Rereading Christabel

Daniel K. Muhlestein

Brigham Young University

ntil the mid-1980s Samuel Taylor Coleridges poem Christabel was typically interpreted in one of two ways: as a Gothic
tale of vampires and demonology (the so-called Nethercot reading) or as an allegory of vicarious suffering and Christian atonement
(the Siegel approach). In the last twenty years, however, the center of
gravity of critical opinion has shifted from Christian to anti-Christian
readings of the poem. Today, the closest thing to a standard interpretation of the text is probably that developed by Camille Paglia, who concludes that Coleridge the Christian was the first misreader of
Coleridge the poet (218), that no poem in literary history has been so
abused by moralistic Christian readings (217), and that far from
demonstrating the success of Christian aspiration, [the poem] abolishes
Christianity
and
returns
the
psyche
to
a primitive world of ethical opacity and sexually malignant spirit-presences (218). In Christabel, Paglia writes, Piety is blasted by a daemonic night wind. Heaven is conquered by hell. Virtue does not and
cannot redeem the poem. The greatness of Christabel arises from its
lurid pagan pictorialism. It is an epiphany of evil (218).
L&B 27.2 2007

Many critics do not like Paglias conclusions. But they cannot refute
them either. Still, a new, alternative reading of the poemwhile it does
nothing to reinstate Christabel as a Christian allegory of vi-carious
sufferinghas two modest virtues: it shifts the focus of critical inquiry to
the part of the text that Paglia cannot adequately explain; and it reconceptualizes the poem in terms of an issue which isor should beof particular interest to Christians. That issue is the extent to which cultural
processes of gender differentiation undermine the relations between
parents and children, especiallyin this casethe relationship between
a father and his daughter.
I
The Conclusion to Part II of Christabel is a puzzling stanza. It
introduces an entirely new narratorone more akin to Coleridge than
to the pious gossips of the earlier sections (Gaskins 4). It also shuts
down the plot so abruptly that some critics dismiss it as an unfortunate late addition which has little or no relationship to the rest of
the work (Hunting 171). Arthur Nethercot, for example, complains
that the lines add nothing to help solve the mystery which [Coleridge] here left dangling to baffle posterity (qtd. in Barth 84), while
Charles Tomlinson asserts that the description of Sir Leolines embrace of Geraldine completes the psychological fable with a succinctness in juxtaposition with which Coleridges tacked-on conclusion to
the second part sticks out uncomfortably from the rest (111).
To other critics The Conclusion to Part II has less to do with the
plot of the poem than with the linguistic tools with which plots are
constructed. For example, Jean-Pierre Mileur says that the coda confronts the poem itself as a word-surprise (66); Jane A. Nelson argues
that the stanza includes an actant designed to mediate binary oppositions (38691); and Richard A. Rand calls the lines a meditation on
the sign-structure which stands in relation to the poem as a sign
stands in relation to its meaning. It means the poem, but in a way
that we cannot rationally analyze. And the meaning of this meaning is
. . . a sign (82).

To most critics, however, The Conclusion to Part II is a meditation not on a sign system but on a character. In a notebook entry Coleridge wrote, A kindhearted man obliged to give a refusal, or the
like, that will give great pain, finds relief in doing it roughly &
fiercelyexplain this, & use it in Christabel (Notebooks 1: entry
1392). On one level the poems coda serves as that explanation. It is
Coleridges attempt to explainand perhaps explain awaythe psychodynamics behind Sir Leolines rough treatment of his daughter. It is
what Roy P. Basler calls an analysis of the psychology of human emotion (43). Why is it, Coleridge asks, that when a father like Leoline
looks at his child, he has two contradictory reactions: his heart is
filled with pleasure, and he expresses that pleasure with words of unmeant bitterness:
And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his loves excess
With words of unmeant bitterness . . . ?
(Christabel ll. 66265)

