Rethinking the Romantic Era

Androgynous Subjectivity and the Recreative in the Writings of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley

Kathryn S. Freeman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350167421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson and Mary Shelley, this book uses key concepts of androgyny, subjectivity and the re-creative as a productive framework to trace the fascinating textual interactions and dialogues among these authors. It crosses the boundary between male and female writers of the Romantic period by linking representations of gender with late Enlightenment upheavals regarding creativity and subjectivity, demonstrating how these interrelated concerns dismantle traditional binaries separating the canonical and the noncanonical; male and female; poetry and prose; good and evil; subject and object. Through the convergences among the writings of Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley, the book argues that each dismantles and reconfigures subjectivity as androgynous and amoral, subverting the centrality of the male gaze associated with canonical Romanticism. In doing so, it examines key works from each author's oeuvre, from Coleridge's "canonical" poems such as Rime of the Ancient Mariner, through Robinson's lyrical poetry and novels such as Walsingham, to Mary Shelley's fiction, including Frankenstein, Mathilda, and The Last Man.

1

Coleridge’s Gendered Revolt against Materialism: Textual Plasticity in “The Eolian Harp,” Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and “Kubla Khan”

In 1807, two events marked Coleridge’s rejection of the stultifying binaries that informed his personal and literary relationships during his early years in the Lake District: his separation from his wife, Sarah Fricker, and his ambivalent “To a Gentleman” following Wordsworth’s recitation of The Prelude.¹ While the 1795 “Eolian Harp” had already marked Coleridge’s doomed new marriage to Sarah as the forced yoking of two disparate sensibilities, the poem “to” Wordsworth reflects the impossibility of Coleridge’s literary union with Wordsworth who insisted upon a subjectivity “wedded to” the “goodly universe.”² “To a Gentleman,” Coleridge’s poetic response to hearing Wordsworth read his then thirteen-book “Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind,” appears on the surface to extoll Wordsworth’s genius and to excoriate Coleridge himself. However, his ambivalence surfaces gradually; he follows the hyperbolic praise of the opening line’s epithets, “Friend of the Wise! And Teacher of the Good!” with a sequence of dubious characterizations of Wordsworth’s poem: the “Theme hard as high!”—itself damning praise—emerges as the essence of Wordsworth’s inner/outer binary: “Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, / When Power stream’d from thee, and thy soul received / The light reflected, as a light bestow’d” (To a Gentleman, ll. 17–19). When Coleridge’s self-pity does emerge in the poem, it has already been problematized by the inherent criticism of Wordsworth: “Fears, self-will’d, that shunn’d the eye of Hope; / And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear” (To a Gentleman, ll. 67–8). Perhaps nowhere does Coleridge better articulate his perverse self-destructiveness, marked by its disruption of the categorical imperative to choose the path of righteousness.

The poem ends in ambiguous prayer that further complicates the earlier self-pity: “I sate, my being blended in one thought / (Thought was it? Or Aspiration? Or Resolve) …. / And when I rose, I found myself in prayer” (To a Gentleman, ll. 109–12). Neither confirming nor negating self-pity, this parenthetical catalogue of questions throws into ironic ambiguity the final line, in which Coleridge finds himself “in prayer.” Coleridge appears as troubled as the Wedding Guest of Rime of the Ancient Mariner, left by the Mariner stunned and solitary rather than embracing the pious community represented by the “kirk”; “To a Gentleman,” in turn, looks ahead to the “secondary imagination” of Biographia Literaria XIII; there, Coleridge declares that the artistic impulse is one of disassembly and which, significantly, precedes Coleridge’s most direct denunciation of Wordsworthian “fancy” in chapter XIV. Returning to the end of “To a Gentleman” from the vantage point of Coleridge’s definition of secondary imagination, Biographia Literaria can be seen to complicate further rather than resolve the catalogue of questions, the continuum from chapters XII to XIV marking the trajectory from Coleridge’s rejection of associationism to the focus on Wordsworthian imagination reduced to “mere Fancy.” Coleridge uses this term in chapter XIII to dismiss the associationism Wordsworth himself learned from Coleridge as a lower faculty than either primary or secondary imagination. Ending “To a Gentleman” in prayer is a variation on a pattern in Coleridge’s conversation poems of ending with a benediction that ostensibly provides resolution but is made ironic in the context of the poems, including “The Eolian Harp,” “Frost at Midnight,” and “Dejection.”

Two years after he wrote “To a Gentleman,” Coleridge wrote in his notebook that the “organs of motion & outward action perform their functions at the stimulus of a galvanic fluid applied by the Will, not by the Spirit of Life that makes Soul and Body one” (Notebooks II, 2557). The passive voice of this statement draws out its self-contradiction: If outward actions result from a “galvanic fluid,” it would appear that Will is of little consequence to what appears an instinctively biological cause-and-effect phenomenon. Not only is Will paradoxically passive in applying such fluid to stimulate motion, but Coleridge distinguishes Will from the “Spirit of Life” that, by contrast to Will, makes “Soul and Body one.” The statement thus epitomizes Coleridge’s pull toward nondualism as a “Spirit of Life” held in contradistinction with mechanistic corporeality.

