Several critics note that the female represents a particular concern for William Wordsworth. Susan Wolfson points out the anxiety produced by the Romantic poet's reliance on sensibility. Although tending to privilege the masculine in her focus on patriarchal constructions, Wolfson quite convincingly argues that Romantic poems "contain an uneasy sense that 'femininity' is not just female, but may claim men of feeling." Taking a more historical tack, Gayatri Spivak avers that Wordsworth's distress over abandoning Annette Vallon and their child was the primary impetus for Books IX through XIII of The Prelude, and Spivak reminds us at the end of her essay that "in the texts of the Great Tradition, the most remotely occluded and transparently mediating figure is a woman." Finally, Anne Mellor contends that while Wordsworth acknowledges the power which female nature "Thrusts forth upon the senses," he also "immediately appropriates that power, insisting that it is a 'genuine Counterpart' of the 'glorious faculty' which the 'higher minds' of poets 'bear with them as their own.'"

Unfortunately, to label an approach appropriative too often means to foreclose discussion and to prevent further investigation. Rather, we ought to pursue the reasons behind the appropriative act, question its need, and rigorously examine the cultural structures it replicates. In other words, we would do more towards eradicating the often silencing effects of appropriating other's voices, if we were to move beyond the label to discover the performance as well as its legitimating and motivating forces. What I propose, then, is a study that scrutinizes the gendered rhetoric in William Wordsworth's poetic system along with the replications of that system within his poetry, though for time's sake, today I will focus on Wordsworth's implementation of his gender theories within three specific poems. For background, however, I'm providing you with a quick run-down of his gendered prose on this handout.

Marlon B. Ross asserts, "Convinced that within the individual an autonomous and forceful agent makes creation possible, [Romantic poets] struggle to control that agent and manipulate its energy." I argue that in several of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, this agent is clearly female. Here, I would like to examine three depictions of motherhood in Lyrical Ballads to determine the extent that Wordsworth attempts to control his female agent. First, I will investigate the direct representation of motherhood in the poems "The Idiot Boy" and "Her Eyes are Wild," revealing the connection between the female "flesh and blood," along with Wordsworth's envy of the creative ability. Secondly, I will look at the potential motherhood portrayed in "The Thorn" and trace the "more subtle windings" of Wordsworth's ambivalence toward motherhood.

Wordsworth's gendered poetics clearly manifests itself in his poems "The Idiot Boy" and "Her Eyes are Wild," as each poem depicts the literal creative body of the mother and illustrates that Wordsworth's ability to create these poems depends upon literal female creativity. We see in "The Idiot Boy" the poem most clearly allied to creative anxiety: the impotent narrator recalls Wordsworth's own bouts of creative incapacity, and, like Wordsworth, this narrator is unable to write the poem without the maternal. Susan Wolfson has observed the transgressive power of Betty Foy's female passion and "its influence, to the point of possession," over the poet, and she points to the similar "narrative incapacity" of both the poet and Betty Foy: Betty's cry, "oh saints! what is become of him?" is echoed by the poet's lament, "Oh gentle muses! let me tell / But half of what to him befel." While this poem certainly indicates the narrative incapacity of the poet-figure, it seems to privilege Betty's female creativity as a mother, a subject for the poem, and a superior poet.

Rather than viewing the narrator-poet's lament as an echo or possession of female passion, we may understand it as a manifestation of Wordsworth's creative anxiety, which he then displaces on Betty Foy as her own ineffectual attempt at creationher Idiot boy. Both the poet and Betty appear completely powerless throughout the poem, yet the poet is the one who fails. Ultimately, the poet is unable to narrate his tale or to create his own imaginative situation. The poet's incessant questioning illustrates his creative frustration, revealing that this is a poem about creative ineptitude. "The Idiot Boy" begins with a series of confusions and contradictions: it is nighttime and the moon is out, but we have a clear, blue sky. The narrator appears to be struggling to set the scene for his poem. As he is incapable of creating pertinent details himself, he directs persistent questions at the female creative source of the poem: "Why bustle thus about your door, / What means this bustle, Betty Foy? / Why are you in this mighty fret? / And why on horseback have you set / Him whom you love, your Idiot Boy?" (7-11). Even the language in the poem is awkward and lisping in rhymes like "bustle / thus" and "him / whom." Neither can this narrator produce the answers to his questions, nor can he create the circumstances of his own poem. The poem itself is out of control, anything but organic, as it proceeds without the poet's direction, unfolding for him as it does for the reader.

