Critics often view William Wordsworth as particularly culpable in displaying insensitivity to gender issues and in objectifying women. For example, Ross argues that "Unlike Byron or Shelley, he never questions how the romantic poetic identity sustains sexual and political hierarchies"("Romantic"49). However, in several of his poems Wordsworth does represent women who have voices. In particular he represents mothers who are present subjects with powers of figuration and not silent or absent objects of quest.[2]

Wordsworth presents one of his best examples of such a mother in "The Emigrant Mother" (1807), a poem about a woman who mourns the loss of her son. He explicitly appropriates a woman's voice to write his own poem; however, he gives his female representation all the narrative powers that he possesses, both receptive and creative, and the ability to recollect and reconstruct "her" story. Certainly, he controls the mother's song, but in representing the mother as telling her story and incorpo rating the words of others into her story, he constructs a woman who is much more than a silent object of quest. Like the poet, she has the powers necessary to tell her story, to form her identity. When we see Wordsworth bestow the skills of the poet on a mother, our view must shift to a more complex understanding of his attitudes about gender, a view beyond the man-as-subject / woman-as-object scheme.

In the rest of my presentation, I will first explain several connections between mourning, language, and poetic composition. Then, I will show how the emigrant mother uses (or is constructed as using) the same methods to mourn her son and construct her voice that Wordsworth uses to create poetry. Because Wordsworth represents the mother as struggling to mourn her loss and to tell her story, he does represent a complex and dynamic subject who is more than a silent or absent object.

I believe that the act of mourning is structured like and can even represent language use and poetic creation. Building mostly on the work of Freud and Erikson, Robert J. Lifton defines mourning as a survivor 's struggle to reconstitute his psychic life in a way that can enable him to separate from the dead person while retaining a sense of connection with him, free himself from the deadness of that person and reestablish within himself, sometimes in altered form , whatever modes of immortality have been threatened by the death. (96)

He stresses the significance of both separation and connection, of accepting the loss of the other but also maintaining a bond with that person. The means to maintaining connection with the absent other is symbolization. For Lifton, symbolization is "the specifically human need to construct all experience as the only means of perceiving, knowing, and feeling"(6 my emphasis). Through symbolization in mourning the survivor re-orders the experience of the other with enough difference to accept the real separation (the physical death) and with enough similarity to create continuity in life (the survivor's).[3] Without building this continuity, Lifton argues that "psychic numbing"or stasis overwhelms the survivor.

A child's acquisition of language also appears to follow the pattern of mourning. Homans revises Lacan's model of language acquisition to explain how infants begin to use language and how this early language activity structures later activity. In her account children perceive separation from mothers as a "death"and use language as a means of reconnecting with their mothers; this dynamic of death and substitution ultimately structures all symbolic language. This substitution appears to be a sort of mourning: a way for children to free themselves from their maternal figures while at the same time remaining connected to them. Since poeti c creation is a sophisticated form of early language activity, the death dynamic also structures this adult language activity. However, the dynamic is much more complicated in poetic creation than in early symbolic activity just as mourning carried out b y adults is more complicated than mourning carried out by children. As Lifton notes, "What distinguishes adult grief [mourning] and depression is symbolization around loss that is, compared to childhood counterparts, much more elaborate and more intensely focused"(187).

While the parallel between mourning and language use is manifest in poetic practice, I believe that Lifton's definition of mourning and Wordsworth's definition of poetry are also very similar. Wordsworth says that poetry is

the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins. (57-58)

His formulation of poetry has two basic parts: 1) an original experience which he has been separated from by time--the actual experience is "dead"; and 2) his recollection, his re-ordering or re-collection, of that experience. The recollection is clearly not the same as the original, but it is "kindred"to the original; it is similar to and different from the ori ginal. Mourning a dead person follows a similar pattern. Death separates the survivor from the absent other; eventually, the survivor reconstructs the other with enough difference to accept that person's actual death but also with enough similarity to establish a connection with him or her in order to affirm the continuity of life (Lifton 96).[4] To say that poetry equals mourning is of course too extreme. What I wish to suggest is that making poetry and mourning work are structured similarly and that both require separation from the original experience/other and a symbolic reconnection with th e original that accepts actual separation. Making poetry might be considered a subset of mourning work.

Wordsworth repeatedly represents separation and loss in the form of mourning as a significant part of the mother-child dyad from both the mother and child's point of view. In both situations, the subjects which are represented try to recreate the absent other. Psychoanalytic theory has shown us that infants "do this"when they begin to use symbolic activity: when the maternal figure, usually female, is absent, the child uses objects or language to try to replace her as in Freud's fort/da example (13-17). What is interesting in Wordsworth's poetry is that he not only portrays this dynamic from the perspective of children, but that he also repeatedly portrays it from an adult mother's perspective. In poems like "The Sailor's Mother"(1807) and "The Force of Prayer"(1815), Wordsworth represents mothers with powers of figuration based on separation from their children, but in "The Emigrant Mother"(1807) the voice is more sophisticated and complex.

