ABSTRACT
This chapter reads Wordsworth’s “The Brothers” as a commentary on the relationship between wildness and weakness. It suggests that the protagonist, Leonard Ewbank, experiences wild and wilderness spaces as way into a weak pastoral mode in which certainty and will are displaced by dialogue and exchange. As a form of kenosis or self-emptying, Leonard’s weakness serves as an example to the Priest of Ennerdale, whose dismissal of his former parishioner as a stranger betrays his vocation and mission. The chapter also argues that Leonard’s weak engagement with the Priest models a weak interpretative approach analogous with Gianni Vattimo’s pensiero debole and Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading. Like kenosis, these methodological approaches empty readers of ego to encourage a charitable exposition of texts even as “The Brothers” reveals the difficulty of sustaining this outlook through Leonard’s eventual return to a marine wilderness.
