Dorothy Wordsworth's Experimental Style
2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/escrit/cgm020
ISSN1471-6852
Autores Tópico(s)Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics
ResumoIN HER ESSAY on Dorothy Wordsworth in The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf set an important critical precedent. Contrasting Dorothy's prose – accurate, restrained, unselfconscious – with that of Mary Wollstonecraft – reformist, passionate, hypersensitive – she wrote: Dorothy never railed against ‘the cloven hoof of despotism’. Dorothy never asked ‘men's questions’ about exports and imports; Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky. This ‘I so much alive’ was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass. For if she let ‘I’ and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get between her and the object, she would be calling the moon ‘the Queen of the Night’; she would be talking of dawn's ‘orient beams’; she would be soaring into reveries and rhapsodies and forgetting to find the exact phrase for the ripple of moonlight upon the lake. It was like ‘herrings in the water’ – she could not have said that if she had been thinking about herself.1
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