Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 2-3-2012 12:00 AM Hazardous Experiments: The Elusive Prefaces of William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley Jeffrey W. Miles, The University of Western Ontario Supervisor: Tilottama Rajan, The University of Western Ontario A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in English © Jeffrey W. Miles 2012 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Miles, Jeffrey W., "Hazardous Experiments: The Elusive Prefaces of William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley" (2012). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository.ca/etd/378 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western.
It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact wlswadmin@uwo. Hazardous Experiments: The Elusive Prefaces of William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley by Jeffrey W. Miles Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Jeffrey W.
Miles, 2012 THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION Supervisor Examiners __________________________ ____________________________ Dr. Tilottama Rajan Dr. Steven Bruhm ____________________________ Supervisory Committee Dr. Monika Lee ____________________________ __________________________ Dr.
Matthew Rowlinson Dr. Joel Faflak ____________________________ Dr. Jonathan Sachs The thesis by Jeffrey Wright Miles entitled: Hazardous Experiments: The Elusive Prefaces of William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date ____________________ _________________________ Chair of the Thesis Examination Board ii —ABSTRACT— This study analyzes the prefaces of four Romantic-period writers: William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Historically, the preface can be traced back to the insinuatio of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which is to evade audience hostility for writers presenting a bad case.
Given the repressive political and cultural atmosphere of the Romantic period, writers like Godwin, Hays, Wordsworth, and Shelley, idealists who seek to disseminate radical ideas in an era of state censorship, must devise a strategy to convey their messages without attracting attention to their subversiveness. Thus, all four writers continually preface their works with ‘elusive’ prefaces, a strategy through which they seek to downplay or elide their radical subject-matter. Chapter One analyzes William Godwin’s prefaces to Enquiry Concerning Political Justice as a prototype of the elusive preface, through which the urgency and force of his prefatory rhetoric contrasts with the message of gradualism he seeks to convey in the treatise. His novel Caleb Williams, whose first edition preface was suppressed by the publisher for its seditious content, incorporates its preface as an extradiegetic layer of the novel, a technique that Mary Hays will also incorporate in her Memoirs of Emma Courtney, a novel that deploys its elusive preface to placate a middle-class reading audience and to address simultaneously a Dissenting public sphere.
Tracing the evolution of Hays’ prefatory author-figure from her early pamphlet Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship: Inscribed to Gilbert Wakefield to her last novel, The Victim of Prejudice, Chapter Two demonstrates how Hays’ rhetorical subterfuge allows her to assert her right to philosophy while ostensibly adhering to conventional poses of femininity. Prose writers like Godwin and Hays seek to convey their idealistic messages to a generally prosaic reading public, making their prefatory insinuatio especially significant. But poets like Wordsworth and Shelley face an especially difficult task in establishing themselves as socially relevant in an age during which poetry is becoming an outmoded form of discourse. Thus, Chapter Three demonstrates how Wordsworth in his preface to Lyrical Ballads becomes increasingly absorbed with the task of establishing the poet’s professional autonomy as he argues for his poetry’s power to rouse a degraded nation from its moral and cultural lethargy.
Throughout the four editions of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth continues to expand his preface and his poetic persona. By the time of his 1815 Poems, he has abandoned the mass audience he once sought to enlighten, instead appealing to a future generation of readers whom he calls upon to vindicate him. Shelley also faces audience hostility, and his attempts to convey his radical beliefs are thwarted by a public sphere whose ad hominem attacks against him hinder his ability to achieve his goals. Chapter Four chronicles Shelley’s immersion in romantic irony, through which his prefaces are characterized by a disjunction between his idealism and his dissociation from his given actuality.
Keywords: (1) Godwin, William 1756-1836. Criticism and Interpretation. (2) Hays, Mary 1759 or 60-1843. Criticism and Interpretation.
Criticism and Interpretation. (4) Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1792-1822. Criticism and Interpretation. iii —ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS— First, I wish to thank my advisors Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak for their unflagging support.
At every stage throughout the process, from proposal to field study to chapter revisions to the final draft, they generously contributed to the development of the thesis in very significant ways. Even in the midst of difficult and challenging times, they continually kept me focused with their positivity and meticulous attention to the nuances of my argument. Their integrity and high intellectual standards have profoundly affected me in personal ways that go well beyond the boundaries of professional duty. I also wish to thank Fanshawe College for supporting me financially during the final three years of my Ph.
Thanks to the college’s financial support, I was able to finish the thesis without the additional pressures of incurring excess debt. I thank my colleagues in the School of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe for their collegiality, good humour, and intellectual engagement. For always believing in me and persevering with me throughout this lengthy process, I thank my parents and first teachers, Tony and Nancy, who have ardently encouraged me throughout my educational career, and to them I owe a debt of gratitude that I can never repay. My children, Gabriel and Heidi, were babies in the infancy of this thesis, and now they are beautifully flowering children.
I also wish to acknowledge Amy and Jason Winders, Andrew Vivona, Jayne and Steve Simon, Drew White, Harry Gorman, Roger Leavens, and Fraser Nixon. Finally, and mostly, I thank Ann, whose brightness and lightness inspire me every day. This is for you. iv —ABBREVIATIONS— EY: Wordsworth, William.
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805. Ernest De Selincourt. LB: Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and other Poems, 1797-1800.
