Tintern Abbey, Selections from LB, and Bate's Argument

We spoke, toward the end of class last week, about those dual interpretations of the "sister" in "Tintern Abbey": that "sister" could refer, literally, to Dorothy Wordsworth, or instead to the poem's female-gendered "Nature." Though I am personally tempted to read "sister" biographically as Dorothy Wordsworth, I have had a great time pondering the implications of Nature as the "sister."

Bate points out the actual ecological harm that the picturesque had on the Wye valley: by Gilpin's own account, Bate tells us that "the traveller is the subject, the environment he visits the object. The Wye valley is a face to be examined, not a home in which to dwell" (142). This is most evident in Bate's commentary on Gilpin's noting the "ouzy, and discolored" waters of the Wye, and the "sludgy shores"--" . . . such symptoms . . . discover the influence less of a tide than of the ironworks" (143) which, strangely enough, tourists would have revered as highly as the natural scenery. Through their objectification of nature, lovers of the picturesque were active participants in ecological destruction.

But Bate argues that Wordsworth has distanced himself from the picturesque in denying the Cartesian dichotomy of man = subject/nature = object in "Tintern Abbey." Bate asserts that the speaker's "sister" [Dorothy], in being gifted some "healing" quality (with the "shooting lights" that are her "wild eyes"), is not an objectification of Nature or women, but is instead one with it, through her "attunement to the place" (151).

If we ignore Bate's reading in favor of that of the female-gendered Nature, the distance that Bate reads between "sister" and "Nature" in the poem is compressed. Bate's argument is now null, because "sister" is just another vessel to be gazed upon. The poem's "Nature" is no longer something intrinsically connected to women, or to people in general; "Nature" becomes a personified objectification that was so characteristic of the picturesque era. This reading suggests that Wordsworth has not actually "denied . . . those Cartesian presumptions with which we must do away if we are to save the earth," and has instead indirectly contributed to ecological destruction (if not literally, then at least philosophically.)

This brings me to an excerpt from Jessica's very insightful and eloquent post on "Lines Written in Early Spring":

Wordsworth’s construction of feminized nature feels largely solipsistic, allowing the speaker access to grief for “what man had made of man.” Man’s agency has superseded nature’s, and nature becomes the backdrop for men’s affairs. Although I’m not advocating for an increase in patriarchy, what would have been the result of a long-ago emergent “father nature,” or better, “the great big hermaphrodite,” etc.? How would this work against expectations regarding how “mother nature” is expected to both behave and react?

I don't have any answers (I immediately thought of Wallace Stevens when I read "Father Nature"), but I think the questions are quite helpful for this Tuesday's reading. The female figures in "Goody Blake," "The Mad Mother," and "The Complaint"are, respectively, thieves, mentally ill, or rendered as slightly selfish (for instance, the mother in "The Complaint" wishes for a moment that her baby might be with her so that she can die contentedly; there is the implication that her infant would die as well.) But in "We Are Seven" and "Lines Written in Early Spring"--where the feminine is either Nature, or a small child that seems more wood-nymph than human--we are given a much more "motherly" impression. What does this dichotomy tell us about Wordsworth's take on femininity and Nature? Is the feminine, then, a tool for male catharsis, rather than the "'inmate' who feels with nature" that Bate describes? Does this further validate our "sister Nature" reading of "Tintern Abbey?"