Strangers And The Deep Community:a Cultural Approach To Wordsworth

Recent thematic studies on William Wordsworth(1770-1850)have by and large overlooked the issue of strangers,hence the neglect of his contribution to the debates on the stranger question among Romantics.Therefore,this thesis proposes to probe into Wordsworth’s depiction of strangers and his role in tackling the stranger syndrome.This study is an attempt to testify to the fact that William Wordsworth has contributed to the composite voice of Romantic poetry on the issue of strangers by conceiving of a stranger-embracing deep community.It is the age of Romanticism that has witnessed the raging issues of strangers and community in unprecedented depth and scope.Due to the individualistic rationalism that ran rampant in Wordsworth’s times,innumerable individuals were uprooted from the originally close-knit communities,and thus reduced to strangers wandering without any fixed and communal bonds.The majority of the strangers under his pen,therefore,are the marginalized poor in these abject conditions,and what Wordsworth seeks is exactly the reception of strangers,through sympathy and mutual understanding,by a deep community.Still noteworthy is that this reception is not premised on converting strangers into close acquaintances of a community.Thus,reserving their strangeness is a distinctive feature of Wordsworth’s delineation of strangers,who tend to remain strangers to the last.He certainly believes that love among people should not be based on the degree of familiarity,but on common humanity,out of which understanding and compassion grow,sympathy for strangers in particular.This leads to a more critical but often overlooked point in Wordsworth’s poems: love for strangers will lead to love for all mankind.It is through the mediation of strangers that Wordsworth’s love for all human beings is ignited and spread.This love for strangers is embodied in the act of carefully listening to strangers.It is the process of hearkening that breaks up the boundaries between the inside and the outside,and brings together various human souls that would otherwise remain separate.Based on such listening and consequent understanding,Wordsworth imagines deep communications of shared feelings,beliefs and ideas,which are indispensable for the realization of a deep community.Running parallel in significance to his concern for strangers is Wordsworth’s notion of community.To possess adequate depth,a community should not stay content with simply accommodating strangers,but rather encourage a warmer and more reciprocal interaction between strangers and the community that receives them.On the one hand,Wordsworth believes that strangers can be the new blood to a community as they can strengthen the communal bonds while invigorating the community with wholesome qualities;on the other hand,it is the community’s responsibility that it takes initiative to extend sincere and warm hospitality to strangers so that they develop a sense of belonging.One may thus safely conclude that Wordsworth’s community is ultimately the community of all human beings,and that strangers are an integral part of his blueprint for an ideal community.