Book 6 of the Excursion: The Consolations of Piety

The White Doe is a transitional work in Wordsworth's career, poised between the sublime poetry of the Great Decade and the works of the later years. But it is also a poem that in its final form qualifies its own otherworldly spirituality. While Wordsworth associates spiritual renunciation with Emily Norton in The White Doe, he also connects spirituality with home and hearth, as we have seen, by focusing on images of

domestic bliss in the prefatory stanzas of 1815. Rather than endorse the austere renunciation of earlier cantos, these stanzas foster piety, a religious perspective based not on transcendence but on devotion to the intertwined values of God, home, and family.

This pattern is evident in the sixth book of The Excursion (the first of two books entitled "The Churchyard Among the Mountains"), which culminates in a vision of domesticity, love, and piety, but only after painful stories of their absence have been told. According to Reed, all the lines I refer to were "Probably written between 3 Jan 1813 and c late May 1814,"^[42] roughly the same period I have discussed in reference to "Laodamia" and The White Doe. In all three narratives female characters and conventional gender expectations are central.

The first story, centered on a local woman who had intelligence and learning beyond her class and sex but was deficient in ordinary human affection and piety, begins on line 675. In his note to Isabella Fenwick, Wordsworth comments on this woman:

This person lived at Town End, and was almost our next neighbour. I have little to notice concerning her beyond what is said in the Poem. She was a most striking instance how far a woman may surpass in talent, in knowledge, and culture of mind, those with and among whom she lives, and yet fall below them in Christian virtues of the heart and spirit. It seemed almost, and I say it with grief, that in proportion as she excelled in the one, she failed in the other. How frequently has one to observe in both sexes the same thing, and how mortifying is the reflection!

(PW 5:459–60)

In 1843, when Wordsworth dictated these comments to his friend, he speaks of "Christian virtues," which also appear more prominently in revisions of the text in 1845. The Vicar describes the woman as finding no contentment from her learning; in fact he describes her as a slave to her passion for knowledge, as if this desire were a kind of sexual transgression. Her hunger for knowledge leads her to other passions, "avaricious thrift" (709) and a twisted, possessive "maternal love" (710) for her only son. When (presumably) her husband died early in their marriage, the woman was indignant about her "dire dependence" (717) and "the weakness of her sex" (719).

I suppose it would be too much to expect for this country Vicar to have read Mary Wollstonecraft on female weakness and dependency, but Wordsworth seems to be able to exercise no imagination concerning Aggy Fisher (so identified by de Selincourt) and her life. Her story, however, is rich in lost possibilities. Obviously frustrated in her talents

within the narrow confines of the village, the historical Aggy comes to life in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, where she talks a great deal, analyzes her neighbors and their relationships, and complains about the beggars whom Dorothy and William welcome. But in The Excursion, all of the woman's energy is constricted by conventional morality and social expectations. Like Mrs. Joe in Great Expectations, another woman frustrated in her talents, the woman lashes out against this imposed weakness. And like Mrs. Joe, she finally makes peace with the world through the author's pious, Christian resolution; all her conflicts are reduced to this:

["] … With a sigh
She spake, yet, I believe, not unsustained
By faith in glory that shall far transcend
Aught by these perishable heavens disclosed
To sight or mind. Nor less than care divine
Is divine mercy. She, who had rebelled,
Was into meekness softened and subdued;
Did, after trials not in vain prolonged,
With resignation sink into the grave;
And her uncharitable acts, I trust,
And harsh unkindnesses are all forgiven,
Tho', in this Vale, remembered with deep awe."

(766–77)

In this passage Aggy Fisher is reduced to an emblem of resignation and submission, a vehicle for communal feelings of charity and forgiveness. Wordsworth acknowledges no basis for her frustrations other than meanness.

The next story is a narrative more generally familiar to readers of Wordsworth: a story of a young woman seduced and abandoned by her lover (a "rash betrayer," 1006) and left with a child to care for on her own. Her grave and that of her infant inspire the Vicar's narrative:

["]There, by her innocent Baby's precious grave,
And on the very turf that roofs her own,
The Mother oft was seen to stand, or kneel
In the broad day, a weeping Magdalene.
Now she is not; the swelling turf reports
Of the fresh shower, but of poor Ellen's tears
Is silent; nor is any vestige left
Of the path worn by mournful tread of her
Who, at her heart's light bidding, once had moved
In virgin fearlessness, with step that seemed
Caught from the pressure of elastic turf

Upon the mountains gemmed with morning dew,
In the prime hour of sweetest scents and airs.
—Serious and thoughtful was her mind; and yet,
By reconcilement exquisite and rare,
The form, port, motions, of this Cottage-girl
Were such as might have quickened and inspired
A Titian's hand, addrest to picture forth
Oread or Dryad glancing through the shade
What time the hunter's earliest horn is heard
Startling the golden hills.["]

