Article

Wordsworth's The Prelude as Autobiography of An Orphan

Gary Farnell
King Alfred's College, Winchester

1
Wordsworth's The Prelude is literally the autobiography
of an orphan. It records in its way the death of the poet's
mother when Wordsworth himself is almost eight, and
that of his father when he is thirteen. It is specified 'in its
way' because, as many readers have noted, even though
the poet tells of his mental growth, oddly, the deaths of
his parents are barely mentioned at all. [1] Part of the
meaning of the poem in the aspect of its story is registered
in the manner of its telling. The burden of disclosure is
distributed unevenly across and through the poem's
structure. As a result the poem is made discontinuous with
itself and is ruptured. This creates the opening for a
symptomatic reading of the poem's speech, and of its
silence. There is a relationship here between the text of
the poem and the significance of what it speaks about.
Evidently, the meaning of this conjuncture is something
which can be shown but not stated. It is in the formal
nature of autobiography that this should be so. Form is
bestowed on ideology by the text in question; a line is
drawn between 'public' and 'private' forms of history. It is
determined what can and cannot be said in the story of (in
this case) the growth of a poet's mind. It is at this moment
that history is entering the text as ideology; the raw
materials of memory and experience worked by The
Prelude are themselves determinate and determining. The
discourse of the work traces the outline of the absent
centre which it is about. What is thus shown without
being stated, it will be argued, is the production of
subjectivity through the ideological interpellation of the
individual. In Wordsworth, famously, 'The Child is Father
of the Man'. [2] This 'fathering', as portrayed
autobiographically in The Prelude, is to be investigated
here in terms of the later Althusserian theory of ideology.
The aim is to shed new light on the much-discussed
question of Wordsworth's politics and their relation to the
French Revolution. The conclusion to be reached here is
that The Prelude is a great poem by its deep registering of
 the significance of historical change precisely because
rather than in spite of its political conservatism.
2
It is important, first, to locate what appears to be an all-
orienting pun made early on in The Prelude's account of
mental growth. Wordsworth writes: 'Fair seed-time had
my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by
fear' (I.305-06). These fostering agencies of 'beauty' and
'fear' are in fact recognizably parental 'presences of
Nature' (I.490). In this respect, Nature is nurture. It is
argued that the second half of the eighteenth century
witnesses a close entangling of aesthetic and sexual-
political concerns. It is, particularly, notions of the state
and of the family which become entangled. As an aspect
of this it appears virtually second nature for the poet
of The Prelude to think of Nature itself in terms of the
sublime and beautiful; that is, in terms of the sexes in
general and of his parents in particular. The sublime in
Nature is 'masculine', and connected with the memory of
the poet's father. The beautiful is 'feminine', and
connected with the mother. But the most significant thing
about this matrix, it is here maintained, has to do with
Wordsworth's insisting in his poem that, with regard to his
'fostering', he feels himself to have been 'A favored being'
(I.364). The poet speaks of himself in this light as 'a
chosen son . . . I was a freeman, in the purest sense / Was
free, and to majestic ends was strong' (III.82-90).
3
To proceed with this investigation of Wordsworthian
subjectivity as made manifest in the face of Nature, the
next thing to do is to establish the nature of Nature itself.
How is it that freedom, in its 'purest sense', can be felt to
be intrinsic to the state of Nature? There is Wordsworth's
claim, made in the supposedly least alienated moments of
his life, that Nature has been to him, as it is described in
'Tintern Abbey' (that magnificently finished version
of The Prelude in miniature), 'all in all' (76). Alan Liu has
argued in discussion of the 'sense of history' in
Wordsworth that 'there is no nature except as it is
constituted by acts of political definition made possible by
particular forms of government'. [3] Liu's is an
historicizing of the concept of Nature, produced from
within the so-called New Historicism in Romantic studies.
This is a movement 'which I criticize', to quote Liu
himself, 'but to which I continue to be committed'. [4] It is
not necessary here to endorse the radical textualism of
New Historicist poetics; there would arguably be the
danger otherwise of repeating a 'Romantic' transcendence
of the world. Seeing an emergent textuality in all forms of
 social life entails naturalizing the existence of all texts as
such. But aside from this, the strategy of historicizing
Nature in the production of historical knowledge has its
uses. It serves to press into relief that which can be
sheerly performative about the power of history itself.
Liu's concern is to suggest that Wordsworth's own deep
sense of history foreshadows this kind of understanding.
This suggested line of enquiry, starting out from Nature as
a form of cultural construction, is worth pursuing for the
purchase it offers on that secret or hidden reality which is
apparently screened by the term 'Nature' as used by
Wordsworth in fact throughout The Prelude.
4
There are a number of these screenings evident in the
composition of the poem as a whole. Briefly, the well-
known episode of the stolen boat is one. The moral of the
boat-stealing adventure as it relates 'an act of stealth / And
troubled pleasure' (I.388-89) is ostensibly that natural law
cannot be transgressed in this guilty way with impunity:
the poet has been taught a lesson by Nature. But beyond
this, the stolen-boat episode presents the entangling of
aesthetics and sexual politics from Wordsworth's own
boyhood as an ideological problem. The matrix of the
masculine-sublime and the feminine-beautiful is imaged
as the structure of subjectivity itself. The experience of
this is figured in the poem in terms of specular
relationship becoming disrupted by symbolic power.
Wordsworth writes of how 'The moon was up, the lake
was shining clear' (I.383). But, the narrative continues,
upon commiting his stealthy, troubled and pleasurable
'act', the 'huge cliff' as seen by the boy from the boat
itself, 'Rose up between me and the stars' (I.409, 410).

