Wordsworth's Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (review)

Wordsworth's Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production by Thomas Pfau. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. x + 454. $51.00 cloth.

If art is a forgetting of that which it encrypts, can there be room for comprehending an affective ground of aesthetic experience? Romantic scholarship has been preoccupied with questions of historical contingency for quite some time. What often seems to be lacking is precisely what Thomas Pfau addresses: the affective depth of the aesthetic precisely within the larger, anonymous historical patterns it partly constructs. The circularity of such a paradigm can be dizzying, and Pfau's ability in this study to maintain his ground is nothing short of spectacular.

Wordsworth's Profession argues that England's middling classes between 1740 and 1820 undergo a dramatic shift in self-understanding. Wishing to distance themselves from the crass consumptive materialism of the upper classes, but lacking a definable alternative in the arena of public accountability, they reconfigure value in the terms of a productive subjectivity. In this understanding, the aesthetic must be productive before it is consumptive, with productive subjectivity standing as the cherished result; the middle class thus moves towards moral and cultural prominence even as it struggles with the political and spiritual disenfranchisement that is its persistent inheritance. In fact, Pfau argues, it is this very disjunction between political disenfranchisement and cultural ascendancy that defines the period's operational structures:

To the extent that it continually stimulates 'mind' to further, more ambitious displays of imaginative mobility, Wordsworth's poetry in particular may be viewed as an encryption of its demographic unconscious: the cultural Romance of the middle-class psyche as the story of an unlimited development realized (and objectified for us) in Wordsworth's approach to discrete aesthetic forms and genres and succinctly captured in his phrase of "something evermore about to be." (8)

The reciprocal legitimation between audience and author thus becomes an important focal point, but it is one that opens onto so many avenues of historical and cultural investigation that no brief description can do justice to its breadth. Pfau is emphatically not interested in reducing the aesthetic to the demographic, or in arguing for a simple causal narrative that collapses sociocultural history into its symbolic representations. Instead, he sees the emerging self-awareness of the middle class as the effect of Romantic cultural productivity, and he understands that "only at a concrete rhetorical (and usually textual) level can we expect to gain insight into the aesthetic (and especially the 'literary') simulation of history as the understated (always 'subtle') drama of its subjects' psychological mobility" (3). This is a study of form and genre that, following Clifford Siskin, views genre as constructing history (rather than the other way around). Thus, history becomes a forum for competing forms of desires and aspirations, where the cultural specificity of any particularized idiom is not presumed to invalidate the affective yield of such forms. Rather, the very fundaments of affective experience become part of the structure of feeling; cause and effect perform a dance here in which neither quite leads nor quite follows.

The book is divided into three sections. The first traces the history of the Picturesque in relation to the so-called "professionalization of leisure," a process by which its practitioners legitimate themselves as members of an established, respected, and above all spiritually and culturally significant community. In recognizing the Picturesque as a historically determined cultural emergence, Pfau interrogates its theoretical claims about its own aesthetic autonomy. The result is a reading of the Picturesque that situates it diacritically, and so finds "its aggressive aestheticization of political consciousness" (31). Where Wordsworth aestheticizes the landscape, then, his investment in the strategies of the Picturesque enables a subtle self-reflexivity with respect to the empirical actuality that his poetry only partly displaces. Descriptive detail in much of the poetry stands as synecdoche for...