“Nature’s Law” and “the Hour of Feeling”: Wordsworth’s Critique of Criminal Justice in Lyrical Ballads

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper is an attempt to investigate, on the one hand, the limits of the criminal justice system, and, on the other hand, the efficacy of the community transmission of emotions through a narrator’s voice. Both of these themes appear prominently in two poems of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), “Andrew Jones” and “The Two Thieves”. While the speaker unreservedly abhors Andrew Jones, he shares with the whole community a warm affection for the petty criminals of “The Two Thieves.” In “Andrew Jones,” the narrator begins the poem with remarks of unbridled enmity for Jones and his children: since Jones shows no pity for a traveler with disabilities, snatching away a penny left for him, he deserves to be swept away from the neighborhood to the rough music of the press-gang. In contrast with the animus expressed towards Jones, the speaker of “The Two Thieves” is biased towards the eponymous reprobates, even though they continue to steal by means of wiles and deceptions. Well-known to the community, the two thieves are ninety-year-old Daniel and his three-year-old grandson. Yet the speaker blesses Old Daniel, his grandson and his daughter in the closing stanza, precisely because of the charitable virtue they plant in the hearts of spectators and neighbors. This paper seeks to argue that Wordsworth endeavors to represent the individuating process of the author, speaker, character and the reader in terms of their emotional engagement in the poetic critique of criminal justice. It is through the poetic texts that the poet deals with the question of emotional exchange and challenges the monolithic reduction of petty criminals into the objects of a penal code. In doing so, Wordsworth invites us to take part in a form of affective community that is constituted by author, speaker, character, and reader as an irreducible individual. Consequently, Wordsworth creates a new sense of justice by resisting the existing laws through his poetics of feelings as a site of contestation.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. Introduction
• Ⅱ. The “press-gang” as a means of wartime criminal justice in “Andrew Jones”
• Ⅲ. Discretion and Pardoning in “The Two Thieves”
• Ⅳ. Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Abstract