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Buried Communities Buried Communities Buried Communities Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning Ĺĺ Kurt Fosso STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Cover illustration: from the juvenile chapbook The Little Maid and The Gentleman; or, We are Seven. 1820. York: Printed by J. Kendrew, 1840, 15 pp. illus.; p. 8. 9 cm. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reference (shelfmark) Vet. A6 g.45 (17). Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2004 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Christine L. Hamel Marketing by Anne Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fosso, Kurt, 1958– Buried communities : Wordsworth and the bonds of mourning / Kurt Fosso. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-7914-5959-4 (alk. paper) 1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Death in literature. 3. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Political and social views. 4. Literature and society—England—History—19th century. 5. Elegiac poetry, English—History and criticism. 6. Mourning customs in literature. 7. Community in literature. 8. Grief in literature. I. Title. PR5892.D35B87 2003 821'.7—dc22 2003057291 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my father, Harold C. Fosso C O N T E N T S Preface ix Abbreviations and Editions xiii Introduction 1 1. A “World of Shades”: The Birth of Community in the Juvenilia 27 2. Grief and Dwelling in the Cambridge Poems, including An Evening Walk 47 3. Genre, Politics, and Community in the Salisbury Plain Poems 67 4. Shades of Mourning and the One Life in The Ruined Cottage 97 5. Elegies, Epitaphs, and Legacies of Loss in Lyrical Ballads 127 6. Grieving and Dwelling in the Five-Book Prelude and Home at Grasmere 163 7. “A New Controul” in Poems in Two Volumes and The Excursion 193 Notes 219 Selected Bibliography 265 Index 283 vii P R E F A C E On September 6, 1997, a funeral cortege wound its way down Kensington High Street toward Westminster Abbey, passing on its way an enormous crowd of mourners. Outside the royal palaces, grieving men and women, adults and children, Britons and foreigners, had deposited more than a mil- lion bouquets and displays for the deceased Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer. The New York Times reported that there seemed “something more Latin than British about the intensity of people’s words and actions; a largely Protestant culture that epitomizes restraint and values privacy was galvanized by a need to display its powerful emotions publicly.”1 One mourner told a London Times reporter how she had suddenly begun to grieve for this “stranger” and had felt compelled to share her grief with others.2 Like her, millions of people had been moved to congregate near Buckingham Palace and attend the public rites held on the day of the funeral. “How could one doing such good works die so tragically?” many asked. “How could she be gone?” Such occasions of massification swiftly transform reporters and others into armchair sociologists delivering up various explanations for whatever group behavior is at issue, in this case that of people crowding before palaces or alongside roadways or in front of television screens. Is the underlying cause the allure of celebrity and glamour? Is it widespread emotional impoverish- ment? Voyeuristic consumption? A false sense of intimacy fostered by the media? Among the crowds commemorating Princess Diana one could no doubt find testimony to support any of these hypotheses. But for many of the mourners one other, ostensibly simple, fact might best explain their behavior and feelings: when burdened by grief, people wish to assemble with kindred mourners and sufferers—millions of them in the case of Diana Spencer, thou- sands or hundreds in the cases of others of some renown. Death draws together human beings to mourn, even to mourn the loss of a virtual stranger. They gather to share their burdens of loss and to try, in doing so, to appease or fulfill their need to express their grief and to properly mourn. Although mourning on the grand scale occasioned by Princess Diana’s death is rare, even in these media-driven times, the social phenomenon of ix x Preface shared mourning in response to grief, and the community of mourners it gath- ers together, is by no means so. One need not look back to the anguished crowd of fans congregated outside the Dakota Apartments in New York City to mourn the death of John Lennon3 or to the spate of memorial scenes for murdered schoolchildren in American towns like Jonesboro, Arkansas, or Lit- tleton, Colorado. We need not even review the aftermath of grief that fol- lowed the disaster of September 11, 2001. The loss of a family member or close friend can as easily spark a desire for the social possibilities afforded by sharing one’s grief with others, particularly when that grief is felt to be bur- densome or even unbearable. It seems clear from all these social manifesta- tions that for such grief to be shared there must be something common to those who gather together, whether what is imparted is grief for the deceased or the unique problems of grief itself. One widower or widow or friend or neighbor seeks out another for comfort and for the particular kind of social cohesion offered by mutual mourning. It was that sense of shared, personal loss that underlay at least some of the national (and global) spectacle associated with Diana’s funeral and the memorials that preceded it. A century and a half earlier a similar experience of loss provoked Britons to parade and exchange their grief, at the occasion of the death of another beloved princess. On Sunday, November 16, 1817, memorial sermons for Princess Charlotte, who had died in childbirth on November 6, were deliv- ered across Britain in Anglican, dissenting, and Catholic churches and in synagogues. That Wednesday her funeral at St. George’s Chapel proved an exercise in what Stephen Behrendt, in his study of the mourning and later mythologizing of Charlotte, calls a “grandiose demonstration of Regency ostentation.” But it was one that, for all its regal spectacle, “did not have the effect of entirely removing the dead princess from the thoughts—or the view—of those citizens to whom she had meant so much.”4 Such are the powers of the dead and of their survivors’ grief. Britain’s newspapers and journals brimmed with sensationalized accounts of the funeral, to be fol- lowed by countless elegies, funeral songs, and tributes for Charlotte, by the likes of Poet Laureate Robert Southey, Leigh Hunt, Letitia Landon, and, now most famously, Percy Bysshe Shelley. In her study of British mourning in this period, Bearing the Dead, Esther Schor describes how, on the day of the lavish funeral, commercial business ground to a halt, “the nation sponta- neously channel[ing] its sorrows into a nationwide observance of funeral ser- vices for the Princess.”5 Schor and Behrendt are each interested in how the Princess’s death and funeral were transformed into myth and spectacle, as one result of the nineteenth-century rise of print culture and its manifesta- tions of national and imperial simultaneity.6 What Schor and Behrendt demonstrate so well is the extent to which the mourning of Charlotte was mediated and in some manner produced by literary and other fictions. But it Preface xi is also the case that the dissemination of words concerning Princess Char- lotte’s death helped to craft a community, even a nation. Grief ’s exchange and its socially cohesive effects as shared sympathies and texts can be further understood by considering the mourning-oriented poetry of the titular head of the first generation of so-called British Romantic writers. For Wordsworth’s poems helpfully explore, at a literary level, this phe- nomenon of community prompted by human beings’ responses to loss and to grief for the dead. This poet’s social vision of mournful community is his par- ticular response to a broad crisis in late eighteenth-century Britain. But his vision also reveals much about the broader dynamics of mourning and com- munity: then, at the turn of the century, and now, in our own times of loss. Wordsworth’s poetry repeatedly shows how we the living remain, even despite ourselves, bound together by the dead and by the griefs we share. Ĺĺ This study of mourning and community in Wordsworth found part of its origin and a good deal of guidance in previous scholars’ explorations of death and grief, chief among them groundbreaking works by Philippe Ariès, Alan Bewell, Jacques Derrida, David Ferry, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Peter Sacks. Like all books, this one has not been a solitary enterprise. For their early advice and sup- port I am indebted to Hazard Adams, Homer Brown, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Schwab, and the late Albert Wlecke. My deepest thanks go to the manuscript’s two principal readers: to William Ulmer, Wordsworthian extraordinaire and friend, who provided thoughtful criticism tempered with encouragement; and to Claudia Nadine, who helped make this book’s pages more worthy of print and whose confidence sustained me in my labors.
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