by Tim Fulford
[Fulford, Tim. "Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge's
Muses and Feminist Criticism." Romanticism On the
Net 13 (February 1999) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/kublarobinson.html>]
According to Thomas De Quincey, the poetics of Romanticism were organised
around a gender opposition: 'the Sublime...
in contraposition to the Beautiful, grew up on the basis of sexual
distinctions - the Sublime corresponding to the male, and
the Beautiful, its anti-pole, corresponding to the female'. (1) The
principal proponent of these gendered poetics was
Edmund Burke, for whom the sublime was characterised by the masculine
traits of power, terror, strength, greatness, and
the beautiful by the feminine qualities of softness, sympathy, and
feeling. (2) Burke's view of the feminine was criticised by
the contemporary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued that it amounted,
when used to define women's social role, to
a prescription for libertinism. (3) Burke's views, she asserted, rendered
women helpless, ill-educated beings. Valued (if at
all) only for their bodily appearance and compliance, they were rejected
when their looks faded because men found them
mentally dull. No longer entranced by their beauty, men became contemptuous
of the very weakness they had encouraged
women to adopt. They cast them off, to replace them with other mistresses
whose weakness was still attractively
accompanied by beauty. In the process, both men and women were degraded.
Inequality was perpetuated; men became
tyrants, women became victims.
Coleridge was briefly a friend of Wollstonecraft. He was, in the 1790s,
a political enemy of Burke. But he was not a
feminist. Despite his political differences from the Reflections on
the Revolution in France, he often viewed the feminine in
a way similar to its author. And, according to a number of recent critics,
he adopted a Burkean view of the feminine in his
poetry. His poetry and poetics, it is suggested, borrowed a gendered
sublime and beautiful, in order to empower the
masculine and disempower the feminine. The male poet, it is argued,
was the principal beneficiary. He became sublime,
whereas he made of the female a beautiful but subordinate muse. Marlon
B. Ross, for instance, sees Coleridge as
participating in male Romanticism's struggle for a transcendent 'power
of self-possession, a power that is repeatedly willed
in the poetry by both overt and subliminal appeals to the virility
and masculinity of his creative project'. (4)
Ross's view of male Romanticism has as its test case Wordsworth's poetic
treatment of women. For Mary Jacobus too,
Wordsworth's poetic power was gained at the expense of the feminine,
and at women's cost. She shows that in
Wordsworth's poetry Dorothy is enlisted as a muse, only for her insights
and words to be absorbed into Wordsworth's
contemplation of his own superior genius. (5) For Anne K. Mellor, Wordsworth's
silencing of Dorothy was replicated by
Coleridge in 'Kubla Khan'. The treatment in that poem of the Abyssinian
maid is paradigmatic of the procedure of male
Romantics: they effect a 'total absorption' of the feminine which leaves
it - and the women who feature in their work -
'conquered' and 'enslaved'. (6) Margaret Homans declares that Wordsworthian
Romantic poetry 'states most compellingly
the traditional myth . . . of woman's place in language as the silent
or vanished object of male representation and quest'. (7)
The male Romantics, in other words, far from being opponents of the
gender inequality which Burke, and the social order
he defended, perpetuated, were complicit with his defence - and with
the social order itself (at least in so far as it concerned
women). They were not, in this area, radicals, and if they were not
libertines they were, in their poetry, conquerors.
In what follows I want to take issue with the idea that Coleridge participates
in a conquest and enslavement of the feminine.
(8) By investigating the poetics of 'Kubla Khan' and the implications
of his verse correspondence with Mary Robinson, poet
and spurned mistress of the Prince of Wales, I shall offer a more historically
nuanced account of Coleridge's versions of
femininity. (9) I shall contend that he undermined (sometimes even
as he set out) what Ross calls male Romanticism's
strategy of presenting poetry as 'a form of masculine empowerment'
and 'a paradigmatic form of manly action'. (10) Rather
than blame Coleridge for a poetic 'conquest' of the feminine, we need
to see him as an unstable writer, who, at his best,
opens gender roles and gendered poetics to question. Unsure of his
own masculinity, in poetry as in life, Coleridge often
leaves masculine and feminine, men and women, in undetermined relationships,
their gender and sexual identities uncertain
and fluid (Geraldine in 'Christabel' being an example of this). (11)
As Laura Claridge notes,
the economies energising the majority of [male
Romantics'] poems aimed at recuperating the special potency
that accrues to marginalised forces, in this
case, woman as that which is not always already written. Saying this
is not the same as accusing the poets of appropriating
such female voices. (12)
I. 'Kubla Khan'
'Kubla Khan' is Coleridge's most concentrated dramatisation of the conflicts,
sexual and implicitly political, produced
through the adoption of the gendered sublime and the beautiful. It
features a male figure of power, the Khan, who is a
sublime genius - a conqueror, a statesman, a master-builder. It also
features a poetic genius, sublime in his capacity to
command awe, who also builds - builds domes in the air, or the imagination.
