Reading Idiocy: Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy"

Abstract

Wordsworth loved writing and re-reading Idiot Boy: wrote the poem with delight and pleasure, and whenever I read it I read it with pleasure (ed. Hill, 52). I shall investigate this exceeding delight and pleasure in the light of three contexts--the Enlightenment understanding of idiocy, Platonic philosophy and Robert Southey--insofar as three pose a challenge to the psychoanalytic assumption that Wordsworth, in loving this poem, was regressing to a frustrated desire for his dead mother. (1) Among other things, this reading overlooks how the simple silhouette of the figure assumed to be Ann Wordsworth tends, as objects always do in Wordsworth, to shimmer and fade until she falls away into a generalized figuration of the mother--a recurrent figure in the Lyrical Ballads. (2) Yet she too disappears as the figure vanishes into the great spiritual mother Nature deeply interfused into all things and impel [ling] / All thinking things, objects of thought (Tintern Abbey 97, 101-3). My threefold re-contextualization of the poem will show that neither nor nature, is that simple. What did the poet love when he loved Idiot Boy? The figurative fertility of the figure exceeds a reductive interpretation of the poem as a projection of Wordsworth's desire for his dead mother. Yet if Wordsworth's love for Idiot Boy remains irrecoverable by psychoanalytic cliches, how is this emotion to be understood? Since the eponymous protagonist of the poem vicariously incarnates this love, the boy is worth questioning insofar as he provides a vivid contrast to the less idiotic (read: more socially adaptable) youths in other Wordsworth poems. Byron's dismissal of the poem in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a helpful guide on how not to read the poem: Thus when he tells the tale of Betty Foy, The mother of 'an Boy'; A moon-struck silly lad who lost his way, And, like his bard, confounded night with day, So close on each pathetic part he dwells, And each adventure so tells, That who view the 'idiot in his glory', Conceive the Bard the of the (247-254). Byron argues that the at the heart of the poem is not, as the reader expects, the boy, but his idiot mother, which becomes even more offensive when he identifies the real hero of the or idiot in his glory as Wordsworth himself. Byron makes this leap because he cannot [c]onceive with certainty the object of Wordsworth's love. Like Keats, Byron is uncomfortable with Wordsworth's espousal of mother-love and reduces it to the earlier poet's love for his own ego. From this reading, it is a small step to the orthodox Oedipal truism that self-love is indistinguishable from an obsessive mother-love. (3) I want to question both this assumption that Wordsworth, in narrating the tale of Betty Foy and her son, is merely sublimely tell[ing] the story of a wordsworthian or egotistical sublime (Keats; 1. 387) and the Freudian corollary that an egotistic self-love leads, once the mother is absent, dead or buried, to the construction of mother Nature as a compensation for this loss. Neither maternity, nor nature was so simple, comforting or reassuring, as Julie Kipp explains in Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (2003): pathologizing of women's bodies and the demonizing of represented mothers as fearful monsters governed by instincts and psychical processes that seemed unthinking [i.e., idiotic, natural or], animal-like, and even potentially pathological (54, 52; my emphasis). Wordsworth counters, I argue, anti-maternal sentiment by his expressed sympathy for both mother and son. Wordsworth expresses, in other words, more maternal than his mis-readers. By maternal I mean that he sympathizes with mothers who suffer social stigmatization as too motherly or pathologically and that he remains open to the sympathetically feminine side of himself through an embrace of the excessive mother-love Betty Foy displays for her wayward child. …