Gender and domesticity
She was totally ignorant of housewifery & could as easily have managed the spear of Minerva as her needle. It was from observing these deficiencies that one day, while she was under my roof, I purposely directed her attention to household economy & told her I had purchased Scales wh. I intended to present to a young lady as a wedding present, pointed out their utility, (for her especial benefit) & said that no ménage ought to be without them.1
Readers who think of Wordsworth as a visionary poet with his head in the clouds would be surprised to discover that these were his words. Such concern with the minutiae of domestic life as getting, spending, and weighing might not seem Wordsworthian. But these thoughts were on the seventy-three-year-old poet’s mind when he dictated notes on his poetry to his friend Isabella Fenwick. Ah, the puzzled reader might now say, these are the concerns of the stodgy old poet, not the fiery young man of the 1790s. But I will argue here that from an early age Wordsworth was concerned with home-making and with the dynamics of gender within ‘household economy’. While we do see a shift in emphasis from the early to later years (an embracing of Victorian domesticity), the idea of domesticity as the source of family, love, and stability remains a constant in Wordsworth’s life and work.
Paradoxically, too, Wordsworth’s critique of housewifery in the quoted passage referred to the popular poet Felicia Hemans, a woman who did not find the kind of domestic happiness in her own life that she praised in her poetry. Hemans might not have managed Minerva’s spear or a nineteenth-century lady’s needle, but she certainly used her pen to praise the idea of domesticity. In fact, she helped usher in the Victorian view of Wordsworth as soother of the soul and family poet: ‘Thine is the strain to read among the hills / . . . Or by some happy hearth where faces meet.’2 While the tenor of Hemans’ praise would please Wordsworth, it masks the difficulties of achieving and sustaining domestic happiness, a theme that is either on the surface of Wordsworth’s elegiac poetry or thinly veiled below. Because in his poetry the greatest celebrations derive from the deepest losses, balance is always tenuous. Domestic tranquillity is no exception.
I shall divide my essay into three sections: First, I argue that Wordsworth was interested in domesticity as a real value in his life and as an idea in his art. His notion of domestic life as the source of human affection and community is central to the poetry and political ideas of the poet who found ‘patriotic and domestic love’ intimately related (1805 ii 195). Domestic happiness is dependent on political and economic stability, as we see in The Ruined Cottage, and in Wordsworth’s own struggle for such security. The second and longest section of the essay focuses on the two places most associated with the idea of home in Wordsworth: Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount. Each place represents a phase in the life of the Wordsworth family, with particular attitudes toward home-making, and with particular poems. How does Wordsworth move from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals and Home at Grasmere, we might ask, to the world of keepsakes and The Triad? Finally, I consider the question of Wordsworth’s dependence on women for his domestic happiness, and, increasingly, on conventional ideas of womanhood in his poetry.
Patriotic and domestic love
Where does this yearning for domestic happiness begin? In Wordsworth’s imagination, it begins at the moment it is lost. The details of Wordsworth’s childhood are well known: the deaths of both parents, the scattering of the five children (Richard, William, Dorothy, John, and Christopher), the financial woes. While the boys were sent to school, Dorothy began a seminomadic existence, shuttled from one set of relatives to another. Although the children struggled to keep in touch, there were long periods of separation. At one point, Dorothy did not see William for nine years. Throughout this time, Dorothy in particular nurtured the idea of setting up a home, of finding both love and happiness in this imagined order. As she writes to her friend Jane Pollard, 16 February 1793,
I look forward with full confidence to the Happiness of receiving you in my little Parsonage, I hope you will spend at least a year with me. I have laid the particular scheme of happiness for each Season. When I think of Winter I hasten to furnish our little Parlour, I close the Shutters, set out the Tea-table, brighten the Fire. When our Refreshment is ended I produce our Work, and William brings his book to our Table and contributes at once to our Instruction and amusement, and at Intervals we lay aside the Book and each hazard our observations upon what has been read without the fear of Ridicule or Censure. We talk over past days, we do not sigh for any Pleasures beyond our humble Habitation ‘The central point of all our joys.
(WL i 88)
This might seem like an intimate girlish fantasy, but its valuing of a secure home and its gender-based distinction between their [needle]work and his ‘instruction’ seems prophetic of the Wordsworthian households to come. Most important, though, is Dorothy’s conviction that home is the source of happiness and pleasure, as well as the site of knowledge and work. From young Dorothy’s point of view, it is also the place where her own intellectual discovery and speculation will be taken seriously.