While Betty's situation is ostensibly as out of control as the narrator's, she actually occupies a position of considerable power within the poem. The poet-narrator must tend his poem, as Betty must care for both her son and her sick neighbor, Susan, with "No hand to help them in distress" (23). Betty's situation seems hopeless: Susan's illness is beyond the two women, and they are as unable to comprehend their circumstances as the poet is his poem. Betty has no choice but to send her child to fetch the doctor, but what a disconsolate choicean utterly ineffectual savior. Far from ineffectual, however, Johnny embodies the Wordsworthian poet in his "spontaneous overflow" of joy. Wordsworth projects his own fears of creative failure onto the characters of this poem, but the poem itself undermines him: both Betty and Johnny emerge as successful creators while only the figure of the poet remains impotent.

The poet-narrator continually struggles to articulate; for him there is no spontaneous overflow. That this is a poem about narrative deficiency and inadequacy becomes even more evident when the poet once again bemoans his inability to fabricate his tale:

	Oh Reader! now that I might tell
	What Johnny and his Horse are doing!
	What they've been doing all this time,
	Oh could I put it into rhyme,
	A most delightful tale pursuing!
	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
	O gentle Muses! is this kind?
	Why will ye thus my suit repel?
	Why of your further aid bereave me?
	And can ye thus unfreinded leave me;
	Ye Muses! whom I love so well? (312-46)

The narrator can imagine Johnny riding over "cliffs and peaks" to pluck a star, or turning backwards on his horse, even galloping or playing hunter, yet nothing terribly transcendent. These images simply fall flat without leaving any emotional impression on the reader. In contrast, Betty's creative powers remain intact, and her poetic images are much more vivid and active than the narrator's. She imagines "dark cave[s]," a "goblin's hall," castles and ghosts (227-31). Furthermore, Betty's tale comprises the emotional element of the poem. We are compelled through otherwise interminable sing-song stanzas by the strength of Betty's concern for her child. Her vivid imagination combines with the simplistic demonstration of her emotions to furnish the poem's forward momentum. Even the language becomes more poetic. The uncomplicated, rushing rhythm of the following stanza conveys emotion without recourse to melodrama or overtly-sentimental musings: "Or him that wicked Pony's carried / To the dark cave, the goblin's hall; / Or in the castle he's pursuing / Among the ghosts his own undoing; Or playing with the waterfall" (227-31). The rising incantative quality of the language quickens the reader's heart, mimicking Betty's panicked heart beat. The feeling, in Lyrical Ballads, informs the poem, giving "importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling" (1800 Preface 6); thus, Betty completes the poetic project. Upon locating her son, Betty replicates his earlier raptures: "She looks again her arms are up / She screams she cannot move for joy" (372-73). Again, Betty's emotion informs the language, causing fits and starts as indicated by the dashes, and Betty herself represents the ultimate creative force in the poem, for her emotion endows the poem with meaning.

While "The Idiot Boy" offers a poetic representation of Wordsworth's biological gendering of creative power, "Her Eyes are Wild" performs a much more insidious appropriation of female creativity. Wordsworth constructs the Mad Mother as an incompetent motheronce she successfully crafts her "poem," she threatens to destroy it. If he can undermine her ability to create, then he can elevate his own creative ability. In other words, in Wordsworth's system, he must destroy the mother to begin his creative process, and his portrait of the Mad Mother exhibits his own uneasiness with female creativity. The mad Mother is both foreign and not foreign, natural and unnatural. "She came far from over the main" (4), but she talks and sings in the "English tongue" (10). Wordsworth clearly links the Mad Mother with nature by endowing her with both the power and knowledge of nature. She knows "The leaves that make the softest bed" (56), "the poisons of the shade" (95), "the earth-nuts fit for food" (96), and the songs of nature: if her son agrees to love her until her death, then he "shalt sing / As merry as the birds in spring" (59-60). Later, she promises, "I'll teach my boy the sweetest things: / I'll teach him how the owlet sings" (81-82). Yet even with all the connections to nature's secrets, the Mad Mother is the antithesis of natural in her monstrous "maternal passion" that threatens to destroy her child.