5
At this juncture the poet's use of language, by its obscure
syntax and difficult thought, clearly becomes problematic.
Wordsworth gives the following account of the content of
his subsequent imaginings and dreams:

no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields,
But huge and mighty forms that do not live
Like living men moved slowly through my mind
By day, and were the trouble of my dreams.

I.422
The mental growth described in this passage is natural, it
could be said, precisely to the extent that it is political (in
 the sense specified by Alan Liu); the dreams are of 'huge
and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men'.
Wordsworth's lines give expression in their
contradictoriness to the determinative force of certain
unnatural words, as it were. By this unnaturalness
Wordsworth himself emerges as a compelling, but only
problematically articulate poet. As he remembers it, this
scene seems to dramatize in a structurally indirect way the
placing of a certain taboo on a specific act of pleasure.
This is the unreal moment when he becomes aware in the
process of his childhood socialization of the reality of this
bar.

6
Catherine Belsey has shown (in part through a reading of
the boat-stealing episode of The Prelude) that it is in the
poetic texts of the turn of the eighteenth century that 'the
unconscious is for the first time produced in
discourse'. [5] Cartesian subjectivity comes of age in and
by the figural language of Romantic writing. The text of
Wordsworth's poem puts ideology to work, here to
facilitate a living out of the 'problem' of a symbolic
disruption of the specular at the level of gender
construction. As a result, the text itself is driven up
against that 'line' between the public and the private which
is drawn from the ideological point of entry of history
into The Prelude. This proves a means, with regard to the
'not said' of the subject's emergence in Wordsworth, of
making the silences speak. What gets 'said' whilst
remaining unspoken in this way is the relation of form to
ideology within, in this case, the totality of
autobiographical discourse. For the text of Wordsworth's
poem suffers an internal displacement in the form of 'the
trouble of my dreams'. Nature, that great Wordsworthian
'all in all' and figurative foster parent in The Prelude, it
emerges, is but a screen for patriarchy itself as both the
condition and effect of mental growth for Wordsworth the
poet and orphan.
7
To put it this way is to hint at the reason why there is an
element of structural indirection built into the specific
elaboration of Wordsworth's text. One might ask, why not
tell the story of one's family relations as it is? Why talk
in The Prelude about acts of theft, as Wordsworth
sometimes does—touching on woodcock snaring, birds-
nesting and boat-stealing—when the poem's drift appears
to bear on the process of one's childhood socialization into
gender identity? Why tell of chance encounters with male
solitaries—the discharged soldier, the blind beggar in
 London—when the sense seems to have to do with
receiving intimations of mortality: 'I looked,/ As if
admonished from another world' (VII.622-23)? It is all
rather enigmatic.
8
David Ellis, after Richard Onorato, suggests with regard
to this peculiarity a possible correspondence between
Wordsworthian 'spots of time' and Freudian 'screen
memories'. [6] (I take it as read that the boat-stealing
episode in The Prelude constitutes an instance of a
Wordsworthian spot of time, though it is not explicitly
designated as such in the text.) [7] A screen memory, for
Freud, is an essentially repressive operation of the mind
whereby mnemic images of a notably consequential
nature, often directly sexual in derivation, are
associatively displaced onto, and in this sense 'screened
by', others which are correspondingly less consequential.
These memories work to conceal 'an unsuspected wealth
of meaning . . . behind their apparent
innocence'. [8]Commenting on the 'distinctive feature' of
what are held to be completely ordinary phenomena,
Freud continues: 'they are extremely well remembered but
. . . their content is completely indifferent' (III.320). So it
is that the correspondence with the spots of time in
Wordsworth seems remarkably close. For the spots, too,
appear outwardly ordinary but are inwardly extraordinary
in terms of their significance and their complex relation to
sexuality. The Preludeseems positively to invite a
'symptomatic' reading of its text, after the fashion of the
critical practice developed by Louis Althusser and his
collaborators, drawing upon Freudian theory. Its
usefulness here consists in its identification of the silences
and absences which deform the literary text. It reveals the
repressed presence of the ideological materials which will
have been worked over in the production of the text at
issue.
9
This particular reading has now to be pressed against the
Ellis interpretation ofThe Prelude. It will become
apparent that the political implications of Wordsworth's
working with spots of time in his poem are in fact misread
in the context of Ellis's own discussion of memory and
autobiography. The upshot of the work which
Wordsworth undertakes with these spots, according to
Ellis, is that 'Nature' (the single most significant and
powerful codifying term in the whole lexicon of The
Prelude), is, by the final, imagination-consecrating Book
of the poem, 'standing in for the mind' (p. 159). This is
 what comes from the combined displacing and screening
action of the spots themselves. And as a result, the mind
itself is ultimately, in Wordsworth's words, 'lord and
master' (XI.271) regarding its essentially interactive
relationship with outward sense (p. 160). If this were not
the case, 'the spots of time could not be interpreted
optimistically' (p. 160). This is Ellis's conclusion, made in
the light of the apparent serenity and confidence
negotiated by Wordsworth in 'Imagination, How Impaired
and Restored', the critical eleventh Book of The
Prelude (the very site of the explicitly-designated spots
themselves).
10
Contrary to this, however, it may be argued that the
serenity, confidence and indeed optimism of
Wordsworth's spots is misplaced. Robert Young, drawing
on a Lacanian insight, sees that the position arrived at by
the close of this particular poem is, really, a positioning.
He notes how, in pursuit of the imagination, Wordsworth
is 'in fact caught within the function that occurs in its
locus'. [9] The reason why this capture comes about is
because the action of going after such a spectacularly all-
consuming thing as the imagination itself 'necessarily
finds the subject "inserted in a function whose exercise
grasps it"' (p. 80). [10]Young's reversed perspective on
the relationship of 'quester' to 'quest' in this pursuit calls
into question the assumptions governing the familiar
reconciliation of subject and object as sine qua non of
Romanticism proper. Ellis tends to share uncritically with
his Wordsworth, then, precisely that optimism which goes
with idealism in the formation of Romantic ideology.
11
It is a matter of seeing through the haunting recollections
and memorializations set forth in Wordsworth's epic
exploration of his own subjectivity. This is all to show,
for the sake of the poet's autobiographical sense of
self as a subject, the reality of that which is being avoided
as a positive means of facilitating mental growth. As we
shall see, the 'natural' freedom of the orphan displaces and
screens the cultural capture of the man. The deaths of the
parents are linked to the play of history itself, and to the
experience of failure as a complex ideological
achievement.
12
It can be argued, now, that the memory of the death of
Wordsworth's mother in fact lies behind the voicing of the
first spot of time (XI.278-327). The poet's re-imagining of
the fate of the hanged murderer serves to establish with
great vividness in his poem the frank reality of death.
 Then narrative attention is switched suddenly,
undemonstrably to the spectacle of 'visionary dreariness'
(XI.310) centring on the sight of the pitcher-bearing girl
struggling against the wind with a naked pool and signal-
beacon at a distance. The effect seems that of a montage.
Images of femininity, valorized as such in terms of the
specific culture of Wordsworth's epic, are juxtaposed with
the concept of death. Syntagmatically, a number of
signifiers are brought into significant relationship with a
single signified. This manoeuvre signals and codifies
what can be described as the death of femininity in The
Prelude. Indeed, if the manifestly archetypal nature of this
spot (the 'bare' common, the 'naked' pool, the nameless
woman) is taken into account, then the conclusion
becomes clear. What, above all, is treated in this not fully
articulate yet wholly suggestive way in this first spot is
the death of the mother-figure herself.
13
Then slightly later in this same Book, in the second spot
of time (XI.344-88), Wordsworth deals in a more direct
way with the loss of his father. Doubtless this reflects on
the part of the poet the increased maturity of his greater
years. Of the father's death, the sorrowful 'event', in
Wordsworth's words, 'appeared / A chastisement' (XI.368-
69). As to why this should be so, Wordsworth remembers
how he has since 'bowed low / To God who thus corrected
my desires' (XI.373-74). The suggestion is that these
'desires', now corrected by the Father, have previously
been directed hostilely towards the paternal father. Hence
the sense of chastisement felt at his passing away. This
hostility has manifested itself, it can be assumed, in the
shape of the boy's desire for the mother. We have noted
the extent to which the child's relationship with Nature, as
remembered by the adult, conforms to the pattern of an
Oedipal sexuality. The prospect of a Christmas holiday
from school and concomitant return home in Hawkshead,
an imminent event at which the thirteen-year-old is
'Feverish' and 'restless' (XI.346), is one of anticipated
pleasure and connectedness. It is in this strict sense,
dependent on the social conditioning of such qualities as
'pleasure' and 'connectedness' as feminine, that the poet
of The Prelude may be said to display desire for the
mother. This is a type of desire which inevitably generates
hostility towards the patriarchal father.
14
Additionally, hostility towards this figure manifests itself
in this second spot in the boy's taking for granted the
imagined presence of the father during periods of his
actual absence. This doing without the father is
 tantamount to consigning the displaced parent to a kind of
death. And so, perhaps, when waiting for the father's
scheduled return the boy looks 'in such anxiety of hope'
(XI.371) with 'trite reflections of morality' (XI.372) whilst
'in the deepest passion' (XI.373). Having taken the father's
presence too much for granted, Wordsworth's reaction is
to feel himself chastised in the event of his death.