William’s desire for this kind of home increased during the troubling decade of the 1790s when, for a few years, he found himself wandering from place to place, depending on the kindness of friends and increasingly judgemental relatives. William’s wandering, his flight from the personal and political turmoil he experienced in revolutionary France, coincided with Dorothy’s desperate desire for a home. As war and distance made an immediate household with his French lover Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline seem impossible, Wordsworth apparently found in his renewed relationship with Dorothy a domestic refuge. Beginning in 1794 they lived together in a series of places in the Lake District, the West Country, and in Germany before settling in Grasmere in December of 1799.
The months spent with Dorothy in Germany during 1798–9 were particularly important in Wordsworth’s rediscovery of the meaning of his Englishness. In a pattern typical of his career and imaginative life, Wordsworth renewed this identity while separated from England, isolated with Dorothy in the town of Goslar during the coldest winter of the century. Dorothy records in her Hamburg journal and in her letters home during this time their intense alienation from their surroundings. In a letter to their brother Christopher Wordsworth, Dorothy confides that ‘Goslar is not a place where it is possible to see any thing of the manners of the more cultivated Germans, or of the higher classes. Its inhabitants are all petty tradespeople; in general a low and selfish race; intent upon gain, and perpetually of course disappointed’ (WL i 245). Likewise, William writes to Josiah Wedgwood that Goslar ‘was once the residence of Emperors, and it is now the residence of Grocers and Linen-drapers who are, I say it with a feeling of sorrow, a wretched race; the flesh, blood, and bone of their minds being nothing but knavery and low falshood [sic]’ (WL i 249). For their part, the locals distrusted the Wordsworths. In fact, Coleridge surmised that the townspeople assumed that Dorothy was William’s lover and shunned the supposed impropriety of the relationship. Wordsworth’s recent biographer Kenneth Johnston follows others in speculating that this unacknowledged tension was behind William’s composition of the Lucy poems and fragmentary ‘spots of time’ for The Prelude.3
This period of German isolation and alienation influenced Wordsworth not only in reformulating his English identity but in embracing the conviction that his only home could be in England, thus the merging of patriotic and domestic love. This identification of patriotic and domestic love is best exemplified in the Lucy poem that he wrote in early 1801 when settled in Grasmere:
I travelled among unknown Men,
In Lands beyond the Sea;
Nor England! Did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.
The poem goes on to celebrate an image of domesticity that combines the speaker’s love for Lucy and her English home, her spinning wheel serving as a metonymy for this mingling of domestic and patriotic love:
Among the mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.
The implicit death of Lucy in this poem (as in all of the poems of the Lucy cycle) serves as a reminder of the fragility of happiness in face of mortality or loss of hope. But the death of Lucy (‘the last green field / Which Lucy’s eyes surveyed!’) does not diminish the power of the speaker’s attachment to her English hearth.
The years preceding Goslar had also been formative in Wordsworth’s creative life, and it is not surprising that his poetry of this period often focuses on the possibilities of domestic happiness and community, and on the relationship between domestic and political economies. Perhaps Wordsworth’s first great poem, The Ruined Cottage, best illustrates this dynamic. Like so many of Wordsworth’s poems, this one begins with an image or images and then weaves the narrative around them. The images refer to the ruin: the ‘four naked walls’ (31) of the cottage, the overgrown garden emblematic of human loss and decay, or the ‘useless fragment of a wooden bowl’ (91). While all of the images reveal the transformation of a productive cottage into a ruin, this last one especially moves the Pedlar’s heart because it represents a particular domestic detail and as such carries metonymic significance for all of the losses suffered. The cluster of images reminds that not only things have been ruined, but human lives: the ‘useless fragment’, once a part of a working household, now represents its destruction.
Furthermore, Wordsworth implies in The Ruined Cottage that domestic happiness and security depend on economic and political stability. For a while, Margaret and her husband Robert, a weaver, lived hardworking and productive lives with their two children. But as the Pedlar explains to his young friend,
You may remember, now some ten years gone,
Two blighting seasons when the fields were left
With half a harvest. It pleased heaven to add
A worse affliction in the plague of war
(134–7)
As I have said, ’twas now
A time of trouble; shoals of artisans
Were from their daily labour turned away
To hang for bread on parish charity
(153–6).
