In his justification of poetic meter in the production of pleasure, Wordsworth believes that pleasure derives from the “perception of similitude in dissimilitude.”
The arousal of passion, “sexual appetite” as well as “all the passions connected with it,” takes root in seeing “similitude in dissimilitude” (Prose I, 148). Applying this argument to the theme of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, we note that all poems circle around the life of the lower class, with different marginal figures (dissimilitude) living in destitution (similitude). Indeed, as Wordsworth came to terms with English ideology, especially regarding his attitude towards the French revolution, this
“similitude in dissimilitude” gradually transformed itself into the aesthetic effect drawn from the lives of different marginal figures. Wordsworth started to shift his emphasis to the beautiful effect of poetry, while his “similitude in dissimilitude”
aimed to produce the aesthetic pleasure derived from recognizing the beauty in his poems, which represent harmony in society. Wordsworth became what James Robert Allard terms a “poet-physician” (10), a cultural guardian whose responsibility was to cure disease and promote the health of the nation.
In his manifesto of healthy poetics in “The Preface” to Lyrical Ballads,
Wordsworth consolidates the hierarchy and disposition of passion and reason. A necessary component of poetry, passion should be harnessed by reason to avoid both excess and sterility. Wordsworth sees “sexual appetite” as the basic form of passion, and all other passions are more or less the extension of this sexual appetite. This understanding of the sexual, together with his Brunonian mindset of health, shapes the sexual as a precarious but ineluctable ingredient of not only poetry but also human beings. His Vaudracour and Julia, completed in 1805 and published in 1820, and Home at Grasmere, started from 1801 and completed in 1806, both contain
Wordsworth’s personal history in which he struggled with an overflow of sexual energy only to transform it into broader national scale.
A. Vaudracour and Julia: A Love Affair Ends Badly
Originally designed as one episode in the 1805 version of The Prelude,
Vaudracour and Julia was separated from The Prelude and published in 1820. It is famous for its off-the-record love affair with Annette Vallon, in the sense that the story of Vaudracour and Julia in many ways is just a transparently fictionalized version of Wordsworth and Annette Vallon’s union: the lovers are forbidden to get married, they have an illegitimate child (Vallon moved from Blois to Orleans to give birth to her child, while Julia, on the contrary, moves from Orleans to Blois to avoid scandal before she becomes visibly pregnant), and they are finally separated apart as an end.
In the 1805 version of The Prelude, the story of Vaudracour and Julia is placed at the end of Book Nine. After recording his friendship with Michel Arnaud Beaupuy, a general in the Republican army, and his revolutionary fervor in the early eighteenth century the passage, culminates in their witnessing of a “hunger-bitten Girl / Who crept along[as be] fitting her languid self,” and who “with her two hands / Was busy knitting in a heartless mood / Of solitude.” Upon watching this scene, Beaupuy
points to the child and cries out: “‘’Tis against that, / Which we are fighting’” (IX 512-20).57 His proclaimed belief in the French Revolution, with no detailed explanation, is abruptly shifted to the story of the French lovers:
I will here instead
Draw from obscurity a tragic tale Not in its spirit singular, indeed, But haply worth memorial, as I heard The events related by my patriot friend
And others who had borne a part therein. (IX 550-555)
The love story is thematically unrelated with Wordsworth’s experience in France as recorded in the text, and there is not even mention of the French Revolution in the Vaudracour and Julia story, which further intensifies the mystery of this story and its relatedness with Wordsworth’s love affair. The son of nobility in France, Vaudracour
“vowed his love / To Julia,” a lady “from parents sprung / Not mean in their condition, but with rights / Unhonoured of nobility” (564-567). Though his love for Julia is objected to by his father due to the impropriety of her lower social status, Vaudracour,
“[s]eeing so many bars betwixt himself / And the dear haven where he wished to be / In honorable wedlock with his love,” still enjoys his time with Julia until “Julia, yet without the name of wife, / Carried about her for a secret grief / The promise of a mother” (598-600; 610-612). The baby is born, which exacerbates the lovers’
situation: Julia is carried to a convent, and Vaudracour imprisoned in his father’s house, finally lapsing into a mental breakdown.
