Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (review)

Susan Wolfson opens her latest study by gesturing at the mythos of the solitary artist, which, despite having been thoroughly deconstructed and historicised over the last forty years, continues to maintain a powerful grasp on the popular understanding of Romanticism. Wolfson’s understanding of the social character of Romantic identity is initially a little vague. However, following a brief foray into etymology, it becomes clear that Wolfson is interested in exploring the intertwining of the intertextual and the intersubjective: a space resolutely personal, even biographical, and deliberately anti-deterministic, yet also alive to the ways in which identities are shaped from outside. In essence, Romantic Interactions studies the field within and by which authorship – authorial public image and self-image alike – is constructed, and the ways in which that construction is occupied and negotiated.

Across the course of the book, this field is interpreted in several different ways. Despite the initial insistence that this is not a study about intertextuality, long stretches of the opening chapters are delicate studies of precisely this: of intertextuality with Milton pre-eminently, but also with Collins, Burke, Shakespeare, Pope and others (even, in the case of Charlotte Smith, Smith with herself). Yet, this is intertextuality distinctly inflected by the gravity of an authorial presence. It is also very much a gendered appropriation of text, genre and motif that Wolfson shows us, whether through counter-revolutionary gothic romance (Burney), the more radical gesture of a maternal critique of war (Smith) or the satirical critique of sentimental ‘female’ poetics (Wollstonecraft). However, in a gesture that will be repeated in the book’s closing chapters on Byron and celebrity, this realist sense of flesh-and-blood authors is tempered by an awareness that the author is also a slippery sign in cultural discourse: hence the contestation of the name and legacy of ‘Wollstonecraft’ as celebrity, author and site of scandal.

What builds throughout the early chapters is a recurrent concern with the construction of female authorship, something sketched-out through dramatic counterpoint in the study’s middle chapters on William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The motivating paradox here is the classic one of centre and supplement, the freighted mutuality that defined the writings of both: ‘her words may imprint his poetry, but his power of imagination haunts her’. For me, these are the strongest sections of a strong book. Loving attention to textual detail combines with powerful critical perspectives: a thorough understanding of how the (male) Wordsworthian ‘I’ is stratified and mingled with the second-person and first-personal plural is matched with a deft analysis of William’s anxieties about ‘feminine’ qualities filtering into his poetics and persona. Meanwhile, the male-female binary is not simply inverted in order to promote Dorothy’s poetics over William’s: her anxieties are traced just as closely as his, most interestingly her ‘perverse gift of self-cancellation’, rooted in the sense, shared by Coleridge (also overshadowed by the same man), that her poetry is a kind of non-poetry or anti-poetry, and that she is a non-poet.

One could not be further away from a non-poet when the book turns to Byron. The last two chapters revolve around Byron’s textual and cultural celebrity, exploring a dynamic of seduction and an erotics of reading applicable to both male and female readers, although female reactions, appropriations and mimicries are uppermost here. With the help of a series of illustrations, Wolfson traces the production and reproduction of ‘Byron’ from the time of the first stirrings of his fame, through the period of scandal, and on into his cultural afterlife. The study is wittily and appropriately aware of Byromania’s tendency towards self-parodic posing, and the ‘mechanics of farce’. One interesting facet of the argument here is that – certainly more so than in any of the other readings – the poet himself seems a strangely mechanical figure at the centre of a self-intensifying...