Rethinking Therapeutic Reading. Kelda Green

Borderers is concerned with psychological rather than physical movement, mental transitions and incomplete internal changes which, privately existent only fleetingly between definite points of public action, are so difficult to observe. As Mortimer – the tragedy’s main character – says as he stands on the cusp of committing a terrible crime, ‘There is something / Which looks like a transition in my soul, / And yet it is not’.⁶ In The Borderers Wordsworth is concerned with identifying those points of transition which do exist, though lost in the moment of their very conversion into abrupt event. As Rivers, the villain of the tragedy, states in Act III:

      Action is transitory, a step, a blow –

      The motion of a muscle – this way or that –

      ‘Tis done – and in the after vacancy

      We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed.⁷

      It was within that ‘after vacancy’ that Wordsworth had found himself writing The Borderers.

      The tragedy is set in thirteenth-century England during the Baronial Revolts which turned the north of the country into a strange and lawless no man’s land. Wordsworth uses this historical setting as a testing ground, conducting an experiment to re-examine – within the controlled space of a five-act tragedy – his experiences of the Revolution and the effects of a lawless vacuum on human psychology. Wordsworth writes in the Fenwick note: ‘As to the scene and period of action, little more was required for my purpose than the absence of established law and government, so that the agents might be at liberty to act on their own impulses.’⁸ ‘At liberty’ hints at a more problematic freedom than the Liberté lauded in the slogans of the French Revolution.

      There are three acts of desertion or betrayal in this tragedy. The first takes place in Act III when Mortimer abandons an old blind man called Herbert on a heath, having been manipulated by Rivers into believing him to be an imposter, posing as the father of the woman Mortimer loves. He leaves him ‘where no foot of man is found, no ear / Can hear his cries’.⁹ But the tragedy’s real psychological starting point and original model of betrayal is revealed in Act IV when Rivers tells the retrospective story of how, when sailing back from Palestine, he had been persuaded by the rest of the ship’s crew to turn against his captain and abandon him on a desert island. It is this act which is replicated in different forms – and each time with different configurations of guilt throughout the tragedy.

      RIVERS: One day at noon we drifted silently

      By a bare rock, narrow and white and bare.

      There was no food, no drink, no grass, no shade,

      No tree nor jutting eminence, nor form

      Inanimate, large as the body of man,

      Nor any living thing whose span of life

      Might stretch beyond the measure of one moon;

      To dig for water we landed there – the captain

      And a small party of which myself was one.

      There I reproach’d him for his treachery

      His temper was imperious, and he struck me –

      A blow! I would have killed him, but my comrades

      Rush’d in between us – They all hated him –

      And they insisted – I was stung to madness –

      That we should leave him there, alive – we did so.¹⁰

      There is a terrible simplicity to Rivers’s final three words, ‘we did so’, for like the firing of a starting pistol, they initiate the tragic momentum of the whole play. ‘Action is transitory’, but there is then an after-sense of contagion running through the tragedy as different characters not only repeat the same acts but also repeat the same words and syntactical forms, unconsciously demonstrating how the driving mental structures behind those acts have spread between them. Mortimer’s construction, ‘no foot of man is found, no ear / Can hear his cries’, finds its root here in Rivers’s own repetition of the words ‘no’ and ‘nor’ which strip away all life from this place, before ending ironically with that very word ‘alive’.