15
Wordsworth has reacted in such a way as to actively
assert, as both a punishment and compensation, the
restorative significance of memory in his life. 'I would
enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration', he
writes (XI.341-42), making this claim immediately prior
to the relating of this second spot. Seen in this light, the
close attention to detail subsequently shown at the level of
narration in the poem is remarkable. Even by
Wordsworth's own standards this second of his 'affecting
incidents' (XI.343) evinces an extraordinary lyrical
realism. It constitutes a moment of particular intensity.
The details of the scene—the 'naked' wall, the 'single'
sheep, the 'whistling' hawthorn—are plain in the extreme.
Yet they are all the more emphatic for their simplicity.
(How one would love Ingmar Bergman to adapt this poem
for the screen.)

16
By this weighting of mood the poet is saying that, in
retrospect, he would not have wanted things between
himself and his parents (particularly his father) to have
been any other way. He encapsulates 'Imagination, How
Impaired and Restored' in his reporting of a late tendency
on his part to overlook the importance of
an imaginative response to outward reality. Ostensibly,
the reference is to the memory of Wordsworth's alienating
experience of life in London and of his suffering
disappointment at the collapse of the French Revolution.
It has all meant succumbing to a creeping impairment of
the imagination. But just ahead of dealing with the death
of his parents through the spots of time episodes,
Wordsworth is able to call a halt to this social-
psychological process of decline:
I shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever, and again
In Nature's presence stood, as I stand now,
A sensitive, and a creative soul.

