"Christabel" and the Origin of Evil

• Published in: Studies in philology 2007-07, Vol.104 (3), p.376-407
• Main Author: Ulmer, William A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Christianity; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834); English literature; Evil; Guilt; Innocence; Love poetry; Morality; Mothers; Narrative poetry; Original sin; Poetry; Religious conversion; Religious poetry
• ISSN: 0039-3738; 1543-0383; 1543-0383
• DOI: 10.1353/sip.2007.0014

[...]Christabel dramatizes Coleridge's Unitarian understanding of Original Sin as a state of guiltless corruption, an innate and mysterious ambivalence of the moral will. Combine these causes only and you will see how almost impossible it was that a maiden so innocent and so susceptible, of an imagination so lively by nature, and so fever-kindled by disease and its occasions... should not mistake, and often, the less painful and in such a frame the sometimes pleasurable approaches to bodily deliquium, and her imperfect fainting-fits for divine transports, and momentary union with God-especially if with a thoughtful yet pure psychology you join the force of suppressed instincts stirring in the heart and bodily frame, of a mind unconscious of their nature and these in the keenly-sensitive body, in the innocent and loving soul of Teresa, with "all her thirsts, and lives, and deaths of love," and what remains unsolved, for which the credulity of the many and the knavery of a few will not furnish ample explanation? In a 1796 letter toThelwall summarizing the essential tenets of Christianity as he understood them, Coleridge departs from Priestley even more significantly in affirming the existence of an immortal soul that, upon the death of the body, entered a state either of enjoyment or suffering-apparently Heaven or Hell since Coleridge could assure a grieving Lamb, "your mother is in heaven" (CL, 1.280 and 239). [...]early commentators, Walter Scott and William Hazlitt among them, also noted the sexual ambience of Coleridge's poem.