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“Transmuting Sorrow”: Earth, Epitaph, and Wordsworth's 2009 Sharon McGrady ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “TRANSMUTING SORROW”: EARTH, EPITAPH, AND WORDSWORTH’S NINETEENTH-CENTURY READERS by SHARON MCGRADY A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program of Literatures in English written under the direction of Professor William H. Galperin and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2009 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Transmuting Sorrow”: Earth, Epitaph, and Wordsworth’s Nineteenth-Century Readers By SHARON MCGRADY Dissertation Director: William H. Galperin This study examines the ways in which nineteenth-century readers experienced Wordsworth’s poetry as wisdom literature—ways of reading the poetry which have been largely lost in the twenty-first century. Considered as disciples, these men and women of letters had lifelong relationships with the poet and poetry which paralleled Wordsworth’s own ritual of returning to the text and to the consecrated place in nature. By examining the reading practices of these Wordsworthians in the light of interpretive methods dating back to monastic readers, I show how such practices went hand in glove with the poet’s epitaphic aesthetic. Wordsworth’s theory of poetry derives from his “Essays Upon Epitaphs” which privilege the sympathetic relationship of the epitaph writer to the deceased and to the mourning survivors. I trace the evolution of this aesthetic in Wordsworth’s poetry through his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, considered as the poet’s own epitaph, and through his turn to the frugality and rigid lines of the sonnet as the form most conducive to fulfilling his prophetic duty in later years. I follow this aesthetic as poetic persona and readers enact the sincerity between epitaph writer and mourners in a mutually sympathetic relationship. This bond between writer and reader assisted in ii transforming suffering into an attractive if unattainable ideal which yet inspired readers to social duty. I use psychoanalytic theory to show how the persona modeled the “transmutation” of sorrow for readers by ordering the mind and cultivating self- forgiveness by means of this ideal. The ritual of reading and revising sorrows which incorporated the persona’s mental discipline importantly depended on the “counter-spirit” or deconstructive quality inherent in language which has its analogue in the cycles of renovation and decay in nature. This instability of language contributed to an ambiguity at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetry which opened up a range of possible interpretations. Depending on the individual, such ambiguity made it possible for nineteenth-century readers to apply the poetry to their lives methodically, both as an aid to mourning and to religious reflection. iii Acknowledgements I happily acknowledge teachers and colleagues who have had a profound impact on my studies at Rutgers. I have been fortunate to learn from wonderful teachers. In particular, I wish to thank the members of three seminars I attended who commented on parts of the dissertation: two writing seminars at Rutgers, one in 2004, and one in 2006, led by Myra Jehlen and Richard E. Miller respectively; and a Mellon Seminar taught by Susan J. Wolfson at Princeton University during the summer of 2005. All three seminars were stimulating and useful and I appreciate members for taking the time to read my work. I also wish to acknowledge Mellon funding for research at the Cornell University Wordsworth Collection whose staff was helpful and cordial. I thank Michael Basinski, curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, where I consulted a William Morris manuscript. At Rutgers, I have appreciated the guidance of Kurt Spellmeyer. My work has also benefited from the guidance of Cheryl Robinson, Courtney Borack, and Eileen Faherty in the Graduate English office. I am deeply grateful for the dedication and brilliance of my dissertation committee members who have brought their unique gifts to bear on this project: William H. Galperin, Carolyn Williams, Colin Jager, and Susan J. Wolfson. I have not been shy in showing my indebtedness to these scholars within the study as they have shaped my thinking in more ways than I can acknowledge. Whatever is good in this dissertation is owing to their influence. I especially want to thank William Galperin for his patience and faith in me, and for the best gift of all, for teaching me Wordsworth in the first place. I could not have done this without the support of my friends and family. Virginia Gilmartin’s sharp intelligence has been greatly appreciated and Kristin Girten has likewise been a loyal iv friend. Virginia Ross Taylor has been a teacher and friend. Finally, I wish to thank family members to whom I will always owe a special debt of gratitude, Wilma Dourney, Shannon