In "The Emigrant Mother"Wordsworth presents a mother who has been separated from her son and tries to substitute ano ther child for him. Like many other poems which represent the mother-child relationship (i.e., "The Norman Boy,""The Sailor's Mother,"and "The Force of Prayer"), Wordsworth begins this poem very self-consciously with a speaker who meta-poetically reveals the source of the poem or "lay"(10). In the introductory section, the speaker reveals that he is friends with a French emigrant who has been separated from her own child, that she has often shared her "griefs"with him, and that the poem that follows i s a song about what she "might say"to a neighbor child. At the end of the introduction he says, "My song the workings of her heart expressed"to stress his identification with her (14).

The song is a combination of the speaker's understanding of the emigrant mother's experience and the speaker's own imagination; it is based on what the speaker "heard and knew, or guessed "(3, 12-13). Just as in the Norman boy poems, I believe this detailed, meta-poetic introduction suggests that the poem is an example of Wordsworth's definition of poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. . . . recollected in tranquility"(57), an enactment of what Wordsworth describes in The Prelude when he characterizes the infant mind which is the model for the poetic spirit as "creator and receiver both."The speaker "guesses"parts of the emigrant's story which is an overtly creative act; he separates what actually happened to the woman from what he individually "guesses "has happened. To tell what he "knows"or has "heard"from her is a receptive act because he describes what has actually happened--what he knows has happened based on his relationship with the emigrant. [5] In the song section which follows the introduction, the mother also relies on creative and receptive facets of her imagination to her story and to mourn her son.

In the first stanza, the mother describes the "`Dear Babe[`s]'"separation from her real mother who is working in the fields (1). The emigrant mother suggests that the child could comfort her if she would be her child for "`one little hour.'"She then explains her separation from her own child (a son) who is still in France, emphasizing the distance as "`a long, long way of land and sea'"(24, 27). Next, she tells of her possible compl ete separation from her son because he may be dead. Before leaving France the mother's tears fell on her son's face, and a nurse told her that such an act was "`"unlucky"'"; however, the mother then hyperbolically denies the act's unluckiness with a series of four no's. After vehemently denying that her tears killed him, she then says that he will die because, according to those who take care of the child in the mother's absence, "`"he pines'"'(47). Here we have the speaker outside the song representing the mother as doing exactly what he has done with his introduction: she bases some of the story on direct experience, but then guesses , to fill in the details about her child that she does not actually know, details which suggest a fantasy of identificati on. The mother hopes her son pines for her just as she obviously pines for him. Just as the speaker in the introduction, she bases the story both on information that she has received and which she creates; her experience of loss leads her to develop a v oice to construct a sense of reality (at least the speaker represents her as doing so).

However, the woman's creative imagination fails to satisfy when she realizes that the little girl's "`cheerful smiles'"and "`looks'"are not the same as her son's (49, 52). Despite her efforts to make the girl into her child, by stanza five the illusion "`Tis gone--like dreams that we forget'"(55). She sees the smiles of her son in her mind 's eye and then recognizes that the smiles of the girl do not correspond. The little girl "`troublest'"and "`confound[s]'"her to the degree that she "`must lay [her] down'"(59-63). The receptive power of her imagination overcomes her creative impulse, knowing overcomes guessing. The mother consciously works through a fantasy o f reality as she would like it to be and the reality of her situation as it is.

In stanza six, her troubled state continues. She no longer tries to make the child into her son and explains that she loves the little girl for her own sake. She loves her even more than her sister's child who also lives nearby and "`who bears [the emigrant's] name'"(67). The French woman even goes so far as to say that "`Never was any child more dear'"which suggests that she loves the infant girl more than any other child, even her own son. She tries to erase the son who she can only connect through memory and to replace him with an actual child who is present but not her own.

However, in stanza seven, the replacement strategy also fails. The verse paragraph begins with a very intrusive one-m dash which marks an abrupt shift in her thinking. The mother reveals that she "`cannot help it'"but that she must weep (75); she cannot replace her son. She fears that her tears and words do the girl-child harm but then, suddenly, the infant gives her a warm kiss which puts her heart "`again in its place'"(84). In a moment of synaesthesia, she says the child's eyes would "`speak'"to help her "`if they could'"(81-82). She receives the sense impression that the child's eyes are on her, but she creatively embellishes the impression as the child's act of sympathy. The mother could be projecting her desire to be comforted onto the child or the infant could actually be consoling her. The final stanza suggests the latter. The m other takes the original sense impression and reconstructs it with her creative imagination to it a meaning.

