Casey Mear Lauren Bacchus Woman vs Superwoman Ananya Saraf Erica Templeton

WOMAN vs SUPERWOMAN

Should we study ‘ordinary’ or ‘extraordinary’ women?

Ananya Saraf Erica Templeton

The female writer, Dorothy Wordsworth, is often affiliated with her sibling – a household name in the sphere of poetry. Although she influenced many works of William Wordsworth, she lacked great ambitions for individual recognition or publication. The exploration of her place amongst the pantheon of females in literature, therefore, serves to illuminate the problem with characterising women into the binary terms of ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’. She conversely settles in the non-categorising “or”, where female texts can be considered without the presence of gender constructs, more importantly focusing on the literature itself.

In her work, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf posits the fictional sister of Shakespeare, which we might directly parallel to Dorothy, the non-fictional ‘sister of Wordsworth’, exhibiting the dichotomy between the ‘extraordinary’ male and the, subsequently, ‘ordinary’ female counterpart. This notion is retained in Dorothy Wordsworth’s prosaic Grasmere Journals, where she admittedly wrote to “give Wm [William] pleasure”. Undeniably, her ode to William expressed a conformity to his traditions, yet the stand-alone publication of Dorothy’s veristic poem, Floating Island, seems to challenge his masculine shadow. This is demonstrated in the oxymoronic line, “But all might see it float, obedient to the wind”, in which a stark juxtaposition of the “dissevered float” (Dorothy), versus its metaphorical tether to “the wind” (William) is noted. Her regularised ballad quatrains, furthermore, serve to enact the attempted alignment with the poetic standards of William, but the utilisation of slant rhyme - “undermined” and “wind” - disrupt this conventionality. We, therefore, notice how Dorothy is conflicted; she tussles with the self, while canonical measures weigh upon her. Woolf, however, through the emancipating lens of the contemporary reader, amends that confrontation in The Voyage Out, with the inversed “freedom…of being the wind”, thereby omitting Dorothy’s problematic “wind” from, and perhaps substituting her own into the female text. I would advance, therefore, that Woolf’s aid perhaps promotes Dorothy to an ‘extraordinary’ status, as she transcends the futile claim of the male Romantic, Percy Shelley, for the wind “to be thou me”. Dorothy, in her earlier Alfoxden Journals, also describes “a union of earth, sky and sea”, which may allude to the opening stanza of Floating Island, “harmonious… sky, earth, …sea”. This motif resolves Dorothy’s initial verse/prose divide, and fuses, via her shared narrative of nature, the too often isolated literary spheres, ultimately devising her own standard. Still, though the island might be an allegory for Dorothy, a void arises with no apparent access to this figuratively “tiny room”, which, beneath the restrictive climate of “the wind”, casts light on her literal disavowal of setting up authorship. As such, Woolf’s provocative advocation for “a room of one’s own” is requisite in averting male archetypes and forging Dorothy’s autonomy. So far, I have considered the elevation of Dorothy to the ‘extraordinary’. However, this is challenged by the perennially ‘extraordinary’ female, Mary Wollstonecraft. Notably, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which surfaced eight years prior to Dorothy’s Grasmere journaling and advocated, unaccustomedly, to “let woman share the rights, …for she must grow more perfect when emancipated”. This acknowledged timeline, where Dorothy’s predecessor, Wollstonecraft, coincides with her refusal of publication, perhaps further dilutes her promotion to the ‘extraordinary’. Wollstonecraft, furthermore, railed against the status quo by establishing her role as the “first of a new genus”, which Dorothy had

no desire to attain. This evident rift was approached by Woolf, who applauded Wollstonecraft and concurrently sidelined Dorothy, who estranges herself from defiance, assigning it to “the trees and the grass”. Yet, Woolf misconstrues Dorothy’s locus - ‘sister of’. The natural world can be seen as her means of escape from the narrow routes of either being “locked in” or “locked out” of William’s poetic “pound”. The alleged gulf, therefore, is amended with both Dorothy and Wollstonecraft experiencing how “the intellectual world is shut against them”. Moreover, in spite of Dorothy’s conflation with William, she was able to find an intellectual “room of her own” when withholding publication due to “reasons entirely disconnected with [her] self”, and so, this freedom of choice brings an emergent sense of identity to the fore, evading the male tradition. Thus, our contemporary treatment allows us to emancipate Dorothy beyond the standards of ‘extraordinary’, so that she might reside in a more inclusive space. Aptly, Emily Dickinson, in her poem, They shut me up in Prose, establishes the conundrum between “they” (the literary traditions) and “me” (the defiant persona). This metaphor is extended to the “closet”, where “they” attempt to exile the persona into reticence by entrapping her within “Prose”. Likewise, the paratactic nature of the poem possibly depicts a sense of repression, while the unorthodox deployment of an ‘em’ dash sets a liberating metre. As such, this structural duality and consequent opposition, could relate to the irreconcilable position of Dorothy Wordsworth, a female - by our definition - poet, confined to being an extension of her male peer. Her exploration of verse, as seen in Floating Island, nonetheless, could represent the idyllic “bird” Dickinson refers to, as she contests male definitions and holds, also, the role of ‘writer’. Hence, the newly found DickinsonWordsworth relationship, bridges the polarised phraseology of ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’, perhaps drawing out an interchangeability, in which both must be appreciated. Finally, on reflection, Dorothy surpasses the literary expectations of the diverging verse/prose genres and, subsequently, sculpts her own. By contrast, the challenge of Wollstonecraft ostensibly sets back Dorothy into the ‘ordinary’. However, Dorothy, perhaps not as overtly, marks a relatively unique ‘extraordinary’, and one that need not be considered plausible by a ‘Wollstonecraft scale’, or else a secondary canon might arise, resulting in further estrangement of female scholars. The location of Dorothy, therefore, seeks the answer in the unstated - the liminal space - where labels can no longer taint her legacy or work, and our reception as reader. Perhaps, a greater value can be found in this conclusion, as Dorothy and other female writers rejected by the canon can find refuge in her creation and acceptance of this space.