Eerie (and erotic?) elsewheres: Coleridge’s 'Christabel', Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and Rossetti’s 'Goblin Market' (drawings by me)
Want to go somewhere different without paying a penny? Then
broaden your mind by letting your imagination lead you away from mundanity with
a little help from some famous poetic types. A word of warning, though: you
might find it slightly disturbing, although not in a bad way. More sort of
creepily erotic. Death and sex. The nature of female sexuality. That sort of
thing. Stay with me on this, please. You’ll be fine.
Fantasies of ‘elsewhere’ present us with contrasts,
parallels, and ambiguities offering reflective insights into the complex
realities of human existence and experience (have to say, I’m quite impressed
with that sentence. Fear not; that’s as long-winded as it gets). The
‘elsewhere’ of Coleridge’s Christabel, Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans
Merci’, and Rossetti’s Goblin Market is a place of dark and ambiguous
sexual fantasy, proving that old poetry is not just dry and dusty. I’m not the
only one who thinks this, by the way, so it’s not just me being dirty-minded. There
are a few hints and spoilers below, but mostly things to muse upon when, or if,
you read or listen to the poems (I’ve put links below).
All three feature characters who have crossed boundaries into
strange, often sexually charged, other worlds represented by ‘otherworldly’
figures. Coleridge’s Geraldine and Keats’s La Belle Dame are enigmatic and
uncanny, while Rossetti’s goblin men are equally ambiguous, possessing the
characteristics of various animals. We don’t know if any of these beings are
real or figments of the imagination: which of these is more worrying? Nasrullah
Mambrol suggests that Christabel might be ‘dreaming the whole thing’ and that
Geraldine may ‘represent [Christabel’s] own sexual anxiety, as well as being a
source of that anxiety’. Intriguing. So, is Geraldine Christabel’s other, far
less innocent, self? Coleridge’s Christabel and Rossetti’s Laura and Lizzie
represent innocent femininity in danger from Geraldine and the goblin men,
respectively. But Keats’s knight also finds himself in trouble, having fallen
under a lady’s spell. Humans end up entranced, and death is an imminent hazard
in all three poems. However, on the other hand, are these poems also talking about
the slightly disquieting nature of sexual discovery, with all its creative
potential, via a fantasy of ‘elsewhere’? Maybe it’s not all bad…?
Are these poems anti-feminist? What do they have to say about
women and women’s sexuality? What do you make of the connections between sex
and death? Are the messages timeless, or purely reflective of the period when
the poems were composed? Where is the darkness, and where is the light: within,
or without? There are paradoxes here, as these fantasies of ‘elsewhere’ are
dangerous, but are also sources of liberation. They generate both understanding
and questioning (a bit like some of my trips abroad, I suppose).
Anyway, enough of my wittering. Have a listen to these whilst
you’re pottering about. And let your mind wander weirdly otherwhere…I’d be
interested to know your own thoughts…
A reading of Goblin Market
Nasrullah Mambrol’s fascinating Analysis of Coleridge’s Christabel –
Literary Theory and Criticism (literariness.org) (well worth a read)
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