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ROMANTICISM AND GENDER 337 And Wordsworth - the disturbed, conflictual man of letters, arrested by the irreconcilability of a theoretical insight with its application - became an asset of singular importance. Wordsworthian contradiction became a constituent element of the illogical logic of cultural production; it became the property, the amulet, of an intelligentsia displaced to the periphery of the social apparatus. Bourke is playing his hand. For this is the undisguised - the entirely undisguised, I think ('the disturbed, conflictual man of letters'?) - lament for an unrealized aspiration, dimly conceived but surely lost. The Wordsworthian critic dedicated to the task of explicating why Wordsworth's_rnodernity just is not enough finds that the periphery of the social apparatus is, alas, where we all take our place. Romanticism and Gender ELIZA BETH JONES Anne K. Mellor. Romanticism and Gender New York and London: Routledge 1993. us $45.00, $14.95 paper Romanticism and Gender is Anne Mellor's contribution to Anglo-American feminist studies of literature. Implicit in such studies, as Mellor states in her Introduction to Romanticism and Feminism (1988), is a 'practical politics/ a 'self-conscious socialist program, an effort to identify the sources of sexual, social, and class oppression and to work toward their elimination.' The six male poets at the centre of the study of Romanticism have been thus heralded, Mellor believes, 'because they endorsed a concept of the self as a power that gains control over and gives significance to nature, a nature troped in their writings as female.' Romanticism and Gender largely adheres to this socialist program, and attempts to reveal the intricacies of a 'feminine Rornanticism/ with a view to establishing an alternate conceptual terrain, one characterized not by the 'masculine' Romanticism of oppositional polarity, dominance and subjugation, and individual rather than social interest, but by a feminine 'ethic of care,' of likeness, sympathy, and community. In its presentation of this alternate feminine perspective, Mellor's book often succeeds admirably; there are problems, however, with theoretical claims which often shift between a radical feminism which clearly values feminine 'virtues' over masculine ideology, and more temperate claims of gender 'difference,' which Mellor claims she views as existing along an objective continuum. If the reader senses a problem in an opposition to what is called a 'masculine' model of binary opposition with an inherently binary gender politicS, so too does the author. Mellor compromises her project from the outset, where she admits that a model based upon the binary opposition of 'feminine' and 'masculine' Romanticisms 'is both theoretically dubious and critically confining,' for, as any traditional Romanticist knows, binary oppositions of the subject/object or mind/nature variety are already 'deeply implicated in "masculine" Roman- 338 ELIZABETH JONES ticism.' Thus, we are on shaky ground, when, in a book called Romanticism and Ge,tder, its author advises that 'we need to learn how to think beyond a dialectic based on polarities.' Thus, Mellor attempts to escape what she sees as an inherently masculine model of binary opposition by using a model based not on 'structural opposition,' but on 'intersection along a fluid continuum': 'Any writer, male or female, could occupy the "masculine" or the "feminine" ideological or subject position, even within the same work.' This is not a particularly radical or novel enterprise, and Mellor seems, at this point, to rehearse more a Jungian paradigm than a strictly feminist one. Tms democratic perspective soon fades, however, and by the time Mellor concludes the section titled 'Gender in Masculine Romanticism/ the reader may feel somewhat led astray by the Introduction's objective claims of gender 'continuity,' and may wonder why Mellor felt the need, in this opening chapter, to adjust what are obviously very strong beliefs in the gender inequality of this period to appeal to an audience with perhaps more moderate views. The book is divided into three parts. The first is a polemical overview of the kinds of appropriations the author believes the male Romantic poets are guilty of, a section which is presented in no uncertain terms as an indictment. Using the major texts of Blake, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, and giving a great deal of attention to Wordsworth's Prelude, Mellor sets about proving her thesis that...

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