In an attempt to explain why fathers yoke feelings of love to expressions of bitterness, Coleridge draws an implicit comparison between procreators of the flesh and creators of the word. It may be, he suggests, that
fathers feel the same desire to reconcile opposites as do poets. The ideal
poet, he observes in Biographia Literaria (1817), has an imaginative creativity which reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or
discordant qualities (16). Perhaps fathers act upon the same impulse:
Perhaps tis pretty to force together / Thoughts so all unlike each
other (Coleridge Christabel ll. 66667).
But while the impulse to yoke opposites may be the same for a father
as for a poet, the results are very different. What in poetry may produce
ideal perfection (Coleridge Biographia 15) tendswhen applied to
father-child relationsto debase and defile. Knowing that, Coleridge restates his explanation in language and imagery which convey a sense of
uneasy defensiveness: To mutter and mock a broken charm, / To dally

with wrong that does no harm (Christabel ll. 66869).

Recognizing the difficulty of his position (to break a charm is
to harm it), Coleridge now reverses the binary. Perhaps, he suggests,
harm does not follow charm but precedes it; bitterness does not destroy love but makes it possible: Perhaps tis tender too and pretty /
At each wild word to feel within / A sweet recoil of love and pity (ll.
67072). Thus, Coleridges explanation becomes a retelling of the
story of the Fall, a confessionand a fearthat a fathers love and pity
are rooted in rage and pain. What was before dalliance is now necessity:
And what, if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom save from rage and pain (ll. 67376)

In an obvious sense, then, The Conclusion to Part II of Christabel is an attempt to undo or to mitigate Sir Leolines treatment of
his daughter (Chayes 314). Leoline, Constance Hunting declares, is
being excused (17475). The basis for that excuse is Coleridges theory
of human nature, his belief that there is a necessary connection between love and wrath (Beer 236). To Robert H. Siegel this connection is
part of the mystery of iniquity (183). To Walter Jackson Bate it is an
expression of natural perversity (7374). But regardless of what one
calls it, one thing is clear: in essentializing the link between love and
hate Coleridge transforms Leolines anger into a symbol of what may
well bein his view, at leasta universal problem: What occurred between Sir Leoline and Christabel could happen in any father-child relationship (Yarlott 192).
Of course, not everyone accepts Coleridges assumption. Not everyone believes that the link between love and hate depicted in the poem
is a natural condition (Radley 540), a fundamental part of human
natureat least human nature after the Fall. Indeed, some critics and
theorists believe precisely the opposite. To them the link between love
and hate described in Christabel has been produced neither by

Adam nor by nature but by culture. One of the most articulate proponents of this view is Nancy Chodorow. Like Freud, Chodorow analyzes how culture shapes personality; like him, she believes that gender
differentiation (the process by which a child develops a sense of identity as a gendered being) plays a critical role in identity formation; and
like him, she is convinced that most children define their gender identities in terms of their mothers. But while Freud argues that girls learn
to view their mothersand so themselvesas incomplete men,
Chodorow concludes that it is boys, not girls, who must define their
core gender identity in terms of absence and difference. Why? Because (historically, at least) most children have been reared primarily
by women, and when a male child who is being reared by a woman begins to define himself as a gendered self, as a boy, he must base that
core gender identity upon difference: because women mother, the
sense of maleness in men differs from the sense of femaleness in
women. Maleness is more conflictual and more problematic. . . . A
boy must learn his gender identity as being not-female, or not-mother
(Chodorow 1213). In the process, most boysand men after them
learn to equate masculinity with autonomy, separation, difference,
and violence: The males self . . . becomes based on a more fixed
menot-me distinction. Separateness and difference . . . become
more salient (13).
From Chodorows perspective, then, the condition described in
The Conclusion to Part II is a result neither of biology nor heredity
nor even of a fall from grace. Rather, it is a product of the gendered division of labor in childrearing. A child whose sense of self has been defined in terms of similarity will exhibit what isin Coleridges
descriptionan almost perfect unity of relationality and independence.
On the one hand, the child will be self-contained and autonomous,
Singing, dancing to itself (Coleridge Christabel l. 657). On the
other, the childs autonomy will engender a corresponding relationality that is as complete as it is unintended: A fairy thing with red
round cheeks, / That always finds, and never seeks (ll. 65859).
To a father like Sir Leoline, however, such a combination of relationality and autonomy is almost impossible to achieve, for [t]he

