It is the tendency of recent criticisms to try to read historical and political dimensions into “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Mariner’s guilt, in New Historicist readings, is sometimes understood as representing the collective guilt of the Europeans related with slave trade, or sometimes understood in the more immediate political context of Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution. With no intention to attack the interpretive mode of the New Historicism per se, this paper will argue that it would be finally insufficient and incorrect to try to explain the question of guilt in Coleridge by recourse to the immediate political context of the 1790s and the social and collective guilt ascribable to his generation. This paper will argue instead that “The Ancient Mariner” is better understood in terms of Coleridge’s life-long moral and theological questionings about man as a free being. It will argue that the poem is about man’s introjection of evil into himself only to become guilt-stricken, which to Coleridge was the “origin of evil.” The theme of “Redemption” is, therefore, never simple in this poem, for it can only be sought in the Mariner’s inexorable repetition of the telling and re-telling of his story, which is in a sense the re-enactment of the extremely contingent act of the shooting of the albatross. Both are understood as “the return of the repressed.”
It is the tendency of recent criticisms to try to read historical and political dimensions into “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Mariner’s guilt, in New Historicist readings, is sometimes understood as representing the collective guilt of the Europeans related with slave trade, or sometimes understood in the more immediate political context of Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution. With no intention to attack the interpretive mode of the New Historicism per se, this paper will argue that it would be finally insufficient and incorrect to try to explain the question of guilt in Coleridge by recourse to the immediate political context of the 1790s and the social and collective guilt ascribable to his generation. This paper will argue instead that “The Ancient Mariner” is better understood in terms of Coleridge’s life-long moral and theological questionings about man as a free being. It will argue that the poem is about man’s introjection of evil into himself only to become guilt-stricken, which to Coleridge was the “origin of evil.” The theme of “Redemption” is, therefore, never simple in this poem, for it can only be sought in the Mariner’s inexorable repetition of the telling and re-telling of his story, which is in a sense the re-enactment of the extremely contingent act of the shooting of the albatross. Both are understood as “the return of the repressed.”
(0)
(0)