Each of these figures is associated with a
female: the Khan with the 'woman wailing for her demon lover', the
poet with the Abyssinian maid, who sings rather than
wails. (13)
Critics of the poem divide on the crucial question of whether the sublime
conqueror Kubla Khan is analogous to, or
contrasts with, the sublime poet, and whether the Abyssinian maid resembles,
or differs from, the wailing woman. (14) If
one accepts that conqueror and poet, woman and maid are analogous,
then the poem seems to suggest that the poet's vision
seeks desperately to preserve, in transcendent form, the masculine
creativity that has built the pleasure dome. For the Khan
is like God in Genesis: he decrees and the dome is erected. His word
has immediate and direct power in the world: it seems
neither to require mediation nor the assistance of another. The Khan
is a creator who needs neither a muse; nor a wife. But
his creation is flawed: being a production of masculinity, and of a
violent masculinity to boot, it is haunted by a dominance
that issues in violent and libertine sexuality:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil
seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were
breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.
(PW, I, 297; ll. 14-21)
Shaped by a masculine sexuality to which women become victims, the Khan's
dome is a place in which women's suffering
and desire are heard as one in the sound of a 'savage' wail. But if
the dome is characterised by conquest and violence, it is
threatened by it too, for it is vulnerable to destruction, to 'ancestral
voices prophesying war' (l. 30).
The dome that the sublime poet proposes to build is not similarly vulnerable,
for it exists only in the imagination. But it is not
clear whether the poet can ever build it, for he doubts his own creative
power. He ends not with a successful construction,
but with a vision of the awe he would inspire, the sublimity he would
acquire, could he envision the dome in words. In a
recent article Jane Moore has construed this outcome as a failure by
the poet to attain the potency he desires. Reading the
poet at the poem's end as being analogous to the Khan, she sees him
as trying, but failing, to become a Khan himself, to
become a sublime creator whose masculinity is produced through the
conquest of the feminine. She declares
it is exactly at the moment when the poet fails
to master woman that he fails also to be master of himself, of his
own actions: the dome is never built and the
poem, at least the poem the preface promises, is never finished.
(15)
For Moore, the poet cannot 'revive within me / [the]symphony and song'
of the Abyssinian maid (ll. 42-43) and therefore
can neither master the feminine nor complete the poem.
Moore's argument is an intriguing one, for it highlights the extent
to which sublimity, creativity, and masculinity are bound
together in the poem, over and against visions of femininity. But in
assuming that Khan and poet are simply analogous
Moore overlooks some of the poem's distinctions in its portraits of
women and of master-builders. The damsel with a
dulcimer is to be distinguished from the 'woman wailing for her demon-lover!'
(l. 16). She is from the start an apparition in a
'vision', and she is not subordinated to a masterful and evil lover.
She does not wail, but sings and plays - signs of culture.
She offers 'deep delight' with her lyric; she gives a gift of poetry.
In other words, she is a muse, one who communicates the
arts of an ancient culture to which a poet might aspire - especially
as she unites words and music, like the minstrels and
bards whom Coleridge idealised. (16) She does not resemble, but differs
from, the unidentified woman who wails for her
demon lover, defined as that woman is by her bodily cry of desire/suffering.
Coleridge, that is to say, sets up an opposition,
not an analogy, making the poet and maid represent a cultured relationship,
a communication of spirit through song, to
contrast with the tyrannical and violent sexual relationship of the
Khan's building.
The building which the Abyssinian maid's symphony and song sponsors
is significantly different from the Khan's. Whereas
Kubla tries to conquer nature by his decree, to shape it to his will,
aping God and producing a dome vitiated by 'ancestral
voices prophesying war' (l. 30), the poet's dome exists only as a possibility
registered in the consciousness of writer and
reader. The poet's dome of air, no more substantial than the breath
of speech, is a more beneficent creation than the Khan's,
is an alternative to Kubla's mastery and to the subjugation it demands,
precisely because it exists only in the other-world of
fiction - a world in which the conditional has, through imagery, the
visual intensity of the apparently real. By the end of the
poem the dome can only be held together in suspension - not in a scene
imagined which might exist beyond the poem but as
a possibility of renewal held for as long as it takes to read the lines
- a tentative half state in which to say 'I would build that
dome in air' is to build it - a castle in the air of poetry.