child . . . threatens its father . . . by impressing itself too directly and

immediately upon him (Henderson 894). Sensing the threat, the father begins to pull back, to break the charm, to use rage and pain to
reestablish the male-mandated distance between self and other. He
guards his fantasied autonomy by opening out spaces betweenbetween bodies, genders, generations (Swann 551). His child must remain foreign to him as well as familiar: an elf (Coleridge
Christabel l. 656), a fairy thing (l. 668), an it (l. 657). His words of
bitterness are thus unmeant but not unmeaningful. He mutters and
mocks and rages and rejects not because he would but because he must.
This, Chodorow would say, is the real explanation of a fathers cruel
treatment of his child. It is the subtextual cause of a textual contradiction, the solution to the riddle of The Conclusion to Part II.
Interestingly, the notion that the coda illustrates the high cost of
traditional methods of gender differentiation is strengthened by the
history of the lines themselves. Earl L. Griggs points out that none of
the manuscript versions of the poem includes a conclusion to Part II
(2: 728). Rather, the lines first appear in a letter from Coleridge to
Robert Southey, dated May 6, 1801, in which Coleridge alluded to his
son Hartleys fragile health and said how devastated he would be if
Hartley were to die: Dear Hartley! we are at times alarmed by the
state of his Healthbut at present he is wellif I were to lose him, I am
afraid, it would exceedingly deaden my affection for any other children
I may have. Coleridge then attempted to explain why a father like
himself will sometimes, without provocation, lash out against a
beloved son. That explanation, written in verse form, be-gan, A little
child, a limber Elf (Griggs 2:728). Fifteen years later, Coleridge appended the lines to Christabel in order to relate Sir Leolines feelings to his own (Fields 73). Though Coleridge tried to lighten the
tone of the letter by calling the stanza a very metaphysi-cal account of
Fathers calling their children rogues, rascals, & little varlets&c
(Griggs 2:729), his anxiety seeped through in the phrase [i]n Words
of Wrong and Bitterness (2:728), which in 1816 he softened to
With words of unmeant bitterness (l. 665).
Paradoxically, the fact that The Conclusion to Part II of Christa-

bel was originally written to describe Coleridges outbursts of temper at his son (Mileur 63) simultaneously personalizes and universalizes the coda. On the one hand, awareness of the circumstances under
which the lines were written leads one to interpret them as a case study
in authorial angst. The poet, declares Geoffrey Yarlott, uses Christabel as a vehicle (a safety-valve almost) for the imaginative exploration
of his feelings about his children (191), and he does so in order to explainor explain awaya painful-pleasurable experience which is a
kind of sadism or close to it (Bostetter 191). But on the other hand,
the link to Hartley also carries the coda beyond poem and biography
alike. It identifies family relationships, not witchcraft, as the source of
the conflict; it implies that fathers feel much the same ambivalence toward their sons as their daughters; it expands the discussion to include
historical figures as well as fictional characters, biological sons as well as
literary daughters; and it invites readers to ponder the magnitude of the
problem, to make the connection between the particular and the general, the fictional and the real. When they do so, they see at once that
the problem described in the coda is repeated elsewhere in the text or,
to be more specific, that it is earlier dramatized in precisely such a way
that once they read The Conclusion to Part II aright, what was before
merely a foreshadowing now confronts them in the form of a belated
repetition.
II
This refers, of course, to the relationship between Sir Leoline and
Roland de Vaux. When the two were children, they were inseparable,
best friends, soulmates. Each was the others hearts best brother
(Coleridge Christabel l. 417). That closeness, however, did not survive the rigors of youth and maturation: Each spake words of high
disdain / And insult to his hearts best brother: / They partedneer
to meet again! (ll. 41618). To the narrator this conflict was unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. It was perpetrated by all the usual
suspectsslander, vanity, anger, and the like:

Alas! they had been friends in youth;

But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain. (ll. 40813)

