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Chapter One: Wordsworthian Intertexts in Kincaid's Lucy
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15 Chapter One Wordsworthian Intertexts in Kincaid's Lucy I have chosen to focus the first chapter of Romantic Revisions on Kincaid's Lucy because it illustrates the concept that is most crucial for contextualizing the four chapters that follow—that the relationship that postcolonial American writers and their subjects have with the English Romantic tradition varies according to their respective frames of reference. In Lucy, a young Caribbean woman who has recently moved to New York to become an au pair describes her coming of age. Living in the US helps bring Lucy to a state of self-awareness: as her worldview expands, she is better able to articulate where she is going and where she has been. By contrasting Lucy's US experiences with those of her host mother, Mariah, Kincaid suggests that the legacy of British colonialism is different for someone from a formerly British island in the Caribbean than it is for a person born and raised in the US. One of the ways in which these legacies differ involves language itself; we can imagine Lucy speaking an English that does not sound like the English spoken by Mariah. Although the spoken word is important in the novel's mapping of colonial legacies through language, it is the written one that ultimately reveals the disparities arising from politics of location. Kincaid reinforces the importance of the written word for colonial experiences in one of Lucy's dreams, recounted near the beginning of the novel. In this dream, Lucy examines the label of one of her nightgowns that reads, "Made in Australia" (9). The dream is interrupted when the American-born maid wakes Lucy; however, Lucy tells us that "as I opened my eyes, the word 'Australia' stood between our faces, and I remembered then that Australia was settled as a prison for bad people, people so bad that they couldn't be put in a prison in their own country" (9). That the name of the former colony becomes literally spelled out between these two domestic workers reinforces the relationship between language and colonial legacies. It also leads the reader to question the histories of these women's ancestors—how they came to be involved in the settlement of the American colonies—and the difference of their worldviews. Kincaid suggests that their views are different, that they see the word Australia differently. 16 Chapter One Words are important to Lucy in a way they are not to other characters in the novel. Because Lucy is an avid reader and aspiring writer, her engagement with literature —particularly the British canon—figures prominently in her growth process and reflects her changing worldview. Kincaid demonstrates the importance of English Romanticism to Lucy's imagination of herself in relation to place through her reactions to William Wordsworth's poetry. With repeated and explicit references to Wordsworth's work, Kincaid invites Lucy's readers to consider the ways in which she appropriates Wordsworthian poetics as she relates the efforts of Lucy, her protagonist , to displace the same poetics with her "vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word" of his poem (18). This poem, which Kincaid uses to highlight Lucy's intertextual connection to Wordsworthian poetry, is his famous lyric about daffodils, "I wandered lonely as a Cloud." Several literary critics and scholars have used these allusions to daffodils as the point of departure for postcolonial interpretations of the text, convincingly arguing that Lucy's anxiety about Wordsworth's poem "creates opportunities for the de-scribing of empire, the continuing process of dismantling colonial regimes of power in language" (I. Smith 803). Moira Ferguson notes that "the fact that William Wordsworth wrote several 'Lucy' poems raises the question of Kincaid's possible ironies" ("Lucy" 241), Bénédicte Ledent writes that "'Lucy' is ironically also the title of one of Wordsworth's poems . . . suggesting that [Kincaid's] Lucy cannot really escape colonial tutelage and in some way also belongs to Wordsworth 's world, whether she wants to or not" (60), and Christine Prentice suggests that Lucy's "very name evokes the persistence of this burden"—a colonially instituted conception of herself as "the interiorized, contemplative subject of the epitome of Romantic Englishness" (217). Although critics and scholars have limited their discussion of Lucy's Wordsworthian intersections almost exclusively to the daffodil poem, I argue that this allusion is not a localized literary effect; rather, it is that Wordworth's entire oeuvre has important interpretive significance for the novel...