Coleridge not only rejects materialism, but he ultimately moves beyond the German transcendentalism that had been his means of rejecting associationism. The 1819 statement can thus be seen as a reiteration of the paradox at the heart of Coleridge’s definition of the artist’s recreative work in chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria. Secondary imagination, Coleridge writes there, is the faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” (Engell and Bate I, 304). The violence inherent in dismembering the world of phenomena as a means of recreation has more in common with Mary Shelley’s 1816 Frankenstein than with Wordsworthian poetics or the German transcendental philosophy that Coleridge ultimately rejects by chapter XIII.³ Indeed, Frankenstein enacts the central idea of Coleridge’s 1798 notebook entry, for it is Frankenstein’s monomaniacal will that stimulates the “galvanic” tissue of body parts to recreate life in a ghastly parody of the artist’s work.⁴ The interplay of these three textual meditations on the creative act—the notebook entry, Frankenstein, Biographia Literaria XIII—demonstrates the potential for a literary engagement that defies the binary systems inherent in segregated studies of gender, genre, and generation.

Attending to Coleridge’s wrestling with systematic binaries from the hindsight of Biographia Literaria shifts the discussion of his literary biography. Doing so in turn challenges the scholarly binary implicit in the separate categories of Coleridge’s poetry and philosophy.

Articulating the frustration for scholars in the pursuit of a full representation of Coleridge, Alethea Hayter notes that privileging certain passages to support one’s interpretation ignores those that do not: “Try as one may, no book like the present one is quite objective. Quotations chosen, as one thinks, to illustrate the tendencies of someone else’s intellect may in fact back-project their light on to shallow, odd, or unseemly corners of one’s own mind” (217). Of course, this dictum applies to all literary analysis in varying degrees; however, it resonates particularly for Coleridge’s multifaceted oeuvre.⁵ A double-edged consideration of his corpus does not mean blending the two disciplines as though they constitute a harmonious whole. Instead, a more accurate representation emerges of Coleridge’s struggle to resist the common foundation upon which the Western traditions of poetry and the religiophilosophical rest, out of which, in turn, emerges his creation of modern literary criticism. This chapter returns to Coleridge’s early literary productions to find the seeds of resistance to the very materialist traditions even as he ambivalently embraced them in poetry and prose.

Dilation and Contraction in “The Eolian Harp”

A starting point for studying Coleridge’s early ambivalence toward British materialist philosophy and its attendant binaries is his 1795 poem, “Effusion XXXV,” revised as “The Eolian Harp” in 1803, in which Coleridge describes a momentary liberation from the constriction of a “world so hush’d” (l. 10). A tight-fitting subjectivity that opens this so-called honeymoon poem is the casualty of a marriage with erotic, epistemological, and artistic implications.

Though the most overt marriage in the poem is to his new wife, a “pensive” Sarah Fricker, there are even more vexed, albeit less explicit, marriages troubling Coleridge here that would take him more than two decades from which he would extricate himself: namely, those to materialist philosophy and, by extension, to William Wordsworth’s poetics of memory. Here as well as in his other fragments, Coleridge revolts against rather than seeks to fulfill the classical standards of wholeness, harmony, and coherence, a view that runs counter to traditional readings such as that of J. C. C. Mays, who suggests that Coleridge revised “The Eolian Harp” in 1797, 1817, and 1828 “to wrestle its components into a more balanced whole by means of large excisions and interpolations,” suggesting that “unsuccess … drove him onward to the end” (qtd. in Halmi et al., 10).

Coleridge’s belated divorce decree is found buried midway through Biographia Literaria, twenty years later. At the end of the first volume, chapter XIII, Coleridge articulates in two brief paragraphs a dissection of imagination distinguishing that which exists in all human perception and that which is only to be found in the artist. Though secondary imagination has already been mentioned, it is worth examining in the entirety of its definition vis-à-vis primary imagination and fancy:

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. (Engell and Bate I, 304)

While secondary imagination is an “echo” of the primary, Coleridge distinguishes it as a recreative faculty. That the process may be “rendered impossible” is an ironic reference to his own inability to embody the poetical character as he represents it, for instance, in the final stanza of “Kubla Khan.”⁶ The statement that follows this definition of primary and secondary imagination is most damning of both Wordsworthian poetics and his own earlier embrace of associationism: the secondary imagination, that recreative faculty of artists, soars above the “fixities and definites” of mere fancy, relegated to a level below both primary and secondary imagination and therefore a derogatory term to which Coleridge finally reduces “the law of association”; Coleridge infers that Wordsworth’s “ordinary memory,” as mere Fancy, receives “all its materials ready made [sic]” (Biographia Literaria, 489).

The nature of the divide between Coleridge and Wordsworth can be foreseen in their earliest dialogues in prose and poetry. That Coleridge called his 1796 poems “Effusions” speaks to his early resistance to Wordsworth’s poetics.⁷ Coleridge’s source for the term may be William Preston whom Halmi et al. quote as defining “love poetry as a ‘spontaneous effusion of a mind wholly occupied by a single idea, careless of rules, little studious of poetic fame, and desirous only of expressing its emotions’” (5, n. 3). There are several ideas in Preston’s statement that reverberate with irony as Coleridge and then Wordsworth echo them.

Defending his poems against charges of egotism in his 1796 Preface to Poems on Various Subjects, Coleridge distinguishes “effusion,” or the outpouring of one’s subjectivity, from egotism that, he claims, “is to be condemned then only when it offends against time and place as in an History or an Epic Poem. To censure it in a Monody or Sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round” (qtd in Halmi et al., 4). Here Coleridge suggests that, whereas subjectivity should not enter narrative, it defines lyrical poetry. That he compares the latter to a circle is telling: Unlike traditional narrative, the lyrical is outside the realm of time and space. The circle image suggests that lyrical poetry is more than subjective; it is nonbinary, a merging of subject and object. In light of Coleridge’s distinction between a nonbinary subjectivity and egotism, when one revisits Wordsworth’s often-cited definition of poetry in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Balla...