Orphaned and turned out of her home at the age of eight, Dorothy Wordsworth was preoccupied with the idea of home. Her journals mostly chronicle the lives of downtrodden women. Her empathy towards these women arises especially because they represent in corporeal form her fears of displacement. These fears are amplified by the courtship of her dearly beloved brother William and her longtime friend Mary Hutchinson, taking place when Dorothy begins the Grasmere journals. For her, William is home and home is best. As such, her life and her journal entries exemplify her desire to create an ideal home and community in Grasmere.
It is clear that Dorothy suffered from some serious anxiety issues. This anxiety was clearly brought on by traumatic childhood events. Her anxiety likely included some issues of somewhat agoraphobic panic. In her first Grasmere Journal entry, she writes that William and their brother John went on a walk to Yorkshire. At the time of their departure, Dorothy reports that her “heart was so full that [she] could hardly speak,” and that afterwards she sat on a stone near the lake shore and “after a flood of tears [her] heart was easier.” Writing at nine o’clock in the evening, six and a half hours after his departure, Dorothy wishes for a letter from William. (Damrosch and Dettmar 551)
This is an abnormal response. Dorothy is extremely anxious that William leaves Grasmere. In fact, her flood of tears seems consistent with an agoraphobic panic attack. An agoraphobic person may experience a panic attack when they leave home, and additionally when he or she exits the company of a “safe” person (Saeed and Bruce). Since Dorothy equates William with home, she is taken outside of her home and therefore outside of her ar...
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... and homelessness. The stories of female beggars, vagrants, and wanderers are a token of her deep-rooted fears of expulsion from the home.
Works Cited
Damrosch, David, and Kevin J.H. Dettmar, eds. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Comp. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning. 3rd ed. Vol. 2A. New York: Longman, 2006. Print.
Levin, Susan M. "Home." Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland &, 2009. 13-65. Print.
Newlyn, Lucy. "Dorothy Wordsworth’s Experimental Style." Essays in Criticism 57.4 (2007): 325-49. Oxford Journals. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.
Saeed, S. Atezaz, and Timothy J. Bruce. "Panic Disorder: Effective Treatment Options." American Academy of Family Physicians. 15 May 1998. Web. 4 Mar. 2011.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1st ed. New York: Vintage, 1966. Print.
Everything the Case family owned was swept away with the raging water, and they were left with the little clothing and possessions they had on them. However, this hardship, the work that Dorothy and her family had to do to reestabli...
In The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Catherine Ann Porter shares the story of an eighty year old woman who has lived a long life filled with personal triumphs and tragedies. Having been left at the altar by the love of her life at a young age, Ellen “Granny” Weatherall, whose name appropriately represents her character, learned to put up walls of protection around herself and her family early in life lest she fall to the same hurt once again. These protective measures and the mindset that seems to come along with said measures contribute to Granny’s bold and abrasive personality which is displayed quite often throughout the story. Granny prided herself in her ability to maintain her home and family without the aid of a man, having been voluntarily left by one man and having the other taken by death at an early age. One finds, however, that Granny was “given back everything he [George] took and more” (Porter, 86) through her second husband, children, and home.
First, we can see the historical experience of its main characters represented in the novel. Dorothy, the female protagonist in the novel is first described as a “little girl” who had very little creature comforts in life beyond her four timber-clad walls, except for her beloved dog, Toto. Dorothy can be seen as a symbol of innocence, wonder, and perseverance; virtues that were common among the men and women who ventured west of the Mississippi in the years following the Homestead Act of ...
She shares a similar experience to Louise Mallard, but in a different situation and ending. The character also suffers from some sort of mental condition that her husband whom also happens to be her physician says is a “temporary nervous depression”. She is staying their over the summer with her husband for her condition to improve. Her husband John, also prescribed her the “rest-cure” treatment for her own good. She is confined to bed rest in a former nursery room with a yellow wallpaper. This is where the narrator will start to experience the changes as she unfolds the hidden “text” in the yellow wallpaper. She starts by explaining each detail that she doesn’t like about the wallpaper and also makes a comparison to how she understands why children never liked a room like this. First of all, she didn’t like the house, second, she did not like the room that was picked for her, and lastly she was not able to perform any activities that she enjoyed. She would try to restrain herself from telling anything to her husband because since he is the physician he wins all the arguments. These are simple stated facts that we know are going to transform her from bad to worse. She is suffering from some sort of mental condition and is being placed somewhere she does not feel comfortable in. “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will”
The domestic sphere was an area of great importance to literature of the 19th century—especially for women writers. As such, aspects of domesticity continued to appear throughout this period in a wide arrange of literature. In Ruth Hall, for instance, the mother struggles with her profession compromising her ability to maintain an atmosphere of domesticity. Similarly, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl covers a slave’s desire for a home and for safety, covering roughly the same sentiment from a wildly different perspective. While their circumstances are dissimilar, both Ruth from Ruth Hall and Linda from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl desire a return to the realms of domesticity that they left behind.
In Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria and Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughter women are subject to many hardships economically, simply because they are women. Women are not given sufficient opportunity, as men are, to pursue a living. Even if she is a woman of taste and morals, she may be treated as though she is a criminal and given no means to protect herself. In order for a woman to be sustained, she must marry into slavery, dishonor herself through unsavory work, or be lucky enough to be properly educated and given proper reference.
Rebecca Wordsworth was, as many writers have pointed out, distressed at Wordsworth’s refusal to hold a full-time job—like many a youth after him, Wordsworth was living the carefree life of the artist. Rebecca wanted him put to rights. He should become an adult now. “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s attempt to explain himself to Rebecca, but also, in crucial ways, to himself.
Wordsworth, William. Excerpt from The Thirteen-Book Prelude, Book VI. 1806. Romanticism: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 389-392.
Wordsworth’s “ Tintern Abbey” twisted the tale of a personal view of his time spent at Tintern Abbey in the past, present, and future. His poetic theory has been used as the basis of Romantic poetry.
‘It is often suggested that the source for many of William Wordsworth’s poems lies in the pages of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. Quite frequently, Dorothy describes an incident in her journal, and William writes a poem about the same incident, often around two years later.’ It is a common observation that whilst Dorothy is a recorder – ‘her face was excessively brown’ – William is a transformer – ‘Her skin was of Egyptian brown’ . The intertextuality between The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals and ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ allows both Dorothy and William to write about the same event, being equally as descriptive, but in very differing ways. Dorothy writes in a realist ‘log-book’ like style, whereas William writes in a romantic ballad style. This can be very misleading, as it gives William’s work more emotional attachment even though his work is drawn upon Dorothy’s diary, which in its turn is very detached, including little personal revelation. When read in conjunction with William’s poetry, Dorothy’s journal seems to be a set of notes written especially for him by her. In fact, from the very beginning of the journals Dorothy has made it quite clear that she was writing them for William’s ‘pleasure’ . This ties in with many of the diary entries in which she has described taking care of William in a physical sense. In a way this depicts the manner in which William uses his sister’s journal to acquire the subject of his poetry, which makes it seem as though Dorothy is his inspiration.
When Louise Mallard first hears that her husband was killed in a railroad accident, "she wept at once," and "went away to her room alone" (12). As she mourns, looking out of her window on the second floor of her home, a sudden change of heart begins to come over her. She notices "the delicious breath of rain," " a peddler . . . crying his wares," "notes of a distant song," "countless sparrows . . . twittering," and "patches of blue sky," "all aquiver with the new spring life" (13). As she stares at the sky, she begins to think about her newfound independence from her husband, uttering the words "free, free, free!" (13). What makes her develop such a sudden change in attitude? Could it be that she sees rebirth in the world through her wind...
“Wordsworth's poetic inspiration continued with little abatement for a dozen years; but about 1815, as he himself states in his fine but pathetic poem 'Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour,' it for the most part abandoned him. He continued, however, to produce a great deal of verse, most of which his admirers would much prefer to have had unwritten,” states Fletcher. One of Wordsworth’s most written about subjects is the death of imagination as we grow older; he relates this in his poems Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, The World is too much With us, and London, 1802.
The word Romantic is one of the great terms of literary history that means the history period from 1798 to 1837(between Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads). Romanism was a literacy and intellectual movement that started in Europe in the late decades of 18th Century. It was with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 by William Samuel Coleridge and Wordsworth. This gave birth to Romanticism in the history of English literature. Romanticism contains elements that are combined in a writer like Coleridge. In this essay, a poetic book “The World Is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth will be analyzed.
William Wordsworth. “Lucy Gray.” English Romantic Poetry .Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover Publications, 1996. 33 – 4.
In the context of Hard times and Wuthering Heights, women were conceived as “angels in the house”, they had to put their own desires aside in order to dedicate their entire self to their house and family, according to Sarah Ellis’ books, as it is said in Natalie McKnight’s work,” it was stipulated that women should always be self-sacrificing, subservient, dutiful, meek - in short, angelic [...] This role falls to women because men are too consumed with the world of work”. This last affirmation is due to the thought of Victorian Era that women and men lived in a separated atmosphere and whereas men’s duty was work, women’s obligation was in their homes, giving birth to children and taking care of the house(except