XI.253-56
 Wordsworth matches a Miltonic Puritanism of the
intellect, it could be said, with a correspondingly
Wordsworthian puritanism of the heart: he has become, as
an individual and an orphan, decidedly all the stronger,
mentally, for the personal losses he has suffered. The
power of memory he everywhere exemplifies as a poet,
arguably to a unique and pre-eminent degree, seems
vitally attributable, psychologically, to the event of the
death of the thirteen-year-old's father. Richard Onorato,
concentrating on the relationship of the poet to the orphan
in The Prelude, emphasizes how the poet's 'fatherless
freedom' revealingly illuminates his 'need to invent
himself' (p. 307).
17
But what might be the political implications of
Wordsworth's inventing himself in this way, by means of
a discourse founded on absence in the form of a 'fatherless
freedom'? The readings of The Prelude which want to
interpret the poem 'optimistically', such as those of Ellis
and Onorato, tend to take Wordsworthian 'freedom' as
implying freedom from direct ideological determination.
The danger of holding to this view, it should be said, is
that it overlooks the connection between the openness of
this 'freedom' and a susceptibility to mediated ideological
determination. Moreover, it overlooks what appears to be
the greater powerfulness of this latter determinative mode.
As Althusser has shown, it is when ideology operates
from an unconscious basis that it achieves its greatest
potency regarding its subjectification of the individual.
The individual-as-subject is, in Althusser's words, 'in the
"grip" of what Freud registered by its effects as being the
unconscious'. [11] The point of the 'great' literary work is
that by its text giving form to ideological unconsciousness
of this kind, it helps to free us from the pressure of that
which, historically, must not or cannot be said.
18
We have reached the point at which can be demonstrated
directly the greatness of The Prelude as understood in this
sense. This, then, is to turn to the two parts of
Wordsworth's poem in which is marked a certain
resolution of Oedipal tensions. Symbolically enough, the
parts in question are located at the narrative centre and
circumference of the work. They feature landscape and
scenery the character of which is strikingly sublime. This
is to refer to those passages in the poem in which
Wordsworth recalls, first, his crossing of the Alps
(VI.525-72) and, second, his ascent of Mount Snowdon
(XIII.1-119).
19
 It is in these particular stretches of the text that the poet
of The Prelude goes one better than the Freudian patient
who, having 'lost his father at a very early age', 'was
always seeking to rediscover him in what was grand and
sublime in Nature'. [12] Wordsworth's achievement
consists in his succeeding in rediscovering his father in
the grandness and sublimity of Nature when he discovers
the imagination. The episode of crossing the Alps results,
startlingly, in an apostrophizing of this imagination. The
sudden turning away from the anti-climax of having
unknowingly crossed the Alps to the surprise of finding
oneself being crossed by imaginative power is the most
impressive feature of the passage. Across the caesura
separating the end of one verse-paragraph from the start
of another (at lines 524-25), the text shifts into a different
register. In a further instance of crossing, the text itself
crosses the lacuna which opens up with the
speechlessness of disappointment felt in the moment of
Alpine anti-climax. The Prelude, not a unified plenitude
of meaning, is made remarkably dissonant by this
movement. What is happening is that the distance
separating the poem from ideology is embodying itself in
the internal distance which is, here, separating the poem
from itself.
20
Crossing the Alps in this unknowing way is for
Wordsworth a complex achievement. Its significance is
not gauged in strictly empirical terms. There is a sense of
disappointment felt in relation to Nature itself. But
Wordsworth's own second nature—now, evidently, a
reality in the context of the growth of his mind—is on
hand to save this particular poet of Nature from radical
disillusionment. Wordsworth writes at line 525:

Imagination!—lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my song
Like an unfathered vapour, here that power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me.

VI.525-29
Robert Young has used the phrase 'phallic ghost' (p. 82) to
characterize the nature and appearance of the imagination
as manifested in Wordsworth's apostrophe. Certainly there
is a clear acknowledgement here of the sublime as
decidedly masculine. On the basis of this, indeed, it has
symbolic power over Wordsworth. Wordsworth's being
crossed by imaginative 'power' as it comes 'Athwart' him
puts him in the grip, so to speak, of the masculine-
sublime. It happens that the imagination itself actively
means him. The apostrophe continues:

I was lost as in a cloud,

Halted without a struggle to break through,
And now, recovering, to my soul I say
'I recognize thy glory'.

VI.529-32
These lines testify to the experience of conversion. The
subject has been lost, but now is found. Acknowledging
the powerfulness of the imagination in the aspect its
masculine sublimity (and sublime masculinity) has meant
rendering oneself able to recognize the 'glory' of one's
own 'soul'. At the same time, it has meant subjectifying
oneself before this imaginative power. But what comes
from this is, paradoxically, a strong sense of freedom on
the part of the subject. Wordsworth goes on to write of the
feeling in this moment of having been set free from the
clutch of all finite references. It is a justly famous
passage, at once affirmative and profound:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home,

Is with infinitude—and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

VI.538-42
Here, the sense of crossing, of crossing over into the
space of a new phase of one's life is palpable. The lines
are reverberate with an underlying sense of an ending.
Wordsworth's life has come to a halt so that it can start
over again; the narrative break cuts both ways.
Progression beyond this effective threshold of the
symbolic then comes about by means of entrance into a
realm of apparently infinite signification. It is implied that
it is this 'infinitude' which guarantees the subject's new-
found sense of freedom. The previously disappointing
Alpine landscape now appears transfigured before the
Wordsworthian imagination. Its features are seen as
internally unified. It is this unity which evokes the infinity
of endless significations. Allusions made to the Bible and
Milton show the subject taking up a position in sublime
discourse. Concluding this account of his 'conversion',
Wordsworth tells of how, to his mind, the different sights
and sounds of the Alps

