“Vain dalliance with misery”: Moral Therapy in William Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage”
Journal Title: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies - Year 2018, Vol 27, Issue 1
Abstract
The following paper will examine how (male) speakers in William Wordsworth’s “The Baker’s Cart” and “Incipient Madness,” which eventually became reworked into “The Ruined Cottage,” narrate the histories of traumatised women. It will be argued that by distorting the women’s accounts of suffering into a didactic lesson for themselves, the poems’ speakers embody the tension present in the chief psychiatric treatment of the Romantic period, moral therapy, which strove to humanise and give voice to afflicted subjects, at the same time trying to contain and eventually correct their “otherness.”
Authors and Affiliations
Piotr Kałowski
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP447640
- DOI 10.7311/0860-5734.27.1.02
- Views 4
- Downloads 0
“I’ll risk you, if you’ll risk me”: The Ambiguity of Human Existence and Relationships in Marilyn Duckworth’s Married Alive
The aim of this paper is to analyse Marilyn Duckworth’s Married Alive within the framework of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of ambiguity, risk and reciprocal recognition. It is argued that the New Zealand writer repres...
Popular Fiction Tropes in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: the Radical
In line with recent critical approaches to George Eliot that increasingly question her reputation as a realist writer, the article seeks to analyse the plot and characterisation in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical...
“[They] would say she was betraying Poland already”: Major Themes in Contemporary Canadian Literature by Writers of Polish Origins
In June 2015 The Canadian Polish Research Institute organized a panel discussion chaired by professor Tamara Trojanowska called “Writing Change and Continuity: Culture, Languages, Generations.” The debate featured esteem...
Genius, Appropriation and Transnational Collaboration in Ezra Pound’s Cathay
When we discuss the cross-cultural relationships of Euro-American modernists we often fall between the poles of either celebrating the ‘coming together of traditions’ or suspiciously decrying the power play involved. A c...
Pleasure Domes and Sunbeams: An Anti-Oedipal Reading of “Kubla Khan”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem “Kubla Khan” begins with the statement that Kubla Khan once caused a pleasure-dome to come into existence by dint of a kingly decree. The last line states that the narrator, should he...