Susan J. Wolfson. Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action.

Rzepka, Charles J.

Susan J. Wolfson. Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. xiv+381. $70.00 cloth/$30.00 paper.

The pace of Susan Wolfson's editorial and scholarly contributions to our field belies what has emerged over the course of a distinguished career as the implicit motto governing everything she writes: "Not so fast!" There is much more going on in what we read, she claims, and much more of value, than our critical hay-bailers and mechanical threshers know how to reap. What is stubble and chaff for the agribusiness of theory is for Wolfson where the really valuable stuff is stashed. Like Wordsworth's solitary reaper, she gathers her harvest one armful at a time and, "oe'r her sickle bending," spots all those violets half hidden from the eye that had to be left behind by the big engines of criticism because, when gathered in multitudes, violets gum up the machinery.

Unlike Wordsworth's solitary singer, however, Wolfson--a virtuoso of contextual close reading--doesn't need an interpreter: her message has been clear since the publication of Formal Charges more than a decade ago, although its militancy seems to have diminished a bit as her audience of willing listeners has grown. From the courtroom combativeness of that title to the ghostlier demarcations traced in Borderlines to the more reciprocal give and take of Romantic Interactions, Wolfson's polemic has moderated while her argument remains the same. As she puts it in Borderlines, speaking of Mary Wollstonecraft's "methodology" of cultural interrogation, we are ourselves diminished, as readers and critics and students, whenever we relax our "commitment to proving (testing, uncovering) large points in local sites, and reading local events into wider registers" (xix). Meanwhile, she has shown that even solitary reapers can fine-tune the big critical machines traversing those "wider registers" to harvest violets without crushing them. No enemy to theory, Wolfson has proven to be one of its most knowledgeable technicians.

Romantic Interactions carries on the project of Borderlines in exploring the subtle paradoxes of gender identification, both self-affirmed and imposed From without, informing the work of long-canonical Romantic writers as well as more recent arrivals to our standard anthologies and syllabi. It is less a coda to its predecessor than a second volume of essays on similar themes. Divided into three parts, the book examines, first, two female writers' engagements with the male poetic tradition, next, the close and mutually formative interactions of William and Dorothy Wordsworth as siblings and writers, and last, the infatuations, disenchantments, recriminations, rebuttals, apologies, and celebrity apotheoses of Byronism in the aftermath of "the Separation," before and after Lord Byron's death.

Part 1 examines the poetry of Charlotte Smith--chiefly The Emigrants--and the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as Wollstonecraft's contentious afterlives in the poetry extending from her death to the present day. By "interactions" Wolfson means, largely, textual allusions and reworkings of male precursors rather than the exchanges of contemporary coteries or literary sororities. Smith, for instance, finds her strongest political and gender allies among the canonical poets, but reapplies, and sometimes transforms, the men's best known lines for her own purposes. "Smith's allusions are her argument," says Wolfson (52). In bringing these "interactions" to light, the author not only takes issue with some feminist critics' tendency to flatten the gender politics of The Emigrants, but also calls attention to the continuous beat of Smith's republican heart: "The urgent divisions," she writes, "are not of nation but of class" (44). These divisions are most prominently displayed in Smith's ambivalence toward the French refugees of the revolution who, demanding compassion, had been so stingy with it while sitting atop the ancien regime. Against evidence of Smith's political retrenchment after 1793, Wolfson notes her continuing advocacy for the poor and exploited, and her unwavering criticism of war in all its forms.

The remaining two chapters of Part I are devoted to Wollstonecraft's pioneering feminist critique of patriarchy and the turmoil surrounding her reputation in the two centuries since her death. Granting Wollstonecraft's skeptical attitude toward the new poetry of sensibility as an insidious influence educing women's compliance in their own subjection, Wolfson notes Wollstonecraft's avidity and admiration for "strong" male poets--Milton and Shakespeare primarily--whom she was fond of quoting to make her case. As in Borderlines, so here, Wolfson fully appreciates, and makes us appreciate, just how far in advance of her times Wollstonecraft was in reading "the motivated social-text" (66) to demystify the cozy reciprocations of culture and gender ideology. Her animadversions on what poetic man has made of woman placed her in advance of Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads as an opponent of the self-conscious "art" of verse in contrast to natural expression.

Wollstonecraft's "interactions with the poets are diverse, even divergent," writes Wolfson (68). Confronted with Milton's patriarchal paradise, the mother of all wars on male chauvinism identifies with the first rebel and "recoils in Satanic dislocation." Venturing "a higher Satanism" (68) in the face of Milton's Eve, Wollstonecraft "invents what we now call feminist literary criticism" (69)--a feat all the more remarkable given the admiring tenor of her 1787 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and her 1789 The Female Reader. Yet even in the latter, observes Wolfson, Wollstonecraft encourages a kind of feminine ventriloquy of masculine subjectivities by offering specimens of male verse for public elocution by female readers. Wolfson ends with a chapter tracing the vicissitudes of Wollstonecraft's afterlives up to the dawn of modern feminism, including the late Adrienne Rich's admiring epigraph in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law of 1963. This tale has been told before but bears retelling, because in each retelling new lights, and lows, reveal themselves, enhancing our appreciation of Wollstonecraft's courageous example and far-reaching impact on a history of liberation that, for the most part, feared to acknowledge her as its fountainhead.

