Romantic Autopsy and Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude

Abstract

This essay traces the development of autoptical dissection as a medical practice during the French Revolution and its relation to modes of self-analysis in Romantic poetry, especially William Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude (1798–1799). In keeping with William Godwin's association of autoptical analysis with radical politics, Wordsworth's autobiographical poem reveals his attraction to a practice of poetic interpretation informed by anatomical techniques of probing and dismemberment. What emerges in the Two-Part Prelude, though, is a hybrid version of dissective exegesis, in which post-Revolutionary radical analysis coexists with an earlier Enlightenment sense of dissection as a procedure that reveals underlying sympathy and wholeness. Performing this double function of dissection through invocations of the probing glance, the Two-Part Prelude looks beneath the surfaces of landscape and of the speaker's body to analyze and animate its account of the growth of the poet's mind. As it marks the historically transitioning status of dissection in the anatomical medicine of the 1790s, the poem asks how medical method might function as a protocol for poetic hermeneutics and anticipates the modern practice of symptomatic close reading.