The Everyday Soundscape: Sound and Mixed Aesthetic Modes in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which Dorothy Wordsworth’s discontent with available aesthetic modes is suggested by shifts in her observational stance from that of a distanced and autonomous viewer to that of an active and involved listener. Throughout the Grasmere Journal and the Alfoxden Journal, Wordsworth establishes herself as continuously situated within a sonic environment, simultaneously subject to the soundscape as a resonator and reciprocally contributing to it as a sounding body. Wordsworth’s approach to recording her listening experiences in the journals gives voice to a dynamic world, weaving its familiar “undersongs” and “strange sounds” into a sonic fabric of everyday life. Her receptivity to sound looks beyond the reign of the visual in picturesque landscape aesthetics and resonates presciently with twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of sonic sensation. I argue that Wordsworth treats attunement to disorganized, even disharmonious sounds as generative of aesthetically meaningful engagement with a world that she finds cannot be composed or framed in order to be legible according to a conventional aesthetic rubric.