As Warren Stevenson points out, these lines seem to refer to the altercation between [Coleridge and Southey] following the Pantisocracy debacle (19). While Coleridge and many of his contemporaries greatly
admired the stanza, most feminist critics now view it as a tool of patriarchal oppression. This panegyric to male bonding, declares Diane
Long Hoeveler, reminds one of the fact that within the patriarchy the
important relationships are between men, not between women or men
and women (185). As such, the passage is, as Karen Swann wryly observes, of course suspicious (544).
What Chodorows model suggests, however, is that the description
of Sir Leolines break with Roland de Vaux is less an expression of patriarchal power than evidence of the high cost of traditional methods
of gender differentiation. What the narrator tentatively advances as the
causes of the break, in other words, is perhaps better understood as its
occasion, and the dreary sea of difference that now separates the two
men is perhaps best read as a manifest symptom of a latent cause (Coleridge Christabel l. 423). The symptom, that is to say, is the determinate break between two characters who are making the transition from
adolescence to manhood, while the cause is a turbulent process of gender development based upon a vision of autonomous male identities which Swann callsin a clever reversal of Freudan expression of
masculine hysteria (545).
Certainly, the results of the fight support such a finding. Aloof-ness
has replaced love; autonomy has replaced brotherhood. Leoline and
de Vaux have been permanently emotionally scarred: They stood
aloof, the scars remaining, / Like cliffs which had been rent asunder
(Coleridge Christabel ll. 42122); and neither one has ever been
able to recreate the primal unity that once characterized their youthful
relationship: But never either found another / To free the hollow

heart from paining (ll. 41920). Sir Leoline, especially, has been
marked for life:
According to the narrator, the Barons cutting efforts leave him
internally scarred. The space between is also a mark within, from
which no shield can protect him. Like the hysteric he is always
vulnerable to a recurrence of swelling confusion, a revival of the
already-internalized mark, to which he responds with another legislative cut. (Swann 54950)

But if the Barons mark is a cut, it is also a sign. The fact that Leoline
neer found . . . a friend again / Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine
(Coleridge Christabel ll. 51718) clearly points the way to the coda.
It simultaneously anticipates and dramatizes what will be stated there.
In that sense, too, it is a mark: an exclamation mark.
This is not to suggest that Sir Leoline does not try to bridge the gap
between himself and his childhood friend. Just the opposite. His initial response to Geraldine is based upon his own contingent nostalgia for his friendship with Sir Roland (Mileur 62). As he gazes into
her eyes, he sees Rolands face and swears vengeance on Geraldines
ravishers. He embraces her and, in proxy, Roland, for as Rolands
daughter she is also his property, an extension of him (Hoeveler
185). To Leoline, Geraldine thus becomes a tool with which to recover his earlier emotional involvement with Roland de Vaux (Voller
119). His goal is to transform her into a material signifier. Lvi-Strauss
points out that men often transform women into repositories of
meaning and then use them as a means for communicating with
other men. One woman may be forced to embody economic value; another may become the medium of political exchange; a third may be
used as a sign of communal relations and personal obligations. The
process by which such communication occurs is often that of gift-giving. Marriage, for example, has been in Lvi-Strausss view a most
basic form of gift exchange, in which it is women who are the most
precious of gifts (Rubin 173). The significance of such gift-giving is
that

it expresses, affirms, or creates a social link between the partners

of [the] exchange. Gift giving confers upon its participants a special relationship of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid. . . . If it is
women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and
take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner in it. (172, 174)

Of course, Sir Leoline cannot simply give Christabel to Lord de

Vaux. Roland appears to have a daughter already and probably (although not certainly) a wife. Further, Christabel has already been
promised to another man, givenin advance, as it wereto her betrothed knight (Coleridge Christabel ll. 28). But though Leoline
cannot give Christabel to Lord de Vaux, he can give back Geraldine.
He can restore to Roland the daughter that Roland can then perhaps
bestow upon him. In a single stroke, Leolinewho, as Jonas Spatz humorously observes, is attracted to Geraldine with a more than
parental passion (113)may be able both to regain an old friend and
gain a new wife, and that is precisely what he hopes to do. Bard Bracy,
he declares, must rush straightway to Rolands castle,
And loud and loud to Lord Roland call,
Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall!
Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free
Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me!
(Coleridge Christabel ll. 50104)

