Christabel Notes

Coleridge's "Christabel"

What exactly happens in this poem?
What exactly is the class's opinion of Geraldine? Is she evil? What exactly is her motivation?

Beer, ed.: "Coleridge now wished to carry into his nature poetry . . . questions of guilt and evil. . . . If the state of grace corresponds to an innocent vision of nature and the fall of man is away from that vision, is it ever possible for the innocent to redeem the experienced?" (257).
Dove=Innocence, Serpent=Experience
"Throughout this poem, evil is represented primarily as the veiling of the good. The minimal light of the clouded moon [18-19] and half-hidden eye of the snake [583-85] both speak of a vision that has been obscured until it no longer controls human energies, which are left to the caprice of the passion of the moment" (258).
If it had been completed, Beer foresees a happy, victorious ending for Christabel.

Claire May, "'Christabel' and Abjection: Coleridge's Narrative in Process/On Trial"
(Psychoanalytic Perspective)

Stable Oppositions (Good/Evil, Life/Death) [important concept during period surrounding French Revolution]
Narrative Time as Progressive, Linear, Uninterrupted

Narrator intrudes here and elsewhere: 13, 53-54, 69-70. 292-96, 621ff., concl. to Pt. 2)
Importance of Absent Mother in P/A theory

Henderson (see below): Christabel experiences a recovery/regression to childhood, a pre-linguistic (i.e silenced) state.

"Christian" CHRIST-ABEL [ironic?] goes to woods to pray amidst moss & mistletoe ["dung-twig"] (29-36).

Anya Taylor, "Coleridge's 'Christabel' and the Phantom Soul"
(Feminist/Historicist Perspective)

"Christabel" as Female Version of "Ancient Mariner"
Christabel embodies STC's concept of phantom soul, "a soul that evaporates for want of a connection with others."

"A will that does not contain the power of opposing itself to another will is no will at all" (STC).

For STC, "there seems to be more and more phantom souls in the increasingly mechanistic world."
STC expresses "belief in the necessity of preserving a distinction between persons and things at a time when human beings were increasingly tabulated as numbers, averages, and groups."
Marlon Ross: explains that STC, in response to WW [see also "Dejection: An Ode"], "becomes abased before WW's masculinity"-- Paul Fry calls his acceptance of WW's exclusion of his name and poems from later editions of Lyrical Ballads as passive.

In fact, WW rejected "Christabel" for the 1800 edition, only to "borrow" its themes of coopting of position in his "Michael"
Geraldine=WW, Christabel=STC

1st 230 lines: Christabel as active, assertive, in control of what happens around her.
Sexuality is "peripheral" to the interaction between Christabel and Geraldine.
The important thing, in Taylor's mind, is the "absorption" and "obliteration" of Christabel by Geraldine, indicated by C's loss of voice.
"Thou had'st thy will (306) echoes "AM" (16).
"Christabel" asks questions about agency in slightly different way than did "AM" (i.e. re: Mariner's shooting of albatross)
Beneath Leoline's mourning for his wife lies "an even more intense" feeling of mourning for his broken friendship with his male friend, Lord Roland.
Geraldine replaces both daughter and wife for Leoline.
Whereas "AM" "circles obsessively around a site of pain and guilt," "'Christabel' focuses on what we now realize are difficult transitions on the personal development of young women, where what is done to them often feels like their own fault."

Andrea Henderson, "Revolution, Response and 'Christabel'"
(Historicist Perspective)

Leoline: "a rich baron whose name suggests a kingly genealogy, while his title ranks him among the lowest classes of nobility."
Opening description of Leoline and his castle suggests isolation and decay (118, 145, 156-57, 163)
Leoline's "chivalric response" to Geraldine's story of abuse (434-37)="an empty gesture"
Last oak leaf (49)=End of Leoline's line
Geraldine's "apparent purity, through its very excessiveness [abjection], proves to be a sign of radical impurity, rather in the way that the pure and rational ideals of the Revolution, carried further and further, finally led to the destructive and irrational rigor of the Terror" (883).
Experience with Geraldine "infantalizes Christabel": "she is held like a child, she smiles like an infant" (885).
"She is characterized by an integration and plenitude characteristic of infancy but, in this case, achieved through strife" (886).
Coda: "Defenses are specifically being erected against the childish, full, and passive status of which Christabel herself is the prime representative in the poem" (894).
Real danger to Leoline is not Geraldine, but Christabel herself.