From Trembling to Tranquility: Women Writers and Wordsworth’s Pleasure Principle

Abstract

If it is commonplace to associate imagination with the cultural movement of Romanticism, it is decidedly more rare for perversion to be placed in its company. But Wollstonecraft’s concern—and the language in which it is couched—is far from uncommon in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century criticism. These remarks from 1797, barely preceding publication of the famous Romantic verse “experiment” of the Lyrical Ballads, not only reflect central concerns dominating the British landscape of the 1790s, a postrevolutionary age of political and cultural repression, but also anticipate the far more well-known formulations of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to follow. At a time when excesses in politics, aesthetics, and sexual activity were often seen as connected, even interchangeable, the perceived need to police such excesses flourished as never before.2 This perception was especially useful to those seeking to establish a public position of cultural legitimacy. Appearing in a late-eighteenth-century magazine largely devoted to original poetry, Wollstonecraft’s observation on perversion also provides a fitting point of entry for examining a figure haunted by the specter of such excesses: William Wordsworth.3