McGrady, and Robert Marsh. v for my mother and sister vi Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgements iv Dedication vi Table of Contents vii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Prelude as Memorial: Revision and Return 21 I. Transmuting the Self 29 II. “Unceasing Ritual” 45 III. Revising the Deity: Wordsworth and the “Spots of Time” 49 Chapter Two: Wordsworth’s “Active Principle” and the Echoing Parts of a World 74 I. The Boy of Winander: “that uncertain Heaven” 85 II. Revolutionary Echoes 98 Chapter Three: Reluctant Return: Earth and Epitaph in the River Duddon Sonnets 108 I. “How shall I paint thee?” 115 II. Earth and Epitaph 123 III. Approaching Abjection Through the Sonnet Form 137 IV. “greater than we know” 149 Chapter Four: Wordsworth’s Victorian Critics and the “Paramount Duty” of Hope 159 I. Spiritual Reading Practices: Types of Types 163 II. Seeing to See: Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” 181 III. Ordering Sorrow: Leslie Stephen’s Modern Wordsworth 199 Chapter Five: Beyond Gender: Touching Mother Earth in Wordsworth’s The White Doe of Rylstone and Morris’s Love is Enough 217 I. “bright about a story never done” 231 II. The Gothic Spirit of Touch 236 III. Absorbing Sorrow 241 IV. Revising Dreams in Love is Enough 254 Works Cited 269 vii 1 Many attachments taken up in early life and which are warm and pleasant while they last, drop off and are left behind us in the necessary course of things; but there are others which not only grow with our growth and strengthen with our strength, but are also bound up with us in our decay. —Sir Henry Taylor (“Poetical Works” 51) 1 Introduction It is hardly surprising that long before Wordsworth’s long life ended on April 23, 1850, critics were hard at work ranking his poetic legacy. No doubt discerning in his Prefaces the poet’s nervous desire to inherit the mantle of Chaucer, Spenser and Milton, reviewers seemed to take on anxiety, for or with the poet, even as he lived. In Wordsworth’s later years and Victorian after-life, critics not only worried over how to situate the poet’s greatness—often below Shakespeare and Milton, and occasionally alongside the latter—they differed as to the constitution of that greatness: to what degree was Wordsworth a poet, philosopher, or teacher of morals; a poet of passion or cold remove; a poet of man or nature; a pantheist or theist? One aspect of the poetry less subject to debate was its tangible effect on the reader, namely its profound spiritual qualities. Indeed, it was not a rare event for readers of divergent backgrounds to converge on Wordsworth, as Stephen Gill’s study thoroughly documents. After the first wave of the “construction of Wordsworth” concluded in the 1860s (Gill, WV 41), came witness after witness to the poetry’s “spiritual power,” an “almost infinitely elastic term” (40). My study re-focuses our understanding of Wordsworth’s audience then and now by showing how the poetry’s “elastic” power was bound up in nineteenth-century spiritual reading practices which valued returning to the text. 2 I begin with the breadth of spiritual encounters on view in this “parade of testimony” (Gill, WV 58). The range of “spiritual power” was great because readers turned to the poetry not only when they were in mourning, but also when they simply sought wisdom. By putting aside thorny questions about the poetry’s content and greatness, and clinging instead to the gratitude it cultivated, nineteenth-century readers lived with the verse over the course of a lifetime. As the dramatist and critic Sir Henry Taylor observed in 1834, Wordsworth was one of those “attachments” which “not only grow with our growth” but are also “bound up with us in our decay” (“Poetical Works” 51). Although their responses were various, one can detect among the poet’s most loyal readers an aesthetic of reading which constituted a practice of returning to the poetry. I hold this practice to the light of the theories espoused in Wordsworth’s “Essays Upon Epitaphs” (1810)2 in which an epitaph is “not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all—to the wise and the most ignorant” (EE1 399-401).3 As this study makes clear, however, Wordsworth’s best nineteenth-century readers in print were careful to take a studious approach to the poetry. The poet’s point is that his epitaphic poetry is not available only to the “studious;” it is not “proud” or “shut up.” He emphasizes instead the openness of the epitaphic aesthetic. As advocated in the “Essays,” the epitaph writer’s relationship with the mourner as well as the deceased was essentially an open and sympathetic one, and importantly, took full account of the natural setting in which the epitaph was “exposed.” The epitaph is “concerning all, and for all:—in the church-yard it is open to the day; the sun looks down upon the stone, and the rains of heaven beat against it” (EE1 406-08).
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