A Reconstructed Reading

Although I find such a reading of The White Doe attractive, I think it does not tell the whole story. First of all, it does not account for Wordsworth's emphasis on consolation. While I do not endorse the pre-

vailing modern critical view of the poem's spirituality, as exemplified by one reader's claim that "Emily subdues her own will to that of her father, and thus begins to imitate the act of transcendent patientia that was the crucifixion of Christ,"^[27] I want to understand Wordsworth's conception of feminine spirituality. Is there a way to share in Wordsworth's spiritual reading of his own poem (amply provided in letters and commentaries) without overt Christian allegorizing and its emphasis on complete renunciation?

The prefatory stanzas added in 1815 set The White Doe in the context of the Wordsworths' loss of their two children as well as the earlier loss of William's brother John Wordsworth in a shipwreck.^[28] The poet suggests here and in his letters that the original impulse for the poem in 1807 was to write a spiritual tale of consolation, focusing on the peace that Emily Norton found in accepting her loss as the will of God. Wordsworth records in several sources—letters, references to attempted poems, "Peele Castle"—the extent to which he felt the loss of his brother.^[29] Certainly the pattern of loss and consolation is a familiar Wordsworthian story. But in earlier poems such as "Tintern Abbey" and the "Intimations" ode the loss is figured in terms of the transition from innocence to consciousness and sympathy with human suffering. In The White Doe Wordsworth writes of a loss so great that only a complete renunciation of earthly desires will heal the wound.

But whereas the body of the poem (the seven cantos) sanctions austere renunciation, the prefatory stanzas—written, it seems, in response to the later loss of Catharine and Thomas—are more complicated. In these stanzas Wordsworth emphasizes the domestic and familial context of grieving, with allusions to his married life with Mary Wordsworth:

In trellis'd shed with clustering roses gay,
And, Mary! oft beside our blazing fire
When years of wedded life were as a day
Whose current answers to the heart's desire,
Did we together read in Spenser's Lay
How Una, sad of soul—in sad attire,
The gentle Una, born of heavenly birth,
To seek her Knight went wandering o'er the earth.

Ah, then, Beloved! pleasing was the smart,
And the tear precious in compassion shed
For Her, who, pierced by sorrow's thrilling dart,
Did meekly bear the pang unmerited;l
Meek as that emblem of her lowly heart

The milk-white Lamb which in a line she led,—
And faithful, loyal in her innocence,
Like the brave Lion slain in her defence.

William and Mary, as depicted in this little domestic scene, a rather prim bower of bliss, share their "heart's desire" as well as their love of The Faerie Queene. Wordsworth focuses on their admiration for Una—her meekness, her innocence, her faith. Most important, Wordsworth admits that his reading of Una's suffering resulted in a pleasant pain and "tear precious." From the safe vantage of their domestic bower and as yet untouched by devastating grief, the couple can enjoy the fiction.

But when faced with devastating loss, "For us the stream of fiction ceased to flow, / For us the voice of melody was mute" (24–25). Only after some time does the poet describe being able to return to Spenser and to The White Doe, which had been completed seven years earlier. Once again, he and Mary can appreciate "griefs whose aery motion comes not near / The pangs that tempt the Spirit to rebel" (35–36). As in "Laodamia," Wordsworth rejects the temptation of "the Spirit to rebel," but also admits to its force. In The White Doe Wordsworth prevents this spiritual rebellion before it takes shape by modeling his female character upon the obedient Una.

But a problem arises in drawing a parallel between Una and Emily Norton. While it is true that Una suffers "the pang unmerited," she will finally be reconciled with her knight. Although Wordsworth interprets his own narrative in a positive way, Francis Norton forbids Emily to hope and will not let her try to change the course of events. She is not only silenced in terms of speech: she is even denied her own story. Speaking of The White Doe, the poet claims that

This tragic Story cheared us; for it speaks
Of female patience winning firm repose;
And of the recompense which conscience seeks
A bright, encouraging example shows;
Needful when o'er wide realms the tempest breaks,
Needful amid life's ordinary woes;—
Hence, not for them unfitted who would bless
A happy hour with holier happiness.

How can the narrator accept the isolation of Emily, befriended by the mysterious white doe but set apart from all human community? The very image of the devoted married couple struggling together with their grief subverts any easy faith in such a consolation and presents a more human version of loss and consolation than the poem itself does.

Furthermore, Wordsworth's bright ending resolves none of the political or familial issues raised in the story of the rebellion. Several commentators have noted the connection between the Norton rebellion of 1569 and the events of the early 1790s, as well as a connection between The Borderers and The White Doe as stories of rebellion.^[30] The consequences of the rebellion were still very much with Wordsworth, who, as we recall, claimed as late as 1835 that he was still haunted by the violence of those events. In presenting the Norton rebellion, Wordsworth faced several difficulties. He does not endorse the rebellion of the Catholics against Queen Elizabeth, but he cannot imagine in 1807 that Francis and Emily would rebel against their father, even though they would be justified politically. The only alternative he can present to rebellion is passive resistance, which Wordsworth presents as a feminized (but highly admirable) virtue in both Francis and Emily.

Although there is almost no action in The White Doe, there is much allusion to violence and death. In keeping with the early Elizabethan setting, religion and spiritual values are embedded in political conflict. In book 7 of The Excursion (in lines probably written between January 1813 and May 1814),^[31] the Vicar comments that a knight, who "in Eliza's golden days" (924) was buried in the churchyard,

Lived in an age conspicuous as our own
For strife and ferment in the minds of men;
Whence alteration in the forms of things,
Various and vast.