Sir Leoline, then, intends to use Geraldine as a material signifier of

his wish to reclaim what he has lostand to add to it. In order for his
gambit to succeed, however, Geraldine must be clearly and unambiguously marked as Rolands daughter. She must signify precisely that relationship. To insure that she does, Leoline employs a technique called
hailing. Louis Althusser remarks that the easiest way to bring individuals into subjection to a social system is to hail them as free subjects of
that system by giving them a name and addressing them in such a way
as to signify their proper place in society. Ideology, he writes, transforms . . . individuals into subjects . . . by that very precise operation

which I have called interpellation or hailing, which can be imagined

along the lines of the most commonplace . . . hailing: Hey, you there!
(174). Thus, in the case of (say) children, one knows in advance that a
child will bear its Fathers Name, and will therefore have an identity
and be irreplaceable (176).
For Sir Leoline, perhaps the best way to ensure that his material signifier is interpreted correctly is to hail Geraldine as the child of his
friend! (446). This he does. When they meet, he focuses on neither
her plight nor her person but on her apparent relationship to Lord de
Vaux, fixating on Rolands name as a kind of memory-trace or scar
(Rand 77):
But when he heard the ladys tale,
And when she told her fathers name,
Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale,
Murmuring oer the name again,
Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine?
(Coleridge Christabel ll. 40307)

From then on, Leoline always hails Geraldine as a fathers daughter

(Fogle 151). Lord Rolands beauteous dove, he calls her with variations on that theme (Coleridge Christabel ll. 569). To him, her name
has no present tense; it is a link to the past and a projection into the future. Through it he plans to speak to, and to be answered by, Lord de
Vaux. In Leolines world, women do not exist as autonomous subjects;
rather, they function as objects of exchange between the power brokers
of the patriarchy (Hoeveler 185). Indeed, as Hoeveler points out,
One would think . . . that on some level Roland had sent his
daughter to Leoline as a peace offering. Or that the proper response from Leoline would now be to send his daughter Christabel to Roland in exchange. The two women, after all, are
interchangeable, fetishistic commodities of exchange. (185)

Though Sir Leoline interpellates Geraldine as a material signifier,

he has no intention of allowing her to interpret the meaning of his

hail. She is the body upon which he inscribes his desire, but she is not
his medium, not his mouthpiece. For that, he turns to a man: bard
Bracy. Geraldine is to be the trace of Leolines desire, but Bracy is to
be the authorized interpreter of that trace, and control of the symbolic order is to remain firmly entrenched in male hands:
And with such lowly tones she prayed
She might be sent without delay
Home to her fathers mansion.
Nay!
Nay, by my soul! said Leoline.
Ho! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine!
(Coleridge Christabel ll. 48084)

Or perhaps not. For the great irony of Christabel is that Geral-dine

has already trumped Sir Leolines hand. Both the account of Coleridges intent by his physician, James Gillman, and the narrators description of Christabels seduction make clear that the Baron is being
duped. He is hailing the wrong woman, orto be more precisehe is
hailing no woman at all, but, rather, a serpent, a vampire, a lamia. He
is trying desperately to make a material signifier out of an immaterial
or at least supernatural being.
In the process Leoline loses control of the symbolic order. When he
accepts Geraldine as the wronged daughter of his friend (l. 645),
when he hails her as Lord Rolands beauteous dove, he is simply repeating what Geraldine herself has already said. She is the one who
earlier answered Christabels question, And who art thou? (l. 70).
She is the one who literally interpellated herself, bestowing upon herself both a name and a blessing: My sire is of a noble line, / And my
name is Geraldine (ll. 7980). She is the one who controlledand in
fact still controlsChristabels iteration of that hail:
For this is alone in
Thy power to declare,
That in the dim forest

Thou heardst a low moaning,

And foundst a bright lady, surpassingly fair. (ll. 27276)

