideo- against themselves, as in this Wordsworthian land- logical perspectives of the narrator to be validated scape the woman is but a reflection of nature as as that Barthian «what goes without saying.» The the objectified Other. That command, «Behold», homoeroticism present in the masculinist construc- that asks the narratee to participate in the poet- tion of this poem - an element present in much of narrator's view of the woman working over there the Western tradition of amorous and lyric poet- («yon») in the field serves not only to differentiate ry - finds resonance not only in Romantic litera- the female object of discourse from the subject- ture, but also in Romantic painting. One of the most narrator, but that command also serves to estab- striking demonstrations can be made by comparing lish a genuine solidarity of the narrator with the two Romantic paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. narratee who must be conceived as physically or The artist's ability to substitute male for female ideally near in order to receive a command that viewer in order to establish a particular kind of does not alert the maiden to his or the poet's pres- sharing or intimacy (and thus community) through ence in this landscape. Just as in Keats's poem, the the work of art may be seen by comparing Fried- ideal reader is ideally male, and the poem serves as rich's previously-mentioned painting, Zwei Man- a cultural invitation to become complicit in the ner in Betrachtung des Mondes, with his Mann und objectifying male gaze. On the fictional and aes- Frau in Betrachtung des Mondes. Both paintings thetic level - the level of male fantasy - the wom- are variations on a similar scene. A couple gazes 70 НАУКОВІ ЗАПИСКИ. Том 21. Філологічні науки through a nightscape at the moon, which is at the In Wordsworth's poem, in spite of this tenden- center of both paintings and which captures the cy of the narratee to assume aspects of the stance couple's rapt attention. This moon, so dear to the and perspective of the narrator, there is the dynam- heart of the Romantics, is, in both paintings, framed ics of the text itself that requires a reading of itself by the gnarled and other-worldly shape of mena- as more than or, at least, different from the mes- cing-looking oak and spruce trees. Instead of a sage or instruction given by the narrator. This dy- frontal view of these couples Friedrich presents namics of textuality that compels us to differenti- them to us with their backs turned (Riickenfiguren) ate between the narratee as a position in the com- and intent only upon the mysterious face of the municative act and the reader who is concretized moon, as if to emphasize the importance of the through the act of reading and interpreting a text poet's private vision and rapture, as if entrance into depends upon what Ross Chambers refers to as these lunar mysteries must be mediated through the «the textual function». This transaction Chambers fascination of these couples. In Zwei Manner... the carefully describes as «a collaborative event that couple consists of two men, who are generally arises from the relation between a text and its read- understood to be the artist, Friedrich, on the right, er, or, more precisely, from the relation between a and his student. In Mann undFrau... the couple piece of writing and an instance of reading». It is consists of the artist once again on the right and, in the moment when collaboration and validation in the painting, once more closer to the moon, and of the narrator and the narrative act gives way to a woman who is usually regarded as his wife. In the interpretive act that Wordsworth's poem seems both paintings the artist's partner leans upon his left both more and less than an innocent and enthusi- shoulder. In the former painting there is both inti- astic episode in the poet's literary life. macy and affection implied by the stance of the What then is the nature of the referentiality of student whose body is leaning towards the artist, the poem? The «world» or frame of reference that and who rests almost his entire arm upon the art- emerges from the interaction of narrator and nar- ist's shoulder. They are painted so close to one ratee in this Wordsworthian lyric is recognized as another that they almost seem to be united except known or familiar, and yet as strange or alien. The for the small spaces that separate their waists and voice that is «so thrilling» is compared with the legs. In the latter picture the woman's hand and voice or song of two birds, the nightingale and the upper arm rest lightly, almost tentatively: upon the cuckoo, both of which would have immediately artist's shoulder and there is no real sense of inti- established common or shared points of reference macy communicated, as she stands stiffly, as does for the narrator and the narratee, but the poetic he, straight ahead. While there is