Happiness and the Interiority of the Body in Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article reconsiders the Romantic conception of subjectivity by examining the representation of the body and self-consciousness in Williams Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere. For many critics, this poem illustrates the transcendental self that incorporates the external world within the mind. I challenge this idealistic interpretation of the poem, elucidating the dialectical relationship between sensibility and interiority through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas. In the poem, Wordsworth delineates an alternative route toward subjectivity, which involves not so much the mind’s intellectual powers as the body’s affective capacity, when he represents himself as the embodied subject in the Levinasian sense. As I explore such issues as sensibility, happiness, possession, forgetting, the anxiety of death, and the ambiguity of thinking, the poet maintains an equivocal relationship with nature, which can be characterized by immanence and separation. On the one hand, the poet eats, sees, smells, and feels, mixing his body with natural elements. Living as “a hungry stomach” (Levinas), he immerses himself in the natural cycle of vital force, and enjoys living in and on gentle nature that nourishes him. On the other hand, the poet in enjoyment suspends immanent engagement with nature, thereby developing consciousness and the sense of self. In feeling content, he separates himself from the world and becomes the “Lord of this enjoyment.” Wordsworth thus demonstrates how the body serves as the locus of interiority and subjectivity. For Wordsworth, as for Levinas, the body turns out to be to a dual existence: the body-in-the-world and the body-as-consciousness. In the conclusion, I revisit the famous metaphor of the marriage of the mind and nature in the poem, suggesting that this Levinasian reading of the poem helps to revise the idealistic paradigm of Wordsworth and Romantic criticism.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• 1. Introduction
• 2. “The Lord of This Enjoyment”: The Subjectivity of the Happy Body
• 3. “Animating Thought”: The Ambiguity of the Body or Consciousness
• 4. Conclusion: Revisiting Wordsworth’s “Great Argument”
• Works Cited
• Abstract