Still, the Mad Mother represents one of Wordsworth's most powerful female figures in her maternal ability to create life as well as to destroy that life. While this mother succeeds in her creation and exerts a frightening control over it, the poet fails to create successfully because he loses control over the object he's created. We must remember that Wordsworth's purpose in the Lyrical Ballads was that the poet should "let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs [the character's]; modifying only the language" (1800 Preface 14). Wordsworth fails to connect with the Mad Mother in this poem; thus, he fails to create his poem according to his own theoryit becomes something larger than the poet's scheme. I say that Wordsworth "failed" here because his "delusional" connection with the Mad Mother is interrupted by his own, though subconscious, agendato unseat female creative power.

Significantly, the Mad Mother's child is male not female. We ought to remember that Wordsworth lost his own mother around the age of eight and that he associates this break with his own poetic development (again, a signal that the poet relies upon the mother). Turning to The Prelude, we see that Wordsworth locates his first poetic experience as an infant at his mother's breast; likewise, this is his first connection to nature. For the infant, "in one dear Presence, there exists. . . . the filial bond / of nature that connect[s] him with the world" (II.238-44). Once his mother dies, Wordsworth's alliance with nature is essentially unmediated. At this point, Wordsworth "was left alone / Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. / The props of [his] affections were removed, / And yet the building stood, as if sustained / By its own spirit!" (II.272-81). Without his mother, the male child's connection to nature not only stands, it grows stronger: "Those incidental charms which first attached / My heart to rural objects, day by day Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell / How Nature, intervenient until this time / And secondary, now at length was sought / For her own sake" (II.198-203). Wordsworth's own creativity hinged on his mother's death, and he reenacts this in his poetry by attempting to depose female creativity.

Wordsworth strips the Mad Mother of her own humanity and constructs her, instead, as a menacing and evil creature: her eyes are wild, and the sun has singed the hair from her head. Not only does this woman look demonic, but she also spawns and suckles demons: "And fiendish faces, one, two, three, / Hung at my breast, and pulled at me" (23-24). Even when she returns to the world of "flesh and blood," she does so only through the sight of her childthis mother is parasitic as well as demonic. Although he is writing about the relationship between a mother and her infant, Wordsworth emphasizes the mother's dependence upon the male child rather than the infant's dependence upon his mother. To enable this move, Wordsworth first seeks to deny the Mad Mother her own motherhood, which once more exposes his fear of female creativity. This mother does not give birth in any physical way, but she simply wakes up to find the child materialized: "A fire once was in my brain . . . / But then there came a sight of joy; / It came at once to do me good; / I waked, and saw my little boy, / My little boy of flesh and blood" (21-29). This birth resembles a biblical miracle more than a biological act. Moreover, the little boy, not the mother, is associated with "flesh and blood," an integral element of Lyrical Ballads. Once he dismisses female creativity, Wordsworth furthers his own agenda and amplifies the male child's power:

	Suck, little babe, oh suck again!
	It cools my blood; it cools my brain;
	Thy lips I feel them baby! they
	Draw from my heart the pain away.
	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
	Oh! love me, love me, little boy!
	Thou art thy mother's only joy.  (31-34; 41-42)

Wordsworth attempts to replace the infant's need with the mother's, thus supplanting the mother's power with the child's. This move ultimately enables Wordsworth to effect the change he desires and needshe converts female creativity into male creativity. Wordsworth "translates" the male infant's capability of sustaining his mother's life into the infant's ability to bestow life, to save his mother's "precious soul" (48) or to become her "little Life" (71).

The Mad Mother, however, is a complex figure, and "Her Eyes are Wild" resists such a simplification. After all, the mother retains a great degree of power. She reserves the ability to jump "o'er the sea-rock's edge" (44) at any moment and abruptly end the child's life. The power to sustain or destroy life still resides within the Mad Mother. Despite the infant's evident power over his mother's life, he remains dependent upon her to provide nourishment and protection. Wordsworth's effort to usurp female creativity and locate it within the male finally fails. The poem subverts Wordsworth's agenda, and again the failure with the poem is not the Mad Mother's failure to mother well, but the poet's own failure to comply with his poetic system. Rather than capturing the Mad Mother's emotions through delusive connections, Wordsworth only exposes his own creative anxieties.