Wordsworth traces the effects of these ills on the family, at first focusing particularly on the effect on Robert. He becomes idle and loses his will to survive. The Pedlar explains that ‘poverty brought on a petted mood / And a sore temper’ (174–5), and finally to the destruction of domestic calm. Although this poem is linked to a particular working class family, like so many of Wordsworth’s poems it focuses on loss and what can be made of it – in this case for those who tell or hear the sad tale, not the protagonists themselves.
Wordsworth echoes the same theme when he writes to Whig leader Charles James Fox in a letter dated 14 January 1801, in recommending ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ from the second volume of Lyrical Ballads:
It appears to me that the most calamitous effect, which has followed the measures which have lately been pursued in this country, is a rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society. This effect the present Rulers of this country are not conscious of, or they disregard it. For many years past, the tendency of society amongst almost all the nations of Europe has been to produce it. But recently by the spreading of manufactures through every part of the country, by the heavy taxes upon postage, by workhouses, Houses of Industry, and the invention of Soup-shops &c. &c. superadded to the encreasing disproportion between the price of labor and that of the necessaries of life, the bonds of domestic feeling among the poor, as far as the influence of these things has extended, have been weakened, and in innumerable instances entirely destroyed.
Throughout the letter, Wordsworth maintains that these social conditions are destroying ‘independent domestic life’ and the happiness associated with it. Wordsworth argues here and elsewhere that these affections are the moral backbone of England, an island of stability in a sea of change. And yet the poems themselves chronicle the collapse of this life that Wordsworth wants so urgently to preserve.
If the domestic affections are the backbone of the country, the family is the microcosm of the larger world. Wordsworth shared with writers on both the right (Edmund Burke) and the left (Mary Wollstonecraft) an interest in the family as the stage where dramas of power, authority, passion, and independence are acted out. The family both represents (on a smaller scale) and is analogous to the society. Certainly the drama of Wordsworth’s own family life in the 1790s represented many of these conflicts as he struggled to find his place in the world in both the literal and figurative senses. After the tense and alienating season in Germany, the search for this domestic security became even more urgent.
Home at Grasmere, home at Rydal Mount
By the time William and Dorothy Wordsworth arrived in Grasmere a few days before Christmas in 1799, they viewed this leg of their journey as a homecoming and Grasmere as home – ‘our little domestic slip of mountain’ (24 and 27 December 1799; WL i 274–5). During the early years at Grasmere, the Wordsworths also recreated the meaning of domesticity within their own lives, even as William continued to document the failures of domestic stability in his poetry. But at Grasmere he and Dorothy, as well as their expanding circle with their brother John and their friends the Hutchinsons, define a domestic life that is intellectually self-conscious and centred around creative work.
Anyone who visits what is now known as Dove Cottage must be surprised to see the cramped living space – small, dark rooms with ceilings so low that Wordsworth had to watch his head while moving about. In some ways though, as others have suggested, this spatial constraint paradoxically inspired imaginative leaps in creative life. John Murdoch has argued, in fact, that the Wordsworths were highly original in transforming a cottage on a public road: ‘the deliberate construction of a cottage and garden adapted to the existence of scholar-gentleman was a characteristic development of the early 19th century’.4 Perhaps this explains Dorothy’s recognition in her journal at one point that their endeavours were a matter of special interest: ‘A coronetted Landau went by when we were sitting upon the sodded wall. The ladies (evidently Tourists) turned an eye of interest upon our little garden & cottage’ (9 June 1800).5 In order to extend their domestic space, William and Dorothy (and to a certain extent their brother John) collaborated on gardens surrounding the cottage and ‘on the construction of sheltered secreted places’ on the property, so that the garden became an extension of the household, garden ‘rooms’ that for a time made up for the constraints within. In fact, gardening became a lifelong pursuit of William’s, and remained linked to his idea of promoting ‘the affections’ by connecting human life to nature (WL i 627; 17 and 24 October 1805) – to one’s plot of ground. But if gardens would become more aesthetic pleasure grounds at Rydal Mount, at Dove Cottage the garden’s main function was practical and immediate: nourishment.
To a certain extent, domestic life at Grasmere was a collaboration, although I would not go as far as claiming, as some have done, that there was not a gendered division of labour at Grasmere.6 While it is true that gardening was truly collaborative, the work associated with the interior household – cooking, baking, washing, copying – seems to have been Dorothy and her female servant’s responsibility. Both Dorothy and William were, however, engaged in creative work – Dorothy on her journals and William on his poetry. But Dorothy was the glue holding their domestic life together, and her journals brim with endless cycles of housework and kitchen gardening, all of which she engages in with tremendous energy. This energetic work seems to have intensified Dorothy’s consciousness of the value of life at Dove Cottage: ‘Grasmere was very solemn in the last glimpse of twilight it calls home the heart to quietness’ (Journals, p. 17).
