Tessa Hadley and William Wordsworth: Literary Lineage and Patriarchal Legacy in The Past

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Tessa Hadley’s The Past (2016), a ruined cottage evokes the dilapidated structure featured in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Ruined Cottage” (1797–98), a poem that privileges the male gaze and male Romantic imagination. I argue Hadley subverts the Romantic tropes bound up in these patriarchal structures by deploying the tropes in such a way as to transfer the powers of perception and imagination to female characters. Through this gynocentric redeployment, Hadley suggests how modern women might surpass Wordsworth’s Margaret in their potential to construct realities in which they have agency while simultaneously reminding us how women remain oppressed by male conceptions of reality. Reading “The Ruined Cottage” alongside The Past also reveals poetry as an under-recognized element of Hadley’s literary lineage and illuminates how this contemporary fiction writer approaches the modernist dual imperative of innovation and inheritance. Reading Hadley’s examination of Romanticism’s androcentric poetic legacy in the context of her modernist heritage positions her as a metamodernist writer. My reading of The Past suggests that a full consideration of modernist continuities and metamodernist practice in contemporary fiction should include poetry, as well as prose, and lineages that predate the twentieth century.