Wordsworth's "The Mad Mother": The Poetics and Politics of Identification

Abstract

In Reading Idiocy: Wordsworth's 'The Idiot Boy, Joshua Gonsalves writes that Wordsworth recognizes some mothers' extreme love for their children he incorporates into his own personality a mother-like vulnerability, unafraid of being feminized, demonized or condemned as effeminate, vulgar, or disgusting (122). Gonsalves views Mad Mother as preparatory for Idiot Boy, preceding it in the 1798 Lyrical. Ballads lower his reader's defenses against mad mothers and enable a sympathetic identification with the extravagant mother he apotheosizes in Idiot Boy (126). I believe Wordsworth's maternal sympathy in Mad Mother also helps explain his poetics and personality, particularly the poetic identification basic his creative process and the evolution of his sexual politics. The textual history of Mad Mother reveals Wordsworth's own shifting sympathies and his commitment the idea of in Deserted her husband and fearing the loss of her son, the mother, instead of sympathizing, projects her own wishes onto her son, creating an imbalance that the balladeer, a mediating figure, offsets in the poem, in the earliest editions (1798-1802), the balladeer identifies with the mother, a similitude comparable the mother's over-identification with her child. However, in the edition of 1805, similitude and dissimilitude in the balladeer-mother relationship contrasts the over-identification he portrays in the mother-infant relationship. In the later editions (beginning in 1815), Wordsworth separates the balladeer and mother's voices until in 1836, the balladeer controls the mother's voice. In the Preface, 1802, Wordsworth includes three ideas relevant my discussion of Mad Mother: the importance of similarity and difference in identification, the people and poets derive from identification, and the basis for poetic identification in human sympathy. For Wordsworth poetic identification involves the poet's of similarity with another person but also difference: the poet bring[s] his near those of the persons whose he described, nay for short spaces of time perhaps and lets himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound[s] and identify[ies] his own with theirs; only the language is thus suggested him a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure (138). For Wordsworth imaginatively modifying the language enables him separate from the original experience and create pleasure. If the poet, Adela Pinch says, modify his reproductions of passions in order make them pleasurable for the reader, it must be because the reader risks slipping into the same delusion (838). When Wordsworth explains the relationship between and identification in the context of meter in the Preface, he characterizes all psychological as that which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder. From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it, take their origin: it is the life of our ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings (149). An imaginative act of sympathy countered with an awareness of difference brings pleasure. One of the ways Wordsworth says that he will achieve the purpose of his poems, to follow the and of the mind when agitated the great and simple affections of our nature, is by tracing the maternal passion through many of its more subtle windings in poems such as Mad Mother (Preface 126). However, different editions of the poem reveal even more subtle fluxes and refluxes of the poet's mind. …