"Look in My Face": The Dramatic Ethics of the Borderers‪.‬

REEVE PARKER'S EXCELLENT ARTICLE ON THE BORDERERS, "'IN SOME SORT Seeing With My Proper Eyes': Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris," begins with the specter of Mortimer wandering alone on the barren heath, where "[n]o human ear shall ever hear my voice" (V.iii.267), (1) and concludes that in this wandering Wordsworth rejects the kind of rhetorical coup de grace represented by Karl Moor in Schiller's Die Rauber (a hero Mortimer closely resembles) in favor of a "deist ex machina--inspired international brigade of heroes, of pentecostally vocal, aeolian worthies": One might wonder exactly what the rhetorical politics of this sort of automatic writing is. At first, Parker's view of Wordsworth would seem to move Wordsworth firmly into the realm of the Romantic ideology--an illusory vision of the individual poet's consciousness turned into collective consciousness. But if Wordsworth's rhetorical stance is ultimately about consciousness, it is also about rhetoric--the "gift of tongues"--and particularly about active rhetoric--a speech that can "do / For France what without help she could not do." It is a rhetoric of immediate spontaneity, a rhetoric of "everyone already knows." But it is also a rhetoric of future promise, of the "wonderous power of words" that can do a work of honor.