The poet's dome, then, is dependent not on a Satanic conqueror of women,
but on the revival of their envisioned song in the
self-conscious creativity of the male poet. The damsel with a dulcimer
is a muse, a feminine song-within, without the
acceptance of which the male poet's creation is vitiated by exclusivity
and mastery as was the Khan's. The poet's
remodelling of creative power, for Coleridge, is dependent upon his
(for it is a he) willingness to be sponsored by the
feminine, to incorporate (his ideas of) a woman's voice into his own:
as he put it in a late notebook, 'in every true and manly
Man there is a translucent Under-tint of the Woman'. (17) It is, of
course, the male poet who sets this agenda, forms this
vision of the feminine, but it is one of revival, of sponsorship (in
Coleridge's terms, reciprocity) not mastery in the sense that
Moore suggests. Nor is it one of conquest or enslavement: it is the
male poet's failure to revive within himself the maid's
song that makes his building of the dome doubtful. It is the willingness
to hear another's voice within, but still to recognise
it as another's voice, that he seeks. The male poet does not absorb,
or wish to absorb, the feminine; rather, he seeks to
retain it as the other within the self. To do this is not to conquer
or enslave, but neither is it to allow the female her own
independent position: her voice remains hers, but it is valued for
its ability to complete the male's creative masculinity.
Coleridge does not reverse the process - value his masculinity in so
far as it may complete the femininity of the maid (or any
female poet).
In 'Kubla Khan' Coleridge constructs a feminine voice in order to licence
the masculine to create a poetry which both
envisions and itself enacts a fragile and timeless harmony. In this
sublime state male poet, poetry and audience are united in
rapture. They participate in a paradisial sublime to contrast with
the demonic and tyrannical sublime which the Khan's
masculinity creates. Coleridge, in other words, had made a version
of masculinity in opposition to the version, so powerful in
eighteenth-century politics and poetics, that defined a man as a sublime
conqueror of women. He had made the sublime man
dependent on a feminine Muse, thus replacing mastery with sympathy,
dominance with poetic chorus. In doing so, he
offered himself - and his readers - a more inclusive masculinity, one
attentive to and completed by a feminine voice. If,
however, this voice is not absorbed, silenced, or conquered, it is
registered in order that it may sponsor the semi-divine
vision which the male poet builds. It is he who gains, via a more inclusive
masculinity, a vision that seems to encompass both
masculine and feminine, centre and circumference, reason and sensibility.
It is because it can sponsor him, and lift him
beyond the vitiating gender stereotype provided by the Khan, that the
maid's voice is valued. Reviving her song allows the
male poet a transcendent wholeness that she herself does not attain:
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
(ll. 50-54)
What the Abyssinian maid would think of this is not recorded.
If Coleridge's new man's sublime is not built on or vulnerable to violence,
it is accessible only in renewed readings of the
poem - or hearings of the maid's song. In the Preface he added later
to the poem, Coleridge further qualified its already
tentative conclusion. He argued that the poem was a 'psychological
curiosity,' a fragment from 'reverie' whose vision he
could not consciously revive once the person from Porlock had interrupted
him. Thus he placed limits on his poem's
visionariness and on its revision of gender roles, denying it the status
of poetry and removing from himself the power to
consciously modify his own masculinity through poetic vision. The Preface,
that is to say, blurs the poet's responsibility for
what he has achieved. It implies that he provides no detailed model
for the revision of masculinity and sublimity in society or
self save by the example of the poem as a language of social and sexual
harmony accessible only in dreams and
drug-induced reveries. It is, apparently, only whilst half-asleep that
Coleridge can discover a new sublime and a new
manliness in which the feminine completes the masculine. (18)
II. Coleridge and Mary Robinson: Feminising the Sublime
After 1798 inspiration by a feminine muse seemed, for a while, no dream.
Coleridge found a poet prepared to act as his
Abyssinian maid, willing to sponsor his bardic song with her own music.
He found Mary Robinson, the former actress
whose appearance as Perdita in The Winter's Tale had, in 1778, brought
her to Prince George's attention. He had wooed
her under the name Florizel, and turned the Shakespearian 'shepherdess'
into his mistress. But he had later abandoned her,
leaving her to the life of the kept mistress of a series of well-known
public men, including Charles James Fox and Banastre
Tarleton. Robinson had turned to poetry to support herself after being
deserted by Tarleton.
Robinson's desertion by the Prince had led to a public scandal in 1781;
(19) in 1796 George's desertion of his wife for
another mistress reminded the public of what had formerly happened
to Robinson. George's tyrannical treatment of women
attracted widespread criticism, for it seemed to epitomise the aristocratic
immorality which was thought to be undermining
the constitution. Coleridge had himself published a poem critical of
George's treatment of his wife, 'On A Late Connubial
Rupture in High Life,' in which he hoped that George would mend his
ways and act, as he was supposed to do, as
protective husband and father: 'And ah! that Truth some holy spell
might lend / To lure thy Wanderer from the Syren's
power' (PW, I, 152).
Robinson's sexual life became a political issue. To conservative supporters
of the social order she was an emblem of female
immodesty, an example of the dangers posed to Britain by radical change.