James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. MHI: Hays, Mary. The Idea of Bing Free: A Mary Hays Reader.
Gina Luria Walker. MY: Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years: Part II, 1812-1820. Ernest de Selincourt.
Mary Moorman and Alan G. PJ: Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin.
London: William Pickering, 1993. PJV: Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Political And Philosophical Writings of William Godwin.
London: William Pickering, 1993. PBSL: Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. PS: Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
The Poems of Shelley. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews. New York: Pearson, 2000. v PW: Wordsworth, William.
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974. SP: Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
Selected Poetry and Prose. Kenneth Neill Cameron. New York: Rinehart, 1953. SPP: Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. UH: White, Newman Ivey, ed.
The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and his Contemporary Critics. New York: Octagon Books, 1966. WCH: Woof, Robert, ed. Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage.
London and New York: Routledge, 2001. WLC: Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.
WPS: Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927.
vi —CONTENTS— Certificate of Examination………………………………………………………………….ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………v-vi Table of Contents…………………….…vii-viii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………1 But Does a Preface Exist?.1 Insinuatio and the Elusive Preface………………………………………………….11 Context: Anxieties of Reception………………………………………………. WILLIAM GODWIN: THE POLITICS OF THE PREFACE…………….……29 Political Justice’s Radical Gradualism……………………………….30 “A Public That is Panic Struck”……………………………….41 Caleb Williams: The Return of the Repressed Preface…………………………….49 The Preface as Narrative Frame………………………………………………….57 Provoking the “Mob Monster”………………………………………………….64 The Afterlife of Caleb Williams……….73 Fleetwood and the Author-Function. MARY HAYS’S PREFACES OF THE 1790s: RHETORICAL SUBTERFUGE AND THE RISE OF RADICAL FEMINISM………………………………….89 The Face of the Feminine: Cursory Remarks………………………………………93 Professional Hays: Letters and Essays……………………………….…103 Rhetorical Subterfuge: Memoirs of Emma Courtney.113 The Vanished Authoress: Appeal to the Men of Great Britain…….137 The Ends of Radical Feminism: The Victim of Prejudice……………. WORDSWORTH’S PREFACES, PROFESSIONAL AMBITION, AND THE PROBLEM OF PARATEXTUAL DIALOGISM….…157 The Poet in the Prefaces: From 1798 to 1802……………………………….162 The Poet in the Poems: Internal Prefacing and Dialogism………….…………177 The Poet in Posterity: The 1815 Preface and “Essay Supplementary”…….
ROMANTIC IRONY AND THE PREFACES OF P.199 The Ironic Void: Alastor ……….………209 Negative Becoming: Laon and Cythna.220 Unstable Irony: Epipsychidion ……………………………….…………………238 Posthumous Parabasis and a Radical Return: Adonais and Hellas…………….248 The Ends of Irony: Mary Shelley’s Posthumous Prefaces………………….293 viii —INTRODUCTION— “A Preface is written to a public; a thing I cannot help looking on as an Enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility” (129). — John Keats To John Hamilton Reynolds, 9 April 1818 But Does a Preface Exist? Keats’s remarks, the result of considerable anxiety over his preface to Endymion, embody many of the key aspects of preface writing in the Romantic period. The feelings of hostility towards his “Enemy”—the “public”—are typical of many of the period’s writers, whose unease about presenting their texts to the public is overdetermined by a complex nexus of institutional, ideological, and demographic factors. Keats’s remarks also perpetuate a facet of the Romantic poet myth, classifying him as a sensitive plant who loathes deigning to present his works to the public, a sentiment revealed elsewhere in his letter to Reynolds: “among Multitudes of Men—I have no feel of stooping, I hate the idea of humility to them” (129).
And the fact that Keats cathects this anxiety onto the preface reveals its significance as a mediating device, the site within which the ‘author’ steps out to plead his or her case with the reader in an effort to influence interpretation. The liminality of Endymion’s preface, foregrounded by the stark juxtaposition between the preface’s prosaic terseness and the poem’s lavish versification, embodies the paradoxes of the prefatory figure constructed by Keats. The preface is separate from the poem, yet inextricably linked to it: having encountered the ‘Keats’ of the preface, the reader identifies the ‘I’ of the poem with the hesitant prefatory figure, who has admitted to “a feeling of regret” for publishing a poem 1 characterized by its “great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt” (11). Paradoxically, however, the very presence of Endymion’s preface undermines Keats’s desire to construct the figure of a chameleon poet within its space.
The original, unpublished, preface expresses Keats’s disdain for prefaces generally: the work of an individual is so insignificant that a preface “seems a sort of impertinent bow to strangers who care nothing about it” (13). The function of a preface, according to Keats, is to “catch an idea of an Author’s modesty, and non opinion of himself” (13). Ironically, then, Keats crafts two versions of a preface whose purpose is self-negation, to present a version of himself characterized, negatively, by his “non opinion.” As if to recognize the rhetorical potential of prosopopoeia, etymologically defined by Paul de Man as the “giving and taking away of faces” (“Autobiography” 76), Keats gives himself a face through his prefatory persona while simultaneously de-facing himself through repeated reference to the poet’s lack of identity. Revealed through Keats’s elaborate prefatory attempts to posit his (non) identity are the factors that generate his anxiety about publishing.