(1009–12)

Like his Vicar, Wordsworth looks back on decades of instability brought on by revolution and war, fearing the disruption of continued strife and ferment. These fears, evident in the political sonnets of 1802, become intensified in the years leading up to Waterloo.^[32]

Even though the prefatory poems added in 1815—"Weak is the will of man" and "In trellis'd shade," as well as the epigraph from Bacon—enforce the spiritual and consolatory reading, the poem comes back to images of violence and decay, such as one found in the opening canto. The poem opens with various parishioners observing the doe in its wanderings about Bolton Priory, each character seeing something different in its weekly pilgrimage:

Pass, pass who will, yon chantry door;
And, through the chink in the fractured floor
Look down, and see a griesly  [sic]  sight;
A vault where the bodies are buried upright!

There face by face, and hand by hand,l
The Claphams and Mauleverers stand;
And, in his place, among son and sire,
Is John de Clapham, that fierce Esquire,—
A valiant man, and a name of dread,
In the ruthless wars of the White and the Red;—
Who dragged Earl Pembroke from Banbury church,
And smote off his head on the stones of the porch!

(1:245–56)

This is the view of a female ancestor of Pembroke, who wonders why the doe loiters around this scene. Although presented through the mind of a superstitious "Dame," these images underscore the violent struggles that form the history of the region and foreshadow the fate of the Nortons. Wordsworth implies that if violence can neither be understood nor justified, at least it can be transcended in a spiritual realm.

While the poem ends affirming a feminine spirituality and contains very little action (in comparison to quarto works by Byron or Scott), it does present a different alternative—albeit one unrealized—in Francis. Francis opposes the violence and militarism of his father, but he cannot manage to rebel against his father's law. Instead, Francis urges his father to reconsider, appealing to his familial responsibilities. Rather than launch this suicidal rebellion, Francis urges, he should "live at home in blissful ease" (2:396) for the sake of his family. In contrast to his father and nine brothers who dress themselves in the costumes of war, Francis joins them with "breast unmailed, unweaponed hand" (3:771). Francis's ethic of nonviolence prevents him from joining his father in the rebellion, but his family loyalty also prevents him from rebelling in any active way against his father. Wordsworth has great sympathy for Francis's dilemma, but there is no resolution. Francis's loyalty to his father ultimately causes his death, after he has forbidden Emily to try to intervene.

To a certain extent Francis represents a positive ethic that counters the Norton violence and fanaticism. This ethic is also associated with the Norton mother, who has died many years earlier. In his anxious thoughts about his daughter, Richard Norton blames his late wife for teaching Emily her Protestant faith; but he also seems to resent the maternal influence, the bond formed in infancy. Emily thinks of her mother and

—Yes, she is soothed:—an Image faint—
And yet not faint—a presence bright
Returns to her;—'tis that bless'd Saint
Who with mild looks and language mild

Instructed here her darling Child,
While yet a prattler on the knee,
To worship in simplicity
The invisible God, and take for guide
The faith reformed and purified.

(4:1136–44)

Wordsworth creates a classic pre-oedipal scene of instruction: "a prattler" on her mother's knee. Emily remembers the gentleness of the mother, contrasting her "mild looks" with the fierce paternal glance and her "language mild" with the insistent symbol-making of the father. But although the memory of her mother's teaching inspires Emily to try to influence her father, ultimately her mother's memory is only a consolation to her and not an influence on the Norton heritage. As the only daughter in the family and a motherless child, Emily has no community of women with whom to identify.

Wordsworth sees value in the ethical perspective of maternal thinking, to borrow Sara Ruddick's term,^[33] but in The White Doe he does not envision it as having power against the inflexible position of the Norton patriarchy. Images of caring and nurturing that are at first associated with the relationship between mother and child are transformed into spiritual metaphors for Emily and the doe. In this transference, I believe, Wordsworth veers away from the positive values he has introduced and instead embraces a more restrictive notion of woman's silent suffering, of spirituality and renunciation as the only alternatives to despair.

Spiritualized nature takes the place of the historical facts about the Norton uprising that Wordsworth rejects from Sir Walter Scott (MY 1:237). After the destruction of the Nortons, Emily inhabits a feminized world of nature and silence. Even before the downfall, Emily and the doe are presented with a lyrical softness that associates them with nature, innocence, and the beautiful, but also with the mysterious and secretive:

But where at this still hour is she,
The consecrated Emily?
Even while I speak, behold the Maid
Emerging from the cedar shade
To open moonshine, where the Doe
Beneath the cypress-spire is laid;
Like a patch of April snow—
Upon a bed of herbage green,
Lingering in a woody glade
Or behind a rocky screen—

(4:997–1006)

The narrator describes Emily and the doe in terms that connect them with images or scenes rather than with speech or language. They become part of the pictorial landscape they inhabit. Like images of Lucy ("A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye") in the cycle of poems written several years earlier, images of Emily and the doe conjure what Wordsworth cannot express about their mysterious communion and substitute for what he does not confront in the narrative of the rebellion.

Wordsworth's decision to invent Emily Norton and focus on her spirituality meant that women actually associated with the story were barely mentioned or suppressed altogether. But at the end of his volume Wordsworth does include the ballad "The Rising in the North." Whitaker had simply hinted at women's role in the story of the doe, but the ballad includes both Lady Percy and the queen. Lady Percy urges her lord (in what will prove sound though unheeded advice) to go to the court and make peace with the queen. Even more aggressive than Lady Percy, the queen responds to the news of rebellion:

Her grace she turned her round about,
          And like a royall queene shee swore,
I will ordayne them such a breakfast,
          As never was in the North before.

(125–28)

Lady Percy does not appear in Wordsworth's poem, and the narrator merely alludes to Elizabeth and her power. Wordsworth is not interested in the paradoxes of Queen Elizabeth's rule, in the meaning of a queen who addressed her troops with the assertion that she had "the body but of a weak and feeble woman" but "the heart and stomach of a King."^[34]