Dorothy Wordsworth's Sense of Self and the Poetics of Community

Dorothy Wordsworth's Sense of Self and the Poetics of Community

Dorothy Wordsworth is known primarily as a writer of journals and recollections, but her writings has attracted little critical attention and even less acclaim. The usual remark about her works is that they lack literary merit, especially when compared to those of the other writer and chief poet of the household, William Wordsworth. Several recent readers have described Dorothy as a person without a poetic self or identity. Dorothy's works, however, characteristically represent a feminine romantic self, which is contrasted to the ideologically dominant constriction of subjectivity Dorothy's self is not only relational, formed in connection with the needs, moods and actions of other human beings, but also physically embodied - not a "mighty mind" but an organic body. Such physical bodies have been for the most part absent from the canonical male writings which have attempted to construct a permanent, even transcendental, ego that endures beyond the limit of matter, time and space. If the clearest divergence of Dorothy's imagination from William's poetry is to be read in her repeated figuring of community in which the self has a place, but not the privileged place, and in which shared lives and values shape and sustain individual desire, she is also aware of how dependent this ideal is It assumes both the availability of a community as a home for the self and the accessibility of that community to the self as its ground of security and focus of activity.