Were all like workings of one mind, the features

 Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great apocalypse,
The types and symbols of eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. [13]

VI.568-72
This passage exemplifies mental growth in and by its
disclosure of that point in the formation of subjectivity
when the subject, on the point of grasping the form of
outward sense, is in fact taken in by it: 'inserted in a
function whose exercise grasps it' (Lacan). It reveals
Wordsworth's learning to come to terms with the reality of
his actually decentred place in the universe. There is the
laying to rest of an Oedipally troubling 'ghost', in the
shape of the memory of the father. The transgressiveness
of the child manifested in, for example, the boat-stealing
desire to strike out against limitations turns into the 'wise
passiveness' of the adult. [14] The paradox is that of
'infinitude' itself: there is no longer anything to strike out
against when there is felt to be an endless crossing of
limitation. For Wordsworth, the process of the orphan's
socialization is now complete.
21
What has been played out is a drama of interpellation.
This is to invoke Althusser's 'little theoretical theatre' (p.
48), in which 'Ideology Interpellates Individuals as
Subjects' (p. 44). We will come shortly to Wordsworth's
rediscovery of his mother in the beauty of Nature. But the
argument on Wordsworthian subjectivity being put
forward here is that the rediscovery by Wordsworth of his
parents in Nature itself, his seemingly unalienated
standing again in 'Nature's presence', constitutes a
fortiori his own crisis-resolving interpellation as an
ideological subject. When remembering the growth of
mind, Wordsworth's tendency is to get things the wrong
way round, or upside-down. In the guise of Nature, that
politically-defined form of society, ideology in its
dominant formations has hailed him. He has responded by
saying, in effect, 'I recognize thy glory', in turn
recognizing that the hailing was 'really' addressed to him,
and that it was 'really him' who was hailed in this way. It
is very muchbecause of his orphaned state, his 'guilty
feelings', and his memory that Wordsworth in The
Prelude is 'a chosen son . . . a freeman . . . and to majestic
ends was strong'.
22
That the poet feels himself to be so free just shows the
success of the subjectivity which exists in this world. It is
 Althusser, seeking to articulate Marx with Freud and
Lacan, who comments that 'you and I are always
alreadysubjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals
of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we
are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and
(naturally) irreplaceable subjects' (pp. 46-47). Our sense
of ourselves as 'individuals' in this way 'gives us the
"consciousness" of our incessant (eternal) practice of
ideological recognition' (p. 47). These comments may be
said to be responsive to the Wordsworthian problematic
of 'crossing', of apostrophizing imagination in a moment
of crisis as coming 'Athwart' oneself. Althusser's theory of
ideology puts on stage for us that eternal circularity in the
structure of subjectivity which arises when the structure
itself is predicated on ritual recognition. This paradoxical
circuit is to the category of the ideological what the
'something evermore about to be' of 'Our destiny, our
nature, and our home,/ Is with infinitude—and only there'
is to Wordsworth's sublime in Nature. The wit and point
of what is staged in the Althusserian 'theatre' consists in
its making explicit that which appears natural—
Althusser's word would be 'obvious'—as itself an effect of
ideological discourse showing, in relation to the subject,
what cannot be stated.
23
Althusser has been criticized—in the context of Romantic
studies, by Philip Shaw, for instance—for failing to
acknowledge the importance of those ideologies which
are resistant to 'the dominant ideology'. [15] Against this,
however, it must be stressed how the crucial Althusserian
insight is one into the functioning of dominant ideology
when it is so dominant that the question of a resistant
subordinate ideology does not arise. Ideology as the
dehistoricizing and naturalizing of the historical and non-
natural guarantees the individualistic freedom of the
subject. We are dealing with the difficulty of just such a
problem as this where Wordsworth himself is concerned.
24
In our consideration of what the autobiography of an
orphan might look like we have now reached the point
where opposites meet. Across the terrain of subjectivity
there is a clear point of contact between Wordsworth's
autobiographical poetry and Althusser's scientific theory.
In a way, Wordsworth and Althusser come together on the
point that, in Althusser's words, 'individuals are always-
already subjects' (p. 50). The peculiar state of affairs
described in this remark is the result of the school-family
couple in modern society functioning as the dominant
ideological state apparatus. Where this is theorized in
 Althusser, it is dramatized in The Prelude. Typically, the
child is born into subjectivity, but as a subject-to-be. It
has a name—the father's name—and an identity, but not a
mind of its 'own'. It therefore becomes what it is. A
certain ownership of mind is being claimed
retrospectively in what we saw of Wordsworth's moment
of apostrophe—of turning away—in the crossing of the
Alps. Wordsworth turns away from fatherlessness to the
father. He becomes what he is as a subject and a 'free'
individual. Althusserian science as, by definition, a
subject-less discourse offers in its theorization of ideology
an inverted mirror-image of the experience of the orphan
as himself a subject without a discourse. In Wordsworth's
case, this mirror 'speaks' of what it is to be free,
specifying, as a matter of definition in relation to the split
between 'subjectivity' and 'subject-to-be', that freedom is
being taken in by the father. The invertedness of the
orphan's crossing-conversion is made explicit.
25
This brings us to the excellent discussion of Wordsworth
which has been produced by Marlon Ross. Studying,
principally, the Lucy lyric 'Three years she grew in sun
and shower' and 'Nutting'—the latter of which was
intended in 1798 for inclusion in the 1799 Prelude—Ross
examines, as he terms it, 'woman's place' in Wordsworth's
'ideological landscape'. [16] He argues that the poet of an
individualistic stance against the norms of established
pedagogic practice and for, on this basis, the education of
women is, nevertheless, a subject of interpellation. The
argument turns on that familiar foundational pun in the
'Fair seed-time' passage of The Prelude:
whereas Wordsworth seems to be portraying a
radically natural feminine education, one divorced
from society and social convention, his education
turns out to reproduce the system of
upbringing fostered by society, simply removing
that upbringing from its overt institutional context
by setting it in the woods and on the mountains.
p. 400, my emphasis
This statement leads to a concise summing up of the
complex nature of 'freedom' as it is represented by
Wordsworth in his ideological landscape: 'Nature here
codifies the social apparatus while it appears to dismantle
it' (p. 400). Society naturalizes itself by Nature more than
Nature socializes itself by society. Nurture is Nature.
'Fostering' basically entails a reproduction of the school-
family couple in all its traditional and highly structured
forms. At the same time, it makes a point of seeking
 actively to disguise the fact that this is not a natural
process. Everything has the appearance of being as it
should. This glance at Ross is enough now to direct our
attention towards Nature's beautiful-feminine aspects and
the bearing which they have on Wordsworthian
subjectivity.

