Wordsworth's Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages

Abstract

Sometime late in 1797 or early in 1798, Wordsworth, in the company of Coleridge and Thomas Poole, came upon a relatively uncommon sight, a mouldering gibbet high among the Quantock hills. circumstances that found their conclusion and sign in this gibbet were unique; Poole related a gruesome story of the savage murder of a harmless idiot named Jenny by her husband John Walford, in Dodington Common. Though the incident might appear at first too crude and sensational to have any lasting effect upon Wordsworth's poetry, its powerful apposition of idiocy and violence helped to generate a number of poems in which Wordsworth attempts to establish the necessities that underlay their appearance together. His first response was moral and led directly, in The Somersetshire Tragedy' and in parts of The Idiot Boy, to a polemic against those unsympathetic representations of idiots that make them vulnerable to such cruelty and to the attempt through poetry, to supplement their deficiencies in feeling with the feeling and passion of those who observe them. However, Wordsworth also was engaged at the same time in writing Recluse, an epic that aimed to set out a comprehensive theory of the historical and educational development of man; and the story seemed to support educational and anthropological speculation about the origins of language and memory. Initially, in The Idiot Boy, and later in Peter Bell, as the narrative is reworked to provide empirical support for such speculation, it increasingly takes on the character of an originary myth or primal scene in the development of the human mind-a universal story of violence and crime that precedes and makes possible human memory and language. Finally, in the 1799 Prelude, Wordsworth makes it an intrinsic aspect of personal memory; the story takes on the character of a personal myth of origins, one located within, in childhood memory. As a result of this displacement, the gibbet at Penrith Beacon comes to serve as an alle-