Romanticism and the Temporality of Wander Neil Finlayson A

Romanticism and the Temporality of Wander Neil Finlayson A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English York University Toronto, Ontario May 2019 ÓNeil Finlayson, 2019 ii Abstract This dissertation contextualizes and accounts for the proliferation of representations of wander that permeate British Romanticism. The prominence of wander in this writing is an articulation of the embodiment of a new temporal mode, namely the quantified temporality of modernity. The study begins by identifying two main versions of Romantic wander: one that is free and naturalized, and one that is monotonous and dispossessing. The duality of wander maps onto two distinct aspects of clock time; a temporality that becomes increasingly entrenched, socially, culturally, and economically, over the course of the eighteenth-century. Through reading four explicit representations of Romantic wander, the dissertation argues that clock time’s open permissiveness is performed in Romanticism as a rhetoric of free wander, while clock time’s structured monotony is demonstrated by the experience of displaced and alienated wander. William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) rhetorically positions free wander as an antidote to the industrialization and solipsism of modernity that is encroaching upon the poem’s pastoral space; however, the rhetoric of wander in the text becomes ideological, in its naturalization of an economical temporal expenditure. Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) demonstrates how the rhetoric of free wander is a privileged fiction, and shows how wander, when experienced by a nameless, connectionless young woman, is not only alienating, but dangerous. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, 1817) draws a link between the dispossessed wander of the Mariner and the newly mechanized, rationalized, and instrumental world he uncovers inadvertently on his voyage—the wandering Mariner becomes the first itinerant, individuated, and time-bound subject of modernity. Finally, Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) functions as a cautionary tale of the alienation that accompanies modern subjectivity and its quantified temporality. Ultimately, wander functions as a kind of warning, as Romanticism paces the uncertain ground of modernity. The duality of wander makes intelligible the duality of the temporality of modernity—a time that is alternately the rhetorical buttressing of class and gender privilege, as well as a means of discipline and a form of dispossession. iii Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to my mother and late father, Jean and Ralph Finlayson. Without their love, guidance, and support, none of this would have been possible. Romantics both, from them I learned the importance of striving to “see into the life of things.” iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisory committee, Ian Balfour, Karen Valihora, and Kim Michasiw, for their insight and support, both as readers and teachers. In particular, I thank Ian for not only guiding my thinking on theory and Romanticism, but for remaining supportive throughout what turned out to be a very long haul. I would also like to thank my examination committee members, Douglas Freake, Mark Cauchi, and Marcie Frank, for their engagement and encouragement. I thank my fellow graduate students, for countless late nights of insightful conversations, and for their continued camaraderie. I thank my friends and family, for their encouragement and support along the way. To my brothers, thank you for looking out for me, and keeping things light. To my mum, for keeping us going spiritually and financially. Quite simply, I would not have been able to complete this without her. Last, I thank Lisa and Maisie for suffering though this with me for far, far too long. Their limitless good will, kindness, love, and encouragement kept us afloat when we needed it most. v Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….v Chapter One Introduction: Wandering on the Clock……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter Two Spending Time: The Excursion and the Rhetoric of Wander……………………………………………………..41 Chapter Three: The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties and the Limits of Wander……………………………………………..97 Chapter Four: Wandering through Modernity: Clock Time and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner…………………156 Chapter Five: The Fall of Wander: Melmoth the Wanderer and the Torment of Time………………………………….205 Chapter Six: Conclusion: The Warning of Wander………………………………………………………………………………………248 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..254 1 Romanticism and the Temporality of Wander Chapter One: Introduction: Wandering on the Clock There are two distinct versions of wander in Romanticism. Most immediately, Romantic wander signifies a free and unstructured movement that fosters imaginative growth and development. Wordsworth begins The Prelude by harnessing exactly this sense of wander when he states, “I look about, and should the guide I chuse / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud / I cannot miss my way” (1: 16-18). Coleridge likewise deploys this version of wander in “Frost at Midnight,” as he imagines, “thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores” (54-55). This iteration of wander is echoed throughout Romanticism, from Mary Robinson’s opening call of “Spirit Divine! with thee I’ll wander!” in “To the Poet Coleridge,” to Keats’ “Ode to Psyche,” which opens, “I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly” (2-3; 7). Despite this, wander in Romanticism is by no means an exclusively positive and freeing movement. Romantic wander is equally a forced, displaced, and alienating experience. As Susan Wolfson observes, Romanticism continuously represents “encounters with outcasts of all kinds— refugees, the poor, abandoned and fallen women, discharged soldiers, sailors, vagrants, peasants, north-country shepherds and smallholders, abject slaves” (8). This iteration of Romantic wander—evident in Blake’s opening lines of “London,” “I wander thro’ each charter’d street / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe”—is far afield from a wander regarded as the very summit of an imaginative and integrative freedom (1-4). Wander in Romanticism is 2 both freedom and alienation; both individual possibility and abjection; both the trope of the Romantic bard and the trope of the Wandering Jew. To wander in Romanticism is to be free and unchecked—to be devoid of social parameters, and to be capable of envisioning and imagining new modes of being; however, to wander in Romanticism is also to be atomized and abject, to be uprooted and listless—to be over-determined. I argue that the duality of Romantic wander, as both a movement of liberation and alienation, reflects the expansion and naturalization of the temporality of clock time that occurs over the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Wander in Romanticism—through both its instantiations—encodes the ways in which clock time begins to radically restructure experience. In “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E.P. Thompson calls attention to the significant shift in temporal consciousness ushered in by the sociopolitical promotion of clock time over the course of the eighteenth-century. Thompson argues that the onset of industrialization oversees the imposition of “a new time-discipline,” which calcifies into a “propaganda of time-thrift” “directed at the working people” (90). Thompson writes, “a general diffusion of clocks and watches [occurs] (as one would expect) at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour” (69). The expansion and enfranchisement of clock time carries out what Cesare Cassarino identifies as the “objectification” of time (226). Clock time disentangles temporality from traditional, cultural and economic practices, and, in so doing, transforms time into an objective and open horizon of being, in and of itself. However, this newly objectified time is established and structured outside of individual ontology, and becomes an 3 external site of temporal estrangement. Clock time appears to give time by rendering it an open and available object, but it does so by way of wrenching time free from bodies that are already temporal (226). “This is the historical conjuncture,” Cassarino writes, “when the double-edged liberation of productive forces from the various yokes of premodern social arrangements increasingly realizes the vital potentials latent in time . as well as increasingly turns time into dead and deadening time” (226). The doubled representation of wander in Romanticism—wander as free and wander as “dead and deadening”—encodes and figures the experience of temporality within the new and equally doubled temporal mode of clock time. The duality of Romantic wander and its reflection of the duality of clock time, however, can be understood further as being comprised of both a rhetoric of wander and an experience of wander. The positive version of wander, as a free, natural, and developmental movement, constitutes a rhetorical fashioning of wander; one that makes an objective, quantified configuration of time acceptable and desirable. The

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