Christabel as gothic poem?
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Answer:
Explanation:
Christabel (poem) Christabel is a long narrative ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in two parts. The first part was reputedly written in 1797, and the second in 1800. For all the attempts to answer it, the question persists: what does it mean that
Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the popular ‘Gothic’ of the 1790s in his unfinished
‘Christabel’, composed between 1797 and 1800, when he so passionately condemns
Gothic fiction as ‘low’, ‘vulgar’, and ‘pernicious’ in reviews and letters of that very
time?1 To be sure, prompted in part by the popularity and translations of G. A.
Burger’s German-Gothic poem Lenore (first Anglicized in 1790),‘Christabel’ strives
mightily to situate its perceived cultural level above what was then termed ‘the terrorist school of writing’.2 In the first place, it echoes particular chivalric ballads from
Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the source even of the
name ‘Christabel’.3 Coleridge thereby advances what James McKusick has aptly
described as this poet’s ‘desire to reassemble the surviving fragments of archaic language into an older, more natural mode of poetic discourse [in which] ‘natural’ . . .
is equated with the primeval origin of human consciousness and values’4 – the very
opposite, it would seem, of what Coleridge regards as the unnatural modern ‘manufacture’ of the tale of horror in his attack on Matthew Lewis’s The Monk in the Critical Review of 1797.
5 Moreover,‘Christabel’ suggests that the gorgeous, but ominous
‘Geraldine’ is the heroine’s dark alter ego, especially when this ‘stately’ figure all in
white disrobes in Christabel’s bedroom to reveal a ‘bosom and half her side’ too horrific for description (ll. 62, 252).6 At that point this poem is echoing Edmund
Spenser’s ‘Duessa’ in Book I of The Fairie Queene, who is stripped of her beauteous
surface to reveal her ‘misshaped parts’ by the end of Canto VIII.7 This allusion, along
with his own brand of falsely antiquated diction, allows Coleridge to link this tale
both to the ‘high culture’ epic-romance of which The Faerie Queene is the supreme
English example and to the long-sanctioned conventions of Christian allegory, in
which title characters encounter the duplicity of Original Sin in themselves and
others by way of preternatural figures soon rendered as loathsome, rather than lingeringly seductive as they are in The Monk. Even when Coleridge turns to less highcultural folklore, such as the East European legends about vampires that are subtly invoked when Geraldine awakens with rejuvenated after having
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