Theorizing Elegiac Consolation as a Transitional Object: The Arab Dream in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude

Abstract

ABSTRACTFor William Wordsworth, a poet preoccupied with the theme of loss, the notion of consolation remains one of the central concerns of his poetry. This article analyzes how the Arab dream episode of The Prelude theorizes consolation as a conceptual version of what D. W. Winnicott calls “transitional object.” In Winnicott’s theory, children bridge their move from one state of cognitive reality to another through the discovery of a transitional object, such as the security blanket in the transition from the mother’s lap to independence. Likewise, the lyric speaker of The Prelude copes with the change of cognitive reality incurred by loss through a temporary acceptance of consolatory fiction. Wordsworth’s theory of consolation in The Prelude hinges on this mechanism of fiction-belief: an act of simultaneous believing and disbelieving that is made possible through the self-aware embracement of consolation as a transitional state of mind.