Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Home at Grasmere Again: Revising the Family in Dove Cottage

Romantic notions of “author” as isolated genius are remarkably persistent , not only among professional literary critics (as Jack Stillinger demonstrates in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius) but among our students and presumably also among the less specialized readers outside the academy whom they represent. Reading William Wordsworth ’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” along with Dorothy Wordsworth ’s journal entry for April 15, 1802 (in which she describes the same scene) generally disappoints students. William’s stock drops and Dorothy ’s rises, but their inclination is to transfer originary power to Dorothy , not to question their fundamental assumption that true artists work alone. Granting the coercive force of Romantic ideologies, the persistence of this particular strand suggests broader foundations than those of “literary” Romanticisms alone. The supporting role played by domestic ideologies has been mapped out in a considerable body of criticism, exemplified by the work of Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, and (for the Americanists) Gillian Brown. The separation of private domesticity from public productivity, the fostering of individual consciousness through domestic relations, the 100 Home at Grasmere Again Revising the Family in Dove Cottage  .  significance of writing as an expression of individual subjectivity—these claims of domestic ideologies ensure a double detachment of the author from both public and private contexts. As an individual deriving motive force from a private domestic space, the author is protected from the supposed moral taint of the marketplace; as a published writer whose work signifies a now mobile individuality, the author is removed from the supposed narrowness of domesticity. I have avoided gendered pronouns here, but of course the domestic/ public separation is gendered, and the critics of domesticity also debate the complex situation of women writers seeking an authorial identity in the masculinized world of paid work. The full impact of these constructions becomes evident when contrasted with earlier configurations of labor and value, in which work of all kinds was less strictly gendered and less closely associated with pay, so that both household and what we now call “public” economies depended on a more diffuse, less monetary productivity. As Kurt Heinzelman has shown, under such conditions it becomes possible to represent authorship as collective, part of an openended domestic economy as well as the public monetary economies of industrialized production. I want to carry on from these perceptions to suggest that fixed definitions of “family”—current academic definitions corresponding to popular notions of the “traditional family”—also play a key role in sustaining the concept of the author as isolated genius. Specifically, I think that our overly stable histories of the family, derived from the intersection of domestic ideologies and modern psychologies, mask the changing significance of the grown sibling in the household. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have analyzed the ahistorical “logic of emotions” governing academic studies of the family, which, despite apparent differences, fixate on the conjugal bond in the nuclear family.1 As Ruth Perry has pointed out, this fixation (her term) operates in literary studies as well, where our readings do not shift to accommodate historical changes in kinship structures and take the affective bond as fundamental . Even where we read sibling relations as having some primary significance, we limit our readings to certain affective/psychosexual meanings that we assume are historically stable.2 Returning to the oftconsidered case of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, I want to recognize the sibling in the house as an unstable economic sign—as a sign, specifically, of the changing valuations of corporate production and domestic labor during the nineteenth century. Home at Grasmere Again 101 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s 1987 historical survey Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 suggests that during the early stages of industrialization in England, middle-class families and households were defined as much by lateral ties as by conjugal or parent-child bonds.3 It was in the late eighteenth century, as Davidoff notes in a later article, that “the growth of outwork and byindustries ” left middle-class siblings in the home together who would otherwise have gone into service or apprenticeship elsewhere. The resulting material and affective economies depended heavily on horizontal ties among siblings or those derived from sibling ties (e.g., aunt and uncle, niece and nephew, and cousin): [B]rothers often went into partnership with the husbands of their sisters or the sister would subsequently marry a brother’s...