Encounters with the Outcast: The Ethical Relation in Wordsworth and Lacan

This dissertation examines the ethical importance of the moments in William Wordsworth's poetry when language verges on silence or presents experience as finally unintelligible, and explores the ethical dimension of outcast figures intimately connected with the problem of this void in signification, on the basis of Jacques Lacan's insights concerning psychoanalytic ethics. The question that orients the examination of the ethical issues embodied in Wordsworth's poetry is how one should encounter or represent the outcast figure as a rupture in meaning. And the ethics of subjectivity which Lacan explores in terms of his theories of the gaze, feminine jouissance, and the reconsideration of the nature of community which these entail, allow us to see more clearly the importance of the profound and mysterious encounters found in Wordsworth's poetry—often between a speaker and some "outcast" other.;Chapter One rereads three poems included in Lyrical Ballads—"The Thorn," "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" and "We Are Seven”—taking as a guideline for analysis Lacan's account of the "not-all" which is tied to the ethical import of feminine jouissance. Chapter Two explores the speaker's sudden encounters with three outcast figures introduced in The Prelude—a blind beggar, a discharged soldier and a drowned man.in terms of Lacan's theory of the gaze. The concept of gaze which Lacan develops in order to articulate a specific moment in the constitution of the subject provides an important clue to read the encounters not simply in relation to the outcast figures, but also in relation to the speaker himself. In addition, this chapter reconsiders the Winander Boy episode as describing the subject‘s gaze present at his own death. Chapter Three examines The Ruined Cottage as the story of Margaret transmitted by the Pedlar to the narrator, through Lacan‘s ethics of speaking well. The ethics of speaking well leads us to understand the way in which the Pedlar preserves and transmits the truth of Margaret without covering up her fundamental unintelligibility.