![]() ![]() ![]() 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. I was a freeman, in the purest sense / Was free, and to majestic ends was strong' (III.82-90). The poet speaks of himself in this light as 'a chosen son. 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 beautiful is 'feminine', and connected with the mother. The sublime in Nature is 'masculine', and connected with the memory of the poet's father. 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. It is, particularly, notions of the state and of the family which become entangled. It is argued that the second half of the eighteenth century witnesses a close entangling of aesthetic and sexual-political concerns. These fostering agencies of 'beauty' and 'fear' are in fact recognizably parental 'presences of Nature' (I.490). Wordsworth writes: 'Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear' (I.305-06). 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. 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. The aim is to shed new light on the much-discussed question of Wordsworth's politics and their relation to the French Revolution. This 'fathering', as portrayed autobiographically in The Prelude, is to be investigated here in terms of the later Althusserian theory of ideology. In Wordsworth, famously, 'The Child is Father of the Man'. ![]() What is thus shown without being stated, it will be argued, is the production of subjectivity through the ideological interpellation of the individual. The discourse of the work traces the outline of the absent centre which it is about. 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. It is determined what can and cannot be said in the story of (in this case) the growth of a poet's mind. Form is bestowed on ideology by the text in question a line is drawn between 'public' and 'private' forms of history. It is in the formal nature of autobiography that this should be so. Evidently, the meaning of this conjuncture is something which can be shown but not stated. There is a relationship here between the text of the poem and the significance of what it speaks about. This creates the opening for a symptomatic reading of the poem's speech, and of its silence. As a result the poem is made discontinuous with itself and is ruptured. The burden of disclosure is distributed unevenly across and through the poem's structure. ![]() Part of the meaning of the poem in the aspect of its story is registered in the manner of its telling. 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. 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. Wordsworth's The Prelude is literally the autobiography of an orphan. ![]()
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