26
Wordsworth's account of his ascent of Mount Snowdon is
placed at the outer edges of The Prelude, at the beginning
of the concluding thirteenth Book of the poem. What gets
related is another ritual of ideological recognition. This is
suggested by the active presence of the sublime to the
narrative. But if the tenor of the episode of crossing the
Alps had been one of conversion, now it is changed to one
of confirmation. And the presence here of that which is
beautiful in Nature is what makes the difference.
27
This is the moment of rediscovery of the mother in
Nature's beauty which Wordsworth shows, but does so
without stating it. This showing-without-stating marks the
poem's relation to ideology as history's mode of existence
in and through the text. Signification itself skews as the
resultant poem is pressurized into giving form to a
discourse on absence, namely the silence of the dead
mother as it presses on the orphan's growth of mind. As
we shall see, that the mother speaks to the subject in this
way from the contrasting position of theabject is the
point.
28
What we have with the ascent of Mount Snowdon is
another of those Wordsworthian experiences ('spots of
time') the full significance of which is grasped only
retrospectively. Most importantly, the mode of
Wordsworth's account of his ascent of Snowdon, which
had been generally naturalistic, changes abruptly at line
42: 'and on the shore / I found myself of a huge sea of
mist' (XIII.42-43). The change is registered at the level of
syntax, with the syntax itself becoming slightly twisted:
the subject is located in the body, rather than at the head,
of what is said. This feature of the writing should, by
now, be enough to alert us to something interestingly
untoward going on in the language. We have entered once
again into the transfigurative matrix of the masculine-
sublime and the feminine-beautiful. The 'sea of mist'
swells into an 'ocean' (XIII.46), to the point whereby the
'real sea' (XIII.49), the Irish Sea which should have been
visible at a distance, is eventually 'Usurped upon as far as
sight could reach' (XIII.51). Nature is displaced by mind
in this displacement of the natural sea by a figurative
counterpart. The imagination, that 'phallic ghost', is
making its sublime presence felt—'lifting up itself'—once
more. In the mist there is 'a fracture in the vapour . . .
through which', Wordsworth writes, 'Mounted the roar of
waters . . . roaring with one voice' (XIII.56-59). The unity
of this roaring 'voice' is a manifestation of imaginative
power. It is revealed at the end of Wordsworth's
paragraph how,

in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The soul, the imagination of the whole.

XIII.62-65
What Wordsworth has recognized, it is explained in the
next verse-paragraph, is himself as a subject in relation to
the mind (the 'sea of mist') and Nature (the 'real sea'). The
structure of this relationship is hierarchical; indeed, it
reproduces the structure of the bourgeois family. The
mind is 'male-paternal', Nature is 'female-maternal', the
subject is the 'chosen son'. This is what marks the
conclusion to The Prelude as autobiography of an orphan.
Wordsworth's retrospect confirms, not least by its use of
the passive voice, the subject's interpellative conversion,
his becoming what he is in terms of a subjectivity which
is ideologically 'always-already':
A meditation rose in me that night
Upon the lonely mountain when the scene
Had passed away, and it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty mind.

XIII.66-69
It is this 'image', in and by its perfection, which secures
the position in this poem of not only the subject, but also
Nature. For this 'mind' is 'one that feeds upon infinity'
(XIII.70). It is fundamentally active compared with the
sort of 'wise passiveness' which is induced by 'infinitude'
itself. And it is 'exalted by an under-presence,/ The sense
of God, or whatsoe'er is dim / Or vast in its own being'
(XIII.71-73). In other words, it is sublime, and by its
sublimity it locates the place of that which is beautiful.
We shall look closely at this 'place' in a moment. But to
press on with what makes the Snowdon scene, for
Wordsworth, the 'perfect' image of this 'mighty mind': it
becomes apparent that the scene itself is one of
triangulation of ideological positions. It brings the
 subject's position into the foreground of discourse even as
it establishes, there, the dominance of mind. This double
movement is a precondition for the various manifestations
of imagination.