(811–31)

The Vicar's description suggests that the young man promised marriage but broke his vow. After she was abandoned Ellen gave birth to a child, and her spirit was renewed by feelings of maternal love. But when the baby died from illness after Ellen had gone off to work and left it in her mother's care, Ellen could not recover. Although Ellen had faith and was accepted by her mother and the Vicar, she reproached herself for her situation. The Vicar repeats the Magdalene image:

["] … a rueful Magdalene!
So call her; for not only she bewailed
A mother's loss, but mourned in bitterness
Her own transgression …["]

(987–90)

The Magdalene allusion once again contrasts with Ellen's earlier, innocent beauty, made universal by the comparison to a mythological figure painted by Titian. At the same time that the Vicar preaches forgiveness and charity, he reminds the reader that Ellen had committed a "transgression" that led to her unhappiness. She deserves, the Vicar implies, the sympathy that Jesus bestowed on Mary Magdalene (commonly interpreted as a repentant prostitute), but, we might add, only in a constrictive morality would Ellen be thus compared. Perhaps Wordsworth was thinking not just of Luke 7:38 but of his own earlier reference to Mary Magdalene in the ninth book of The Prelude, a painting of a weeping Mary Magdalene by Charles le Brun (in the 1805 version, 72–80) that had affected him in revolutionary France. Once again he rewrites the story of transgression and abandonment to achieve a happier resolution. The Vicar's narrative ends with Ellen's pious acceptance of her fate, and she becomes an emblem of spiritual hope.

In each of these narratives from The Excursion Wordsworth shows a form of transgression against custom that prevents a life of domestic

happiness. In the last narrative that is included in later editions of the sixth book of The Excursion, the Vicar tells the story of a widower and his six daughters, a "sisterhood" (1182) who make a home for their bereft father and devote themselves to his contentment. The book originally ended with another story about a man who lost his first wife and almost lost his land but was happily saved from the loneliness of widowerhood by a formidable-sounding "virtuous Woman, of grave years / And of prudential habits" (1241–42) and from economic ruin and loss of his "paternal fields" (1220) by the "liberal hand" (1238) of his creditor.^[43] Perhaps Wordsworth wanted to end this book on a more idyllic note, so the Vicar provides a long description of the garden, the emblem of the family's self-sufficiency and happiness:

          "Brought from the woods the honeysuckle twines
Round the porch, and seems, in that trim place,
A plant no longer wild; the cultured rose
There blossoms, strong in health, and will be soon
Roof-high; the wild pink crowns the garden wall,
And with the flowers are intermingled stones
Sparry and bright, rough scatterings of the hills.
These ornaments, that fade not with the year,
A hardy Girl continues to provide;
Who, mounting fearlessly the rocky heights,
Her Father's prompt attendant, does for him
All that a boy could do, but with delight
More keen and prouder daring; yet hath she,
Within the garden, like the rest, a bed
For her own flowers and favourite herbs, a space,
By sacred charter, holden for her use.["]

(1149–64)

The cultivated garden in which wild plants are tamed and trained to grow according to plan seems to represent the possibility of hope and happiness. The Vicar sees the garden as the girls' responsibility and their birthright ("By sacred charter"). Perhaps there is no trouble yet in this garden because none of the daughters is yet herself "a full-blown flower" (1130). And the poverty, doubt, and desire that motivated the other tales are banished from this idyllic space. Whatever the other narratives have led us to expect, Wordsworth ends this one with the Vicar's approving glance inside their home, where he sees the eldest daughter at her spinning wheel, teaching "some Novice of the sisterhood" (1182) the skill she knows so well. Although emphasis is on the redemptive power of this sisterhood, we should note that the father has taught his motherless

daughter to spin and that the energetic younger girl does "all that a boy could do." This flexibility reminds us of the world of "Michael," where domestic labor is shared by all. But there are no patrimonial fields to lose here—only the modest plot of cultivated ground.

It is not such a big step from this idyllic setting to the domestic ideology of Victorian England. The image of six daughters ministering to their widowed father is a variant of a familiar Victorian narrative, especially the picture of the oldest daughter "teaching some Novice of the sisterhood" (1182), taking on a motherly role. As we shall see in the next chapter, Wordsworth had an abiding interest in the education of daughters.

These images of domestic bliss, from the prefatory stanzas of The White Doe to The Excursion, depend on the family functioning in unison. There can be no discordant voices, no major rebellions, and no disruptive passions. Wordsworth's vision of domestic happiness does not include dangerously passionate or unruly women like Ellen or Aggy Fisher. Even blameless female figures who threaten this domestic world, like Caroline in "It is a Beauteous Evening," must be banished. Wordsworth's vision depends on women who sacrifice their individual desires to find happiness in home life or in the world beyond. As we shall see, in his own life Wordsworth expected no less from the women he loved.