Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 12 of Sexual Personae

[Note 1] 

Paglia identifies Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a Romantic poet, like Rousseau, Sade, Goethe, and Wordsworth (pp. 319, 324). Coleridge's best poetry is dated around 1797-8, in other words about 30 years before the start of Decadent literature. 

 

Paglia says that Coleridge is a moralist who captures and records daemonic visions and then tries to turn them into tales of redemption and Christian morality. She says that his best poems (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Kubla Khan," and Christabel) start out as "dream poems" in which Coleridge records powerful Dionysian visions gleaned from dreams and drug use; he later tacks on a second section in which he tries to lead the tale around to bourgeois redemption. The later "moral" portions of the poems are inevitably disappointing, confused, and maudlin; but the initial Dionysian "dream poem" sections are powerful enough by themselves to bring Coleridge fame and serve as literary models for later generations of Romantic and Decadent poets.

 

[Note 2] 

Paglia discusses two of Coleridge's main Romantic themes in the poems "The Eolian Harp" and "To William Wordsworth."

 

1) The passive male heroine: In previous chapters of Sexual Personae Paglia has talked about other Romantic artists who are passive or masochistic males delighting in sexual thrall to an Androgyne or Femme fatale. Paglia talks about Coleridge's "sexual ambiguities" in much the same way: In terms of passivity and masochism. In her description of "The Eolian Harp" (1795), Paglia says, "The poet is a passive instrument played upon by the masculine Muse-force of nature. [...] His ecstatic self-projections are always feminine." (pp. 318-9) And in reference to "To William Wordsworth" (1807), Paglia says, "Wordsworth and Coleridge were locked in a sadomasochistic marriage of minds, where Wordsworth kept the hierarchical advantage and Coleridge surrendered himself to ritualistic self-abasement. [...] He is penetrated and filled by Wordsworth, to whom he abandons himself. Sex is poetry; poetry is sex." (pp. 319-20)

 

2) The ring of eyes: In reference to "To William Wordsworth" (1807), Paglia says that Coleridge is fascinated by Wordsworth's command of the audience and aspires himself to be a "hierarchic authority" surrounded by an adoring audience. She says that it is related to exhibitionism: "[T]his ring of eyes is one of Coleridge's persistent motifs. [...] the erotic ecstasy of a masochistic male heroine is strongly stimulated by a ring of attentive eyes. 'To William Wordsworth' is a luridly pagan poem. Incantation by a god-priest in a cult of personality leads to ritual public intercourse. Climax is epiphany and transfiguration. Sexual exhibitionism and voyeurism are at the heart of art. Here as in Christabel, the hunger for conversion is expressed as a hunger for rape." (p. 321)

 

[Note 3] 

Paglia's analysis of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner further develops these two themes and adds a third:

 

1) The passive male heroine: Paglia emphasizes the Mariner's passivity: "My reading of The Ancient Mariner makes this passivity the central psychological fact of the poem." She notes that other commentators have also remarked about the Mariner's passivity, including Wordsworth who saw it as a "great defect" of the poem (presumably not noticing the similarity to his own passive creative characters, "the solitaries," as described in Chapter 11 of Sexual Personae). (p. 321)

 

2) The ring of eyes: Paglia says that the passivity of the male heroine is related to the theme of the ring of eyes. But here, the ring of eyes is a consequence of both sexual attraction and anxiety; in other words, the ring of eyes is a source of both gratification and torment. Paglia quotes Bostetter: "The poem is the morbidly self-obsessed account of a man who through his act has become the center of universal attention.” Paglia adds: "Two hundred sailors, dying, stare dolefully at the Mariner. The male heroine, by operatic self-dramatization, is a prima donna triumphing through exquisite public suffering. The eyes of the universe are fixed on him. Coleridge's ring of eyes is part paranoiac reproach, part eroticizing adoration. Eyes crucify his protagonists, pinning them in immobilized passivity, an uncanny world fear." (pp. 321-322) As Paglia describes it, the eyes are accusing and punishing. And the crime that they accuse the Mariner of is daring to assert himself, perhaps simply daring to exist. Paglia says, "This albatross is the biggest red herring in poetry. Its only significance is as a vehicle of transgression. The Mariner commits an obscure crime and becomes the focus of cosmic wrath. But he is as blameless as the shadow heroes of Kafka, who are hauled before faceless courts of law. In the world of The Ancient Mariner, any action is immediately punished. Masculine assertion is rebuked and humanity condemned to passive suffering." (p. 324)