Richard Polwhele attacked her along with
Wollstonecraft as ‘female Quixotes of the new philosophy’. (20) His
phrase saw them as self-deluding knights, seduced by
the romance of radical French ideas, when they should have been innocent
damsels. Similarly, the Annual Review reminded
women readers of her sexual past in order to deny her the power to
speak for them; Robinson, it proclaimed, wielded a
‘pen of vice’:
Before a tender-hearted young lady has committed
to memory the invocation to ‘Apathy', or learned to recite
with tragic emphasis the ‘Ode to Ingratitude',
let her at least be aware from what reflections the author
wished to take shelter in insensibility, and
for what favours her lovers had proved ungrateful. (21)
Opposition Whigs and radicals saw Robinson differently: to them she
became a symbol of the injustice perpetuated by the
aristocratic establishment which they were seeking to change. Her status
as a victim of royal libertinism was cemented by
the fact that she was, in fact, suffering from a paralysing disease.
Coleridge pitied her for this, but also admired her writing.
He did not seek to silence her authorial voice but promoted it in publications
over which he had influence. He and she
published poetic compliments to each other in the anti-ministerial
newspaper The Morning Post, the paper which printed
his political criticism of the government.
In the newspaper Coleridge presented their poetic relationship as one
of mutual sympathy, in noticeable contrast to the
sexual despotism Robinson had suffered as George's mistress. This gave
gender relations a political context because
sympathy for Robinson was implicitly a criticism of the Prince who
had abandoned her, undermining his chivalric duty to
protect. If George was Robinson's demon lover, abandoning her to wail,
Coleridge was, as he represented it, her fellow
poet, she his maid - as much French as Abyssinian. Coleridge placed
his ‘The Visions of the Maid of Orleans’ immediately
before Robinson's 'The Snow Drop' in the Morning Post of 26 December
1797. Taking advantage of the seasonal
emphasis on peace and forgiveness, Robinson's poem used the flower
as an image of herself as an abandoned, tender,
crippled female:
All weak and wan, with head inclined,
Its parent breast, the drifted snow;
It trembles while the ruthless wind
Bends its slim form; the tempest lours,
Its em'rald eye drops crystal show'rs
On its cold bed below. (22)
Coleridge's ‘Visions’ (an extract from ‘The Destiny of Nations’) use
similar maternal and sentimental imagery to link
Robinson with a French maid. He portrays Joan of Arc as a paragon of
female virtue: Joan encounters a family frozen to
death as they tried to escape the sacking of their village:
She meantime,
Saw crowded close beneath the couverture
A mother and her children - lifeless all,
Yet lovely! not a lineament was marred -
Death had put on so slumber-like a form!
It was a piteous sight! and one, a babe,
Lay on the woman's arm, its little hand
Smooth on her bosom. Wildly pale the maid
Gaz'd at the living wretch ... (23)
Coleridge's poem had a political purpose: by arousing sympathy for innocent
French womanhood besieged by war it
opposed the government's current war with revolutionary France. And
preceding Robinson's poem, it contextualised her
work in an implicitly political way as that of another innocent female
who, like Joan, was sacrificed to the cruelty of the
British aristocracy.
Robinson herself did not simply play upon her status as a suffering
victim of libertinism. She also offered herself as a muse
and respondent. In her 'To the Poet Coleridge' Robinson positioned
herself as the sympathetic admirer of a poet already
known for his radical opinions. She also positioned herself as a fellow
lyricist, as a woman whose song responded to, but
also inspired, Coleridge's words. Specifically, she associated herself
with the Abyssinian maid of 'Kubla Khan':
I'll mark thy 'sunny dome', and view
Thy 'caves of ice', thy fields of dew!
Thy ever-blooming mead, whose flower
Waves to the cold breath of the moonlight
hour! (24)
Here Robinson offers herself as the delighted viewer of and believer
in Coleridge's poetic landscape; her own verse appears
as the offspring of his fertility, his 'ever-blooming mead'. Mutual
sympathy replaces the sexual servitude Robinson had
suffered (or was agreed to have suffered) at the hands of the libertine
Prince. Coleridge's literary masculinity, Robinson
suggests, is productive through sympathy, rather than dominant through
sexuality. She shares the Abyssinian maid's song
with Coleridge, and then gives him a song of her own inspired by it:
And now, with lofty tones inviting,
Thy Nymph, her dulcimer swift-smiting,
Shall wake me in ecstatic measures,
Far, far removed from mortal pleasures!
In cadence rich, in cadence strong,
Proving the wondrous witcheries of song!
I hear her voice! thy 'sunny dome,'
Thy 'caves of ice,' aloud repeat,
Vibrations, maddening sweet!
Calling the visionary wanderer home.
She sings of thee, O! favoured child
Of minstrelsy sublimely wild!
Of thee, whose soul can feel the tone
Which gives to airy dreams a magic all thy
own!
