Dorothy Wordsworth's Ecology

Kenneth Cervelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135861087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period.

With the rise of women's studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy's work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy's writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade.

One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy's changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy's work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.

Chapter One Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals

10.4324/9780203942031-1

Perhaps no one has thought as long or as deeply about William Wordsworth's “Home at Grasmere” as Karl Kroeber. And what ties this thought together conceptually is an interest in ecology. From “‘Home at Grasmere’: Ecological Holiness” (1974) to Ecological Literary Criticism_ Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (1994), Kroeber has consistently explored what is surely one of William's most problematic long poems in relation to matters of the earth. This is fitting given that “Home at Grasmere” is William's paean (really a kind of sustained crescendo) to a cherished spot, a spot the poet early on in the poem rather audaciously describes as

A termination, and a last retreat,

A Centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,

A Whole without dependence or defect,

Made for itself, and happy in itself,

Perfect Contentment, Unity entire. (166–70)

In fact, it is precisely this passage that Kroeber seizes upon, ultimately arguing that this “Unity entire” represents nothing less than a complex ecosystem. He elucidates this fundamental ecological concept through a methodology that mirrors the concept he describes, which is to say that, for Kroeber, an ecosystem explains William's poem to the same degree that William's poem explains the concept of an ecosystem. This gives his discussions of “Home at Grasmere” an unusual breadth and allows him to introduce ecological ideas to a more “purely” literary-oriented audience.

Take the following example for instance, which comes from the aforementioned Ecological Literary Criticism. “An ecosystem,” Kroeber writes, “is a constantly self-transforming continuity. No ecosystem exists outside time or is adequately representable as anything other than an encompassing ongoing process made up of diversely intersecting subordinate temporal processes” (55). This definition occurs in the context of Kroeber's discussion of “Home at Grasmere,” and it neatly illustrates his desire to take us inside and outside Romantic poems at one and the same time. After all, what makes an ecosystem an ecosystem is the idea of interconnectedness, and in Kroeber's view “Home at Grasmere” represents only one example (but a very significant one) of the interconnectedness of everything on the earth, whether it be works of literature shaped by the hands of men and women or flowers conditioned to grow in greenhouses.

But if everything really is intimately interconnected in an ecosystem, then so are works of literature and the writers who produce them. And who were more interconnected in life and in literature (no matter how one-sided that connection might seem) than William and Dorothy Wordsworth? Even enforced separation could not threaten this relationship, as Dorothy herself articulates in a letter to her lifelong friend, Jane Pollard, where she says that she and her brothers

have been endeared to each other by early misfortune. We in the same moment lost a father, a mother, a home, we have been equally deprived of our patrimony by the cruel Hand of lordly Tyranny… . Neither absence nor Distance nor Time can ever break the chain that links me to my Brothers. (Early Years 88)

Dorothy wrote this in February of 1793, a full year before she and William—the brother to whom she ultimately felt closest—would be reunited, never to part again. Of course, nothing could alter their status as orphans, but they would regain the home (and eventually claim the “patrimony”) they had lost when they were children. And if they were remarkably unsettled initially, living at Windy Brow, Racedown, Alfoxden, and even in Germany between the years 1794 and 1799, they finally settled for life back in their beloved Lake District—in Grasmere to be more precise—at the very end of 1799.

“Home at Grasmere” celebrates this homecoming, and, as Jonathan Wordsworth has argued, it “is, almost in its entirety, a poem of 1800” (28). ¹ The Grasmere journals, Dorothy Wordsworth's most famous writings, are also works of 1800—at least initially. Unlike William's poem, however, no controversy surrounds the composition and completion of Dorothy's journals, simply because precise dates are a generic attribute of journals themselves. They move patiently through time (beginning on May 14, 1800) and end abruptly—in mid-sentence—on January 16, 1803. Meanwhile, it would seem that “Home at Grasmere” attempts to perpetuate the year 1800 through a kind of endless circular movement, which might at least partially explain why scholars have disputed the composition and completion of the poem. ² In spite of their radical differences, then (and, indeed, in spite of their very different approaches to subject matter in general), “Home at Gras-mere” and the Grasmere journals are preoccupied with time. More precisely, they are preoccupied with the relationship between time and space, since both works grow out of and respond to a dearly beloved place: Grasmere. Karl Kroeber's ecological reading of William's poem illuminates the subtle relationship between time and space in both works and in doing so paves the way for our understanding of the Grasmere journals themselves as a kind of unique ecosystem.

A good place to begin is with part of an entry near the end of the journals. Dorothy and William have been away for most of the summer; they have been to France (where Dorothy met Annette Vallon, William's former lover, and their illegitimate daughter, Caroline), and they are now, in October of 1802, making the journey back to Grasmere. Accompanying them is Mary Wordsworth, William's new wife.