 

3) The Dionysian vision of the Great Mother: Upon the death of the 200 sailors, the anxiety brought on by their accusatory stare is brought to a peak with a vision of the deadly Great Mother: The murderous fertility goddess of the ancients, the daemonic side of nature, femininity, and motherhood. Paglia says, "She is the Whore of Babylon, the daemon unbound." (p. 325). But she is also a cathartic element, a natural part of the artistic process: "The principle at work in The Ancient Mariner, as in "To William Wordsworth,” is pagan sexual exhibitionism. Self-pity in The Ancient Mariner is like the self-flagellation of the ancient goddess-cults. It is neither callow nor sick. It is a ritual device to facilitate daemonic vision. The Romantic male heroine is a self-emasculating devotee of chthonian nature." (p. 323)

 

As Paglia points out elsewhere, Coleridge's portrayal of the daemonic Great Mother puts Coleridge in the same camp as the Marquis de Sade. By way of comparison, Rousseau and Wordsworth worshiped a positive, sentimental image of nature and refused to see or portray the darker, more dangerous side of the Great Mother. Coleridge and Sade, on the other hand, turned to face the Great Mother head-on and they portrayed her daemonic aspect as it appeared to them. Coleridge was ultimately more fearful of the Great Mother than Sade: Sade positively reveled in the darkness and abomination of the daemonic, whereas Coleridge was a moralist and tried to amend his dark visions with a message of redemption at the end. But each recognized the Great Mother's power in his own way.

 

One more horror follows the vision of the Great Mother: The sea at the Mariner's feet fills with writhing snakes. Paglia says that this is a regression to the womb of the Great Mother (p. 326). But it also represents the end of the Dionysian "dream poem" portion of the poem. The poem subsequently devolves into a sentimental moral section: Paglia says that "Coleridge is overcome by anxiety" at the regression to the womb, and this causes the Mariner to pray his way out of his predicament. 

 

Paglia finds this conclusion unsatisfying: "Love and prayer are a ludicrously inadequate response to the chthonian horror that Coleridge has summoned from the dark heart of existence. [...] Having introduced a benevolent emotion into his daemonic poem, Coleridge is at a loss how to proceed. A new cast of characters is hustled in--seraphs, a Pilot, a Hermit. There is confused dialogue, a fuzzy twisting and turning. Here is the point: the moment the Mariner prays, the moment good rather than evil triumphs, the poem falls apart. At the end of Part IV, Coleridge is overwhelmed with fear at what he has written and vainly attempts to turn his poem in a redemptive direction. The superego acts to obscure what has come from the amoral id." Paglia sees this as "Coleridge the moralist" trying to redeem and tamp down "Coleridge the visionary." Coleridge continued to try to revise the poem in later years. Paglia says of his revisions, "We hear in them the Christian Coleridge trying to soften the daemonic Coleridge [...] By rationalization and moralization, Coleridge strove to put out the daemonic fires of his own imagination." (pp. 326-7)

 

[Note 4] 

"Kubla Khan" is Coleridge's depiction of the artist or poet as visionary. The three themes mentioned previously reappear, although in a new form:

 