Similarities and differences co-exist in the two stories; Wordsworth in 1805 acted as a rational storyteller whose job was nothing but delineating a story seemingly
57 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (London: Norton, 1979). All subsequent references to Vaudracour and Julia are from the 1805 version unless otherwise stated.
unrelated to him. Vaudracour is depicted as a young man full of passionate for his lover without heeding constraints of reason, one who always “[w]as under
fascination,” for “he beheld / A vision, and he loved the thing he saw” (IX 581-583), and it is his rashness and other untoward events of rashness, including an unplanned elopement, the murder of his father’s guardians, and the sending of his child to an orphanage, that altogether lead to tragedy.
In August 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, the first truce between England and France in nine years, Wordsworth visited his onetime lover, Annette Vallon, and his daughter, Anne Caroline Wordsworth. The visit was planned before Wordsworth’s marriage with Mary Hutchinson in the coming October. John L. Mahoney wittily points out Wordsworth’s attitude in late 1802 towards the mother and the daughter:
“Annette and Caroline were still on his mind, and Wordsworth, formerly the political radical and gallant lover and now the more sober, concerned poet about to marry and to take on new responsibilities, wanted to deal with what he considered his
obligations” (158). Whether the guilt was aggregated or alleviated after the visit and his marriage with Mary Hutchinson, the love affair turned into a story of and for others. In 1805, three years after the visit, Wordsworth was grated by the distance, when he recollected his personal history silhouetted in the story of Vaudracour, and self-complacently preserved his health by his opaque “confession.” When it was published separately in 1820, no one but the Wordsworth circle could recognize the relation between this French love story and Wordsworth’s own biography of events on French soil.
B. Home at Grasmere: Dorothy as Invisible Voice
Wordsworth’s marriage with Mary Hutchinson not only temporarily ended the Wordsworth/ Vallon affair; it had a more drastic impact on the Wordsworth/Dorothy relationship. As early as the summer of 1799, Wordsworth started to pay visits to his
childhood friend, Mary Hutchinsion, living at Sockburn, and the love between them grew until finally they planned to get married in October, 1802. As literary
historians note, it posed a great problem to the brother/sister relation:
Dorothy’s anxieties about her brother’s visits to Mary and about the
implications of marriage for his poetic career notwithstanding, Wordsworth and Mary were formally engaged and planned a simple autumn wedding…
[w]ith Dorothy reassured that she would live with her brother and sister-in-law after the wedding. (Mahoney, 158)
In addition to the promise of all three living together given to Dorothy after the
marriage, Dorothy’s reaction to the wedding also went beyond the normal relationship between brother and sister: “The night before the wedding she [Dorothy] slept
wearing the wedding ring (though not on her second finger) and when she gave it to Wordsworth on the morning of 4 October he slipped it back on again and ‘blessed [her]
fervently’” (Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, 211). The ring on Dorothy’s finger carries more meaning than can be readily explained by pure loyalty and love between brother and sister.
The passion between brother and sister, symbolized in the wedding ring, was in late 1802 forced to subside as the simply dual relation extended to one among brother/sister-in-law/sister. This change of relation is latently recorded in Home at Grasmere. Composed early in 1800 and finished in 1806, Home at Grasmere was planned as the first Book of The Recluse.58 Like The Prelude, the first part of Home at Grasmere was preserved until its posthumous publication (The Prelude in 1850, Home at Grasmere in 1888). The years from 1800 to 1806 encompass the time when Wordsworth and Dorothy moved to Dove Cottage, Grasmere on December 20,
58 In Wordsworth’s blueprint of his “philosophical song,” The Recluse contains three parts. The first part, Home at Grasmere, was published in 1888; the second part, The Excursion, is the only part published in Wordsworth’s lifetime (PW II 951).
1799, to Wordsworth’s marriage with Mary in October, 1802. As John Beer
comments, Grasmere with Dorothy alone is a prelude to Grasmere with Dorothy and Mary, with the intense love of brother/sister extending from the smaller to the larger community, “where the quiet work of the mature human heart, anchored in a deeply physical love, could contain, and find a place for, more intense and extreme
attachment” (164).
Home at Grasmere can be divided into two parts: the first part records
Wordsworth’s moving Grasmere and his first few years living there; the second part pinpoints Wordsworth’s ambition to compose his “philosophical song,” The Recluse.