(ll. 59-72)
Reading Kubla Khan, she is inspired to write, rather than reduced to being the wailing victim of a demon lover.
If Robinson found her poetic field enriched by Coleridge's, Coleridge
found in her - at least briefly - a lyric voice capable of
modifying his own. He admired her for exactly that for which he praised
the Abyssinian maid - her music. Recommending
her 'Jasper' for inclusion in the Annual Anthology, he 'thought the
metre stimulating'. (25) He also praised 'the fascinating
metre' of 'The Haunted Beach'. This latter poem was derivative of 'The
Ancient Mariner' in subject matter but succeeded in
intertwining lines of different metrical balance with an intricate
and unusual rhyme-scheme:
The Spectre-band, his messmates brave
Sunk in the yawning ocean,
While to the mast he lash'd him fast
And brav'd the storm's commotion.
The winter moon, upon the sand
A silv'ry carpet made,
And mark'd the Sailor reach the land,
And mark'd his murd'rer wash his hand
Where the green billows play'd. (26)
The last three lines of what Coleridge publicly called 'that absolutely
original Stanza' (27) suspend the expected resolution,
protracting the verse by introducing a couplet which, conclusive though
its rhyme might normally be, is itself superseded.
Suspending the reader's expectations of narrative sequence was, of
course, vital to Coleridge's own supernatural poetry,
and in appreciating Robinson's music Coleridge was paying tribute to
an ability which he understood to be more than merely
technical. It was, he thought, through control of metre and rhyme that
poetry could make readers suspend their disbelief in
the supernatural. (28) Prosody, Coleridge knew, could lull audiences
into 'poetic faith', make them temporarily believe in
events they had thought to be beyond nature. What was, and was not,
natural might then become a matter of doubt. And
this process, of course, was potentially radical, since what had been
assumed to be natural might include the established
social and political order.
Robinson's control of music intrigued Coleridge with the possibility
of modifying the understanding of gender on which the
established order was dependent. It was through a lyrical revision
of the sublime, made in reply to Robinson, that Coleridge
again attempted, as he had in 'Kubla Khan', to undo the Burkean assumption
that authority takes the form of a dominant
masculinity. He did so in a poem called 'A Stranger Minstrel' (1800).
This poem replied to Robinson's tributes to him. It
alluded to her poem to his son Derwent, in which she imagines, via
allusions to Coleridge's own verse, his son wandering
through 'Romantic Mountains' with 'brows sublime'. It echoed Robinson's
description of herself as a 'Stranger' and an
'untaught minstrel' in comparison with 'his loftier Muse'. (29) In
that poem Robinson had concluded with the hope that her
poetic sublime would outlive the sublime mountains of his birthplace:
'Still may thy name survive, sweet Boy! till Time / Shall
bend to Keswick's vale - thy Skiddaw's brow sublime!' (ll. 101-2).
Coleridge's ‘A Stranger Minstrel’ takes up the questions Robinson had
posed to the natural sublime. It too is set on
Skiddaw. It too considers the role of the poet, even as it alludes
to her poems:
In that sweet mood of sad and humorous thought
A form within me rose, within me wrought
With such strong magic, that I cried aloud,
'Thou ancient Skiddaw by thy helm of cloud,
And by thy many-colour'd chasms deep,
And by their shadows that for ever sleep,
By yon small flaky mists that love to creep
Along the edges of those spots of light,
Those sunny islands on thy smooth green height,
And by yon shepherds with their sheep,
And dogs and boys, a gladsome crowd,
That rush e'en now with clamour loud
Sudden from forth thy topmost cloud,
And by this laugh, and by this tear,
I would, old Skiddaw, she were here!
A lady of sweet song is she,
Her soft blue eye was made for thee!
O ancient Skiddaw, by this tear,
I would, I would that she were here!'
Then ancient Skiddaw, stern and proud,
In sullen majesty replying,
Thus spake from out his helm of cloud
(His voice was like an echo dying!):-
'She dwells belike in scenes more fair,
And scorns a mount so bleak and bare'.
(PW, I, 351, ll. 9-33)
So far, so conventional: Skiddaw speaks through the Burkean sublime.
But as he reads and quotes Robinson in the poem,
Coleridge seems to challenge his own need to have his nature poetry
confirmed as a protective and powerful masculine
authority. The masculine Skiddaw ('His voice was like a monarch wooing')
redefines his own sublimity in the words of
Robinson's poetry:
Now to the 'haunted beach' can fly,
Beside the threshold scourged with waves,
Now where the maniac wildly raves,
'Pale moon, thou spectre of the sky!'
No wind that hurries o'er my height
Can travel with so swift a flight.
I too, methinks, might merit
The presence of her spirit!
To me too might belong
The honour of her song and witching melody,
Which most resembles me,
Soft, various, and sublime,
Exempt from wrongs of Time!