A shower came on just after we left the Inn while the Rain beat against the Windows we ate our dinners which M & W heartily enjoyed—I was not quite well. When we passed thro’ the village of Wensly my heart was melted away with dear recollections, the Bridge, the little waterspout the steep hill the Church—They are among the most vivid of my own inner visions, for they were the first objects that I saw after we were left to ourselves, & had turned our whole hearts to Grasmere as a home in which we were to rest. The Vale looked most beautiful each way… . I could not help observing as we went along how much more varied the prospects of Wensly Dale are in the summer time than I could have thought possible in the winter. (129)

This entry concludes very precisely several pages later with Dorothy commemorating a significant occasion: “On Friday 8^th we baked Bread, & Mary & I walked, first upon the Hill side, & then in John's Grove, then in view of Rydale, the first walk that I had taken with my Sister” (132). The placidity of this final sentence (a miniature entry in itself) is all the more striking for its appearance at the end of an entry overflowing with barely contained emotion. Dorothy's chaotic journey through England, then to France, and then through England again comes to an end as she and her new sister take measured steps in a familiar landscape.

Reading this entry in relation to other entries, and at the same time limiting our angle of vision, we begin to detect a pattern, one that allows us to find order in an otherwise sprawling, disorganized body of writings. Emotional haste informs the entry preceding their departure for France: “The Swallows I must leave them the well the garden the Roses all—Dear creatures!! they sang last night after I was in bed—seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to rest for the night. Well I must go— Farewell.———. ” (119). According to Pamela Woof, Dorothy's “handwriting becomes larger and looser as the moment to leave approaches and she continues to write” (244). Clearly Dorothy is writing during a moment of intense emotion (not one, but two exclamation marks), but she manages to maintain composure, for as Woof goes on to point out, she “still manages to insert the extra word ‘white’ to describe the sky-like brightness of the lake” (244). And in fact, if we go back to the very first entry of the journals we notice that Dorothy's desire for equanimity seems to be her reason for writing in the first place: “I resolved to write a journal of the time till W[illiam] & J[ohn] return, & I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself, & because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again” (1). Quite simply, the Grasmere journals are an act of will; those measured steps she takes with her new sister “first upon the Hill side, & then in John's Grove, then in view of Rydale” have been hard won. Kenneth Johnston puts it succinctly when he suggests that “[t]hese are the diary entries of a woman whose heart is breaking but who is determined not to lose her mind under the strain” (Hidden 715).

Johnston's statement takes us into a kind of psychic landscape. Similarly, by emphasizing Dorothy's will to write we have emphasized the inte-riority of the journals. The physical landscape Dorothy has become famous for describing recedes somewhat as we discover her need for psychic containment, a need that might mirror our own rage for order as readers. Susan Levin claims that “[i]f we wish to find a narrative structure for this text, we may say it is Dorothy's story of William's engagement and marriage to Mary Hutchinson” (21). The passage with which I opened my examination of the Grasmere journals occurs at the end of this “narrative structure” and represents the end of the story: Mary Hutchinson has become Mary Wordsworth. From a logical perspective, then, it makes sense that the journals themselves should come to an end shortly thereafter. But does this narrative of psychic containment represent the whole story? Elsewhere, Woof suggests the existence of several narratives in the Grasmere journals (for example, “the story of Coleridge, his excited coming to the Lake District, a stranger to it, and then his depression… .”), but then points out that as “interesting as they are as they mingle together, they do not explain the ultimate fineness of the journal” (“Dorothy” 160–61). She proceeds to eschew a narrative approach in favour of a close analysis of Dorothy's remarkable powers of description. For many of us, those remarkable powers represent the genuine Dorothy Wordsworth, and yet the journals’ many narratives (which possibly mingle together to form a kind of grand narrative, according to Susan Levin and others) are not necessarily going to go away. ³ Is there a way to read the Gras-mere journals that accounts for these intersecting modes of writing, one that will transform our understanding of Dorothy's relationship to her world— and deliver that world as a palpable presence—in the process?

In order to approach this question, we need to return to Karl Kroe-ber's definition of an ecosystem, but with the word “journal” replacing “ecosystem”:

[A journal] is a constantly self-transforming continuity. No [journal] exists outside time or is adequately representable as anything other than an encompassing ongoing process made up of diversely intersecting subordinate temporal processes. (55)

On one level, such an alteration might seem no more than a bit of semantic trickery—and besides, we can look elsewhere for definitions of journals. Robert A. Fothergill, for example, claims that a diary (he notes the “shadowy difference” between a diary and a journal and thus uses the two words more or less interchangeably) “articulates the subject matter of one day at a time” (82, 84). Since both Fothergill's and Kroeber's definitions revolve around concepts of time, and precisely this link suggests that, the Grasmere journals illustrate what both definitions, with a nudge from the enterprising reader, work together to suggest: that there is an ecology of journal writing.

As I have already pointed out, the Grasmere journals move through time, which suggests a linear process. We need look no further than those dated, sequential entries for proof of this, and it seems that any narrative approach to the journals works from this linear perspective, since all good stories (at least of a certain kind) have beginnings, middles, and ends. But the journals end with a dash, not a period—that is, they do not actually end, but simply trail off, rather like an unresolved note of music left to fade quietly in the air. We ourselves round off the journals; we bring them to an end, typically through speculation as to why exactly she “stopped” writing. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton have engaged in precisely this kind of speculation.

