Two Poems by Dorothy Wordsworth in Dialogic Interaction with "Tintern Abbey"

Abstract

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH'S WORK HAS REVEALED ITSELF OF PARADIGMATIC value to feminist criticism seeking a more complete and truthful picture of Romanticism, thought by scholars working in the area to be possible only through a recapturing of texts hitherto not allowed into the canon, these being often texts by acknowledged or unacknowledged woman writers. Rectifying the traditional attitude to Wordsworth's work, which treated it merely as a textual-biographical source illuminating William Wordsworth's life and work, Margaret Homans and Susan Levin drew attention to the value of her writing both in its own fight and as a part of Romantic literary activity/history. Evaluating her poetry mainly in terms of a negative or absent process of poetic identity-formation because of her subordination as a woman both within the masculine tradition and to her brother's creative selfhood, these critics chose to deemphasize that aspect of her writing in positive dialogue with Wordsworth's work and with Romantic literature at large. Responding in turn to Homans' and Levin's polemical (1) emphases, critics such as Susan Wolfson, Anne Mellor and James Soderholm have drawn attention to that quality of her poetry in relation to Wordsworth's poetry which, I would suggest, can be properly termed dialogic because it involves a dialogization, in oblique and subtle ways, of Wordsworth's imaginative values and discursive practices. This study attempts to examine the dialogic interaction of two poems by mainly with Tintern Abbey in addition to some other poems by Wordsworth. Embodying a direct response to Tintern Abbey, Thoughts on my sick-bed is the one, out of her twenty seven extant poems, that most explicitly and intensely enters into dialogue with Wordsworth's poetry. The other poem chosen for discussion is Irregular Verses because it offers the most explicit statement, among her poems, of her rejection of poetic identity, thus offering a negative writing of the prime theme of Tintern Abbey as well as other great lyrics by such as The Prelude, namely the formation of the poetic subject. I will first present what is intended as a brief but sufficiently detailed dialogic reading of Tintern Abbey in order to prepare the ground for an intertextual/dialogic reading of Wordsworth's poems in relation to Tintern This analysis will necessarily incorporate an incomplete summary of the contemporary critical discussion about the poem as far as a dialogic approach to it is concerned. (2) A focus on the dialogic elements of Tintern Abbey would reveal that in Wordsworthian lyric the poetic/masculine subject position constructed in and by discourse is far from a unified one, and that poetic mastery is achieved through a constant struggle to heal/reveal the divisions of language and consciousness. Such a perspective would in turn shed light on the quality of Wordsworth's poems as direct and indirect responses to Tintern I say already dialogized because as utterances addressing Tintern Abbey they do not simply dialogize its discursive elements, but to the degree that they adopt certain of its discursive features as a totality of stylistic and thematic elements in the Bakhtinian sense, they are colored and influenced by its language and internal dialogization. Furthermore, the internal dialogization of Tintern Abbey is in a fundamental sense constructed around notions sustained by the implicit definition of as the other of the masculine/poetic subject in the poem, which inevitably and dialogically determines how we read the selected poems written by her insofar as they are responses to Tintern I will then proceed with Irregular Verses because as a of negative vocation (Wolfson, Dorothy Wordsworth 142) it relates more immediately to the myth of poetic origins in Tintern Abbey than Thoughts. I will next discuss Thoughts, where the theme of spiritual compensation is developed in intertextual relationship mainly with Tintern Abbey. …