Abstract
By surveying various encounters with disability in Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude, in this chapter it is proposed that Wordsworthian aesthetics are fundamentally disability aesthetics. The disabled bodies and minds that Wordsworth depicts leave formal traces on his poetry, as do the bodily reactions Wordsworth’s narrators register when they encounter human difference. In order to demonstrate the importance of disability to Wordsworth’s growth as a poet, the chapter focuses on the Discharged Soldier passage of The Prelude, and then moves on to the Blind Beggar passage. By offering readings of ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Thorn’, and ‘The Idiot Boy’, I also consider the ways that disability is central to the admonitory power of Wordsworth’s verse. For poet and reader alike, encountering disability may trigger an aesthetic and ethical crisis and elicit reflection that can lead directly to moral growth.
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Notes
- 1.
The frequency of disability in Wordsworth’s poetry is striking. That we do not already consider Wordsworth a disability poet is characteristic of a phenomenon described by Disability Studies scholars. As David Mitchell has noted, “Once readers begin to actively seek out representations of disability in our literatures, it is difficult for them to avoid being struck by disability’s tendency to proliferate in texts with which they believed themselves to be utterly familiar” (19). Paul Longmore has similarly revealed the ubiquity of disability in film, and Tobin Siebers argues of the visual arts that “disability is rarely recognized as such, even though it often serves as the very factor that establishes works as superior examples of aesthetic beauty” (4).
- 2.
Syntactically, the 1798 version of this self-indictment is much more straightforward: “Not without reproach / Had I prolonged my watch” (83–4). Compared to the 1805 version of these lines, this is a relatively simple recognition: the narrator acknowledges that his voyeurism is problematic and comes out of hiding. This is one of several ways in which the 1798 passage is a much less ambivalent—and to my mind much less compelling—encounter with non-normative embodiment. I have argued elsewhere that the passage may be said to harness the aesthetic potency of disability for a largely implicit but nonetheless powerful commentary on war, imperialism, and class. In doing so, however, it offers a less incisive commentary on the aesthetics of disability. (See Stanback, “Wordsworthian Admonishment”). Also see Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease (116–9).
- 3.
Here Wordsworth uses the same terminology to describe Wedgwood’s sublimity that he uses elsewhere to describe the natural sublime. In the textual fragment “[The Sublime and the Beautiful],” the poet defines sublimity as “exist[ing] in the extinction of the comparing power of the mind, & in intense unity” (356). Like Wedgwood’s peculiarly “united” face, body, and affect (one “beautiful,” one “deplorably changed,” and the last “calm and dignified”), a rock and a waterfall “will be found to have exalted the mind to the highest state of sublimity when they are thought of in that state of opposition & yet reconcilement” (357).
- 4.
Bewell has written of the 1798 passages that the soldier’s “social depravation” is due not to his own “state” but rather to “the poet’s ‘eye,’ which has repeatedly deprived him of human status” (Wordsworth 89–90). The matter is amplified in the passage’s 1805 iteration.
- 5.
The 1798 passage ends as the narrator responds to the soldier’s thanks: “I returned / The blessing of the poor unhappy man, / And so we parted” (170–2). These mutual blessings provide a conspicuously resolved conclusion, and prevent the episode from fully passing the threshold of crisis and correction. Wolfson notes of the 1850 version that likewise it “seems intended to mitigate this effect and contain its disturbance” (<CitationRef 141).
- 6.
The earliest extant version of these lines, in MS X makes this crisis yet clearer: “and I thought / That even the very most of what we know / Both of ourselves and of the universe, / The whole of what is written to our view, / Is but a label on a blind man’s chest.”
- 7.
James Macpherson had popularized the (purported) works of the sightless Celt of antiquity, Ossian, in the 1760s. Although the authenticity of the works was immediately called into question, Ossian became a hugely popular “author” and also a central figure in nationalist narratives of late eighteenth-century Britain.
- 8.
Milton’s special importance to Wordsworth has been detailed by scholars including Harold Bloom, Robin Jarvis, and Nicholas Roe. I mention Roe’s much shorter treatment of the topic because Roe emphasizes that in his youth, the radical Wordsworth felt a strong solidarity with Milton (“Politics of Poetic Influence”). As such, the beggar’s recollection of Milton dramatizes the tension between the young Wordsworth in London and the mature poet struggling against his literary predecessor as he wrote The Prelude.
- 9.
In this way I propose here something very different from what Jonathan Wordsworth has written of the beggar and border figures in general: that they “possess a symbolic, not an actual, wisdom” (Borders 10).
- 10.
Some critics have suggested a kind of reciprocity to Wordsworth’s encounter with the beggar. Megan Becker-Leckrone, for example, contends that the blind beggar “speaks, as it were, through the written text upon his chest” (996). The assumption that the beggar’s inner world might seem accessible through his sign is specious; at the very least the beggar cannot verify it, and he may not know what exactly it contains. Moreover, Wordsworth has not engaged with the man, who gives no indication that he is aware of Wordsworth’s presence.
- 11.
This is assuming, of course, that unlike Wordsworth, the beggar has the use of all of the non-visual senses.
- 12.