Part 2 begins by observing the inherent contradictions in Wordsworth and Coleridge's use of "impregnate" to talk about poetic passion in practically the same breath as the need for order. "The pregnancy of impassioned words is a risky affair," writes Wolfson, "an inspiration, yet a problem for orderly management." Common to both poets is their uneasiness at "the proximity of the trope to the female condition and, perforce, to a field of interaction with female passions that may compromise male poetic identity" (114). Many of Wordsworth's male characters display "female" susceptibilities to the passions in Lyrical Ballads, and despite the poet's attempts to discriminate male from female emotions, his men are "philosophically embarrassed by weakness" and constantly apologetic about it (115-16). Wolfson takes on the now-standard negative assessment of Wordsworth's masculine "colonizing" of the feminine to support "gender hierarchy" by pointing out, in the first instance, how his contemporaries saw him: "fantastic, undisciplined, childish, infantile--in a word, unmanly" (116). These characterizations of Wordsworth's conflicted relationship to the feminine are supported by analyses of the 1800 and 1802 Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads and superb close readings of "Strange fits of passion," "The Thorn," and the set of verses called "Poems on the Naming of Places."

The succeeding two chapters in Part 2 consider William and Dorothy in their reciprocal effects on each other's writings. To begin with, Wolfson argues for a more complex understanding of Dorothy's relationship to her brother--not just as servant and help-mate, and not just as inaccessible "other" to his masculine sense of entitlement, but also as a proximate reflection of his own most disturbing "female" tendencies. Wolfson sees Dorothy's fair-copying and taking dictation as intensely "interactive": not demeaning or subordinating, but collaborative. At the same time, she is sensitive to William's diminishing of his sister's active role to a passive modeling of emotions too delicate to acknowledge as originating in himself, not to mention the eliding of her notebooks as important sources for some of his most vigorous and self-assertive verses, a sibling version of Bloom's "anxiety of influence" (170).

In seeking to elucidate Dorothy's views of William, Wolfson acknowledges the contradictions and self-denigrations apparent in the journals and poetry, but also spots Dorothy's care for her own writing as a gift for family and friends, and points to the self-respect evidenced in her taking the trouble to title, fair-copy, and date her poems. Yes, the story "Dorothy is most confident in telling, and telling herself, is the anatomy of her melancholy" (183). But Wolfson rejects the standard binary that sets William's masculine self-confidence and assertiveness against Dorothy's female abjection, noting that her poetry "ripples with intimate understanding of William's tendencies," expressed not while standing "under his shadow, but in dynamics of difference" (189). Accordingly, Wolfson reads Dorothy's "The Ramble" as a "counter-story" to "The Thorn," a "refusal of superstition" negating the psychological dynamics of William's poem, rather than, as Margaret Homans argues, an emblem of her acquiescence to her role as sister-poet. The author concludes with a moving analysis of Dorothy's prose Narrative concerning George and Sarah Green (1808) as a "shadow-narrative" that "taps a psychic substratum of perils" rooted in "the orphan-diaspora of her early life" (204) and, more recently, in her sense of abandonment after William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson and her brother John's death at sea in 1805.

In Part 3, Wolfson returns to what, when viewed in the retrospect of a long history of Romantic interactions of her own, seems to be her favorite subject: Byron--or in this case, to be more precise, Byronism. In two chapters focusing on the contemporary impact and reception history of the poet's separation from Lady Bryon in 1816, Wolfson takes us on a dazzling tour of the outing and in-fighting, the iconic infatuations and militant disenchantments, the slippery alliances and covert disloyalties that characterized the first half century of Byron's celebrity "interactions" and the initial stirrings of his critical rehabilitation a century after that. Private correspondence, portraits, engravings, caricatures, reviews, biographies, table talk, overheard conversations, advertising--the range of sources is head-turning. "Byron was a dreamboat for everyone," writes Wolfson (212), and while the ship's manifest now seemed to include depraved vampires as well as soliloquizing corsairs, it was the cargo hidden below-decks, in the fancied recesses of that noble but ruined Flying Dutchman, that continued to fascinate Byron's readers--men as well as women, enemies as well as admirers. Throughout, "Byron was spinning Byronism" (280), aware that the very mystique surrounding what lay below was a more potent weapon than a magazine full of gunpowder. Wolfson is particularly good on the history and impact of Byron's portraits and the contradictory currents of his influence on female writers following his death, especially Laetitia Landon and Felicia Hemans. Even those among his female epigones who felt compelled to condemn his behavior toward Lady Byron, not to mention women in general, could not resist the power of his poetic example. After casting aside Moore's Life of Byron in disgust, Hemans's subsequent poetry showed that she still "couldn't separate from Lord Byron," but "kept true to her textual marriage" (269).

Romantic Interactions is a worthy successor to Borderlines and can be read with profit selectively or serially. Like all of Wolfson's work, its value lies as much in its example as in its content. If anyone still clings to the idea that close reading blinds us to history, ideology, or differance, let him or her read ten consecutive pages of this book, chosen at random. For Wolfson, reading closely means observing every point of connection between the text and all its relevant contexts: literary history as well as material history; etymology as well orthography; bibliography, biography, and autobiography; reaction and reception; revisions and transmissions; culture and its constructs; and, of course, the relationship of every relevant detail of a text to its place and function within the work as a whole. Exemplary as well is Wolfson's prose: precise but not fussy, sophisticated without strain, and mixing the colloquial with the formal in a combination that De Quincey, whose description of his mother's writing Wolfson cites with admiration in Borderlines (24), would call "racy and fresh with idiomatic graces." "Racy" may sound incongruent with the motto, "Not so fast," but in slowing your pace to Wolfson's, you'll be surprised at how time flies.

Charles J. Rzepka

Boston University