Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women
Judith W. Page
University of California Press, 1995
ISBN: 0520084934
Only in the last decade have feminist critics turned to an examination of Wordsworth’s poetry. focusing almost exclusively on the poems of the “Great Decade” (1797–1807), these first readers have tended to see Wordsworth as a ruthless exploiter of women and “feminine” perspectives – a poet, for instance, who abandons his illegitimate French daughter Caroline, steals Dorothy Wordworth’s journals to use in his own poetry, and surrounds himself with female devotees.
In this important new study, Judith W. Page also approaches Wordsworth’s poetry from a feminist perspective. However, by examining works from throughout his long career, rather than limiting the focus to what has been regarded as his major decade, Page offers a more nuanced examination of Wordsworth’s values. Instead of accepting some of the predictable, even formulaic, ways in which Wordsworth has been read, she asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. Thus instead of simply faulting Wordsworth for exploiting the women of his household, Page asks what value these particular women placed on their own contributions to his work and how they saw their relationship to the poet in the context of contemporary relations between women and men.
The book reinterprets some familiar poetry, such as “Tintern Abbey,” but it also introduces readers to a new Wordsworth: a poet who wrote for particular gift annuals in the 1820s and the 1830s and had to define himself among such writers as Alfred Tennyson and Felicia Hemans. And “Tintern Abbey” takes on a new significance as a poem that was read and reread by the women in Wordsworth’s life and continues to be reread and renegotiated by readers today.
Making extensive use of family letters, journals, and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet’s daughter Dora Wordworth from the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere, this first book-length study of Wordsworth and women presents an original and provocative view of the poet. We see Worsdworth as a poet defined primarily not by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life.