While the first part contains personal history, the second part lays out the sketch of his poem. The distinction between the public and private sphere may be the reason why the second part was taken to be the “Prospectus” for The Excursion, published in 1814, while the first part was kept hidden from public view until 1888. In the first part, Wordsworth retraces his childhood memories in Grasmere, setting the tone of a sense of home for Grasmere. When he was still a boy, the “unfettered liberty” he felt, the
“beautiful” place enjoyed by his senses, had early decided him that Grasmere “[m]ust be his Home, / this Valley be his World” (37; 49; 45).59
The determination, retrospective as it is, comes true when he proclaims:
And now ‘tis mine, perchance for life, dear Vale, Beloved Grasmere (let the Wandering Streams Take up, the cloud-capt hills repeat, the Name), One of thy lowly Dwellings is my Home. (56-59)
An image of home is Grasmere, the feeling for it resulting not from its beautiful scenery or childhood memories. As an essential element of home, Wordsworth more
59 Quotations of the first part of Home at Grasmere are from William Wordsworth: The Poems. Vol. 1.
Ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1977).
imbues family with a sense of homeliness. “Eden,” the metaphor for Grasmere, a paradise where “[t]he boon is absolute” and “grace” is “surpassing” (103-105), implicitly associates Wordsworth and Dorothy as Adam with Eve. The close relationship between brother and sister is ambivalently described:
Where’er my footsteps turned, Her Voice was like a hidden Bird that sang, The thought of her was like a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind. (90-94; original italics)
As discussed in the previous chapter, Dorothy’s reliance on Wordsworth in 1799 had caused trouble and financial problems for Wordsworth on their trip to Germany in 1799. The tension between an unmarried girl and her adult brother, moreover, led not only to the brother’s anxiety but to suspicions among their neighbors in Alfoxden.
Reading these lines in their historical context therefore discloses Wordsworth’s ambivalence towards Dorothy. Dorothy is a good companion, but her reliance on her brother, following “[w]here’er [his] footsteps turned,” may not have always been a pleasant thing to experience. Her tender voice and companionship did help
Wordsworth through the trauma of the French Revolution (The Prelude 1805 XI), but their close relationship sometimes became a burden for the brother. Therefore, it should be suggested, Wordsworth aestheticizes Dorothy’s existence, turning her into a beautiful presence, a “hidden Bird that sang,” “a flash of light,” offering “unseen companionship.” Dorothy’s presence is beautified, and at the same time
Wordsworth’s sense of uneasiness over this day by day companionship is partly revealed. Ideally, she is sometimes “hidden” and “unseen.” When Wordsworth describes their first year in Grasmere, the image of swans further attests to his uneasiness. On the day of thanksgiving, he and Dorothy enjoyed the view and “the
happy Choirs of Spring,” only to find that:
But two are missing― two, a lonely pair
Of milk-white Swans, wherefore are they not seen Partaking this day’s pleasure? From afar
They came, to sojourn here in solitude,
Choosing this Valley, they who had the choice Of the whole world. (238-244)
They have become familiar with the two swans since they moved into Grasmere.
For the past “two months of unrelenting storm,” the two swans were seen “at the centre of the Lake” (244-245). Now the two swans are lost, causing sorrow for their human friends because
They were more dear than may be well believed, Not only for their beauty, and their still
And placid way of life and constant love Inseparable, not for these alone,
But that their state so much resembled ours. (248-252)
The sympathy projected on to the swans speaks more about what Wordsworth and Dorothy had undergone. Like the swans, they were “strangers,” “a solitary pair”
“[f]aithful Companions” when they moved to Grasmere (254; 255; 262). Strangers to the new environment, it is due to the close tie and mutual trust that the feeling of home gradually takes root. However, the disappearance of the swans, the surmise being they were shot by “[t]he Dalesmen,” with either one killed or both (“both are gone / One death, and that were mercy given to both” [266-268]), contains not so much the misgivings of an outsider but the acceptance of a new family circle. The metaphor of the pair of swans, as applied either in The Evening Walk (1793) or Salisbury Plain (1798), suggests the interdependence and pure love of a couple.
Their imagined death implies the end of the brother and sister’s own close
relationship, not really through corporeal separation but from the addition of family members and friends:
Our beautiful and quiet home, enriched Already with a Stranger whom we love Deeply, a Stranger of our Father’s House.
