Monthly Archives: July 2011

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson is not exactly a traditional biography. It does tell Dorothy’s life story, but it doesn’t try to include all the details or treat all the times in her life equally. Instead, it moves through her early years quickly, rushes through the last five decades at breakneck speed, and spends most of its time on the years of the Grasmere Journals, four journals she kept from 1800 to the very beginning of 1803. In this section, she spends a lot of time discussing the journals themselves, reading them closely for insights into Dorothy’s life at this time, and also using details from Dorothy’s life to illuminate the journals. It was the most exciting, most famous time in her long life: the time when she and William Wordsworth collaborated on their writing and tramped all over the Lake District, with Coleridge as their frequent companion.

The picture Wilson creates of Dorothy is different than the one I had in mind and the one painted by her letters (which I wrote about here). I had always thought of her as an avid walker, which she was, and also a dreamy, melancholy type, a person who thought and felt deeply, moody and brooding, a woman of sensibility, full of Romantic longing. The letters portray her as a quiet family woman, a person devoted to her brothers, nieces, and nephews and concerned above all else for their welfare. She was at least some of those things, but in Wilson’s biography, she is also very charismatic and full of energy and life:

Those who knew Dorothy in her hot youth describe her as possessing all the wildness of the Brontë heroines she helped to inspire. It was the quality of her gaze they noticed first. For John Thelwall, the radical, she was “the maid of ardent eye”; Wordsworth, in “Tintern Abbey,” famously praised “the shooting lights” of her “wild eyes,” which were a clear and light gray-blue, and Coleridge, taking his cue, wrote of “the wild lights in her eyes.” De Quincey described her eyes as “wild and startling” and Dorothy as “all fire, and … ardour,” the “very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known.” She had something of the “gipsy” to her, De Quincey said…

It’s this wildness that’s intriguing, and also her anxieties and what Wilson calls her neurotic personality. At the center of Wilson’s biography is a very strange scene from Dorothy journal, which takes place on Williams’s wedding day. She is devastated by the wedding, completely undone, although she has known it would happen for many months and sees William’s wife Mary as a close friend whom she is very fond of. But she had had William all to herself for several years and now, although she will continue to live with him, she will have to share him. Here is the scene from Dorothy’s journal:

On Monday 4th October 1802, my Brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson …William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring — with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before — he slipped it again onto my finger & blessed me fervently. When they were absent my dear little Sara [Mary’s sister] prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything, till Sara came upstairs to me & said “They are coming.” This forced me from the bed where I lay & I moved I knew not how straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William & fell upon his bosom….

This is a bizarre scene for a lot of reasons — the exchange of the wedding ring that mimics a wedding ceremony, her loss of consciousness when she realizes the wedding is over, her propulsion into William’s bosom at the end. Her relationship with William was the defining factor of her life, and readers have long speculated on its nature. Could it have been incestuous? Or haunted by unfulfilled sexual longing? Or of a more ethereal, spiritual nature?

Wilson handles all these questions well and other tricky ones such as the nature of Dorothy’s mental illness in her later years (a very sad story). She weaves Dorothy’s words into her text, using italics for language from the journals, with no quotation marks. This could come across as presumptuous, perhaps, implying that Wilson’s mind has somehow melded with Dorothy’s, but instead it comes across as intensely devoted and sympathetic while at the same time, somehow, not losing a feeling of objectivity.

Another aspect of Wilson’s biography that surprised me is her description of Dorothy as not given to self-reflection or self-awareness. She is a creature of surfaces, not at all, as Wilson says, like Mary Shelley who wrote in her diary, “Let me fearlessly descend into the remotest caverns of my own mind, carry the torch of self-knowledge into its dimmest recesses.” Dorothy prefers to stay on the outside, observing the natural world or writing accounts of actions rather than thoughts. It’s true that self-revealing moments in the journals are rare and Dorothy rarely tells us what she is thinking, but I wonder whether it’s right to move from the evidence of the journals to making a claim about what goes on in Dorothy’s mind. Her record of her life is very incomplete, after all. But it’s fascinating to think of this woman surrounded by Romantic poets, living out what seems to be an intensely Romantic life, and not being terribly interested in exploring the movements of her own mind.

As I said in my previous post, Wilson’s biography made me want to pick up the journals again, which I have, and I’m now reading through them very slowly. It’s easy to skim over her entries and feel like you’ve gotten the gist, but Wilson’s book makes a case for taking one’s time with them and treating them more like poetry than prose, so that’s what I’m trying to do.