We might also say that Home at Grasmere is William’s attempt – not entirely successful – to call home the heart to quietness. For while Home at Grasmere is a celebratory poem that commemorates this homecoming and new life, it also reveals the anxieties of domesticity, no doubt reflecting William’s own conflicted emotions over his relationships with Dorothy, Mary Hutchinson, and Annette Vallon, not to mention his anxiety about his career and his capacity to earn money. The narrator of Home at Grasmere celebrates his happiness with Emma [Dorothy], but the joy is qualified. In appreciating the spring and flocks of birds, the narrator must acknowledge:
But two are missing – two, a lonely pair
Of milk-white Swans – ah, why are they not here?
These above all, ah, why are they not here
To share in this day’s pleasure? From afar
They came, like Emma and myself, to live
Together here in peace and solitude
Choosing this Valley, they who had the choice
Of the whole world.
(322–9)
Although the speaker muses that ‘They should not have departed’ (342), he senses that they will not return. Their absence highlights the fragility of the ‘placid way of life’ (336) that he and ‘Emma’ have chosen in Grasmere, that their peace and happiness may also be difficult to sustain.
Other vignettes and images of domesticity support this tenuousness, although there is yearning for hope. First there is the story of the man who became a ‘lawless Suitor’ (506) to a girl working within his household. Wracked by guilt and shame, the man cannot speak his shame and becomes alienated from his home and family: ‘he died of his own grief, / He could not bear the weight of his own shame’ (531–2). The other story is more hopeful, although it is tinged with sadness because it tells of six motherless daughters and their father. The narrator focuses on one of the daughters, who
Companion of her Father, does for him
Where’er he wanders in his pastoral course
The service of a Boy, and with delight
More keen and prouder daring: yet hath She
Within the garden, like the rest, a bed
For her own flowers, or favorite Herbs, a space
Holden by sacred charter; and I guess
She also helped to frame that tiny Plot
Of garden ground which one day ’twas my chance
To find among the woody rocks that rise
Above the House, a Slip of smoother earth . . .
(575–86)
As in the Wordsworths’ letters and journals of the period, the garden becomes an emblem both of the human connection to nature and of domestic order. The very language echoes other writing: plot of ground, slip of earth. In addition, the political resonance of ‘sacred charter’ suggests that this garden links domestic and patriotic affections, a Wordsworthian ideal.
During this period of settling into Grasmere, Coleridge had begun to urge Wordsworth to write the great philosophical poem of the age: The Recluse. Although Wordsworth wrote portions of what was to have become this poem, he also (and more happily) focused on shorter pieces. Just as the cramped interiors of Dove Cottage inspired improvements in the landscape and bursts of creativity, Wordsworth found the less daunting structures of the shorter genres liberating. As one writer has ingeniously noted, Wordsworth uses the ‘very language that describes the Grasmere property’ in the sonnet that ‘speaks of “the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground” (‘Nuns fret not’). The sonnet, in short, epitomizes the domestic space that William celebrated at Grasmere and bestows upon that space an aesthetic analogue’ (Heinzelman, ‘Cult of Domesticity’, p. 63). This is especially interesting because Wordsworth thought of gardening as a liberal art bound by the same formal concerns and affective possibilities as poetry.7 Furthermore, the poem turns with this thought:
In truth, the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground:
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find short solace there, as I have found.
These lines are also interesting in terms of Wordsworth’s life in and preceding Grasmere. We can interpret ‘the weight of too much liberty’ as referring both to the Recluse project and to Wordsworth’s own emotional life before Grasmere – his time in France, his wandering. The ‘prison’ of Grasmere and domesticity must have been a welcome antidote to this homelessness, wandering, and alienation.
With Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson and the growing family at Grasmere (which, at different times, included Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge, and others, as well as Dorothy and eventually five children), Dove Cottage became too scanty even for the most imaginative homemakers. The ménage moved through several unsatisfactory homes and sustained the tragic loss of two of the children – Thomas and Catherine – before they became tenants of Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s home for the rest of his life and the place most associated with the idea of ‘Wordsworth’. Although Rydal is only about a mile from Dove Cottage, in some ways it could be a world away. Comparatively spacious and beautifully situated, the house became another kind of home, one suitable to Turkish carpets, tea urns, keepsakes, and landscaped lawns. Paintings of the Wordsworths during this period represent Rydal Mount as an idealized retreat with both elegant interiors and terraced exterior spaces. But despite these contemporary images, we should keep in mind that although Rydal Mount was comfortable, it was in reality never luxuriously furnished or excessively decorated. Furthermore, luxury was never the issue: for Wordsworth, Rydal Mount became a domestic anchor and spiritual home. When Lady le Fleming, the owner of Rydal Mount, seemed ready to evict the Wordsworths in favour of her aunt in 1825, Wordsworth quickly bought a field adjoining her property and commissioned plans for a grand villa next to Lady le Fleming’s own home. Wordsworth’s ploy was successful. Lady le Fleming backed off and never again tried to evict her poetic tenant.
During the Rydal years, the idea of domesticity is both highly idealized in Wordsworth’s poetry and very practical in his prose – letters, notes, reported comments. His prefatory poem to The White Doe of Rylstone, for instance, celebrates the power of domestic affections and of poetry to console the wounded spirit. Having just lost two beloved children, Wordsworth begins the poem by addressing his wife:
In trellis’d shed with clustering roses gay,
And, mary! Oft beside our blazing fire,
When years of wedded life were as a day
Whose current answers to the heart’s desire,
Did we together read in Spenser’s Lay
How Una, sad of soul – in sad attire,
The gentle Una, born of heavenly birth,
To seek her Knight went wandering o’er the earth.
(1–8)
Here two emblems of domestic life – the garden refuge and the hearth – become perfect spots for reading Spenser and finding ‘recompense’ (51). Through the years, Rydal also nurtured Wordsworth’s practical side – his concern with how actual domestic life can be maintained through certain economies. As Harriet Martineau recounts in her Autobiography, Wordsworth (even in 1845) remained concerned with this practical side. After planting a tree on her property, Wordsworth advised the eccentric and unpredictable Martineau: ‘ “When you have a visitor”, said he, “you must do as we did; – you must say ‘if you like to have a cup of tea with us, you are very welcome: but if you want any meat, – you must pay for your board’ ”. . . The mixture of odd economies and neighborly generosity was one of the most striking things in the old poet.’8 Perhaps Wordsworth’s economy was not as odd as Martineau implies, especially if he was thinking back on his years at Dove Cottage and the struggle to support his young family.
So what was Rydal Mount really like? To a certain extent, we can reconstruct the home by reading the poetry and letters of the period and by reading what such friends as Martineau, as well as Henry Crabb Robinson, Isabella Fenwick, and Hartley Coleridge say about it. While Rydal Mount has been rightly associated in recent years with Victorian interiority and a ‘cult of domesticity’ (Heinzelman’s term), I do not think we can view Rydal Mount as simply representing a Victorian separation of spheres. For while Wordsworth certainly saw women and ‘womanly virtues’ (WL vii 235) as closely associated with home, the division of the domestic and the public spheres was not absolute. The home was more than just a refuge from the world: it was also a well-situated and protected vantage point from which to view the larger world. And, furthermore, because the home was the site of work for the poet and increasingly a tourist destination in itself, it was not ‘separate’ from the larger world.
But a new emphasis in the poetry from the 1820s onward reveals that Wordsworth accepted and contributed to emerging Victorian ideas of femininity and the domestic sphere. At the same time, the elegiac sense that pervades the earlier poetry and its hope for the ‘domestic affections’ are replaced by a more light and playful approach that belies continuing tensions in the Wordsworths’ family romance. The Triad, written for the 1828 gift annual The Keepsake, best exemplifies this new emphasis. This poem, like other contributions, was written for the marketplace – quite literally. Including a medley of selections in prose and verse as well as engraved plates, The Keepsake and other gift annuals were designed more to be seen than read. They were the nineteenth-century equivalent of our decorative coffee table books. Following years of resisting and balking, Wordsworth stooped to conquer, and as Peter Manning has suggested, ‘After a career-long suspicion of popular narrative, the almost sixty-year-old poet was learning new tricks.’9 What especially interests me here is not just this new engagement with the literary marketplace, but the fact that the marketplace was calling for poems that embraced a particular ideology of feminine beauty and virtue centred on domesticity and domestic accomplishments. As the unsophisticated worker Bob Jakin exclaims over the illustrations in a Keepsake in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860 but set in the 1820s, ‘ “here’s ladies for you, some wi’ curly hair and some wi’ smooth, an’ some a-smiling wi’ their heads o’ one side, an’ some as if they were goin’ to cry – look here – a-sittin’ on the ground out o’ door, dressed like the ladies I’n seen get out o’ carriages at the balls in th’ Old Hall there” ’ (Book iv, chapter iii).