(ll. 55-67)
A strange shift has occurred, for although Skiddaw says that Robinson's
song 'resembles me' it seems rather that he now
resembles it in being 'soft, various and sublime' rather than 'stern
and proud' and sublime (l. 28). The masculine majestical
sublime has been modified from within by Robinson's words as, for the
sake of the nation's moral health, Coleridge wished
the Prince of Wales to have been. Here Coleridge was publicly providing
an alternative version of masculine authority in
which monarchical mountains and the male poet are presented as softened
into feminine sensibility and yearning:
Thus spake the mighty Mount, and I
Made answer, with a deep-drawn sigh:-
'Thou ancient Skiddaw, by this tear,
I would, I would that she were here!'
(ll. 68-71)
This conclusion is as near as Coleridge comes to a poetry in which the
sublime is feminised. Here the conventionally
masculine is not just redefined as a power capable of encompassing
the feminine in an all embracing vision. Instead, the
mountain is both sublime and feminine, its masculinity in abeyance.
Borrowing the words of Robinson, words offered in
poetic correspondence as those of a muse writing of/from Coleridge's
own poetic landscape (the Lake District), Coleridge
lets woman's verse and a feminine discourse reset his own. He was able
to accept and adapt those words because they
were offered in poetic friendship, indeed in tribute, in terms with
which he identified himself. In a sense, then, Robinson, the
self-appointed Abyssinian muse, had colonised Coleridge's landscape
from within, by moving to Skiddaw and making it a
feminised ground. Coleridge, in response, neither acts as fatherly
protector, nor as a male poet bolstering his threatened
mastery with the admiring verse of a subordinate poetess. He envisages
not just a suspension of sublime power but a
feminine occupation of the traditionally masculine.
As was the case in 'Kubla Khan', Coleridge did not succeed in developing
a way in which the visions conjured up in his
poem could be translated into actions in the world beyond. That he
did not succeed was due in part to his own fear of the
radical unorthodoxy of the poetics he had sketched out. Susan Luther
has written astutely of both his unorthodoxy and his
fear. He was, she argues, groping towards a redefinition of the sublime
in which authority would be based not on
subordination but interchange, one that 'attempts to bring the lady's
terms to his own'. Ultimately unsuccessful, it was flawed
by Coleridge's desire simply to incorporate Robinson as woman and as
poet in his own self-reflection. In Luther's words it
displays 'the difference between the WOMAN and the MUSE as well as
their unsettling similarity, the hazards encountered
when the sublime of "SENSIBILITY!" and Fancy meets the sublime of .
. . Imagination'. (30) Coleridge's feminised sublime
proved too hot for him to handle.
After having written 'A Stranger Minstrel', Coleridge tended to retreat
from its implicitly radical version of femininity. He
reinscribed Robinson within a more conventional relationship, in which
sublime authority was again gendered as masculine.
In a letter of 1801, for example, he wished for Robinson the protection
of a good husband and of his own poetry. And he
quoted a letter of hers which suggests that she was ready to appeal
to such chivalric values. The quotation suggests that
Coleridge took refuge in the belief that Robinson simply confirmed
him in the role of powerful man and sublime nature poet:
Poor dear Mrs Robinson! you have heard of her
Death. She wrote me a most affecting, heart-rending Letter a
few weeks before she died, to express what
she called her death bed affection & esteem for me - the very last
Lines of her Letter are indeed sublime -
'My little Cottage is retired and comfortable.
There I mean to remain (if indeed I live so long) till Christmas.
But it is not surrounded with the romantic
Scenery of your chosen retreat: it is not, my dear Sir! the nursery of
sublime Thoughts - the abode of Peace - the
solitude of Nature's Wonders. O! Skiddaw! - I think, if I could
but once contemplate thy Summit, I should
never quit the Prospect it would present till my eyes were closed
for ever!'
O Poole! that that Woman had but been married
to a noble Being, what a noble Being she herself would have
been. Latterly, she felt this with a poignant
anguish. - Well! -
O'er her pil'd
grave the gale of evening sighs;
And flowers
will grow upon it's grassy Slope.
I wipe the dimming
Water from mine eyes -
Ev'n in the
cold Grave dwells the Cherub Hope!
(CL, II, 669)
Here Coleridge's lines of verse respond to Robinson's own idealisation
of the mountain as an abode of peace and a 'nursery
of sublime Thoughts'. They depict her death as a release of the kind
she sought when her 'eyes were closed for ever'. Her
grave becomes a nursery of the cherub hope; in the poetry of the man
who himself dwelt under Skiddaw pity for her is able
to release her from her thraldom to the sensible world of nature. Not
Skiddaw, but the male poet who writes under its
authority, becomes the locus of a sublime of translation from the sensible
to the spiritual, from bondage to nature to hope of
heaven. Coleridge, as the Lake District man and poet to whom Robinson
appeals in her dying weakness, becomes, in his
own eyes, the poetic husband who restores her lost nobility and respectability.
