Responding to the Spectral Voice of the Outcast: Reading of William Wordsworth's "The Thorn"

William Wordsworth's "The Thorn" revolves around the following questions: Who is Martha? Why does she go to the mountain top and repeat her doleful cry? To these questions, it gives us two different kinds of answers; one derives from the villagers, and the other from the narrator. This essay attempts to examine how the answers exemplify two different critical approaches to the problem of community, using Jacques Lacan's account of sexual difference in his seminar on Encore as a guiding thread of analysis. The important thing to retain here is that sexual difference in Lacan's seminar on Encore does not so much indicate biological determinations as two distinct forms of relating to the other which are intimately bound up with the question of how a community is constructed and maintained. The first form, called "masculine," suggests that it is a radical exception to a community that makes possible the community as a field of totality or sameness; the second form, called "feminine," shows that each of the subjects cannot be regarded as a member of a closed community which is guaranteed by the exceptionality, but as an exception that is radically singular. This in turn leads us to consider the possibility that the masculine form has to do with the villagers' effort to distinguish themselves from Martha and the feminine form with the way in which the narrator confronts and represents her. In the course of his formulation of sexuation graph, Lacan stresses that the masculine side must be supplemented by the feminine side, which allows us to elaborate on why, concerning Martha, the narrator does not just keep the completely different position from the villagers'. This is to say that the villagers' representation of Martha as an exception to the community should be supplemented by the narrator's attempt to tell Martha's story as the villagers do and at the same time to capture something of her enigmatic unrepresentability. Bearing in mind Charles Shepherdson's elaboration of traumatic memory, this essay also tries to clarify how the narrator preserves and even transmits something of Martha's truth that is embodied in her uncontrollable and unassimilable cry.