even less physi- elaboration or framing given to these birds, i. e., cal space between the two figures than in the their unusual locales, «Arabian sands» and «the former painting, nevertheless her form is, in shape farthest Hebrides», constitute a kind of distancing and color, totally distinct from his, whereas in Zwei of the poet-narrator from the narratee, as this oth- Manner... the two men are dressed in nearly iden- er frame of reference, the exotic and distant («Ara- tical clothing and in identical colors. The posture bian sands») and the distant («Hebrides») compel of the two men on the stony and sloping ground is the narratee to accept what Marion B. Ross would a more relaxed and comfortable stationing than we perhaps describe as the narrator's «priority». In his find in Mann und Frau... where the posture or at- discussion of Wordsworth's poem, «To a Highland titude of man and wife is almost military. The Girl», in «Naturalizing Gender: Woman's Place in warmth of the colors in the former painting, pre- Wordsworth's Ideological Landscape», Ross con- dominantly brownish-gold and green-gray serve to tends that, «Wordsworth is incapable of concep- emphasize the humanity of the two male figures, tualizing any kind of relationship to the girl except while in the latter the dark colors, primarily char- that which affirms his own priority... he would not coal and purple almost seem to swallow up the be willing to be her son or her younger brother. This human characters. The colors also give the scene, would threaten his priority, his claim to self- especially the framing oak, a more menacing or determination.» These comments are equally ap- eerie character than it has in the other painting, and plicable to «The Solitary Reaper». Just as the the dark brown of the woman's dress makes her choice of less familiar locales points to the narra- barely distinguishable from the earth from which tor's knowledge and priority here, too, it also she seems to arise, thus re-enforcing the associa- serves to make an implicit claim for the authority tion of woman with nature or the material. of the narrator. If Wordsworth's solitary reaper is Fleming R. Wordsworth's «The Solitary Reaper»... 71 the typical Romantic object of male desire, osten- choly song could then be said to activate both in- sibly captured and re-presented through the poet's dividual and collective-cultural memory. What ul- imagination, then it is no less true that both her timately contributes to the sense that something is presence and absence in the poem are marred by a not entirely satisfactory in this poem, in spite of peculiar nostalgia. This is a nostalgia not for who its numerous musical and linguistic felicities, is the woman actually was, but, rather, more for the Wordsworth's rejection here of a concern to con- rich associations her symbolic presence and sug- front the individual history that may be the source gested experiential realm occasion. This is a realm of that song. The 1805 Prelude is contemporane- of largely vague (for the male poet) female experi- ous with «The Solitary Reaper» and Wordsworth ences and feelings about which the poet makes is nothing if not exhaustive in personal and histor- implicit claims of knowledge and appreciation. Such ical detail when the subject is his song. I wish to implicit factual knowledge of her and appreciation underline the «restricted» feminine economy of the of her song are formal elements in the structural solitary reaper: she works and sings. We know then ideology of the poem that serve to privilege his what she does, but we do not know who she is. It discourse of insight and authority. One of the ele- is no wonder then that the poet-narrator cannot ments that makes the description of her song so translate or understand the music or principle of imaginatively appealing to the poet-narrator is the harmony that the woman represents: «Will no one suggestion that its theme may be «old, unhappy, tell me what she sings?» In this poem the only real far-off things». Such music may be melancholy or action that occurs or is inferred is that of the fe- sad, but the fact that it may be imagined to con- male: the male «character» represents the passive cern the past and half-forgotten matters gives them and meditative and does nothing in the poem. In a distance that attenuates that possible unhappiness Doris Dome's celebrated movie, Màinner, she has communicated in her song. The immediacy of pain the male protagonist assert, «Ein Mann ist was er is both deflected and diminished in the totality of tut. Eine Frau was sie ist.» (A man is what he does; the staging, of the substance of the song as dis- a woman is what she is). While such an assertion tanced in time («old») and space («far-off»), while might be said to be characteristic of a male domi- yet familiar and recognizable as «unhappy» or sad. nated society this is just the opposite of what