29
But this is not all. For this conjuncture is itself dependent
on the subordination of that which is made abject by the
mind's domination of the eternal subject. This dependency
is what makes Wordsworthian subjectivity as deep as it is.
Drawing upon Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, Mary
Jacobus has this to say about Wordsworth's complex
conception of 'fathering': 'The mother must be absent or
dead in order for the child to be father to the man, and the
note of the poet's voice satisfyingly reiterated and
prolonged' (p. 240). This sends us back to the Snowdon
scene in The Prelude, to the image of the moon as one
which, structurally, seems to be there for the subject's
recognition of itself and its relation to mind. The moon
features twice in the passage in question, at lines 41 and
52. By his use of this image at these points Wordsworth is
able to put a frame round the central action of the mind's
displacement of Nature at the level of the real. It is
mentioned at the point of transformation of the poem's
generalized naturalism how 'The moon stood naked in the
heavens at height / Immense above my head' (XIII.41-42).
Then, immediately after the account of the 'real sea'
becoming 'Usurped upon' by the 'sea of mist', the
following observation is made: 'Meanwhile, the moon
looked down upon this shew / In single glory, and we
stood, the mist / Touching our very feet' (XIII.52-54). Use
of the adverbial 'Meanwhile' here suggests that, in this
moment of displacement, the moon is at once 'there' and
'not there'. As a frame it is part of the very definition of
the action, but it is not the action itself. It is both 'inside'
and 'outside'. What it is is deconstructed. Because of this,
it occupies the position reserved for the abject in
Wordsworth's 'fathering' of himself, his becoming what he
is.
30
This combined marginality and femininity of the moon as
image is what connects it with the mother in Wordsworth.
It brings us now to the maternal 'fostering' which is
performed by the beautiful in Nature. If the effect of the
sublime on the subject is to make it feel like a free
individual, the effect of the beautiful consists in
socializing this individuality. The sublimity of
Wordsworth's ascent of Mount Snowdon is marked by his
pressing on ahead of the others in his party, to the point
 where he is, in fact, 'the foremost of the band' (XIII.35).
(The figure in Caspar David Friederich's Der Wanderer
über dem Nebelmeerseems the very type of the individual
who feels free in the presence of forms of the sublime.)
The Snowdon scene suggests that this distinction, marked
both physically and narratively by Wordsworth, is
important for the subsequent experience of Nature's
displacement by the mind. There is an element of
tempering of this 'masculine' freedom and individuality.
There is a shift in the narrative from the first to the third
person, from 'on the shore / I found myself' to 'we stood,
the mist / Touching our very feet'. Wordsworth's physical
individuality in this scene is shifted at the narrative level.
The subject's sociality which seemed absent before the
transfiguration of sea into mist is now confirmed as
present. At the points marking what is 'before' and 'after'
in this respect the moon either 'stood naked in the
heavens' or 'looked down upon this shew'. This seems no
coincidence: the suggestion, clearly, is that sublimity
tempered in this way by beauty constitutes an ideal model
of subjectivity. Nature displaced (the 'real sea') speaks to
the mental growth of the subject by and through its
abjection (the 'moon stood naked'/the 'moon looked
down'). It articulates the social, as a category, in relation
to that which is categorial about the individual.
31
The subject's emergence is thus stabilized by Nature's
beauty. This subject emerges out of the zero degree of
imagination. There is a sudden projection of mind over
matter in the moment of sublime uplift. This project is,
necessarily, as narcissistic as it is idealistic; it would be
unable, otherwise, to get off the ground in the first place.
If there is the danger of a crisis of subjectivity ensuing
from the precariousness of this emergence, then the
presence of Nature which is assured in a structural way is
itself reassuring. This sort of stabilization is evident in
Wordsworth in the steadying of symbolic disruption
which is performed by specular relationship.
Wordsworth's saying to his own soul 'I recognize thy
glory', or Nature's scenery appearing as 'The perfect
image of a mighty mind' serve to exemplify the intrinsic
specularity of the very feeling of stability. Ronald Paulson
notes how it is often the case in Wordsworth 'that
temporally the sublime must be succeeded by the
beautiful'. [17] This is another way of describing the
temporality of abjection. Clearly, the moon's shining in
the way that it does in The Prelude is ideologically
loaded. Wordsworth's poem is 'unconsciously'
reproducing the structure of social institutions in precisely
 those places—the Alps, Mount Snowdon—which are
supposed to be the furthest removed from society itself.
The result in this case, not merely a matter of 'entangling',
is a more or less systematic codification of the discourse
of sexual politics by that of aesthetics.
32
Interpellation as an ideological subject in The Prelude is
something which is neither hidden nor spoken of by
Wordsworth. Nevertheless, it is spoken about, in the sense
of constituting the unsaid of Wordsworth's silence which
can be heard in his speech. It is, precisely, what goes
without saying, understood as a discursive category. This
helps to explain the influence it exerts, in Wordsworth, in
determining the poet's mode of insertion into the world by
the growth of his mind. Working through Wordsworthian
subjectivity is the interpellative moment with its effects of
disavowal of the ideological character of ideology arising
in the forms of consciousness and recognition. It follows
that Wordsworth's bearing towards the world itself should
be grasped in terms of the complex sense of what it is to
be 'a freeman'.
33
On this basis, it emerges how Wordsworth the man might
be said to stand in symbolic relation to his age; The
Prelude as an orphan's autobiography reads as the
spiritual biography of a generation. The hegemonic
institutions of British society prove themselves strong
enough, in the 1790s, to withstand that threat of radical
change which emanates powerfully from republican,
revolutionary France. This is, at the same time, the story
of Wordsworth's guilty abandonment of the cause of the
French Revolution in favour of an ideal of community life
modelled on the settled ways of the English Lake District.
As a model, this is one which is at once virtuous and
reactionary. It invokes a form of practice in which the
very land which is laboured on in as wholesome a way as
possible, over against encroaching market relationships, is
always handed down from father to son. (The poem
'Michael' comes to mind as a forceful dramatization of
this basic idea.) It is not hard to see how ambiguously
provincial this vision may prove to be.
34
What also is problematic is the way that the imagination
(of all things) functions as the agency which binds this
community together by means of an apparent
overdetermination as a type of 'usurpation'. A well-known
passage in The Prelude dealing with the sheer enjoyment
of relationship felt by the 'infant babe' (II.237) nursed in
his mother's arms touches on 'the first / Poetic spirit of our
 human life' (II.275-76). Wordsworth's concern is to
establish imaginative power as benignly binding, and as
an expression of 'the great social principle of life /
Coercing all things into sympathy' (II.408-09). But that
'Coercing' there, by its suggestion of 'masculine' force,
reveals the degree to which, at the level of discourse,
sexual politics has been codified by aesthetics. Here, the
beautiful is 'usurped upon' by the sublime. The mother-
figure is displaced by the imagination as the source of our
socially sympathetic feelings. Concomitantly, there is a
shift from the active to the passive on the part of the
subject regarding its relation to that specific source of
feeling. This movement from the infant babe, which 'Doth
gather passion from his mother's eye' (II.243), to
'Coercing' is not unfamiliar to us from the course of what
is described as 'The progress of our being' (II.239) traced
by Wordsworth in his autobiography. The Prelude is
overdetermined to the point whereby it speaks, either with
or against the grain of its historical nature, of more than
just Wordsworth's own life, and more than just what is
'own' in that life.
35
The result is that the moral and political gains of the
doctrine of home finally espoused by Wordsworth in his
work are, more fundamentally, his work's great
ideological give-aways. The Prelude prides itself on its
eventual discovery of how 'the mind of man becomes / A
thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which
he dwells' (XIII.446-48). But this is a 'truth' which in
reality had been waiting to be found. It is the action of
Wordsworth's poem in its rising and falling, emerging and
mirroring which is telling and decisive. The
Preludeshows, in and by its very act, that rebellious late-
eighteenth-century society frightens itself by means of the
alternating shrieks and sighs of the sublime and beautiful
into accepting a state of affairs where, at the end of
speech, the appealing prospect of a 'fatherless' future
existence tends rather to fade away.

