Things, Words, Words-Worth

Abstract

This paper attempts to demonstrate that Wordsworth’s things consti- tute, and are constituted by, a fundamental relatedness, which the poet envisions as an increasing expansion of beings. Through his system of things, Wordsworth provides an alternative to move beyond Romantic individualism and anthropocentric attitude toward nonhuman objects. Wordsworth’s things are capable of speaking and performing; neverthe- less, he often puts the significance of things at the boundary between their objectivity and his consciousness. When read under the framework of things, “Tintern Abbey” is a poem in which eighteenth-century object- based epistemology is overcome to invigorate the connection between the life of things and human. Unlike New Historicists’ perspectives, Wordsworth doesn’t approve of landscape as a container of historical facts and empirical evidence for the past. It also gives us a framework of things that negates human’s privilege over natural objects. Wordsworth’s concept of “words as things” keeps the idea of things as the “active and effective” agency. It denies the opposition of words to things. In “The Thorn” words consistently reverse their utilization as ref- erential tools, as is displayed by Martha Ray’s insistence on using the same words repeatedly. Repetition, an incidence of the materiality of words, here enacts certain performativity powered by words as things. Wordsworth’s system of things exceeds the distinction between the mate- rial and immaterial and leads us into an opening between the two spheres. Most of all, Wordsworthian materiality of words keeps us from relapsing into an undifferentiated, deadened redundancy operated by the equalizing instruments.