UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles After Wordsworth: Global Revisions of the English Poet A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Katherine Lillian Bergren 2013 © Copyright by Katherine Lillian Bergren 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION After Wordsworth: Global Revisions of the English Poet by Katherine Lillian Bergren Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Saree Makdisi, Chair After Wordsworth reads the fraught relationships between the English poet and his global Anglophone audience, for whom he was an inspiration and a burden—often at the same time. Where other scholars, both Romanticist and otherwise, have analyzed the afterlives of Romanticism in a teleological straight path from life to afterlife, my dissertation turns this path into a round-trip. By connecting the trajectory of life and afterlife in a circuit, I argue that William Wordsworth’s appearances in a variety of genres and locales—from political tracts to memoirs, from New England to the Amazon—do not just produce a reception history. Rather, they uncover the ambivalent Englishness of Wordsworth’s own writing. The dissertation opens with a primal scene: the common childhood experience, especially in the colonies of the British empire, of memorizing and reciting Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” In Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), this experience inspires the title ii character’s immediate hatred for daffodils. But in chapter one I argue that rather than repudiating Wordsworth’s poetry, Kincaid in My Garden (Book): (1999) shares Wordsworth’s struggle in his Guide to the Lakes (1835) to express the relationship between local stasis and colonial movement through the contested and artificial space of the garden. In chapter two I examine J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and contest the critical assumption that it uses Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805) merely to indicate the irrelevance of what Coetzee calls in White Writing “the quintessentially European posture of reader vis-à-vis environment.” In chapter three I examine the abolitionist afterlife of Wordsworth in the political writings of antebellum activist Lydia Maria Child, who musters Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) in support of her comprehensive anti-slavery agenda— an agenda that Wordsworth seldom considered. In my concluding chapter I suggest that Wordsworth’s representativeness, his ability to stand for moral, geographical, and national spheres beyond those which he actually inhabited in his writing, has in part a strange and paradoxical source: it has been constructed since the 1790s by the Wordsworth family. Both then and now, the Wordsworth family labors reveal that the poet’s preeminence is a result of his representativeness, a quality that requires a familial infrastructure ready to subsume itself under the banner of Wordsworth. The dissertation of Katherine Lillian Bergren is approved. Jonathan Grossman Elizabeth DeLoughrey Michael Meranze Saree Makdisi, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 For my parents, James Bergren and Nancy Vander Pyl TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................... vii VITA .............................................................................................................................................. x INTRODUCTION Those Same Daffodils ................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1 Localism Unrooted ................................................................................... 21 Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book): and Among Flowers William Wordsworth, Guide to the District of the Lakes CHAPTER 2 Paying for Reciprocity ............................................................................. 59 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace William Wordsworth, The Prelude and the Lucy poems CHAPTER 3 ‘How to live’ in England and Beyond ................................................... 100 Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans and the National Anti-Slavery Standard William Wordsworth, The Excursion CHAPTER 4 The Wordsworth Family Business ......................................................... 145 Jonathan Wordsworth, essays Richard Wordsworth, “The Bliss of Solitude” William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................... 181 vi LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: USDA Hardiness Zone Map (2012) ......................................................................... 55 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project began in an attic classroom at Wellesley College in 2001. Alison Hickey taught me to love Wordsworth, but she ran a classroom where openly disliking Wordsworth was an equally valid response, and I’ve been interested in the diverse reactions that Wordsworth inspires ever since. At UCLA, Barbara Packer floated the idea that it might be fun to write about Lydia Maria Child’s literary epigraphs, and once I got started Saree Makdisi added that it might take a whole dissertation to do the topic justice. I am grateful to them both, for the excitement, pragmatism, and confidence they offered along the way. In particular, I doubt I would have focused on Wordsworth were it not for a series of well-timed emails from Saree, telling me to trust my passions and write on whatever I wanted. His support of this project has been constant, and I have felt it deeply. The arguments of this dissertation have developed out of many conversations with Jonathan Grossman and his dry-erase board. He took my zaniest ideas seriously, and inspired me to do the same. Talking with him became one of the most enjoyable parts of writing a dissertation. Liz DeLoughrey’s seminar on postcolonial ecocriticism altered my approach to literature, and her careful readings of my drafts have shown me the path toward becoming a better postcolonial scholar. Michael Meranze asked the question that got me through four years of writing: who do you want this new Wordsworth to be? And in a pinch Michael North offered generous advice on a project he had learned about just two days earlier. At all levels, the members of the English department at UCLA provided intellectual and emotional support far beyond my expectations. I remember with excitement conversations with Ian Newman, Sina Rahmani, and Mike Nicholson. Glenn Brewer gave me some of my most valuable Wordsworth references. Will Clark, Justine Pizzo, and Katherine Isokawa are dream colleagues, but they are even better friends. Their love built a community in Los Angeles that I am lucky to carry with me. When my father went back to school to get a B.A. in English, I was ten years old. For many formative years he modeled what it looked like for an adult to engage and grapple with new ideas and passions. He and my mother always trusted that getting a Ph.D. in English was a fine idea, and had more faith in me and the process than I did at times. This dissertation is dedicated to them for the support and example they provided. Ann Bergren gave me a home base in Los Angeles, and I am grateful for her eagerness to read and discuss my work, or not read and not discuss my work—whichever I preferred at the time. Justin Eichenlaub is an inspiring person to live with. As a scholar and partner he is my first line of defense, my most encouraging reader, and the best person to talk to over dinner. I am grateful for the impossible opportunity to put into words the value of his love and partnership. VITA 2004 B. A., English Wellesley College Wellesley, MA 2005-6 Chancellor’s Prize University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 2006-8 Teaching Assistant Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 2008 M.A., English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 2008-9 Graduate Research Mentorship University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 2009-10 Teaching Fellow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2010-11 Dissertation Research Fellowship Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2011-12 Teaching Fellow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2012-13 Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS “Lydia Maria Child and the Abolitionist Afterlife of William Wordsworth,” Modern Philology 111 no. 1 (2013). “The Poetic Infrastructure of Westminster Bridge.” Paper presented at the UCLA Southland conference, June 2009. “That ‘hideous spectacle’: Corporeal Morality in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Paper presented at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism annual conference, May 2009. “The Politics of the Epigraph: Wordsworth in Lydia Maria Child’s Anti-Slavery Writing.” Paper presented at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism annual conference, August 2008. “‘But You are a Man Indeed!’: Suburbia, Imperialism, and Masculinity in The War of the Worlds.” Paper presented at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies annual conference, April 2007. Introduction. Those Same Daffodils This dissertation is about the literary afterlives of William Wordsworth’s writing, and the ability of those afterlives to act as a context for interpreting the writings they repurpose. Wordsworth, who died in 1850, became a canonical writer as soon as the category