Notes

[1]
See, for example, Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing
and Sexual Difference: Essays on 'The Prelude' (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989) pp. 6-16; Duncan Wu,
'Wordsworth and Helvellyn's Womb', Essays in Criticism,
 44 (1994) 6-25. Where appropriate in this paper, page
references are given in the text.
[2]
See 'My heart leaps up when I behold' (7), in William
Wordsworth, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984) p. 246. References to
Wordsworth's poetry are to this edition. References to The
Prelude in particular are to the 1805 version of the poem,
included in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. by
Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill
(New York: Norton, 1979).
[3]
Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1989) p. 104.
[4]
Alan Liu, 'The Power of Formalism: The New
Historicism', ELH, 56 (1989) 752.
[5]
Catherine Belsey, 'The Romantic Construction of the
Unconscious', inLiterature, Politics and Theory: Papers
from the Essex Conference 1976-84, ed. by Francis
Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley
(London: Methuen, 1986) p. 58.
[6]
David Ellis, Wordsworth, Freud and the spots of time:
Interpretation in 'The Prelude' (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985) pp. 62-83; Richard J.
Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in 'The
Prelude' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) pp.
205-19.
[7]
Regarding the problematic classification of memories
in The Prelude, Wordsworth, in the two-Part poem of
1799, introduces both the drowned man of Esthwaite and
the spots themselves by speaking of 'such effects as
cannot here / Be regularly classed, yet tend no less / To
the same point, the growth of mental power / And love of
Nature's works' (I.255-58).
[8]
Sigmund Freud, 'Screen Memories', in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, gen. ed. and trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols
(London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1953-1974) vol. III, p. 309.
[9]
Robert Young, 'The Eye and Progress of his Song: A
Lacanian Reading of The Prelude', Oxford Literary
Review, 3 (1979) 80.
[10]
 See also Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1977) p. 100.
[11]
Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)', in Essays
on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984) p. 50.
[12]
Sigmund Freud, 'Psycho-Analytic Notes on An
Autobiographical Account of A Case of Paranoia
(Dementia Paranoides)', in Standard Edition, vol. XII, p.
54.
[13]
See also Genesis, Revelation and Milton's Paradise
Lost (V.165).
[14]
The reference in 'wise passiveness' is to Wordsworth's
poem 'Expostulation and Reply' (24).
[15]
See Philip Shaw, 'Romantic Space: Topo-analysis and
Subjectivity in The Prelude', in 'The Prelude': Theory in
Practice, ed. by Nigel Wood (Buckingham: Open
University Press, 1993) pp. 76-78, 95.
[16]
Marlon B. Ross, 'Naturalizing Gender: Woman's Place in
Wordsworth's Ideological Landscape', ELH, 53 (1986)
391-410.
[17]
Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-
1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) p. 264.
Auteur : Gary Farnell
Titre : Wordsworth's The Prelude as Autobiography of An Orphan
Revue : Romanticism on the Net, Numéro 13, Février 1999
URI : http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/005847ar

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