Theorizing Elegiac Consolation as a Transitional Object: The Arab Dream in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude

ABSTRACT

For William Wordsworth, a poet preoccupied with the theme of loss, the notion of consolation remains one of the central concerns of his poetry. This article analyzes how the Arab dream episode of The Prelude theorizes consolation as a conceptual version of what D. W. Winnicott calls “transitional object.” In Winnicott’s theory, children bridge their move from one state of cognitive reality to another through the discovery of a transitional object, such as the security blanket in the transition from the mother’s lap to independence. Likewise, the lyric speaker of The Prelude copes with the change of cognitive reality incurred by loss through a temporary acceptance of consolatory fiction. Wordsworth’s theory of consolation in The Prelude hinges on this mechanism of fiction-belief: an act of simultaneous believing and disbelieving that is made possible through the self-aware embracement of consolation as a transitional state of mind.

Notes

1. The present author came up with this number by consulting multiple concordances including Lane Cooper’s A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth and Mitsuharu Matsuoka’s The Victorian Literary Studies Archive: Hyper-Concordance, by keyword-searching the online text entitled The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, by reading The Prelude on his own, and by consulting others who have.

2. The present paper refers to the 1805 version of The Prelude, unless noted otherwise.

3. In “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” Melanie Klein explores the connection between testing of reality in normal mourning and early processes of the mind; the child goes through states of mind comparable to the mourning of the adult. The infant’s depressive feelings begin with the primal loss, and then reach a climax around the time of weaning, triggered by the prospect or actual experience of the loss of the breast and all that it and the milk have come to stand for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness, and security (Klein 147–48).

4. In The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, Peter Sacks proposes that elegies console by means of compensation. To this end, Sacks refers to Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and its description of the game of fort-da, which Freud sees as a mental exercise for the child conditioning himself to the process of loss, detachment, and rediscovery. Sacks adapts Freud’s theories to formulate a model of mourning that begins with a loss of the object, then proceeds to a renunciation of the object, and culminates in the mourner’s acceptance of the compensatory substitute as well as the very practice of compensatory substitution, such as in a poem or philosophy that rationalizes and lionizes the loss (Sacks 4–10).

5. In her essay, “Wordsworth’s Dream of Poetry and Science: The Prelude, Book V,” Jane Worthington Smyser offers two explanations on why Wordsworth made the friend’s dream into his in the 1850 version. First, Wordsworth made the revision possibly because, by 1839 when this revision took place, the dream had become his dream; after all, “it was he who had made the dream of Descartes into something new and strange” (274). And the second explanation, which Smyser thinks is more likely, is that Wordsworth was prompted to make the change for artistic reasons—that is, to reinforce the dramatic credibility of the dream. Mary E. Burton believes that the change was made to avoid the “explanatory ‘he said’,” and the awkwardness of Wordsworth’s telling what his friend thought (192–93). Nonetheless, by underscoring the multi-layering, shared nature of the dream—Descartes, the friend, the speaker all “share” this dream—Wordsworth in the 1805 version creates a fantasy that this image of books on the barren desert is a collective anxiety.

6. It is also suggestive that, prior to falling asleep and having the dream, the friend is reading Don Quixote—a book that, by this time, Friedrich Schlegel had made famous as one of the representative cases of romantic irony. While it is uncertain if Wordsworth was familiar with Schlegel’s work, critics have determined that Coleridge had in fact read Schlegel, and that he expounded on Don Quixote in his posthumously published Lectures of 1818 (Nelson 28). Given the date of composition, it is unlikely that Wordsworth might have planted “the famous history of the errant knight / Recorded by Cervantes” (5.59–60) in this dream episode in Book 5 as homage to Coleridge, but regardless of authorial intentions, one can observe elements of self-referentiality and metafiction in this dream episode.