Home, Family, Livelihood, and Their Displacements in William Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere
| Autor: | Chang-Hsi Tsai, 蔡昌熹 |
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| Rok vydání: | 2003 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 91 This thesis attempts to bring out the three ideas─home, family, and livelihood─in William Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere so as to facilitate the reading of these ideas in terms of New Historist thinking as patterns of displacement. That is, putting the poem in both socio-historical and thematic context, I would like to approach Wordsworth’s delineations of home, family, and livelihood in the poem as displacements. This thesis first argues that Wordsworth’s home re-established in the natural vale, Grasmere, near his birthplace represents both a nostalgia for the paternal home he lost in his childhood and the demand for consolation due to the frustration resulting from the betrayals in 1790s. Imagining his home and his self as guarded by the mountains, Wordsworth tries to grasp the spreading joy, overflowing love, and safety provided by the vale to displace and to compensate for the senses of loss. Besides, Wordsworth’s home consists of several members, and the most essential one is his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, who is described and annihilated as a silent listener in the poem. But scrutinizing their modus vivendi, their ways of life, I would like to speculate that Dorothy provides indispensable family affections, which are viewed as the ethos of nuclear family, to Wordsworth. Compared with Dorothy, Coleridge, who is accommodated in Wordsworth’s family, stands for an ambiguous character through whom Wordsworth extends his family affections from the domestic to the public so as to displace his desire for the ethos of nuclear family. Furthermore, when depicting the local dwellers’ ways of life, Wordsworth demonstrates his obsession with their self-sufficient and independent livelihood. But examining the paradoxical narration of the two family tales in the poem, I am inclined to study Wordsworth’s descriptions of the self-sufficient life at Grasmere as displacements─a nostalgia for the loss of such a livelihood. Because of the nostalgia, Wordsworth himself attempts to practice the similar way of laboring in his poetical output. In order to maintain his own life as well as his family’s life, Wordsworth has to accumulate poetical subject matters and to search for possible readers, which traps him into the dilemma of peddling─an act between pre-capitalist patronage and capitalist commodity-selling, and such a dilemma is displaced by his sonorous announcement of his plan of writing The Recluse, “On Man, on Nature, on Human Life”─almost everything in the vale but not reality. In this way, Wordsworth’s concepts of home, family, and livelihood in Home at Grasmere are exquisitely displaced for his ideological reluctance to face the facts of loss─the loss of possible marriage with Annette Vallon, friendship with Coleridge, old self-ingratiating patronage, etc. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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