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Fh.A>..Et T. '-Fl)~ LOVE'S EXCESS AND UNMEANT BITTERNESSa AMBIVALENT LOVE RELATIONSHIPS IN COLERIDGE'S "CHRISTABEL" A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree lJ!aster of Arts by Diane !2ewhurst, B. ·A. The Ohio State University 1975 Approved by fh. a>..et T. '-fl)~ Adviser Department of English 11 Table of Contents Page Introduction • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 1 I. The Parent/Child Relationship ••••••••••••••••• 8· II. Friendship ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 32 III. The Sexual Relationship••••••••••••••••••••• 50 Conclusion••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ?8 Notes •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• SJ List of Works Cited •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 90 1 Introduction During the many years which intervened be­ tween the composition and the publication of CHRISTABEL, it became almost as well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale.... From almost all of our most celebrated Poets, and from some with whom I had no personal acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of admiration that (I can truly say) ap­ peared to myself utterly disproportionate to a work that pretended to be nothing more than a common Faery Tale.... -This before publication. And since then, with very few exceptions, I have heard no­ thing but abuse, and this too in a spirit of bitterness at least as disproportionate to the pretensions of the poem, had it been the most pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous eulogies and far more in­ explicable. l Surely Coleridge jests when he calls his unfinished "Christabel" a "common Faery Tale." If not, then the joke is on the countless twentieth-century critics who have labored to penetrate the interlaced sexual, religious, and psychological symbolism and the maze of balanced oppo- sites in "Christabel." For years critics have tried to explain the strange power this poem exerts on the minds of men, a power which could inspire Walter Scott in the writing of The Lay of the Last Minstrel and cause Percy Shelley to go shrieking out of a room in the belief that he had seen eyes in the breasts of his wife. The same poem could fill Coleridge's contemporaries, such as Haz­ litt, with disgust, while inspiring others to compose 2 vulgar doggerel imitations of it. Today we are more ho- mogeneous in our response to "Christabel." We see it as a great poem, in fact, one of Coleridge's three greatest works, produced in the "annus mirabilis." But , judging from modern criticism, the diverse and contradictory inter­ pretations of "Christabel," we understand it little better· than those whose abuse of the poem Coleridge lamented. Norman Fruman remarks that the "precise grounds" on which "Christabel" should be "rationally admired has always been a massive embarrassment to critics.•2 The poet himself did not consider "Christabel" profound or particularly difficult (if his own remarks about the poem can be trusted~ ._,-­ yet for us it is "far more inexplicable." The con.fusing and extensive corpus of "Christabel" criticism actually can be divided into two main categories, the literary and the psychological. Arthur Nethercott heads the first, the literary school. His book, The Road to Tryermaine, probably the most ambitious work on "Chris­ tabel" to date, follows a path similar to the one Lowes led to Xanadu, tracing literary sources. Nethercott and his followers, e. g., John Adlard, assume that "Christabel" stands in the tradition of the Gothic romance. To them t,.-/. the question is not whether the ambiguous Geraldine (one of the three major characters of the poem) is human or supernatural, but whether she is a witch, lamia, or vam- J pire. They also assume that Geraldine acts to the detri- ment of the innocent Christabel at the prompting of some extra-human power, either evil or good (it is hard to say which). To the psycholog;cal critics, such as G. Wilson Knight, Edgar Jones, and R. P. Basler, the Gothic inter- pretation·is ridiculous oversimplification. Of course, Geraldine appears to be an evil supernatural creature, but, as all educated modern men know, evil originates in the mind of man. It is Gerlaidne's twisted mind that harms Christabel. Thus, for these critics, especially Norman Fruman, the important question again is not whether Geraldine is supernatural or human but whether she is a lesbian, a male (in disguise) rapist, or Christabel's mother (committing incest). The psychological school has an advantage over the literary in being able to explain why Coleridge could not finish "Christabel" by identifying him with their version of Geraldine. According to them, Coleridge abandoned the poem because in the midst of writ- ing it he realized that he ?!!! the horrible Ge~aldine -------· But taken separately neither of the two schools offers a satisfying explication of "Christabel." The problem is that this poem is clearly like a Gothic