Matrilinear Journalising: Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth's 1820 continental tours and the female sublime

• Published in: Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period 1998-10, Vol.5 (3), p.329-352
• Main Author: Boden, Helen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0969-9082; 1747-5848
• DOI: 10.1080/09699089800200049

This article introduces Mary Wordsworth as a travel writer, and contributes to the growing debate about the "female sublime" by suggesting how the sublime is used, in slightly different ways, by Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth to interrogate the nature of writing and representation. It opens with a brief discussion of the textual history of the extant Mary Wordsworth manuscripts, especially as compared with those of Dorothy Wordsworth, indicating what this suggests about the politics of the canon. The author shows how contemporary writers, together with later editors and readers, have conspired to marginalize Mary Wordsworth. Read against the grain, however, her 1820 Journal of a Tour on the Continent emerges as a collaborative textual enterprise (with her sister-in-law, and, less directly, with her intended audience, her daughter), in which she nonetheless occupies a clear subject-position of her own, and which raises important questions about her concept of authorship and response. The journal exists in multiple versions, and its bibliographical/textual status, together with the actual writing, beg to be considered in the light of recent advances in critical theory. The bulk of the article, therefore, goes on to consider extracts from both Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth's 1820 tour journals in relation to contemporary formulations and later reappropriations of aesthetic theory. The author argues that the conventional unrepresentability of the sublime environment (especially to women writers) is challenged by the development of a new "rhetorical sublime", which involves an eliding of the distinctions between fact and fiction, or reality and fantasy, rather than a direct rejection of the "masculine" strategies of confrontation, opposition and appropriation. In this, the author departs from what at present seems to be a general consensus of opinion amongst female critics of the sublime. It is also shown how the act of producing what the author terms the "fictive sublime" is connected with an awareness of the processes of recollection and writing, and of the intended readership of the journal - the "matrilinear" impulse. The final sections of the article deal with Mary Wordsworth's textualisation of her journey, considering the ramifications of the issues about representation experienced in situ, for the process of textual production itself, focusing in particular on how linguistic difference, and the writer's partial access to the codes and conventions of received