The Baron, however, remains oblivious to Geraldines mastery of the

symbolic order. He completely misreads Bracys cautionary dream
(Delson 139), and he never suspects that his own true thoughts are
cast in the form of figures . . . furnished by Geraldine herself, Geraldine being the first to utter the name of Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine (Rand 77).
Unfortunately, although Geraldine is able to wrest control of the symbolic order from Sir Leoline, Christabel is not. Like Geraldine, Christabel has been hailed as daughter; her identity and place in society have
been defined in terms of Leolines part in her conception. She is his
only child (Coleridge Christabel ll. 622, 634, 643), his gentle
daughter (l. 398), his daughter mild (l. 471), the one upon whom he
has placed what Jacques Lacan calls the Name of the Father:1 That gentle bird, whom thou dost love, / And callst by thy own daughters
name / Sir Leoline! (Coleridge Christabel ll. 53234).
Having hailed Christabel in his own name, Leoline is subject to a
reciprocal hail. He is her father (l. 24), her sire (l. 392): O softly
tread, said Christabel, / My father seldom sleepeth well (ll. 16465).
To Leoline, however, father and daughter are not equivalent hails. The
first is an assignment of masculine privilege, the second, of feminine
submission. Neither in his rough economy of language is mother the
equal of father. Hence, when presented with what appears to be a
chance to regain an old friend and gain a new wife, Leoline rejects both
a daughters hail and a mothers prayer. Christabel invokes her mothers
soul when she asks Leoline to dismiss Geraldine: By
my mothers soul do I entreat / That thou this woman send away! (ll.
61617), and the narrator devotes an entire stanza to the topic of a fathers obligations to a mother and daughter:
Sir Leoline? Thy only child
Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride,
For a helpful overview of Lacans terminology, see Richard Boothby.

So fair, so innocent, so mild;

The same, for whom thy lady died!
O by the pangs of her dear mother
Think thou no evil of thy child!
...................
And wouldst thou wrong thy only child,
Her child and thine? (ll. 62227, 63435)

Leoline, though, is in no mood to be bound by a daughters hail

and a mothers prayer. To him, the word father implies no necessary
obligation, and the purely contingent claims of mother and daughter
have been weakened by circumstance and opportunity. Christabel has
already been offered to another and so is as much bride-to-be as
daughter; and Geraldine may be available as wife. Further, although Leoline has always looked upon his daughter as a lovely gift, he has also
looked upon her as a lovely gift, a material signifier of his relationship
with Christabels mother:
For her, and thee, and for no other,
She prayed the moment ere she died:
Prayed that the babe for whom she died,
Might prove her dear lords joy and pride!
That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled,
Sir Leoline! (ll. 62833)

To Leoline, then, Christabel has been a material signifier in the

most precise sense of the word: a gift which expresses, affirms, or creates a social link between the partners of [the] exchange (Rubin 172).
She has been a conduit between husband and wife, the living and the
dead. Her father, however, no longer desires the linkage implicit in
the gift. He wants not an old wife but a new one, not the past but the
future. And so he abandons gift and giver alike, rejecting the notion
that a reciprocal hail implies a mutual obligation:
Within the Barons heart and brain
If thoughts, like these, had any share,

They only swelled his rage and pain,

And did but work confusion there.
...................
And turning from his own sweet maid,
The aged knight, Sir Leoline,
Led forth the lady Geraldine! (ll. 63639, 65355)

III
From the perspective of Chodorows theory, then, Christabel is neither a Christian allegory of vicarious suffering nor an anti-Christian
polemic which abolishes Christianity and returns the psyche to a primitive world of ethical opacity (Paglia 218). Rather, it is a parable about
families. It is a cautionary tale depicting the tragic consequences of traditional methods of male gender socialization. It uses Leolines actions
to highlight three characteristics of the kind of masculinity produced by
such socialization: an inability to maintain close relationships, a tendency to use hailing to transform women into material signifiers of
male desire, and a stubborn unwillingness to accept the view that interpellation is never unidirectional and that a reciprocal hail produces a
mutual obligation. Finally, it leaves readers with Leolines wish to be reunited with de Vaux. It leaves them, that is to say, with the very bad expression of a very good desire: the desirefelt by many mento
reestablish the kind of relational unity experienced by boys but denied
to men. In doing so, the poem leaves readers with the hope that someday, some way, brotherhood will become as common as sisterhood, and
that both will flourish together under the fatherhood of God.
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Jacobs Ladder
William Blake, 1806