1) The Dionysian vision of the Great Mother: The poet is a daemonic visionary: He is made powerful by his visions, but they also infect and torment him. Paglia says, "Dangerous: the poet of 'Kubla Khan' is enclosed in a zone of 'holy dread.' He is an untouchable, a carrier of charisma kept under quarantine." The Great Mother never actually appears in this poem, but it's not a great leap to surmise that she is the source of the poet's visions. "He is a visionary who sees too much and is tortured by his visions. [...] As a sexual persona, Coleridge's poet is a suffering hermaphrodite, a sacred monster, breeding genies from the sterile air." (pp. 330-331) 

 

2) The passive androgyne: The poet's visions and resulting isolation add a more masculine element to the poet and turn him from a "male heroine" (male Dionysian) into a self-involved and self-sufficient Androgyne. Paglia repeatedly calls him a hermaphrodite and androgyne; she says, "Masculine and feminine dilate about him like a solar corona." (p. 330) However, the poet's visions still render him passive and imprisoned, like the Ancient Mariner transfixed before the vision of the Great Mother as Whore of Babylon: "The poet is feminine because passive to his own vision. He is arresting because arrested. His senses are a house of detention. His eyes are the barred window of poetry. [...] The poet is blind, maimed, lame. His imagination is free, but his body is bound in ritual limitation." (pp. 329-330)

 

3) The ring of eyes: As was the case in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the ring of eyes becomes a source of anxiety and torment. The poet is made powerful by his visions but he is also infected and corrupted by them, and he becomes dangerous to the society around him. The adoring crowd must turn away from him and shun him. The "ring of eyes" is denied to the poet. "Artist and audience are at war. The poet is a nonperson, subject to mass shunning." (p. 330) It's a paranoid scenario: Poetry and art turn into a form of martyrdom; shunned, imprisoned, and isolated, the poet is left with only his frightening visions to entertain him.

 

[Note 5] 

The previous poems represented Coleridge as a passive visionary who is at war with his daemonic visions. But in the poem Christabel Coleridge finally finds a device that allows him to embrace both the visionary and his visions and develop both to full effect:

• Geraldine is a vampire or femme fatale, in other words, the daemonic Great Mother embodied as rapist and despoiler;

• Christabel is the passive victim who both dreads and subconsciously invites the rape of the daemonic Great Mother.

 

1) The Dionysian vision of the Great Mother: Paglia repeatedly refers to Geraldine as a "lesbian vampire." Occasionally Paglia refers to some "hermaphroditic" component in Geraldine's makeup or refers to her as an androgyne, but Paglia is clear throughout: Geraldine is a full-fledged vampire, a femme fatale in the mold of the monster Medusa or the murderous sorceress Medea. Paglia says, "The greatness of Christabel comes from its lurid pagan pictorialism. It is an epiphany of evil. [...] Behold the star: the lesbian vampire Geraldine is the chthonian reawakened from its earthy grave." (p. 331) "The poem's greatness resides in the seductive vampirism of Geraldine. It was inspired by a vision of a female persona of overwhelming force. [...] She radiates her cold hieratic glamour like a sun king [...] the lesbian vampire, dazzlingly beautiful, relentlessly masculine." (p. 341)

 

2) The passive male heroine: Paglia says that the character of Christabel, the rape victim, is Coleridge in disguise. When depicted as a male the poet could only look upon the Great Mother from afar, as in The Ancient Mariner. But by reimagining himself as a female rape victim, Coleridge can fantasize about sexual union with the daemonic Great Mother appearing as Geraldine.