romance, especially Part I with its partlcuiarly eerie atmosphere, but it is, at the same time, much more complicated than one by vir­ tue of its ambiguity. For example, the reader of 4 "Christabel" do.es. not know for certain if Geraldine is human or otherwise, good or evils nor does he know exact­ ly. what her terrible crime is. In addition, by the time the reader reaches Part II of the poem, the Gothic eeri­ ness has all but disappeared and the story changes to one of intra-familial: relationships. Consequently, the reader of "Christabel" needs the insights of both the literary, Gothic-oriented critics and the psychological ones. In one respect b.oth groups of critics have failed. They have focused their attention on Geraldine and Chris­ tabel, admittedly the dominant relationship, but, for the most part, they have ignored much of what goes on in Part II between Christabel and her father, Leoline, Geraldine and Leoline, Roland (Geraldine's father) and Leoline, as well as the bard Bracy and his master, Leoline. Obvi-· ously, if all our attention is on Geraldine and Christabel, a third major character is overlooked. One cannot but wonder what all these other relationships have to do with what both the literary and psychological critics take to be the theme of the poem, the ambiguity of evil (embodied in Geraldine), or the fall of innocence (embodied in Chris­ tabel). Virginia Radley has an answer. She proposes that the theme of "Christabel" is not evil but love! She arrived at this conclusion via the "psycho-sexual" approach to the poema s I would suggest that the critic who intends to support the psycho-sexual interpretation give some attention to the Notebooks •••• In an examination of them, I found two or three references which might be pertinent. In particular were the various allusions to the Greek poet, Sappho.... I do not be­ lieve that Coleridge exuded sophistication in matters of sexual perversion, but I have no doubt that he had some awareness of such matters ••• beyond the area circumscribed by witchcraft and demonology. • •• the allusion to Sappho in the context of love is relevant to the point in question herea "To write a series of Love Poems- truly Sapphic, save they shall have a large Interfusion of moral Sentiment cand1 calm Imagery on Love in all moods of the mind- Philosophic, fantastic, in moods of high enthusiasm, of Simple Feel­ ings, of mysticism, of Religion- comprize in it all the practice cand1 all the phil­ osophy of love (p. 1064). Professor Coburn sets the date of this entry as December 1801, scarcely too late to be relevant in a consideration of the meaning of Christabel. If I interpret the passage correctly, Cole­ ridge had in mind a plan to show love in its many facets and was projecting a "series of love Poems" ••• We know, for example, that Coleridge broke into the writing of Christabel to write the poem Love, and that Love raised some of the same questions as doe'SCliristabel •••• Such comprises the evidence I could find which might be used to bolster tbe psy­ chological explication of Christabel.) Surely the relationships in Part II already mentioned, i. e., between father and daughter, friend and friend, seem more in keeping with a poem about love than about evil. But any astute reader may raise the objection that all the characters in the poem who once loved each other are at odds with one another by the end of Part II. So how can it be a poem about love? Just as the unmistakable evil 6 in Geraldine is ambivalent (sometimes seeming good), the love· in all the relationships in the poem, including Geraldine and Christabel's, is ambivalent. Anyone famil- iar with biographies of Coleridge knows that his own inti­ mate relationships with loved ones, parents, brothers, spouse, children, and friends, were invariably ambivalent and shortlived. In writing poetry about love he probably wrote of love as he knew it in his own life. Of course, there is no definite proof that Coleridge intended "Chris­ tabel" to be a poem about love, as Radley claims. In fact, it seems at first, as we noted, like a Gothic tale of evils but, it is easy to see how writing about evil could have led Coleridge to an analysis of failed love re- lationships. The real evil in "Christabel" turns out to be the failure of love in inter-personal relai:i:>nships •. Unfortuantely, Coleridge could no more easily harmonize the conflicting elements in these complex, failed relation­ ships in the poem than he could do so in his own life. Werner Beyer comments on the "evil" in "Christabel"• Part II reveals the ascendance, the conta­ gion, and the disintegrating effects of evil in terms, increasingly psychological, and it may be autobiographic, of human fear and ambivalence, lone14ness, estrangement, and baffled paralysis. It remains to be seen how closely the major love re­ lationships in "Christabel," which I take to be the 7 parental/filial relationship, friendship, and the sexual relationship, do parallel Coleridge's own.
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