This second sense of smitten (from “smit”) is akin to the common association of disability with contagion. This association was mostly latent at Wordsworth’s time, but is also evident in the responses to the Pneumatic Institution’s nitrous oxide trials that I detailed in Chapter 3. Although I do not think Wordsworth intended to explicitly engage with this association, the lingering effects of the encounter nonetheless recall the fears of disability infecting the body politic that would become more culturally prominent over the course of the nineteenth century, and would figure centrally in many public health and eugenic campaigns.
- 13.
Alan Bewell has read these lines as indicating that the poet’s “interest” in strangers “is fundamentally linked to moral inquiry (Wordsworth 29), and rightly notes that Wordsworth offers a kind of corrective to the “customary stance” of eighteenth-century anthropology. Partly because of Wordsworth’s emphasis on contact (“familiar talk”), Bewell characterizes Wordsworth’s approach as one of “domestic anthropology” (30–1).
- 14.
This vacillation between descriptions of deficiency and excessive materiality calls to mind what James I. Porter writes of the “disabled” body: from one “angle … it seems too little a body” yet “[v]iewed in itself… [it] seems somehow too much a body, too real, too corporeal” (xiii).
- 15.
Although the poem resists transforming Simon’s body into an emblem of the plight of the labouring poor, it does emphasize the dynamic connection between his body and social status, an important point insofar as literature “rarely take[s] up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions,” even when it uses disability to comment on social ills (David Mitchell 16). For example, Simon’s later life is characterized by a realistic interplay of the physical, functional, and economic: “he’s forced to work, though weak” (39), and “the more he works, the more / His poor old ancles swell” (67–8).
- 16.
Simon’s history is often read as a “narrative of suffering” (McGrath 570), and his later life as “miserable old age” (Griffin 392). The assumption that Simon is unequivocally woeful reflects common assumptions of disability, but does not reflect the character of Simon Lee himself—nor necessarily the nuanced realities of old age and disability.
- 17.
Both Susan Wolfson and Stephen Parrish suggest that the narrator might have imagined this encounter, but its mystery and emotion can be accounted for by the difficulty of articulating encounters with disability, as well as their tendency to evoke a sense of sublimity.
- 18.
Although I have no interest in retrospective (and anachronistic) diagnoses, it is worth mentioning that the cluster of associations conjured by the poem’s reference to a mill closely resembles common twentieth- and twenty-first-century characterizations of autistic individuals—and it is through the repetitive movements and sounds characteristic of autism that these associations are often drawn.
- 19.
Johnny is aligned with the devil, both by the doctor and by the narrator (268, 342–6). He is linked to aspects of the natural world including the moon (90–1), as well as animals (the owls and his pony) (114–15, 117). Finally, Betty associates Johnny with the wild child by imagining he may have been “misled, / And joined the wandering gypsey-folk” (235–6). See Alan Bewell on “The Idiot Boy” and the wild child, and also philosophy (“Wordsworth’s Primal Scene”). See Angus Easson and Christopher Simons on “The Idiot Boy” and the Romance. Bewell has rightly noted that the supernatural images in the narrator’s speculations “distance us from idiocy” (Wordsworth 56).
- 20.
For a detailed historical examination of definitions and views of idiocy, refer to Rushton or Neugebauer.
- 21.
It is partly because of Wordsworth’s emphasis on Johnny Foy’s capacity in his letter to Wilson that I disagree with Bewell’s claim that the poem contrasts Johnny’s “original” and eventual mental capacity, and constructs his immersion in nature as “an educative process” (Wordsworth 68–9)—even though I agree with several broader points he makes about the poem, as well as his argument about Wordsworth’s engagement with and subversion of Enlightenment conventions of idiocy.
- 22.
Writing of mentally disabled fiber artist Judith Scott and the critical anxiety surrounding her art, Tobin Siebers observes that “[t]he problem, of course, is that Scott did not possess the intelligence associated with true artists by the tradition of art history.” He asks, further, “What kind of changes in the conception of art would be necessary to include her in this history?” (19). A similar anxiety may be at play in assessments of Johnny’s narrative as potentially poetic and visionary.
- 23.
Visceral responses to “The Idiot Boy” persisted into the twentieth century. Perhaps no example is more telling than a vehement analysis by Jonathan Wordsworth, who writes, “Johnny is a mongol (Down’s Syndrome is the euphemism we now prefer). Not since Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (where the heroine is a prostitute) had any writer taken on the task of establishing sympathy for a more incongruous hero” (“Wordsworthian Comedy” 203). This assumption of Johnny’s unsympathetic character is more reflective of mid- to late twentieth-century views of idiocy than of the diverse perspectives recorded by authors of the Romantic era. Yet more compellingly, there is nothing in “The Idiot Boy”— or anything Wordsworth wrote about the poem—that suggests Johnny has Down Syndrome. There is even evidence to the contrary, insofar as Wordsworth insisted to John Wilson that as he imagined him, Johnny was handsome according to normative standards, suggesting the likelihood that he did not bear any physical mark of his cognitive difference.
References
Home, Everard. “An Account of a Child with a Double Head.” The Literary and Biographical Magazine and British Review for 1791. Vol. VI. London, 1791. 258–61.
Kirby, R. S. Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum: Or, Magazine of Remarkable Characters; Including All the Curiosities of Nature and Art, from the Remotest Period to the Present Time, Drawn from every authentic Source. Vol. III–VI. London: 1805, 1820.
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Stanback, E.B. (2016). Wordsworthian Encounters: Sympathy, Admonishment, and the Aesthetics of Human Difference. In: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51140-9_6
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