The emigrant mother perceives that the girl is not her son, but she finds "`contentment, joy, and mother's glee'"in her (87). Even though she strongly identifies the little girl with her son by calling her "`by [her] darling's name'"and saying her "`features seem to [her] the same,'"the emigrant mother says "`His little sister thou shalt be'"(90-93). She achieves a balance between the recepti ve and creative facets of her imagination. She receives the sense impressions that indicate the child is not her son and recognizes that the child is not her own, but she also and at the same time recognizes that the child is enough like her son that she can make him into a close substitute for him. Just as in Jessica Benjamin's description of the mother who feels recognized by her newborn, the emigrant mother does not simply project her feelings onto the girl--which she surely does--but she also acknowle dges that the girl is different from her mental impression or identification of her with her son:

To experience recognition in the fullest most joyful way, entails the paradox that `you'who are `mine'are also different, new, outside of me. It thus includes the sense of loss that you are . . . no longer simply my fantasy of you. (Benjamin 15) [6]

Because of this depicted experience of recognition, this mother is one of the most fully delineated subjects that Wordsworth creates. She connects/identifies with another subject, but she does not merge her identity with his. She does not become, in Lifton's terms "static"(6). She is aware of and accepts her ability to fantasize and uses that power to mourn her loss. More than any other mother Wordsworth represents, she has an overt self-consciousness.

But what the mother's response to her son? While the mother's experience with the present girl is decidedly one of recognition, her experience with her absent son (or her mental image of him) is one of successful mourning. The mother struggles to put order back into her life after being separated from her country and child by "free[ing] [her]self from the deadness"or absence "of that person"and "retaining a sense of connection with him"(Broken 96). She creates a figure of her son by substituting the girl for him and discovers that strategy is ineffective. She then decides to completely replace him with the girl and also finds that approach is ineffective. Finally, she accepts her separation from the son and her uncertainty about his absence or death and also accepts that the girl is not her child, but very consciously plays as if she is. Just as the girl will "play"with "grass"and "flowers,"the emigrant will play with the child: she "will call [her] by her darling's name"(90). Her mourning play, in effect, allows her to tell the story of her separation from her son. She is not bound by the restrictions of reality and uses the creative and receptive components of her imagination to adjust to the loss of her son. This narrative, or song, represents Lifton's creative mode of immortality: she forms a work which lasts and gives her son, herself and her surrogate daughter immortality. The fact that when she returns to France, she will "tell [her son] m any tales of [the girl] not only makes her differentiation between son and surrogate daughter clear, but it also suggests that the emigrant's strategy for mourning the loss of the little girl when she returns to France will be narrative: she will tell her son about "His little sister"(93). [7]

The special complexity of this poem is that Wordsworth very overtly represents the poem as the narrator's rendering of the emigrant mother's mourning: "My song the workings of her heart expressed"(14, my italics). He very definitely appropriates a woman's voice to write his own poem, but he gives his female representation all the powers that he possesses, both receptive and creative powers, the ability to recollect and reconstruct "her"story. He also represents th e mother as being able to represent other characters who tell stories: the mother tells of the nurse who told her: "`"Tears should not / Be shed upon an infant's face / It was unlucky"'"(41-43). Certainly, his use of quotation marks and stanza numbers in each verse paragraph of the song remind readers that Wordsworth is very definitely in control (it is his song, and she is an "object of male representation") but in representing the mother as telling her story and incorporating the words of others into her story, she is not just a "silent"or "vanished"object of "quest"(Homans 40). Just like the Wordsworth's self-representation in The Prelude, and all subjects represented in poetry, she is an object of Wordsworth's representation; however, she, unlike all poetic objects, is also given a complex voice to tell her story.

In several of his poems Wordsworth represents women who actively struggle to endure their losses and bring continuity to their lives. In portraying mothers who express desire and satis fy their desires to varying degrees, he represents women who are not simply objects of desire themselves. Indeed, their symbolizations or works of mourning are like the poet's constructions of poems. Both the poet and the mothers strive to recollect or re-order an original experience or person to simultaneously accept their separation from it and maintain a sense of connection to it. This suggests that Wordsworth's view of women is, in some instances, more complex than many critics believe. To associa tethe same skills to a woman that he attributes to the poet breaks the binary system of man as subject and woman as object that is often attributed to him. What remains for critics is to uncover a pattern of when Wordsworth represents women as subjects an d when he represents them as objects and to speculate about why he shifts between these views.

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Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. New York: Norton, 1961.

Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1986.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Mellor, Anne K., ed. Romanticism & Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

---. Romanticism & Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Richardson, Alan. "Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine."Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. 13-25. <

Ross, Marlon B. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

---. "Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine Power in the Crisis of Poetic Identity."Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. 26-51.

Wordsworth, William. The Literary Criticism Of William Wordsworth. Ed. Paul M. Zall. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1966.

---. Wordsworth Poetical Works. Eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Thomas Hutchinson. New York: Oxford UP, 1984.