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The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge's “Christabel”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Jonas Spatz
Jonas Spatz*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Kansas City
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Abstract

Most interpretations of “Christabel” ignore the creative context from which it emerged. In his notebooks and letters, Coleridge developed a theory of the nature of human sexuality and its importance as the foundation of love and marriage. In a series of poems written from 1797 to 1801, Coleridge dramatized the problem of sexual maturation by focusing on the betrothal of a girl threatened by her own sexuality. “Christabel,” the culmination of this period, traces the heroine's attempt to come to terms with her erotic impulses, to recognize their essential role in her love for her absent knight, and to progress from adolescence to womanhood. Geraldine, the projection of those impulses, is the woman she yearns and fears to become. Although the poem is unfinished, its fairy-tale structure, psychology, and symbolism, along with its relation to Coleridge's other poems and his ideas about sex, love, and marriage, indicate that the continuation summarized by James Gillman accurately describes Coleridge's intentions.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , January 1975 , pp. 107 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

1 Norman Fruman, Coleridge the Damaged Archangel (New York: Braziller, 1971), p. 372.

2 Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 191–98.

3 David Beres, “A Dream, a Vision and a Poem,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32 (1951), 106–08.

4 Edward E. Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1953), pp. 121–22.

5 Arthur H. Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine (New York: Russell, 1962), pp. 24–26.

6 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry N. Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1836), pp. 70–71.

7 The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl L. Griggs (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956–71), i, 145.

8 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 11 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), Entry 2556.

9 The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 1912), i, 388. In the remainder of this essay, references to the 2 volumes will be incorporated into the text and abbreviated CPW.

10 “Mark you, Southey!—/ will do my Duty” (Collected Letters, I, 145).

11 See “Lines Written at Shurton Bars,” CPW, i, 96–100, and “The Hour When We Shall Meet Again,” CPW, i, 96.

12 E.g., “Sara- is uncommonly cold in her feelings of animal Love—” (Notebooks, i, Entry 979).

13 The erotic intensity of this passion can be more clearly seen in a stanza Coleridge added in 1810 but later discarded:

I saw her bosom

heave

rise

and swell, Heave and swell with inward sighs—

I could not choose but love to see Her gentle bosom rise.

(CPW, i, 334, n.)

14 It is interesting in this connection to note the discrepancy between the mother's speech in the text accusing Mary of pride, envy, hypocrisy, and prodigality and the Preface, where Coleridge has her say simply, “O Edward ! indeed, indeed, she is not fit for you—she has not a heart to love you as you deserve” (CPW, i, 268). Coleridge's real intention emerges in the Preface, written long after the fragment.

15 I am indebted for these details to Roy P. Basler, Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1948) and Gerald Enscoe, Eros and the Romantics (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).

16 Dreams, that made her moan and leap, As on her bed she lay in sleep.

(CPW, i, 216, n.)

17 Coleridge apparently sensed the immodesty involved and sometimes sought to tone down her urgency. The text reads:

But we will move as if in stealth,

And I beseech your courtesy,

This night, to share your couch with me.

(CPW, i, 220)

The manuscript version, however, emphasizes the secrecy of their movement toward the bedroom and Christabel's importunity:

So to my room we'll creep in stealth, And you to-night must sleep with me.

(CPW, i, 220, n.)

18 The manuscript reads “spicy” (CPW, i, 222, n.). Another example of Coleridge's tendency to “spiritualize” Christabel's personality occurs at 1. 137, where “devoutly” replaces “sweetly” (CPW, i, 220, n.). These revisions clearly indicate that Coleridge was aware and perhaps ashamed of the erotic element in the feelings he was describing. In one of his frequent attacks of revulsion against “Christabel,” he compared it unfavorably with Wordsworth's “Ruth,” a poem whose heroine is deserted by her dissolute lover but who, unlike Christabel, maintains the purity of her passion to the end. See Collected Letters, i, 631–32.

19 See 11. 447–50, 475–79, 566–72.

20 The suggestion that Géraldine frequently embodies the threat of sexual violation is closer to the surface of the poem than it seems. When “Christabel” was published in 1817, it was condemned as obscene, and Coleridge was enraged by the rumor that “Hazlitt from pure malignity had spread about the Report that Géraldine was a man in disguise” (Collected Letters, iv, 918). See Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine, pp. 33–35, for a discussion of this episode.

21 James Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Pickering, 1838), pp. 301–02.

22 Biographia Literaria (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1847), ii, 680.

23 Julius E. Heuscher, A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales (Springfield, 111.: C. C. Thomas, 1963), pp. 130–31.