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Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth's Pastoral

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mark Jones
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Abstract

Literary historians have celebrated Wordsworth's pastoral poems for their realism; more recently, new-historicist critics have criticized them for idealization. Reading the poems as ironic, even as parodie in Bakhtin's sense, explains what makes such opposite assessments both plausible and insufficient. My chief example is “Michael.” Formal symmetries in “Michael” suggest a mythic dimension, but they are subtly breached so that the poem cannot be read definitively as idealization. Conversely, while the poem's emphasis on labor suggests reality, its subtle exaggerations also discredit the use of labor as a mere device of realism. Wordsworth invites readers to consider pastoral's primary symbols, sheep, in two symbologies simultaneously: spiritual and material. Such cross-valuation, which recovers an ambivalence crucial to both biblical and classical pastoral, neither mimics nor distorts reality but rather foregrounds the way reality is constructed from symbols. Considering Wordsworth's pastoral as a version of Bakhtinian parody further illuminates the anti-interpretive functions of both modes.

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1098 - 1113
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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