sex—text: "Christabel" and the Christabelliads

The pictographic arrangement of "text" and "sex" in the title of this article embodies my critical focus as well as my methodology. The typographic intersection of "text" and "sex" emblematises my bibliographic reading of the friction between sexuality and textuality in contemporary parodies of Coleridge's "Christabel" (1816). Where sex and text cross paths, a fruitful scene of interpretation emerges. In this critical space, sexuality is an arena of interpretive conflict between two groups of readers: contemporary parodists and the Coleridge family. The former attempts to more closely align the supernatural and sexual poles of the poem, while the latter endeavours to textually and editorially robe the sexually suggestive elements of "Christabel." The friction between sexuality and textuality is the result of the rub—the contact—between the poem's oral and textual transmission and the corpus of criticism that has attended "Christabel" for more than 180 years. From William Hazlitt in 1816 to Camille Paglia in the 1980s to Laura Adams in 1998, readers of "Christabel" have been alternately intrigued and aggrieved by the sexual and gothic representations of the Christabel-Geraldine relationship. There is "something disgusting at the bottom of [Coleridge's] subject," Hazlitt declares; while Paglia reprimands humanistic scholarship for its failure to engage what she sees as the poem's "blatant lesbian pornography." And in her novel Christabel, Adams transports Coleridge's poem to the late twentieth century, exploring the gradual evolution of the love affair between Christabel and Dina (Geraldine). But to suggest that there has been a point of contact between textual study of the poem and the near-200 year corpus of commentary over-states the case. Critics have invested little energy in consideration of the connections between the poem's transmission and reception history and various textual witnesses' depictions of the Christabel-Geraldine relationship. In unpacking the sexual and gothic elements of "Christabel," critics have been largely silent about the relationship between the poem's textual history and sexual interpretations. This inattention is problematic; the result is that a significant element of the poem's textual and critical history has been neglected: Coleridge's attempts to counter and suppress the sexual (even lesbian) code of "Christabel" that contemporary parodists expose and ridicule. "Christabel" caused a clamour soon after its release from John Murray's press on 25 May 1816. Reviewers' reactions were generally negative and dismissive—or exasperated and perplexed, as the anonymous Champion reviewer's distressed interrogation of "Christabel" reveals: The circularity of the Champion reviewer's commentary demonstrates the poem's frustrating indeterminacy: "what is it all about" gives away to more specific thematic and interpretive inquiries about genre, ontology, biology, and sexuality only to return to the general "it." Indeed, as Henry Nelson Coleridge's Quarterly review of Coleridge's 1834 Poetical Works evinces, questions about "Christabel" only lead to more questions: The Champion reviewer's and Henry's questions are links in a explicatory chain that are both anchored in Christabel's words to Geraldine upon their first meeting: "And who art thou?" This is not, however, simply an inquiry into identity. Like the Hermit's question of the Ancient Mariner ("What manner of man art thou?"), Christabel's question concerns ontology. "Who and what is Geraldine?" "What is he, or she, or it?" Contemporary parodists were quick to answer these questions. For them, Geraldine is a protean figure—at once, supernaturally sexual, sexually supernatural, and suggestively hermaphroditic. Between 1816 and 1832, no less than seven verse parodies of "Christabel" were published. The parodies, considered in combination with the 15 "Christabel" continuations published between 1815 and 1909, position the poem as one of Coleridge's most often emulated works in the nineteenth century. The appeal of Coleridge's poem is its incompletion: only two of a projected …