ABSTRACT

Central to the construction of both masculine and feminine Romanticism is the conception and linguistic representation of the self. Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals are exceptionally revealing autobiographical self-writing. And yet several recent readers of these Journals have described Dorothy as a person without a self or identity. Margaret Homans insists that her “poetic identity” was silenced by her adherence to her brother's equation of unspeaking nature with the female; James Holt McGavran, Jr., claims that in her relations with her brother she paid the “terrible price” of “the loss of any firm sense of personal identity”; and even Susan Levin's far more insightful and complex rendering of Dorothy Wordsworth's subjectivity finally describes her “self” as precarious, vulnerable, ambivalent, as a “negative center” whose writing is primarily characterized by gestures of “refusal.” 1 Why has Dorothy Wordsworth's self so often been read as either repressed or inadequate, her writing defined as the failure to achieve narrative representation of a distinct subjectivity? Is this the only, or even the most appropriate, way to read her Journals? To answer these questions, we must consider both the way in which the self was constructed in the Romantic period, and the role 145played by autobiography in culturally reinforcing this particular Romantic self.