The fiends that plague thee thus: An examination of gender and the role it plays in Coleridge’s【翻译】

Dedication
This thesis truly was a labor of love. I hated writing and researching this work at
times, but I always truly loved, appreciated, and believed in the topic I had chosen.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I’m sure, both loved and hated his Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, a ballad that he revised for almost twenty years. It only took me two years to
research and write this, so in no way can I claim Coleridge’s dedication, but that might be
what makes me love his work so much – it truly must have been a labor of love for
Coleridge, just as this work was the culmination of my love of literature and language.
I need to thank some people for their support and occasional nagging. Mom and
Dad, thank you for supporting me in everything that I do. You are my heroes. I also
have to thank Randy, my blue-eyed muse. Without you, in collaboration with my
mother, I probably never would have been goaded into putting my thoughts down on
paper finally. Thank you, all three of you, for your love and support.
Finally, I promised my AP Literature class of 2010 that I would mention them in
this dedication. Thank you for reading and editing my Proposal, which you tore apart. It
was a very humbling experience. Thank you also for putting up with me as I frantically
tried to write this thesis. You inspire me each and every day and make me remember
why I love my job so much.
I would like to dedicate this thesis to all of you who have loved me and believed
in me – I love you too. Enjoy!
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Abstract
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was, and remains today, one of the most important literary
figures in history, and his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner continues to be one of
the most widely read pieces of literature in schools across the world. When it was first
published, the poem was ahead of its time and was widely misinterpreted. For the past
two hundred years, even, critical examinations of the poem have tended to reveal
discrepancies rather than attempt to explain them. This work examines the poem through
the lens of queer theory in an attempt to explain those apparent inconsistencies. The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner has central, if disregarded, radical gender formulations, that,
when highlighted, will help explain more fully the poetic closure of the poem and
Coleridge’s decisions regarding the revision of his famous rime.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………...…… ii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..….iii
Introduction and Background………………………………………………………….….1
Chapter 1: Critical Analysis………………………………………………………….…...9
Strange Powers of Speech……………………………………………………..…10
With a Woeful Agony Which Forced Me to Begin my Tale………………….....13
An It Were a Christian Soul………………………………………………….…..16
Four Times Fifty Living Men………………….……………………………..….20
Chapter 2: The Story…...……………………………………………………………..….22
He Shone Bright……………………………………………………………..…...26
The Albatross About My Neck Was Hung…………………………………...….28
That Woman and her Mate………………………………………….………..….33
And I Bless’d Them Unaware…………………………….…………….……..…38
Alone on the Wide, Wide Sea……………………………………………..……..41
Chapter 3: The Structure……...………………………………………………………….46
My Ghastly Adventure……………………………………………………….…..47
He Cannot Chuse but Hear……………………………………………..………..48
It is an Ancyent Marinere………………………………………………………..55
The Pious Bird of Good Omen…………………………………………………..59
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….68
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………...…73
Introduction and Background
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first published
in 1798 to negative review both by the general readership and by William Wordsworth,
Coleridge’s close friend and literary instigator for the poem. The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner was first conceived by Coleridge and Wordsworth, together with Wordsworth’s
sister Dorothy, as they were walking through the British countryside. As Wordsworth
published in 1843, “In the Spring of the year 1798 [Coleridge], my Sister, and myself
started from Alfoxden, pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the
Valley of Stones near it, and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the
expense of the tour by writing a Poem to be sent to the New Monthly
Magazine…Accordingly we set off…and in the course of this walk was planned the
Poem of the Ancient Mariner” (Owen vii). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first
published in 1798 in a collection of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads, a collection arranged
by Wordsworth. Coleridge’s poem occupied the eminently prestigious first place in the
collection. Apparently both Wordsworth and Coleridge had high hopes for the poem, but
it was not well received by critics. Most critics writing on the collection of poems,
Lyrical Ballads, praised Coleridge’s style but condemned his message as confusing or
incoherent. Dr. Charles Burney in his literary criticism, published in Monthly Review in
1799, writes,
The author’s first piece, the Rime of the anycent marinere, in imitation
of the style as well as the spirit of the elder poets, is the strangest story
of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper: yet, though it seems a
rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence, (of which we
do not perceive the drift, unless the joke lies in depriving the wedding
guest of his share of the feast,) there are in it poetical touches of an
exquisite kind. (Reiman 714)
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Burney, while praising the lyricism of the poetry itself, offers a sardonic attack of the
Mariner’s story and the fact that the meaning of the poem seems obscure, or
“unintelligible.”