It is his capacity for pity and grief ('the
dimming Water') that allows her a possible future existence. Burkean
subjection before natural power is transformed,
through a feminine appeal to masculine pity and protectiveness, into
a discourse which allows the woman a limited (but
subordinate) position of freedom. Here though it is after death, and
through the man's nature poetry, that the freedom is
possible. Coleridge here falls short of his achievement in 'A Stranger
Minstrel': he flatters rather than questions himself as he
imagines himself in the conventional role of the strong male protector
of the helpless female.
Coleridge continued to fight shy of the implications of his poem. In
1802 he rebuked Robinson's daughter for planning to
publish in a collection of her mother's works a poem of his own alongside
ones by Moore and 'Monk' Lewis, 'men, who
have sold provocatives to vulgar Debauchees' (CL, II, 905). Idealising
Robinson as a pure and dear Mother, 'of all names
the most awful, the most venerable, next to that of God', Coleridge
wished to save Robinson's posthumous reputation from
the notoriety of the writers she had been associated with, to reinscribe
her within the discourse of literary as well as personal
propriety. But he also wished to save himself: faced with the prospect
of publicly appearing as one of a company of libertine
men who were associated with her, Coleridge was afraid. No longer able
to see himself as her private literary protector, he
panicked. He wished to avoid having his verse seem to be indebted to
a poetic muse known for her loose morals and the
bad company she kept.
Coleridge was neither disinterested nor feminist: he was trying to shape
an authority-in-writing that he could himself adopt.
He needed to be lord of his own utterance, to gain a position at the
top, but through words that rejected the prevailing kinds
of manliness. Robinson had inspired in Coleridge what his Abyssinian
maid inspired in the idealised poet of 'Kubla Khan', a
poetry which can escape the kind of masculinity set out by Burke and
practised by the Prince, the kind predicated on its
capacity to inspire awe and fear. As in ‘Kubla Khan’, however, Coleridge
found difficulties in making this kind of poetic
masculinity that on which he took his public stand. He remained unable
and unwilling to risk staking his poetic character on a
language of suspension and enchantment which flourished from positions
that were culturally unconventional - from drug
induced reverie, from the inspiration of a feminine sublime, from dialogue
with a woman whom many regarded as notorious.
Luther sums up Coleridge's problems in doing justice to what Robinson
had shown him as she had become a more
challenging and creative muse than at first appeared:
If the problem for [the female lyricist] is
how to recreate for herself the space of the beautiful within the
sublime, or the sublime within the beautiful,
how to claim her erotic and lyrical power without having to deny
their contiguity so as to escape being once
more (negatively) defined as her flesh, the problem for [the male
lyricist] seems to be how to assimilate, accommodate,
encompass and compose those moods, rhetorical
modes and human impulses that his own and
his culture's values deny him, unless he is willing to relinquish his
position at the top. (31)
Coleridge may have been unable wholly to relinquish his desire for a
position at the top, yet his Romanticism should not as a
consequence be seen as a consistent 'conquest' and 'enslavement' of
the female. If it often idealises a role for women that is
at best supportive of and at worst subordinate to male creativity,
if it often presents the feminine as merely a supplement to
masculine power, it nevertheless also often calls women's subordination
to those languages into question. Coleridge did
sketch - but only sketch - an alternative model of poetic power through
a feminising dialogue with a woman poet and muse.
In doing so he revealed some of the limitations of the traditional
(and interlinked) discourses of/about political and poetic
power.
Notes
This essay has benefited from the suggestions of Tilar Mazzeo, Lucy
Newlyn, and Seamus Perry. I am most grateful to
them.
(1) Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols.
(Edinburgh, 1889-90) vol. X, pp. 300-301.
(back)
(2) Burke set out his gendered definition in A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (London, 1958). (back)
(3) See A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in The Works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn
Butler, 7 vols. (London, 1989) vol. V, p. 45. The argument is continued
in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),
ed. Miriam Brody (London, 1985). (back)
(4) Marlon B. Ross, 'Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine
Power in the Crisis of Poetic Identity,' in
Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1988) p. 34. See also
Ross's The Contours of Masculine Desire — Romanticism and the Rise
of Women's Poetry (New York, 1988). (back)
(5) See Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Oxford, 1989). (back)
(6) See Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London, 1993) pp. 20-27. (back)
(7) In Bearing The Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century
Women's Writing (Chicago and
London, 1986) p. 40. (back)
(8) I discuss these issues at greater length in my Romanticism and Masculinity:
Gender, Politics and Poetics in Burke,
Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Basingstoke:
Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1999). (back)
(9) In this project I follow the subtle historicist work of Claudia
L. Johnson in Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and
Sentimentality in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen
(Chicago and London, 1995) pp. 3-23. Also
important for an approach of this kind are Mary Poovey, The Proper
Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in
the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago
and London, 1984) pp. 18-35. See also
Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford, 1993).
