Hazel Carroll
The child in Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude is a figure that’s hard to pin down. Externally, much of this comes from the nebulous idea of childhood that existed within the Romantic period. The era invited debate over what a child physically is, that is, what ages define the child, as well as what childhood means. This latter question was very much shaped by the debate between Augustine and Pelagius over the nature of children and whether humans are born evil, a debate that continued through the tradition of English literature and was particularly shaped during the Romantic period by the thinking of Rousseau. The child is then further troubled within the text by his nature as memory. The figure of the child in Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude is reminded through the image of the corpse that he, himself, is also only a spectre, as he can only exist in memory.
One root cause of the troubled nature of Wordsworth’s child is the Romantic period’s troubled definition of childhood. It was not clear (and, arguably, continues to be unclear) what exactly childhood was. At the most basic, logistical level, there was no agreement about what age one had to be in order to be a child. Did childhood begin with infancy? Rousseau, who was a great influence on depictions of childhood in Romantic English literature, believed that childhood began with language (Austin 78). If that was then taken to be true, then when did childhood end? David Hartley depicted the stages of childhood as follows: “I. Childhood, or Boyhood; the age of sensation II. Youth; the age of simple ideas and emotions III. Maturity the age of complex intellectual ideas and more complex emotions” (Hartley qtd. in Gatti-Taylor 255). Ultimately, it was determined that the end of childhood depended on individual experience, usually that of a traumatic event, which indicated that the child could no longer exist within the bounds of childhood and must move on (Austin 80).
In the words of Carolyn Steedman, “childhood [in the Romantic period] was a category of dependence, a term that defined certain relationships of powerlessness, submission and bodily inferiority or weakness, before it became descriptive of chronological age” (qtd. in Austin 77). While true, one no longer being able to exist within the bounds of childhood due to an event in one’s life insinuates that the bounds of childhood may also have something to do with one’s character. There is a lack of experience, an innocence, that is associated with childhood; consider the title of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Thus, when a child is forced to learn of the cruelties of the world through trauma – losing their innocence by having gained experience – they then can no longer exist as a child, for they no longer fit the definition. For centuries, the depiction of the child within English literature has oscillated between the Augustinian view of the child as inherently sinful and the Pelagian view of the child as “in the same condition as Adam before the Fall” (Augustine qtd. in Pattison 52). Augustine won the debate, yet the idea of the child as innocent persisted, becoming a theme in English literature. Rousseau, in particular, was greatly influenced by Pelagian ideas. However, his belief in the importance of the child lay mainly in the child’s capacity for freedom, both the freedom to be free from sin, as Pelagius believed, but also the freedom in education. “The sentiment which grows out of Rousseau’s version of childhood […] is based on the ‘feeling of life.’ For Rousseau, the innocence usually associated with the lost Eden is available here and now. […] His golden age is not mythic but palpable, not reached by grace but by education of the individual will” (Pattison 52).
Wordsworth’s child is a reflection of Rousseau’s, echoing Pelagian ideals. However, “unlike Rousseau’s idea of childhood, [it is] not a state through which a man passes on his way to a productive adulthood; it is a condition which for a vast majority of men is irretrievably lost as soon as completed” (Pattison 58). Thus the child is continuously threatened by those conditions that might trigger the “death,” as it might be understood, of childhood through the creation of the adult. In the 1799 Prelude, this occurs most prominently in the image of the drowned man and the spectre of the hanged man. What threatens the child the most, however, is the fact that by the very nature of the medium, it is already dead as it has already been enclosed in memory. Robert Pattison said that Wordsworth believed that “to be a poet is to sustain the state of childhood,” (Pattison 60) yet even as he considered himself a poet, the speaker of The Prelude considers the child to be separate from himself:
“A tranquillizing spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days
Which yet have such self-presence in my heart
That sometimes when I think of them I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other being.” (2.25-31)
The poet, then, may only sustain the state of childhood through memory. Even as the speaker is conscious of the presence of the child, it is a state which he can only attempt to emulate, but not become.
The transience of the child of The Prelude is most evident in the appearance of the corpses. Lines 260 through 298 encompass the encounter with the drowned man. At first, all that is discovered is “a heap of garments” (271), but without an owner, the garments become a sign without a referent, pointing at the illusion of what we believe should be there. The face of the corpse, having risen “bolt upright” (280), having been dredged from the lake, is described as “ghastly” (281). The term is etymologically linked to the word “ghost,” further troubling the lines between reality and illusion through the insinuation of something remaining after death (Oxford English Dictionary, Ghastly, Adj.). Looking deeper into the term, “gast” from which “ghastly” is derived, meant “to destroy” in Old English, a meaning which, though debatable whether Wordsworth would have had awareness of it, coincides with the threat of destruction that the appearance of the corpse poses to the child (Oxford English Dictionary, Gast, v.1).
According to Julia Kristeva, the corpse is the most powerful form of the abject in that it rids one of their understanding of themself within a system. Through the dissolving of borders, the self is also dissolved, “it is death infecting life” (3–4). The image of death is particularly powerful when paired with the image of the child, as it is childhood that is supposed to save one from death (Kristeva 4). When the child is confronted with the drowned man, he is infected by death, reminded of his own transience, and that he, too, will die one day. In fact, the child himself is a ghost, existing only within the memory of the poet who struggles to sustain the state of him. This is further evidenced by the image, or, rather, the lack of an image of the hanged man.
“I led my horse and, stumbling on, at length
Came to a bottom where in former times
A man, the murderer of his wife, was hung
In irons; mouldered was the gibbet mast,
The bones were gone, the iron and the wood,
Only a long green ridge of turf remained
Whose shape was like a grave.” (Wordsworth 309–15)
Without a body, the corpse itself becomes transient, reliant on the gallows and the grave to summon the spectre of the man that once hung there. When put together, they become an archive of the past. However, the archive is imperfect as it itself is transient and cannot maintain its form. The picture, and thus the archive as well, is incomplete, and it is up to illusions summoned by the imagination to fill it in. It is in this way that the gallows and the grave are much like The Prelude itself. The child of the first part no longer exists; he, too, in a way, is dead, with more in common with the drowned and hanged men than the speaker who assumes his consciousness. Thus, The Prelude becomes an incomplete archive for the life of the child and the state of childhood. It can only insinuate, because, for the archive to be complete and perfected would require resurrecting the child himself, which is not possible. The child of Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude cannot escape his own transience; it haunts him as he haunts the narrative itself. Although, according to Wordsworth, the poet is meant to “sustain the state of childhood” (Pattison 60), this is demonstrated to be an impossibility as the poet cannot truly resurrect the child he once was. Instead, the child becomes haunted by symbols of his own transience, the garments and the drowned man, the gallows and the grave, which speak of a past that, much like the child, can only exist in the imagined world.
Bibliography
Austin, Linda. “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 42, no. 1, 2003, pp. 75–98.
Gatti-Taylor, Marisa. “The Myth of the Child in Wordsworth and Pascoli.” Essays in Literature [Macomb, IL], vol. 4, 1977, pp. 250–64.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Pattison, Robert. The Child Figure in English Literature. University of Georgia Press, 1978.Wordsworth, William. “The Two Part Prelude of 1799.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Age of Romanticism, edited by Joseph Black et al., 2nd ed., vol. 4, Broadview Press, 2012, pp. 263–75. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature 4.
