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Holy Ghosts: Romantic Asceticism and Its Figural Phantoms

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Holy Ghosts: Romantic Asceticism and Its Figural Phantoms HOLY GHOSTS: ROMANTIC ASCETICISM AND ITS FIGURAL PHANTOMS by ANNA CARROLL A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2015 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Anna Carroll Title: Holy Ghosts: Romantic Asceticism and Its Figural Phantoms This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Forest Pyle Chairperson Paul Peppis Core Member Karen Ford Core Member Ken Calhoon Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded December 2015 ii © 2015 Anna Carroll iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Anna Carroll Doctor of Philosophy Department of English December 2015 Title: Holy Ghosts: Romantic Asceticism and Its Figural Phantoms This dissertation reconsiders sacred tropes in the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats within the context of ascetic performances and written saints’ lives. I argue that reading these poets as ascetic figures helps us to better understand Romantic isolation as a deeply social engagement, for an ascetic rejects his social milieu in order to call for the sanctification of a corrupt community. Asceticism redraws the lines of Romantic immanent critique of nineteenth-century England and newly explains the ghostly afterlives of poets whose literary personae transcend their biographical lives. Furthermore, this study takes up the ways in which the foundational ascetic tropes of Romantic poetry bind the major poets together in an impenetrable canon of writers with holy vows to poetry and to each other. My readings examine different kinds of ascetic vocation at play in the work of each poet, and I ultimately argue that this traditional support for the Romantic canon demands that we reconsider our critical attachments to Romanticism as the beginning of a secular literary tradition. iv CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Anna Carroll GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2015, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2010, University of West Florida Bachelor of Arts, English, 2007, University of West Florida AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Poetry and Poetics British Romantic Poetry Literary Theory Magical Realism PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of English, University of Oregon, 2010- 2015 Graduate Research Assistant, Department of English, University of West Florida, 2008-2010 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Sherwood Travel Award, “Phantom Poetics: Accounting for Anxiety and Absence in the ‘Lucy’ Poems,” University of Oregon, 2012 Bursary Award, 2011 Wordsworth Summer Conference, Wordsworth Trust v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my esteemed advisor and dissertation chair, Forest Pyle, for his encouragement and support of my work. I’m so fortunate to have the guidance of such an exceptional scholar and generous person. I would also like to thank Professor Paul Peppis, Professor Karen Ford, and Professor Kenneth Calhoon for agreeing to serve on my dissertation committee. Having a group of people whom I so deeply respect as teachers and scholars has raised the standard of my writing and thinking. I’m eternally grateful for my advisors at the University of West Florida, David Baulch, Robin Blyn, and Gregory Tomso. You taught me to think critically, and this dissertation and degree would not have come to pass without your confidence in me. I am also thankful to the many wonderful friends who have gone with me through this graduate program. There are so many people who have contributed to my well being, but I would like to thank specifically those of you who have read and listened to my writing, and helped me clarify this project, especially Francesca Gentile, Diana Martinez, Hannah Godwin, Sarah Ray Rondot, Bethany Jacobs, Mary Ganster, Bill Fogarty, Rose DeBell, Margaret Bostrom, and Kaila Rose. Thank you for your love, patience, and brilliance. Finally, thank you to my family. You’re everything to me, and wanting to do justice to your faith in me has seen me through this process. Thank you to my incomparable parents, Tom and Betsy Carroll, who always love me, no matter how whiny I get. And thank you to my grandparents, Jane and Jim Clowe. To my Pappy, who went to be at peace just before this project was finished, thank you for believing in me and trusting me to make good on my word. vi To my Granny, who lately reminded me that poetry is the language of the soul. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC ASCETICISM AND THE SURVIVAL OF SACRED TEXTS ........................................................................................................ 1 II. HOLY HINTERLANDS: WORDSWORTH’S RURAL SACRED GROUND AS CRITIQUE OF THE MODERN .................................................................................. 23 III. SHELLEY’S SYMPATHETIC APOSTASY: ALASTOR AND ASCETIC WANDERING ............................................................................................................. 72 IV. KEATS’S “MONKISH CELL”: MONASTIC REBELLION AND THE PERSONAL SACRED ................................................................................................ 123 V. CODA: THOMAS HARDY AND THE GHOSTLY AFTERLIFE OF ROMANTIC ASCETICISM ....................................................................................... 172 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 188 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC ASCETICISM AND THE SURVIVAL OF SACRED TEXTS In a 2014 episode of the podcast Radiolab, the show’s host, Jad Abumrad, interviews Eugene Thacker, the author of In the Dust of This Planet, a 2011 book on nihilism. Abumrad and Thacker discuss the curious pop culture after-life of the book. Though the text itself enjoys no great commercial success,1 the cover image is appropriated and painted by a Norwegian artist, whose art is picked up by a high-end fashion label. This label then outfits the titanic American rapper-producer Jay-Z for a video featuring his widely consumed music and his just-as-widely consumed celebrity persona. As such, In the Dust of This Planet becomes visible in one of the most recognizable cultural projects of our time. Thacker is utterly bemused by the accidental ubiquity of his work, but the episode is dedicated to finding out whether the appearance of this trace of nihilist philosophy in the work of one of the most famous pop artists in the world is pure coincidence, or an unconscious manifestation of the spirit of the age. By way of making this inquiry, the episode describes the context in which Jay-Z carries this nihilist message: a fake movie trailer for his On the Run worldwide tour with Beyonce. The trailer pitches the Bonnie-and-Clyde tale of Jay-Z and Beyonce as they flee from the criminal city (presumably Vegas) to the Nevada desert. Having escaped all the seedy characters who try to entangle them in a web of corruption, the couple makes it to the 1 The actual text of In the Dust of This Planet is, however, source material for the writers of the True Detective character, pessimist Louisiana detective Rust Cohle. Abumrad brings up the influence of nihilist philosophy on the HBO phenomenon to point to a superlative surge in nihilist tendencies at our contemporary moment of pop culture. 1 desert, and thus to the scene in which Jay-Z sports In the Dust of This Planet on the back of his motorcycle jacket as he points a gun toward the sky. Radiolab asks two related questions of this odd moment in mainstream art: why is Thacker’s book appearing in this moment of contemporary history? And why does this happen in the desert? The correspondents for this episode of Radiolab question why nihilism should be at the heart of this generation’s aesthetic expressions, and they trace similar surges in nihilist sensibility through history, explaining that these outbursts all follow violent upheavals in geopolitics. After the confusion and disgust that follow WWI, Dadaism is born; after the threat of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War, punk emerges. For the episode’s contributors, the present moment of pop culture is responding to the ambient threat of global terrorism, ecological disaster, and deadly epidemics. Yet, when Abumrad interviews Simon Critchley, a philosopher who teaches, among other subjects, early Christian mysticism at The New School for Social Research, Critchley explains that nihilism’s utter repudiation of corrupt society is only one part of a process that has much deeper roots in early ascetic practice. At times of crisis, culture turns to the desert, the symbolic province of ascetics. Asceticism is an aesthetic first responder to the emergency state of a socio-political system that is moving toward its own self-destruction. When Jay-Z escapes to the desert, then, he participates in a long aesthetic tradition of carrying art into the wilderness, where the artist can be cleansed, his art sanctified, and his textual offering made worthy of dissemination among the masses, who are in desperate need of an alternative to dying culture. Jay-Z takes the ambient nihilism of contemporary culture into the wild, and this act symbolizes his rejection
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