HyperCultura (Apr 2024)
“The Hermit Sits A(ll) (in) One”: Linguistic Equivocations in “Tintern Abbey”
Abstract
The source meaning and its analytic worth in William Wordsworth’s “Lines, Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798,” are rendered oblivious to us, I argue, when one does not take into account the fact that Wordsworth’s connotations are hid across both English and German lexicons, allowing him the advantage of linguistic polyvalency, alongside its ambiguity. Wordsworth’s meanings across the words “one,” “all,” “still,” “man,” and “sublime” overlap, forcing his readers to recognize two important implications: first, that Wordsworth, almost authoritatively, upholds the traditional hierarchy between genders; second, that the poem’s objective meanders into an ideology, where the pluralization of the Wordsworthian “men” is posited as the primary, pedagogical objective in Wordsworth’s poem. Psychoanalytic nuances, carefully incorporated within Wordsworth’s narration, uphold his central doctrine which, theoretically, fosters the de-feminization of Dorothy towards the end of the poem—a conscious stance undertaken at the risk of traditional readings and interpretation of Dorothy’s empowerment in the poem. The paper concludes with a fresh take on Dorothy’s prolonged illness since the early 1830s, where I argue that it was psycho-physiological, triggered by her Wordsworthian sacrifice.
