"Hauntings from the Infirmity of Love": Wordsworth and the Illusion of Pastoral

Abstract

1 IN 1815 WORDSWORTH PUBLISHED A REVISED TEXT OF ELEGIAC STANZAS Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm in which he commemorated fond (29) of his youthful faith in invulnerable calm that he had shared with silent breathing life of landscape. In first version of poem, published in 1807, he had described that faith more severely; it had been, he wrote, a fond delusion. The distinction between and delusion, invoked here by Wordsworth, is not always easy to clarify, since two words so often overlap in meaning. It is, however, a distinction to which psychoanalysis has paid particular attention, and in The Future of an Illusion Freud offered some typically clear definitions that may serve as our starting-point. Both and delusions, he wrote, characterized by prominence of wish-fulfilment in their motivation; it is this that distinguishes them from errors, although, he adds, an is not necessarily an error. Otherwise, he concludes, difference between a delusion and an has to do with our point of view: when we call a belief a delusion we considering it primarily in terms of its objective relation to reality, whilst when we call it an we considering it primarily in terms of its subjective elements of wish-fulfilment. (1) A further difference between two words lies in their different implications for mental health. If, as Freud says, a delusion is a mistaken belief motivated by wish-fulfilment and identified by reference to a shared world of knowledge and common sense, it is also a word which expresses an alienation from that world which may at times become madness. It was widely believed in eighteenth century, for example, that delusive ideas were symptoms of insanity. Illusions, on other hand, as Charles Rycroft reminds us, are not pathological phenomena. (2) If sometimes they alienate us from world, they may also connect us to it. Illusions belong to normal history of our desires and affections as they mix themselves with world, and we acknowledge this when we speak of rather than delusions of childhood. If delusions songs of experience, songs of innocence, from which we do not need to be cured, only awoken. It was not always so. In Renaissance Britain, was most commonly used to express dangerous false seeing inspired by witches and other enemies of truth and patriarchal order. Prince Arthur in The Faerie Queene feared power ofsome magicall / Illusion, that did beguile his (II: II.39.6); Hecate sought illusion of artifical sprites to confound Macbeth (III.v.27-28). Even secular references to sweet illusions of love retained something of this demonic sense of danger. But with bourgeois pacification at end of seventeenth century entered upon its modern meaning where anxieties no longer theological but psychological, originating in tensions between reason and wish-fulfilments of fancy and imagination. In this new world, where delusion remained alien to reason and common sense, enjoyed a richly ambiguous relationship with them. Mrs Radcliffe, for instance, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, condemned the of a distempered imagination but celebrated the magical of twilight. (3) On one hand, was checked in name of patriarchal reason; on other, it was indulged as a source of value in its own right. In this second sense, it represented an exemption granted to fancy and desire by taxing world of knowledge and common sense; and if that exemption was often marginalized, banished as it were to twilight, it nevertheless indicates a bourgeois society more relaxed about its countercultural play than Renaissance Britain had been. In Elegiac Stanzas of 1807, fresh from shock of his brother's death, Wordsworth had emphasized error of his youthful faith: dream in which he had been housed was a false belief, a delusion alienating him from his fellow-men, his Kind (54). …