…… And others whom we love Will seek us also, Sisters of our hearts And One, like them, a Brother of our hearts, Philosopher and Poet in whose sight
These Mountains will rejoice with open joy. (652-661)
The addition of family and family-like members included John Wordsworth, the poet’s elder brother, Coleridge, the “[p]hilosopher and Poet” treated as a “[b]rother,”60 and childhood friends, Mary Hutchinson and her sister Sara Hutchinson, one “[s]ister”
of which was to become the poet’s wife. It is the gathering of new family members that adds color to the feeling of home, at the same time changing the relations of the
“solitary pair,” especially the appearance of Mary Hutchinson. With the
participation of Mary in the new home, the “solitary pair” turns into a new couple with a now solitary sister.
New tension between Wordsworth, Mary, and Dorothy can be detected from the love letter Wordsworth sent to Mary on 22 July 1810:
D― is gone to church at Ashby with the ladies, and I seize with eagerness this opportunity to write to my dearest Love…. I was so much affected by the manner in which you spoke of dear little Catharine and her lameness…. D―
60 The close tie of friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge substantially changed after their quarrel in 1810, due to Wordsworth’s public criticism of Coleridge’s usage of opium.
[,] who is grown very fat and looks better than she has done, since she had that complaint at Racedown. (Love Letters, 34-35)
For years, Dorothy had taken on the task of writing down and editing Wordsworth’s poetry, but love letters are for sure not appropriate vehicles to be written down by others. What is revealed in Wordsworth’s expression, “seiz[ing] with eagerness this opportunity to write,” is that writing to Mary in Dorothy’s presence might cause uneasiness. With Dorothy’s absence, Wordsworth is free to express his feeling for his wife and concern for his daughter. However, Dorothy seems to be a main topic in the letter that Wordsworth could not omit, because she is member of the family.
In this complicated new relationship, Dorothy became an ineluctable presence, and even an obstacle between Wordsworth and Mary, effectively preventing the husband’s spontaneous overflow of powerful love for his wife. In the fleeting moment of the sister’s absence from the mind, the husband’s expression of love can be quite
straightforward, with his passion circumventing the surveillance of his sister:
I fancied that we should have seen so deeply into each others [sic] hearts, and been so fondly locked in each others arms…. O Mary I love you with a passion of love which grows till I tremble to think of its strength…. I am at every moment, I will not say reminded of you, for you never I think are out of my mind 3 minutes together however I am engaged…. not having you at my side my pleasure is so imperfect that after a short look I had rather not see the objects at all. (Love Letters 61-62, my italics)
In his study of the problematization of the pleasure of sex in The Use of Pleasure (the second volume of his History of Sexuality,) Foucault locates different positions of sexual pleasure in and outside marriage in ancient Greece. Some discourses combined sexual pleasure with marriage, especially in a strict monogamous system, while others located sexual pleasure outside marriage and emphasized the sexual
relation in its reproductive function, as nothing but a means of procreation, as in the formula typified by the speech Against Neaera (144-145). In addition to its
reproductive function, the pleasure of sex for Wordsworth is also confined to marriage and severely precluded outside marriage. Marriage fulfills the role of surveillance, preventing the seeking of sexual pleasure outside its bounds, his awareness of which he manifested in his visit to Annette Vallon right before his marriage with Mary, and the distance he kept from Vaudracour, the French counterpart of his youth. As the same time, his sexual relations were encumbered by the female member of the family, a figure often mistaken for his wife.61 The invisible voice of Dorothy, incarnated as the sensual base for Wordsworth’s philosophical system of reason and imagination, is literally an invisible presence between Wordsworth and Mary.
Wordsworth’s discipline of self, seen from Vaudracour and Julia and the first part of Home at Grasmere, is a series of operations of reason to identify the
appropriate distribution of his passion. The passion for Vallon is implicitly declared to have subsided, and love for Dorothy is revealed more in praise for her sensibility.
The appearance of Mary Hutchinson signals a new stage in Wordsworth’s life.62 Though the voices of Vallon and Dorothy might still hold a place in Wordsworth’s mind,63 his adjustment to the new identity of husband allowed them only to be released in poems.