(back)
(10) Marlon B. Ross, 'Romantic Quest...', p. 40. For a similar critique
of Ross see Judith Page, Wordsworth and the
Cultivation of Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1994) p. 36.
(back)
(11) Hazlitt identified Geraldine as a man in disguise, an identification
Coleridge resented. The matter is discussed in John
Beer, 'Coleridge, Hazlitt, and "Christabel"', Review of English Studies
37 (1986) 40-54 (pp. 50, 47, 50). See also Karen
Swann, 'Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character
of Christabel,’ ELH 52 (1985) 398-418.
More recently, Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae (London, 1991) pp.
331-46, and myself, in Romanticism and
Masculinity, have analysed gender fluidity in the poem. (back)
(12) Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire (Ithaca and London, 1992)
p. 17. See also the introduction to Laura
Claridge and Elisabeth Langland, Out of Bounds. Male Writers and Gendered
Criticism (Amherst, Mass., 1990) pp. 4,
13. (back)
(13) I take the text from The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (London, 1912)
vol. I, pp. 295-98; hereafter abbreviated as PW. (back)
(14) Contrasts are made by E. S. Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and the Fall
of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in
Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770-1880 (Cambridge, 1975)
p. 185 and Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and
the Abyssinian Maid (London, 1967) p. 142. Analogies are discoverable
in John Drew, India and the Romantic
Imagination (Delhi, 1987) pp. 219-20, as well as in Paglia, Sexual
Personae, p. 328 and Mellor, Romanticism and
Gender, p. 20. (back)
(15) Jane Moore, 'Plagiarism with a Difference: Subjectivity in "Kubla
Khan" and Letter Written During a Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark', in Beyond Romanticism: New
Approaches to Texts and Contexts
1780-1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York,
1992) p. 157. (back)
(16) For Coleridge’s idealisation of bards and minstrels, see Bard Bracy
in 'Christabel' and the discussion in John Beer,
Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959) pp. 46, 64-65, 187-88, 258-62.
(back)
(17) S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 5 vols. (London
and Princeton, N.J., 1980-) vol. III, p. 906n.
(back)
(18) By 1816, when the poem was published with its Preface, Coleridge
was already more socially and politically
conservative than in 1797, and was inclined, like the later Burke,
to blame social ills on a feminisation of culture. (back)
(19) On Robinson's public notoriety and the political satire directed
through ridicule of her towards the Prince, see
Marguerite Steen, The Lost One: a Biography of Mary (Perdita) Robinson
(London, 1937). Details of Robinson's life
and loves were made available by her daughter in 1801 in Memoirs of
the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written By Herself [2nd
edn (London, 1930)]. (back)
(20) Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females, A Poem (London, 1798) p. 6. (back)
(21) Review of The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, in
the Annual Review for 1806 5 (1807) 516-17.
(back)
(22) For ease of reference I quote the text from Robinson's novel, where
it is incorporated in order to present the author as
a sentimental heroine: Walsingham or, the Pupil of Nature, 4 vols.
(London, 1797; facsimile rpt. New York and London,
1974) vol. I, pp. 53-54. (back)
(23) The newspaper variants from the longer poem are recorded in David
V. Erdman, 'Unrecorded Coleridge Variants',
Studies in Bibliography II (1958) 152; cf. PW, I, 138; 209-18. (back)
(24) I take the text from Romantic Women Poets 1770-1838: An Anthology,
ed. Andrew Ashfield (Manchester and
New York, 1995) pp. 131-32. (back)
(25) The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs,
6 vols. (London, 1956-71) vol. I, p. 562;
hereafter abbreviated as CL. (back)
(26) I quote the seventh stanza, ll. 55-63, from the text included in
Lyrical Tales (London, 1800; facsimile rpt. Oxford,
1989) pp. 72-77. (back)
(27) The phrase, from the introduction to The Solitude of Binnorie in
the Morning Post, is quoted in S. T. Coleridge,
Essays on his Times, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (London and Princeton,
1978) vol. III, p. 291. (back)
(28) Coleridge's theories about the preconditions for suspension of
disbelief are explained in John Beer, Coleridge's Poetic
Intelligence (London and Basingstoke, 1977) pp. 87-90. (back)
(29) ‘Ode Inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’ lines
54, 68, in Ashfield (ed.), Romantic Women Poets,
pp. 133-34. In The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, ed.
M.E. Robinson, 3 vols. (London, 1806).
(back)
(30) Susan Luther, 'A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge's Mrs Robinson', SiR 33 (1994) 407. (back)
(31) Luther, 'A Stranger Minstrel', p. 408. (back)
Tim Fulford
Nottingham Trent University
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