Eliot’s description of the Keepsake leads us to Wordsworth’s playful comment to a correspondent in 1826 – ‘My Daughter, Dora by name, is now installed in my House in the office of regular tea maker, why cannot you come and swell the chorus of praises she draws forth for her performance of that important part of feminine duty?’ – and to the world of The Triad and keepsakes. In The Triad, Wordsworth celebrates the kind of feminine beauty that Eliot’s character catalogues. Although the poem imagines a youth from ‘Olympian clime’ – a proto-Victorian judgement of Paris – who has come to select a wife from among the ‘Phantasms’ of three young women, Edith Southey, Dora Wordsworth, and Sara Coleridge, there is no real drama. Instead, the poem uses this fiction to create a tableau of ideal womanhood from the male poet’s point of view. Sara Coleridge later asserted that ‘There is no truth in it [the poem] as a whole, although bits of truth, glazed and magnified, are embodied in it’ (LP 439). This glazing is an apt metaphor for Wordsworth’s technique, and I think it is Sara Coleridge’s way of resisting the unnatural lustre and display in which she and the other women are turned into chaste art objects. Her comment gives the ‘mute Phantoms’ (212) imagined by the poet a say in how we remember them.
All three of the portraits link the women to images of domesticity, and in fact see women as responsible for creating domestic calm. The speaker first describes Edith Southey:
O Lady, worthy of earth’s proudest throne!
Nor less, by excellence of nature, fit
Beside an unambitious hearth to sit
Domestic queen, where grandeur is unknown;
What living man could fear
The worst of Fortune’s malice, wert Thou near,
Humbling that lily-stem, thy sceptre meek,
That its fair flowers may from his cheek
Brush the too happy tear?
(52–60)
Wordsworth’s ‘Domestic queen’ fits well into this idealized world, as does the picture of Dora as a damsel of romance who ‘bears the stringed lute of old romance, / That cheered the trellised arbour’s privacy, / And soothed war-wearied knights in raftered hall’ (101–3). The speaker praises Dora’s ‘self-forgetfulness’ (160), reminding us of the virtue of self-sacrifice often associated with Victorian womanhood. Even Sara Coleridge, who was the most intellectually accomplished of the three, must fit into the context of domestic life so the youth does not ‘dread the depth of meditative eye’ (193).
These formal descriptions connecting women to chivalrous notions and genres as well as Victorian interiors carry us away from the Grasmere and pre-Grasmere days, when Dorothy Wordsworth went hiking through the countryside like Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and her wild eyes reflected the poet’s own passions. After Dorothy’s Aunt (Mrs Christopher) Crackanthorpe criticized her for ‘rambling about the country on foot’, Dorothy defended herself in a letter from Windy Brow in April of 1794. But in The Triad the narrator urges the daughters of the poets to embrace propriety and sit before the paternal tea urn dispensing tea and sympathy to weary knights. Unlike Tennyson in Mariana or The Lady of Shalott, Wordsworth does not intuit the dark side of these gilded cages or the possibility that this domestic ideal has its price.
Actual life at Rydal Mount was certainly not as idealized as this portrait. As we have seen in Wordsworth’s comments about Hemans, the poet had a very practical and prosaic sense of ‘housewifery’ to go with his idealized views of femininity. Furthermore, even amidst a close family, numerous tensions will surface. Wordsworth’s relationships with his three children were not always easy. Both John and William, Jr were disappointments intellectually, and Wordsworth worried much about their futures. And as we shall see, his intense and loving relationship with Dora was not without pain on both sides. Furthermore, Dorothy, who for years was a mainstay of the household, went into a mental and physical decline after 1829. In her own words:
When shall I tread your garden path?
Or climb your sheltering hill?
When shall I wander, free as air,
And track the foaming rill?
A prisoner on my pillowed couch
Five years in feebleness I’ve lain,
Oh! shall I e’er with vigorous step
Travel the hills again?