Finally, "The Thorn" characterizes a woman who has the potential to create outside a patriarchal system that names male creator; Martha Ray transgresses this system and must be punished. That Wordsworth's poems participate in an oppressive power structure belies his own apprehension of a woman controlling her own creativity, for this would mean that women could violate the boundary between literal and figurative creativity. A woman could become a poet; she could control and participate in the figurative creative process without mediation. Indeed, the female poet would command direct access to nature, and her power, once unleashed, could annihilate the male by rendering him obsolete.

"The Thorn" vividly details the ramifications of transgressing cultural boundaries, as well as Wordsworth's vested interest in maintaining those boundaries. Significantly, the poem represents a dilemma in Wordsworth's poetic process: he once noted to Isabella Fenwick that upon seeing the thorn, he thought, "Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn permanently an impressive object as the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment?" Wordsworth overcomes this dilemma and renders the thorn impressive by detailing social construction of information and, more specially, by narrating Martha Ray's story. Martha Ray is a "fallen woman," thus a threat to male authority; she exists outside patriarchy because she never married after giving "with a maiden's true good-will / Her company to Stephen Hill" (106-07). Martha Ray evades cultural regulation, and, similarly, she overflows Wordsworth's design by usurping the principal role in the poem.

Speculation and gossipand that is all we haveoccupies the majority of the poem, and we observe several competing social constructions of Martha Ray, all of which remain unsubstantiated and spurious. Predominantly, although they vary slightly, the town constructions identify Martha Ray as a witch, both in her monstrous female otherness (reminiscent of the Mad Mother) and her unnatural feminine "mastery" of nature. The town shapes Martha Ray as a mad woman, uncontrollable and external to social norms, which represents their own unease with her condition. Martha Ray falls in love with young Stephen Hill, and in an acceptable act when legitimated by marriage, she relinquishes her virginity "While friends and kindred all approved" (109). Because Stephen actually flouted cultural law by engaging himself to two women, Martha Ray resists cultural dishonor and complicates social stations, as she is still an unwed, "fallen" woman. The narrator's lament, "O guilty Father would that death / Had saved him from that breach of faith!" (131-32), insinuates that if Stephen had died, Martha Ray's honor would be still intact, though her hymen was not; indeed, the line would better read "would that death / Had saved her from that breach of faith!" But neither dies, and the town must incorporate Martha Ray in a system that has no rules for her situation.

The various constructions of Martha Ray that the town offers the narrator represent an attempt to reintegrate her within a patriarchal system. Though the narrator continues to question this information, he simply asserts his own construction of the woman, whose voice we never really hear. The narrator contemplates the town's speculations: "What could she seek? or wish to hide?" (126); "But what's the Thorn? and what the pond? / And what the hill of moss to her? / And what the creeping breeze that comes / The little pond to stir?" (199-202). Not only does he question the information, he attempts deliberately to cull the facts from the gossip: "I cannot think, whate'er they say, / They had to do with Martha Ray" (164-65); "But kill a new-born infant thus, / I do not think she could!" (212-13). The narrator, though outwardly less injurious than the town, still participates in silencing Martha Ray by appropriating her voice and constructing her as other. We have no more reason to believe that Martha Ray climbs that mountain than we have to believe that the hill of moss actually began to quake. The narrator repeatedly informs us that he's "never heard of such as dare / Approach the spot when she is there" (98-99), and he becomes our only witness to her presence: "But that she goes to this old Thorn . . . I will be sworn is true" (166-69). Yet how can he be certain of this considering the conditions under which he saw her? Supposedly, he spots her on the mountain one day when he climbs to view the ocean in some fit of melancholy or nostalgia. While he's up there, a storm descends: "Twas mist and rain, and storm and rain . . . A wind full ten time over" (177-80). This was such a gale that the narrator continually reminds us that his vision was completely impaired; he could see "No object higher than [his] knee" (176), and he later informs us that "No screen, no fence could I discover" (178). Furthermore, when he first beholds Martha Ray, he mistakes her for a "jutting crag" where he runs for shelter, but "Instead of a jutting crag, [he] found / A Woman seated on the ground" (186-87). Now, we are never told the size of Martha Ray, but we ought to question how likely it is that a woman, seated on the ground, would appear large enough in shape to shelter a grown man from a raging storm. The evidence is simply insubstantial.