we The contradiction of this aesthetic culture is that find in «The Solitary Reaper», in which the wom- the very nature of melody or song that is sad or an is defined by action («reaping and singing» and «plaintive» often produces a pleasurable experience «she cuts and binds the grain») and the or response in the auditor. poet-narrator by being an artist. If the poem itself How do we begin to account for the intense is that activity (what he does) that helps to define delight that the poet-narrator derives from the sol- the Romantic poet, then that activity becomes sus- itary reaper's song, a song about which the only pect, since the poet as «exceptional man» or Ro- thing we know for certain is that it is sad? Because mantic hero (at least in his own eyes), emerges as the experience of pain or sorrow is a universal one, such in this poem only in relation to those passive and yet an experience unique to each individual's «virtues» that have been attributed to women. In own sensitivity and understanding of that suffer- his letter of February 19, 1818 to John Hamilton ing, the note of sadness recognized as such point Reynolds Keats counselled a wise passiveness: to the real existence of a «music of humanity», to «Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly quote Wordsworth's «Tintern Abbey». This is a like Mercury - let us not therefore go hurrying music constituted by the symphony of existence, about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and this is also a music whose more melancholy and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is strains remind us of our own uniqueness as, ulti- to be arrived at: but let us open our leaves like a mately, isolated in the actual experience of joy and flower and be passive and receptive - budding pain who are, paradoxically, related more through patiently under the eye of Apollo.» It should be our isolation, our individuality, than we are through noted that in this letter the passiveness ordinarily the actual content, of those sorrows and joys. It is associated with women is now linked to Jove, or the reminder of our own personal histories called Jupiter, a figure of patriarchal authority, and in the forth by the sad song, the bittersweet recognition process of appropriating what had been tradition- of separation and relatedness, that constitutes the ally associated with the feminine, passiveness be- complex character of our aesthetic response to this comes a desirable, admirable and now judiciously music. The suggestion then of a woman's melan- masculine characteristic. Such critics as Mary Ja- 72 НАУКОВІ ЗАПИСКИ. Том 21. Філологічні науки cobus, Alan Richardson, and Diane Hoeveler, occurs in the fall, after the grain has reached its among others, have noted this need of the Roman- maturity, is accomplished with the aid of a «sick- tic poet to appropriate, absorb, colonize, or canni- le» (whose presence communicates phallic danger balize those qualities traditionally aligned or cultur- to the male observers); 2) by the end of the poem ally associated with the feminine. Hoeveler explains that song that enraptures or enthralls is no longer this literary practice in terms of Romantic culture: there or real, having died or faded away to the point All the Romantic poets to a large extent explored in of leaving only its impression or trace upon the their poetry one of their culture's dominant ideological narrator, a trace that is simultaneously confirmed fantasies — that artistic power and creativity were by the new song which is his poem and yet denied possible for men only if they unified their masculine by her absence when, at the end of the poem, he and feminine components. For male poets, then, female claims to have captured her «music». As Wallace characters had to be either projections and/or symbolic extensions of the masculine psyche. Stevens asserts in his poem, «Credences of Sum- mer», «it was difficult to sing in face/ Of the ob- Paradoxically enough, it is in this process of ject. The singers had to avert themselves/ Or else projection that the Romantic poet preserves that avert the object». Wordsworth does not and can- symbolic space between himself as the «imperial» not «sing in face/ Of the object», and so he averts subject and the woman as natural object. In the the object. The secretive character of his appro- poet-narrator's turning from the woman to her song priation or cannibalization of her song while he is we witness an attempt by the Romantic poet to distancing himself from her («I listened motionless achieve transcendence in the poem, transcendence and still... as I mounted up the hill») indicates that of the woman. This transcendence is predicated there is no real human bond established between upon the textual removal or distancing of the soli- the poet-narrator and the «Highland Lass», and, tary reaper so that the bond between the male sub- consequently, there