It is often asked why Dorothy ceased to keep her Grasmere journal after 16 January, in spite of determining to start a new book and ‘write regularly and, if I can, legibly’ [Grasmere journals 137]. Some unlikely reasons have been put forward; the most likely is that now, in spite of her resolve, she simply did not have time.” (142–43)

Gittings and Manton's speculations are quite sensible; Dorothy was certainly busy looking after a new household and a pregnant sister-in-law. But we should not press this too far, since the journals themselves illustrate how little time Dorothy ever had for writing. ⁴ Moreover, the fact that “unlikely reasons have been put forward” suggests that we cannot really know why Dorothy stopped keeping a journal at this time. And she certainly did not stop writing. Letters continued to flow from the cottage at Town End (compared to her brother, Dorothy was much more assiduous about letter writing), and of course she would keep journals again, some of them quite extensive. ⁵ My feeling here is that when faced with the cessation of the journals, our need to read them as an extended narrative takes precedence. Gittings and Manton's speculations fit nicely into that grand narrative Susan Levin locates, for they point out (immediately after musing on why Dorothy failed to return to the journals) that supporting Mary “in the second half of her pregnancy was a prospect she embraced with the whole of her loving feelings” (143). This is true, but it does not necessarily have anything to do with Dorothy's writing habits; rather, we make the connection and then follow it to its logical conclusion.

I do not mean to belabour our tendency to read Dorothy's journals for the presence of narratives; nor do I doubt the existence of those narratives (although I would—and will—question the presence of an all-encompassing narrative in the Grasmere journals). They exist, however, within an altogether larger framework, and Susan Levin herself hints at this when she describes the paradoxical nature of Dorothy's journals:

The journals are not a simple series of happenings; events are emplotted and through a sequence make various statements about the emotional life of the narrator. At the same time, however, as the journals contain the open-endedness of the form (journal as day-by-day, indefinitely continuous account), they also each seem to tell a story that can be read as an enclosed narrative: the story of William's marrying in the Grasmere journal or the story of a particular trip in the travel journals. (8)

Levin's point that Dorothy's journals can be read either as open forms or as an enclosed narrative uncannily resembles Kroeber's definition of an ecosystem as a “constantly self-transforming continuity.” One of the most fascinating aspects of examining the Grasmere journals from an ecological perspective is our discovery that a wide range of recent literary criticism helps explain the journals’ ecological processes without actually knowing that it is doing so. Fothergill and Levin are not concerned with ecological matters, and Kroeber mentions Dorothy only once (and then only in relation to Dorothy's role in “Tintern Abbey”), and yet, taken collectively, their ideas inform our awareness of the ecology of Dorothy's work. This might suggest the amorphousness of ecologically oriented thought; however, it ultimately illustrates the elusiveness of the journals themselves. They so naturally accrete to form an ecosystem that we are scarcely aware of it.

The Grasmere journals are more than linear constructs, then (and yet, they are at least in part linear constructs; embracing the paradoxical is the key to comprehending Dorothy's journals), but what else are they? In his most recent ecologically oriented study, The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate argues that “an ecosystem does not have a centre” but instead is comprised of a “network of relations” (107). Bate's statement reminds us that ecosystems not only exist temporally but are also spatial entities, albeit of a particular kind. Time and space are of course crucial to the Grasmere journals (we have decided to call them the Grasmere journals after all), and I would like to consider their relationship in Dorothy's work by revisiting the entry with which I began my examination.

Woof speculates that after Dorothy's departure in July “much of the Journal is recollected narrative” and suggests that she might not have composed this material until the last week of October, when she “had been ‘confined upstairs’ for a week ‘in the tooth ache’” (Grasmere journals xviii-xix). In other words, Dorothy writes from the “Centre” of Gras-mere. She recalls all that she has seen, all that she has experienced (or rather, what she prefers to recall), her journal acting as the living medium through which that experience is refracted. I say “living” because Dorothy's engagement with her recent past ultimately represents a new experience as separate “spots of time” collapse into one another:

When we passed thro’ the village of Wensly my heart was melted away with dear recollections, the Bridge, the little waterspout the steep hill the Church—They are among the most vivid of my own inner visions, for they were the first objects that I saw after we were left to ourselves, & had turned our whole hearts to Grasmere as a home in which we were to rest. (129)

An emotional interfusion occurs here captured in the prose itself by the gradual disappearance of punctuation in that first clause, Dorothy recalling in the present moment of writing her distant and more recent pasts. All of this is, of course, perfectly Wordswo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Studies in Major
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordworth’s Grasmere Journals
• Chapter Two The High Road Home: Paths to Ecology in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland
• Chapter Three The Illuminated Earth: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry
• Chapter Four “More Allied to Human Life”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Communion with the Dead
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Biblography
• Index