I happened to pick up a copy of Dorothy Wordsworth’s selected letters while in London — I have her journals and a biography, so it seemed appropriate to get some letters as well — and on a whim I began reading them while flying back to the U.S. The letters were interesting; I enjoyed the glimpse into Dorothy’s life they gave, and it’s always fun to read about that group of great writers who spent so much time together, Dorothy, William Wordsworth, and Coleridge, with appearances now and then by Thomas De Quincey and Charles and Mary Lamb. The letters are also fairly tame and quiet since Dorothy is being her best social self, although it was fun to see her putting an aunt firmly in her place by insisting that there is nothing improper in going on a long walking tour with her brother:

I cannot pass unnoticed that part of your letter in which you speak of my “rambling about the country on foot.” So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise — but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.

As Dorothy is penniless at this point, saving thirty shillings is significant. I love the fact that she is basically running away from home here. She’s not sneaking off exactly, but she has left the aunt and uncle who have taken care of her since her mother died, and her relatives are not particularly pleased with her. This was unconventional behavior. She and William walk for the next two days, the first day to Grasmere, which is where they will live five years later during that famous time William Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote their Lyrical Ballads and she wrote her Grasmere journals, and the second day to Keswick, where they stayed with friends.

This is, perhaps, the point at which she finally grows up. She is 23 at the time, having spent most of her life up to this point separated from her four brothers. Her mother died when she was six, the event that shook up the family and sent her off to live with her aunt and uncle. Her father died when she was 12, but even then, she didn’t see her family. Finally, now that she is in her 20s, she is reunited with her long-lost brothers, and at this point, she is making her dramatic move — leaving her guardians and clinging to William, with whom she will live for decades to come.

She is also establishing her reputation as a serious walker. She will walk miles and miles, most famously in the area around Grasmere. She and William, accompanied sometimes by neighbors and friends, will cover the same ground again and again, getting to know their area intimately, and their walks will inspire the poetry and poetic prose to come. It’s fitting that part of her striking out on her own with William involves a defense of the value of walking: it’s healthy and pleasurable, and it’s using the great gift given to herby nature — her strength.

After reading the letters, I thought I would pick up a recent biography of Dorothy, Frances Wilson’s book The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. I’m nearing the end of it now. I quickly decided that reading the biography meant I needed to reread the Grasmere journals as well, so I’m in the middle of those too. The biography and the journals paint quite a different picture of Dorothy than the letters do. But more on that later.

I picked up Stephanie Staal’s book Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life on a whim at the library and read it relatively quickly over the July 4th weekend. It was a good book, an enjoyable and interesting read, although I found it more interesting for the personal stories told than for the discussions of feminist texts. Perhaps it was because I was already familiar with many of the books she discussed and her summaries of their main arguments didn’t go beyond the basics, but I was always a little relieved when she returned to her personal story.

The book begins with Staal’s frustration with her situation in life — unexpectedly finding herself a dissatisfied wife and mother who was struggling to keep a career going. She decided to look for books by women who addressed the frustrations she was feeling, and she found herself looking through the Women’s Studies section of her local bookstore searching for wisdom. Eventually she hits on the idea of retaking the “Fem. Texts” course she took at Barnard as an undergrad. She will read or reread the great works of feminism to see what she can learn from them the second time around, and also to see how she has changed and how the students taking the class have changed from her undergrad days. (The premise of the book is in essence the same as David Denby’s Great Books where he goes back to Columbia to retake their “Great Books” curriculum, and she doesn’t mention this. I kind of thought she should have.)

The book takes us through her year of reading, beginning with Genesis and the Garden of Eden story, and hitting many of the great feminist writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Helene Cixous, and many others. Staal intersperses discussions of these writers and descriptions of classroom dynamics with stories about her life. She writes about raising her daughter while trying to keep a freelance career going, about moving to Maryland from New York City and trying to fit into the very different culture there, about her sometimes troubled marriage and her struggles getting her husband to understand what she was feeling and to help out more around the house. She’s dismayed at the distance she has traveled from her undergrad self, from the person who would not have believed that she would one day find herself feeling trapped in the house taking care of a child. She found she identified much too closely with the audience of dissatisfied 1950s housewives Betty Friedan addressed in The Feminine Mystique.

Not surprisingly, taking the Fem. Texts course leads Staal to more questions than answers, but she does take comfort in reading how other women grappled with the those same questions. There was less comfort to be found from observing her young classmates. She admires their self-confidence, but also feels that feminism has taken a wrong turn somewhere. She is disturbed by certain aspects of third-wave feminism, especially the easy comfort the students feel with pornography and our highly-sexualized culture. She worries about what her daughter will face as she grows older.

This book would be worth reading for anyone who wants an introduction to feminist texts (it comes complete with reading lists), and for anyone who wants to read about one woman’s struggles to stay true to her feminist values. I enjoyed it most for the latter, but it does both well.