could be no real sense of loss ject and the logos will seem to be transparent («na- from staging her demise. tural» and «spontaneous» in Romantic parlance) It is well known that Wordsworth's poem was and unmediated, which is to say, not dependent partially based upon personal experience, but pri- upon the agency or presence of the Other. In such marily inspired by a passage in Thomas Wilkinson's a process it would seem to be more efficient and manuscript that later became the book, Tour of effective to simply kill off the woman in the text, Scotland. The detachment between poet-narrator as in the Lucy poems, rather than to marginalize and the woman who is initially presented as the her, as in «The Solitary Reaper». The death of Lucy center of his poetic discourse is brought into fo- in Wordsworth's poetry reenacts, as J. Hillis Mill- cus by this biographical information, but the bio- er has observed, the death of Wordsworth's own graphical in no way explains the detachment, since mother, but those frequent deaths in Romantic art for the Romantic poet the region or world created also reenact in general the symbolic death of the by the imagination was more intense and more maternal who, as Margaret Homans asserts, is seen «real» than physical reality, and thus we might well as the impediment to the male's accession to the expect an intense personal investment in the female symbolic, to the language and prerogatives of his character in the imagined Scottish countryside. literary. To clear the poetic landscape of her pres- The psychic investment does occur in this poem, ence, which occasioned the poem, can clearly be but this investment of sympathy and concern is seen as the expression of the poet's wish to also made on behalf of the character who is the poet- clear the aesthetic landscape of her trace, those narrator. If the woman has no particular or con- hints or intimations of mortality that call into doubt crete identity in the poem she does, nevertheless, the actual ability of the strong poet to, in god-like hold a particular interest for the poet qua poet, in fashion, create a self. In «The Solitary Reaper» such that she represents as natural singer or artist a har- a fatal choice, the death of the young woman, mony and fusion that is the unspoken ideal of the would be superfluous for two important reasons: poem itself, i.e., the dream of radical unity: the 1) the maiden is already, to paraphrase August Graf solitary reaper in her «reaping and singing» achieves von Platen's «Tristan,» given over as a hostage to a simultaneity of practical industry or profit and art. death, is already subtly and intimately associated Reaping implies that ripeness or maturity has been with death and diminishment since she, while not reached, that there is an identifiable return upon obviously «grim», is nevertheless the reaper, or previous effort, a return that is in addition to the symbol of death, and her reaping or harvesting that art product, her song. Within early nineteenth cen- Fleming R. Wordsworth's «The Solitary Reaper»... 73 tury industrial capitalism the agrarian worker, the codified into public provider (male) and domestic solitary reaper, is, in the poem, implicitly compared «angel in the house» (female). The laboring, low- to the Romantic poet and she emerges in this mod- er class reaper is not so limited. It is not merely ern context as a formidable model who produces that deep down in the poet's subconscious this not only art that nourishes the soul (Her song sus- woman is a threatening figure because her art is tains and supports his art «long after it was heard obviously more spontaneous and natural than his no more»), but she also harvests and collects the own song or poem, but perhaps what disturbs the «grain» that nourishes the body. Within such an poet most may be the fact that she, the less than economy and society the female laborer who can privileged, achieves art and industry at one and the simultaneously contribute to that economy and to same time, so that the temporal, the moment of art is an intimidating and imposing figure. Helen song and physical labor, becomes also the place, Haworth has shown that nineteenth century bour- the unalienated space where an ideal unity and har- geois society (from which most Romantic artists mony are attained. came) saw traditional masculine and feminine roles

Флемінг P. «САМОТНЯ ЖНИЦЯ» ВОРДСВОРТА: ҐЕНДЕРНИЙ АСПЕКТ ТА ІДЕОЛОГІЧНА СТРУКТУРА ЛІРИКИ РОМАНТИЗМУ

Об'єктом аналізу у статті є твір поета XIX cm. Вільяма Вордсворта «Самотня жниця» («The Solitary Reaper»), один із прикладів літератури романтизму. Дослідник окреслює характерні риси того, як наратор -романтичний ліричний герой - осмислює оточення, уособлене в образній картині вірша, а також: своє місце в ньому. Особливу увагу приділено образам навколишнього природного середовища як чинникам формування характеру ліричного героя.