 

Paglia says: "We must logically infer some element of self-identification in Christabel. [...] Christabel contains one of the greatest transsexual self-transformations in literature. [...] Christabel is Coleridge, a poet condemned to fascination by the daemonic. The poem begins a peculiar nineteenth-century tradition in which a sexually ambivalent poet paints a scene of intense lesbian eroticism in order to identify himself, by a daring warp of imaginative gender, with the passive partner. [...] Christabel is a ritual of surrender to pagan corruption. Its heroine is entranced, morally drugged, powerless to flee from an irresistible Power." (p. 342)

​

The critic Harold Bloom calls Christabel a "half-willing victim." (p. 333) Paglia lists all the ways that Christabel facilitates her own rape (albeit unconsciously) and concludes that "Christabel's maiden voyage into archaic night is foolish and possibly provocative. She summons the very evil she hopes to quell. [...] Geraldine seems to evoke the unconscious complicity of her prey." (pp. 332-333) Elsewhere Paglia says, "[Christabel] is like the rape victims of The Faerie Queene, whose femininity invites disaster [...] Good is actually a titillation to lust and provokes the vampire's assault. Paganism stakes its claim in the virgin heart of Christian virtue." (p. 340) This probably reflects Coleridge's own conflict between his conscious moral beliefs and his unconscious fascination with the daemonic and the passive role. (And Paglia's comparison of Christabel to the rape victims in The Faerie Queene means that I have put Christabel together with the latter in the "ExDion" category, above. See my notes on chapter 6 for a description of the characters in The Faerie Queene.)

​

3) The ring of eyes: Once raped, Christabel becomes an outcast from society. Paglia compares Christabel to the visionary poet in "Kubla Khan": The poet in "Kubla Khan" was made so frightening and dangerous by his visions that society had to turn away from him. In the poem Christabel, the rape has tainted the character Christabel and silenced her in the company of others. Paglia says, "As in 'Kubla Khan,' those struck by prophecy are trapped in taboo. Christabel is shunned, persecuted. Touched, touching, untouchable. Elected by the daemonic, she is made, that is both violated and initiated." (p. 345)

 

Paglia says that this too is a projection of Coleridge. Coleridge had many powerful creative visions, but as a moralist he felt that he couldn't express them without some redemption arc at the end to make them appropriate for public consumption. Coleridge couldn't revel in the daemonic the way that Sade did. To publish his raw daemonic visions was to court public disapproval or worse; but the alternative was silence. Coleridge even withheld Christabel from publication initially; he only published it later at the urging of Lord Byron. (p. 331) Coleridge added a second chapter to the poem with the aim of redeeming Christabel; but Paglia finds the later material unconvincing. She says, "Part I ends with Christabel still in Geraldine's arms. I will argue that this encompasses the totality of Coleridge's vision and that the second part written three years later, as well as his rough plan for three more parts, was born of fear at what he had already created. Christabel remained unfinished because, try as he might, Coleridge could not turn his daemonic saga into a parable of Christian redemption." (p. 340)

 

Paglia describes Christabel as follows: "Christabel is one of the most misread poems in history. Critics have projected a Christian moralism upon it. Coleridge himself could not bear what he had written, and he tried to revise and reinterpret long afterward. Christabel is a splendid case study of the tension between imagination and morality. Through it, we follow a great poet into his excess of daemonic vision and then out again into the social realm of humane good wishes, where the visionary is beset by doubt, anxiety, and guilt. Christabel shows the birth of poetry in evil, hostility, and crime. [...] In Christabel, opposites come together so powerfully that Coleridge could not shape the poem according to his stated intention. It is no coincidence that his supreme works are dream poems. [...] Much of Coleridge's conscious life was devoted to defenses of Christianity. In the poetry welling up from his dream life, however, the Judeo-Christian no is obliterated by sexually dual daemonic powers." (p. 317)

 

Thus, as in "Kubla Kahn" and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the ring of eyes turns into a trap, a reproach, a source of anxiety: "Christabel mute is Coleridge irresolute. [...] Christabel's inability to speak is Coleridge stammering. It represents within the poem the poet's inability to complete the poem itself." (p. 344) "The poet is a nonperson, subject to mass shunning, one who has broken the honor code. We must remember this for Christabel, where the heroine is cruelly shunned after her election by the daemonic and where she is imprisoned in her own silence. The poet is a visionary who sees too much and is tortured by his visions." (p. 330)

​

Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

​

~Posted December 1, 2024