To Mr Carter DW Novr 11–183510
The sad answer to this question for Dorothy Wordsworth is ‘no’; her condition as an invalid also meant a changed domestic life for her and for the family circle. She who had been the caregiver now became totally dependent on others for her life and care – imprisoned on her couch in a cruel parody both of her former self and of positive poetic images of domestic entrapment.
The company of women
Viewing Dorothy Wordsworth’s life more than two centuries after her birth, it is tempting to find a medical diagnosis or to blame her ruined health on frustrated personal desires and years of self-sacrifice. To this latter reading, her long illness inflicted a kind of poetic justice on the household that had accepted those sacrifices for so long. But the fate of Dorothy Wordsworth raises additional and more complicated questions about Wordsworth’s different relationships with the many women in his life and their role in making both Grasmere and Rydal Mount home.
The early feminist critique of Wordsworth interprets William as a patriarchal villain who took advantage of the women in his household, especially Dorothy.11 The criticism of Wordsworth’s dependence on women did not originate in the last twenty or so years, however. In the autumn of 1803 Coleridge complained that Wordsworth was ‘hypocondriacal’ from ‘living wholly among Devotees – having every the [sic] minutest Thing, almost his very Eating & Drinking done for him by his Sister, or Wife’ (STCL ii, 1013). Although Coleridge’s comments are tainted by his own envy and wish that he could be surrounded by devotees, his comments are nonetheless perceptive. After Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson in 1802, Wordsworth and his career became increasingly the focal point. It was no longer just William and Dorothy, sharing and collaborating, but a whole household of (mostly) women who revolved around William.
But it would be inaccurate to say that the other members of the household were ever held hostage to William’s demands. This view overlooks the fact that Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wordsworth, and Sara Hutchinson had minds and wills of their own. It denies the value that they themselves placed on their home-making and on the choices they made. It also overlooks their irreverent attitude toward some of William’s concerns. For instance, Wordsworth was afraid of publishing The Convention of Cintra because it was politically controversial. Following William’s serious worry about ‘Prosecution in any of the courts of law’, Sara adds to the letter: ‘We Females shall be very sorry to find that the pamphlet is not published for we have not the least fear of Newgate – if there was but a Garden to walk in we think we should do very nicely – and a Gaol in the Country would be quite pleasant’ (WL ii 330). Sara’s letter not only reveals her own sardonic wit, but also suggests that there is a female solidarity in this household for whom she speaks. She certainly does not fit the pattern of a woman oppressed and beaten down by the forces of male ego, and she herself sees the sly humour in portraying home life as analogous to prison in the country. Nor was she afraid to smuggle Blackwood’s into the house to read hostile reviews of her brother-in-law’s poetry.
Much of the specific criticism of Wordsworth has focused on Dorothy and her long life with William and his family. The case of Dorothy is more complicated because her fate is so much more closely linked with William’s from the beginning. Some feminist criticism has focused on William’s alleged theft of Dorothy’s ideas and images from the journals and on his preventing her own career as a writer. Kenneth Johnston’s analysis is more on the mark when he writes that Dorothy ‘knew by now [1799] that she would never marry and that she was in a real sense wedded to him for life. It is hard to argue that Dorothy missed out on a writing career for her devotion, but it is certainly true that she sacrificed herself as a woman to William’s (vocational) desires’ (The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 651). From this perspective, it is less William’s overriding selfishness in appropriating Dorothy to his household than it is Dorothy’s circumstances as an unmarried sister without a fortune – a prerequisite in her culture to either independence or marriage – that led to her casting her lot for home and happiness with her favourite brother.
I do suggest, however, that we view Dorothy’s transformation over the years from a passionate and energetic young woman to a ruin of her former self in the context of the life that she embraced. For her life at Grasmere and Rydal required a constant sublimation of her own individual desires in favour of the good of the household and the need to serve others. And we must remember that in one sense Dorothy bore the responsibilities of a wife without the benefit of having a husband with whom she could share her deepest passions. For as her behaviour at the time of William’s marriage to her good friend Mary reveals, Dorothy knew that this marriage would break the particular intimacy that she and William had established in the early days at Grasmere when William was her beloved.