Similarly, and citing the same advertisement, Robert Southey, in his article for
Critical Review in 1798, asserts that the poem is “a ballad (says the advertisement)
professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as of the spirit of the elder poets. We
are tolerably conversant with the early English poets and can discover no resemblance
whatever, except in antiquated spelling and a few obsolete words” (Reiman 308). He
goes on to add that “many of the stanzas are labouriously beautiful; but in connection
they are absurd or unintelligible…We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyze
it…Genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit” (Reiman 308-
309). Both critics, Burney and Southey, admit a certain confusion with the story itself
but seem to admire the lyricism of the poem itself, if not the advertisement that the poem
is an imitation of earlier poetry. This seems to mirror the general confused and negative
reception of the poem. Even Sara Coleridge, Coleridge’s wife, admitted in a letter in
March of 1799, “The Lyrical Ballads are laughed at and disliked by all with very few
excepted” (Jackson 61), showing the unpopular reception of the collection of poetry in
Lyrical Ballads, of which The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a part.
Wordsworth, Coleridge’s close friend and literary peer, also found fault with the
poem. Wordsworth, in a note added to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, asserted that
the poem “has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct
character…; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the
events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the
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imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated” (Owen 214-215). Wordsworth was
not the only person to believe that the events “do not produce each other” and seem to
have no purpose. Most critics argued that the poem failed as a supernatural and
Romantic endeavor and that the poetic closure of the poem did not successfully conclude
the moral questions introduced in the text as a whole. Several critics cited the end of the
poem, specifically the stanza reading:
He prayeth well who loveth well,
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best who loveth best,
All things both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all (659-664).
For many critics, while this stanza offers a definitive moral conclusion about Christianity
and the importance of prayer, the poem itself tends to offer more ambiguous values.
Even the killing of the Albatross at the end of Part I simply reads “with my cross bow / I
shot the Albatross” (79-80). There is no judgment upon the action. Yet, because of the
Mariner’s actions, all of the seamen aboard the ship die as retribution. Everyone around
the Mariner is punished for the Mariner’s actions, but he lives. Thus, the ethical
implications of the poem appear to be contradictory, and the conclusion seems to have no
relevant connection to the moral values offered in the poem.
The poetic closure is not actually contradictory to the rest of the poem and the
Mariner’s actions if the poem is read using queer theory. Using such a lens directs
attention away from the antiquated spelling that critics found fault with, the lyricism and
structure of the poem that critics admired, the supernatural events that seemed to confuse
even Wordsworth, and the paradoxical nature of the poetic closure that critics highlighted
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upon its reception. Reading this poem, using queer theory as an impetus, as an allegory
for self-discovery in a homosocial world away from the physical and moral limitations on
land, allows the inconsistencies in the text to be embraced rather than rejected as an
impediment to the text. The fact that although Coleridge revised his poem for the next
twenty years but failed to alter a single word of his poetic closure, arguably the most
criticized portion of his poem, reveals that Coleridge thought his ending a fitting
conclusion to the moral questions brought up in the Mariner’s story.
There was so much public denunciation after the publication of the poem in 1798
that Coleridge re-introduced an edited version, complete with a Gloss, in Sibylline Leaves
in 1817. However, it is important to note that despite all the criticism over the last few
stanzas of his original poem, Coleridge chose not to delete or change the controversial
stanzas that contained the moral conclusion. Traditionally, the poetic closure is one of
the most influential parts of a work – it simultaneously reiterates the author’s point and
often leaves the reader with something to think about. Coleridge chose not to change his
poetic closure because he arguably thought it an adequate conclusion for the moral
message of the rest of the poem. Sadly, most criticism, both older and more
contemporary, either glosses over the conclusion as being ineffectual or ignores it
completely. Even John Livingston Lowes, in one of the most influential books on the
poem, seems to gloss over the conclusion. He writes about “the Mariner’s valedictory
piety, which does, I fear, warrant Coleridge’s (and our own) regret” (Lowes 302). Even
Lowes misses the root of Coleridge’s poem, which is an allegory of self-discovery, and
dismisses it as an unfortunate addition to the literary work.

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