The other details we learn of Martha Ray are just as suspect. That she has become the town pariah is obvious, and her treatment is certainly reminiscent of mob justice and witch trials. The town constructs her as a murderess of an innocent child, pictures the infant's murder in clear detail, and seeks punishment for a crime of their imagination. Varying allegations against Martha Ray circulate through town: ". . . some will say / She hanged her baby on the tree; / Some say she drowned it in the pond, / Which is a little step beyond: / But all and each agree, / The little Babe was buried there, / Beneath that hill of moss so fair" (203-09). Regardless of the particular details, the town agrees that Martha Ray requires constraint, and they take up their spades and march to the little hill of moss to exhume their evidence. Once they arrive, however, "instantly the hill of moss / Before their eyes began to stir! / And, for full fifty yards around, / The grass it shook upon the ground!" (225-28). Perhaps an earthquake happened to coincide with their foray. Perhaps they found nothing, and rather than admit their folly, they amended the storyimproved it even. The reasons simply do not matter; now, the town possesses supernatural evidence for their speculations and a diabolical threat against further investigation.

The town constructs Martha Ray, like the Mad Mother, as a witch precisely because of her ability both to create and to destroy. Her potentialand it is only potential in this poemto create a life outside accepted conventions turns Martha Ray into a formidable threat to cultural order; indeed, she embodies debauched female sexuality. That Martha Ray attempted to abide by cultural law and marry her lover is inconsequential; her biology automatically condemns her in a patriarchal systemStephen, whose actions border on bigamy, abandons her, and Martha Ray is penalized. The poet participates in this condemnation by denying Martha Ray a voice; her only words, "Oh misery! oh misery! / Oh woe is me! oh misery!" (65-66; 76-77; 241-42) are indistinct and often mingle with the howl of the wind. Nevertheless, we are to accept their authenticity as we are her story and its tellers. Ultimately, the poet legitimates the oppressive patriarchal structure by usurping Martha Ray's voice and narrative. To allow her to create her own story is far too dangerous for a male poet who assumes a biologically determined creative process. If the female can figuratively create, what will happen to the male poet?

In Wordsworth's poetic system, the male's purchase on creativity is indirect and tenuous. However, by appropriating female creativity, the male poet becomes a genius, who has "set his faculties industriously to work upon this Poem, everywhere impregnated with original excellence" ("Supplementary" 53). Yet Wordsworth clearly indicates that the genius is dependent upon woman, as we see in the final quote on your handout. For Wordsworth, then, once the female becomes the poet, the entire system will be feminine: the male will simply disappear, impotent and incidental.

Ultimately, Wordsworth's creative anxiety as a male poet regulates his language and his poetry, as he conceptualizes an essentialist creative system that clearly privileges female biological creativity. By examining Wordsworth's gendered rhetoric as well as the poems' performative function, we reveal the strength and vigor of the female ideal, which obliges us to rethink existing critical paradigms. Harold Bloom's theory that asserts poetic fathers as the source of Romantic anxiety becomes significantly complicated and less paramount when one considers the anxiety generated by female creativity troped as mother. Similarly complicated is a feminist reading like Anne Mellor's, which asserts that Romantic poets "often subtly regender both the subject [mind] and the object [nature] as male and in the process erase the female from discourse: she does not speak; she therefore has no existence." Both Betty Foy and the Mad Mother emerge as successful creators despite the male poet's attempt to appropriate their creativity while Martha Ray exposes the male poet's need to harness female creative power. In each of these poems, the female breaks her constraints; she creates meaning; she regenerates; she transgresses; she overflows. While she may be enslaved, never is she silenced or erased from existence; instead, she is writ-large and self-proliferating.

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