Cook — ‘I Will Not Quarrel with Myself’ (1991)

Cook, Kay Kellam. “‘I Will Not Quarrel with Myself’: Dorothy Wordsworth, Subjectivity, and Romantic Autobiography.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Colorado—Boulder, 1991.

Abstract: “This dissertation proposes a theory of women’s private writings through an examination of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal (1800–1803) and Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803). Additionally, I address the place of private writings in current critical discussions of literature and identity in early nineteenth-century England. Locating Dorothy Wordsworth in the Romantic movement and within the tradition of autobiography of necessity complicates theories and assessments of both. Following an introduction to my own theory of the journal as genre and a contextualization of that theory in other critical approaches, I look at Dorothy Wordsworth’s choice of the journal form to record her experiences as a strategical act that deflects the male (William’s) gaze. I then examine the subjectifying strategies within that form—amatory discourse, the locative impulse, perceptual experimentation—that work toward creating a self that often resists the unified impulse of much hegemonic self-writing, best exemplified by her brother’s autobiographical work, The Prelude. Within the critical framework that I identify—parataxis, immersion, fragmentation, and detail—I examine specific passages in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals that exemplify how the genre permits experimentation and expression counter to the dominant approaches of autobiography. ¶ An analysis of Wordsworth’s Tour, which follows, is placed in the context of travel literature in the early nineteenth century. My purpose is to examine generic differences between the private journal and the more public tour, to make distinctions between the categories of the sublime and the picturesque in the Tour, and to introduce a third category of perception, ‘singular absorption,’ which is particularly amenable to the immersive strategies in Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings. ¶ The conclusion emphasizes that ignoring private life writings in theories of autobiography or of notions of identity in the early nineteenth century results in incomplete assessments of either.”