Wordsworth's The Prelude as Autobiography of An Orphan

Wordsworth's The Prelude is literally the autobiography of an orphan. It records in its way the death of the poet's mother when Wordsworth himself is almost eight, and that of his father when he is thirteen. It is specified 'in its way' because, as many readers have noted, even though the poet tells of his mental growth, oddly, the deaths of his parents are barely mentioned at all. Part of the meaning of the poem in the aspect of its story is registered in the manner of its telling. The burden of disclosure is distributed unevenly across and through the poem's structure. As a result the poem is made discontinuous with itself and is ruptured. This creates the opening for a symptomatic reading of the poem's speech, and of its silence. There is a relationship here between the text of the poem and the significance of what it speaks about. Evidently, the meaning of this conjuncture is something which can be shown but not stated. It is in the formal nature of autobiography that this should be so. Form is bestowed on ideology by the text in question; a line is drawn between 'public' and 'private' forms of history. It is determined what can and cannot be said in the story of (in this case) the growth of a poet's mind. It is at this moment that history is entering the text as ideology; the raw materials of memory and experience worked by The Prelude are themselves determinate and determining. The discourse of the work traces the outline of the absent centre which it is about. What is thus shown without being stated, it will be argued, is the production of subjectivity through the ideological interpellation of the individual. In Wordsworth, famously, 'The Child is Father of the Man'. This 'fathering', as portrayed autobiographically in The Prelude, is to be investigated here in terms of the later Althusserian theory of ideology. The aim is to shed new light on the much-discussed question of Wordsworth's politics and their relation to the French Revolution. The conclusion to be reached here is that The Prelude is a great poem by its deep registering of the significance of historical change precisely because rather than in spite of its political conservatism. It is important, first, to locate what appears to be an all-orienting pun made early on in The Prelude's account of mental growth. Wordsworth writes: 'Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear' (I.305-06). These fostering agencies of 'beauty' and 'fear' are in fact recognizably parental 'presences of Nature' (I.490). In this respect, Nature is nurture. It is argued that the second half of the eighteenth century witnesses a close entangling of aesthetic and sexual-political concerns. It is, particularly, notions of the state and of the family which become entangled. As an aspect of this it appears virtually second nature for the poet of The Prelude to think of Nature itself in terms of the sublime and beautiful; that is, in terms of the sexes in general and of his parents in particular. The sublime in Nature is 'masculine', and connected with the memory of the poet's father. The beautiful is 'feminine', and connected with the mother. But the most significant thing about this matrix, it is here maintained, has to do with Wordsworth's insisting in his poem that, with regard to his 'fostering', he feels himself to have been 'A favored being' (I.364). The poet speaks of himself in this light as 'a chosen son . . . I was a freeman, …