Going into The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, I had the mindset of trying to decide what was being collected here. After brief review, I came to the conclusion that the speaker herself was not collecting anything (as much as I enjoy such poems), but if she wasn't, then who was? It's not as though Wordsworth is able to collect the thoughts and memories of his speaker and use them to his advantage, nor is he of the culture where the collection of the memory of the woman would be particularly significant.
Overall, I think Wordsworth was collecting an entirely new perspective, if he could. I would not put it past him to attempt to sort of collect the different view points of those around them and work from there in order to produce some of his best poetry and thought processes. Someone of a different culture would have been fascinating to Wordsworth, and after a little research on any traditional practices, putting a speaker in a culture-specific position would allow him to expand upon his own perceptions.
I feel the same way as well, I found myself looking for the connection but I could not find one.
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ReplyDeleteThis collection of poems has been discussed (by Alan Bewell in his book Wordsworth and the Enlightenment) as an ethnographic collection. While most of the poems turn the anthropologist's eye on the lower class peasantry of England, in this poem Wordsworth has read a passage from an explorer, Hearn, and used it to create a poem about someone from a different culture. The question is why he has decided to do this: is he trying to understand the perspective of someone from another culture? Or is he using this dramatic situation to provoke an emotional response in the audience? or can it be both? What does it mean for him to do this?
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