Dorothy Wordsworth and her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy

Abstract

In this article I argue that a feminine ‘material’ sublime approach to mountains exists and has for generations but remains under-recognized and on the fringes of mainstream dialogues, which -- historically and in the present -- are dominated by masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime accounts, encounters and endeavours.

The article enables me to explore how in Early Romanticism the concept of the masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime -- an intellectual and spiritual experience that transcends physical matter -- came to dominate discourses on landscape. I then propose how, in contrast, the feminine ‘material’ sublime is located in and present to the physical landscape, not as a place from which to ‘escape’ or ‘disappear’ but as a place in which to ‘reappear’ -- a process I suggest is transformative and therapeutic. To do this, I show how the landscape writing of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries represents a feminine ‘material’ sublime ‘mode’ of engaging with landscape that enabled them to see afresh ‘everyday’ objects, people and experiences that were ordinarily overlooked or on the edges of mainstream social and cultural discourses.

I explore the way in which the work of these women and their ‘mode’ of engagement are closely allied with my own practice and have informed a model I have developed for creating applied scenography in the form of walking-performances in mountainous and rural landscapes that emplace, re-image and transform ‘missing’, marginal and challenging life-events. Underpinning that model are seven ‘scenographic’ principles, which I demonstrate through an analysis of a number of walking-performance projects. The Gathering / Yr Helfa (2014), which revealed the fertility cycles of the ewes on a hill-farm in Wales, and two projects specific to The Lake District: Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting On Infertility and Childlessness (2015-ongoing) aimed at women who are biologically childless-by-circumstance (2015); Dorothy’s Room and Women’s Walks to Remember: ‘With memory I was there.’ (2018), an installation and surrogate-walking project that maps walks women are no longer able to do physically but remember vividly.

Notes

1 By ‘missing’ life-event I mean the absence of a hoped- or planned-for life-event and the missing social status or role that might otherwise have been achieved.

2 Extract from the poem The Sparrows Nest by William Wordsworth (Wordsworth 1851: 183).

3 Dorothy Wordsworth and her companion Mary Barker wrote letters on the day of the excursion that have not survived.

4 The concept of the feminine ‘material’ sublime is not about the female gender but reflects a sensibility that manifests in a ‘located’ way of engaging with environment and landscape. For writing on the feminine sublime see, Christine Battersby’s The Phenomenal Woman (1998) and The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (2007); Barbara Claire Freeman’s The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (1995); and John G. Pipkin’s The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets (1998).

5 In ‘Key Principles of “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads’ Sally Bushell explains that ‘In the 1800 and 1802 preface, published with the collection Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth made a number of core statements that were to change poetry forever and give the preface the status of a manifesto for British Romanticism’ (Bushell 2015).

6 Mary Wollstonecraft was responding to Burke’s writings on the masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) prompted by his publication entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

7 My use of viewpoints that are specific to a place and a life-event subject matter works with a literal application of Donna Haraway’s concepts of ‘views from somewhere’ and ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway 1988: 581, 590). ‘A view from somewhere’ is a term associated with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism where it becomes ‘advantageous for a group to temporarily “essentialize” themselves [in order to] bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals’ (qtd in Ashcroft 1998: 159–60).

8 Mulliontide (2016) is a coastal walk on the Lizard in Cornwall evolved in collaboration with local residents that acknowledged deep feelings for place and recognized the challenges of change, both personal and topographical.

9 ‘[I]n Cumbria sheep were ‘salved’ with a mix of tar and rancid butter to kill off lice, keds, ticks’ (Countryside Museum 2017).

10 Extract from the poem Scan written by Gillian Clarke for The Gathering.

11 Extract from the poem Scan written by Gillian Clarke for The Gathering.

12 Warnscale participant, ZB. Participants are identified by their initials.

13 Warnscale participant, SR.

14 Warnscale participant, RGi.

15 Extract from Dorothy’s Wordsworth’s poem Thoughts on my Sickbed. A working draft of this poem can be seen in one of her later her Rydal Journals (1831–3).

16 ‘Moments of Being’ – a concept developed by Virginia Woolf – ‘punctuates the cotton wool of daily life rendering one blind to the particular and the common place’ (Woolf 1978: 84). In a way that parallels Dorothy Wordsworth’s observational looking Woolf found ‘moments of being’ in the ‘grey-green creases of bark on a tree’, ‘the life force of a budding plant’, ‘a puddle on a path’, the ‘ribbed pattern on shells’, the ‘lined face of an old woman’ (82–7).

17 Warnscale participant, ZA.