- Title
- The perfect electrometer: Dorothy Wordsworth's lover's discourse
- Creator
- Pender, Patricia
- Relation
- Australian Humanities Review Issue 47, p. 67-84
- Relation
- http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/home.html
- Publisher
- ANU EPress
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- Dorothy Wordsworth presents an ongoing conundrum for literary biography and critical analysis. On the one hand, her relationship with her famous brother William has made her a highly visible figure in literary history. On the other, as an autobiographical writer who wrote very little that is obviously personal, she continues to present intriguing obstacles to interpretation. While her journals have been celebrated for their purported sincerity and simplicity, the extent to which they deliver an accessible authorial 'self' is limited by their strangely impersonal quality: instead of a poetics of self, Dorothy's journals seem to offer a poetics of self-effacement. Similarly, critical analysis of the journals oscillates between reading Dorothy as an active desiring subject on the one hand, and as an object or conduit for desire on the other. In this essay I take as my starting point two crucial insights offered by Frances Wilson's recent critically acclaimed Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008): that Dorothy was an active desiring agent and that she was in love with her brother. While these insights are far from novel (rumours to this effect circulated during the siblings' residence at Dove Cottage), Wilson's exploration of this material is nevertheless powerfully suggestive; she mines the journals largely in the service of a newly invigorated, yet still empirical, reading of the life. In contrast, this essay takes up one of Wilson's more provocative but unexplored suggestions-that the journals resemble a love letter-and offers a reading of the journals via Roland Barthes' rhetorical anatomisation of the desiring subject in A Lover's Discourse. I read Dorothy Wordsworth's projection in the journals of a fractured, fretful and quarrelsome self through Barthes' protracted dilation on desire, in particular through his analysis of the figures of affirmation, alteration and annulment.
- Subject
- Dorothy Wordsworth; diaries; William Wordsworth; essays
- Identifier
- uon:7377
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/807352
- Identifier
- ISSN:1835-8063
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