Nor can Wordsworth be said to have been tyrannical with his wife, to whom he was married for almost fifty years. Mary Wordsworth apparently did not share her sister Sara’s sharp wit, but she was a strong woman, passionately attached to her family. She was not a pushover. Although she often served as her husband’s amanuensis, she sometimes refused to work with him until his mood improved. Wordsworth was a relentless reviser who depended on various members of the household (usually female) to carry out the arduous task of taking dictation and copying manuscripts. He did not take this work lightly or for granted. In a letter on 5 July 1837 written from abroad, he pleads: ‘Dearest Mary, when I have felt how harshly I often demeaned myself to you, my inestimable fellow-labourer, while correcting the last Edition of my poems, I often pray to God that He would grant us both life, that I may make some amends to you for that, and all my unworthiness.’ Wordsworth was aware of his own shortcomings. When Crabb Robinson told him that De Quincey had said that he had a better wife than he deserved, Wordsworth reportedly agreed.12 While this may be the case, Wordsworth did see Mary as his ‘inestimable fellow-labourer’, his partner in the whole Wordsworthian enterprise.
With all of the women who were his contemporaries – Dorothy, Mary, Sara – it is fair to say that their role in Wordsworthian domesticity was to a large extent by choice. The same cannot be said for his daughter Dorothy, or Dora, as she was known. Wordsworth’s only surviving legitimate daughter, Dora was much beloved by her father – a feeling that she reciprocated. But this love carried with it a burden, especially as Dora matured. Dora, this second Dorothy, was groomed for her role as her father’s amanuensis, companion, and ‘regular tea maker’ – a Victorian angel with editorial responsibilities. From the outside, others saw that Dora’s responsibilities placed a constraint on her life, particularly on her making a life for herself independent of Rydal Mount. Dora’s friend Sara Coleridge (and one of the three Graces from The Triad) commented that ‘The Rydal Mount career frustrated a real talent’,13 referring to her travel journal on Spain and Portugal. In 1830, Sara’s brother Hartley had written that ‘Dora, as sweet a creature as ever breath’d, suffers sadly from debility. I have my suspicions that she would be a healthier matron than she is a Virgin, but strong indeed must be the love that could induce her to leave her father, whom she adores and who quite doats upon her’ (30 August 1830).14
After a too-long courtship, Dora married Edward Quillinan when she was thirty-seven – with her father’s grudging consent, gained after years of painful intransigence on Wordsworth’s part. Dora’s difficult time separating herself from home – and her father’s long refusal to let her go – both reveal the darker side of Rydal Mount and family relations (as does Dorothy Wordsworth’s sad fate). While in earlier years Wordsworth felt the weight of too much liberty and thrived on the scanty plot at Grasmere, Dora felt the weight of too much control.
And yet these tensions only strengthened the fabric of domestic attachments at Rydal Mount. Dora returned home in 1847 to be nursed in her final illness by her parents. According to various accounts, including that of Crabb Robinson, vitality and happiness never returned to the Mount after Dora’s death, but the home remained a focal point for affection and memory during the Wordsworths’ last years, an emblem of both loss and hope.15 Even after the poet stopped writing about this or any subject, he was sustained and comforted by the home and the idea of home that they had all worked so long and hard to create. In the end, Rydal called the heart home to quietness too.
NOTES
1 Jared Curtis (ed.), The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (London: Bristol Classical Press 1993), p. 60.
2 From ‘To Wordsworth’, in William M. Rossetti (ed.), The Poetical Works of Felicia Hemans (London: Ward Lock and Co., 1878).
3 Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 635.
4 John Murdoch, The Discovery of the Lake District (London: The Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984), p. 81.
5 Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford, 1991), p. 9.
6 Kurt Heinzelman, ‘The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth at Grasmere’, in Anne K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), p. 53 and passim. Despite some differences, I am indebted to the insights of this important essay.
7 For the best developed analysis of this topic, see Russell Noyes, Wordsworth and the Art of Landscape (1968 rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1973).
8 Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 3rd edn 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), vol. 2, p. 235.
9 Peter J. Manning, ‘Wordsworth in the Keepsake, 1829’, in John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (eds.), Literature in the Marketplace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
10 Quoted in Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 231.
11 For instance, see Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). For an extended analysis of the feminist critique of Wordsworth, see my Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (University of California Press, 1994).
12 Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 90.
13 Howard P. Vincent (ed.), The Letters of Dora Wordsworth (Chicago: Packard, 1944), ‘Introduction’, p. 11.
14 The Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 112.
15 See Edith J. Morley (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle (1808–66), 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), including ‘Introduction’, vol. 1, pp. 1–27. Also corroborating this is Stephen Gill’s conclusion in William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); I have relied on Gill throughout.