Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge's Muses and Feminist Criticism

According to Thomas De Quincey, the poetics of Romanticism were organised around a gender opposition: 'the Sublime... in contraposition to the Beautiful, grew up on the basis of sexual distinctions - the Sublime corresponding to the male, and the Beautiful, its anti-pole, corresponding to the female'. The principal proponent of these gendered poetics was Edmund Burke, for whom the sublime was characterised by the masculine traits of power, terror, strength, greatness, and the beautiful by the feminine qualities of softness, sympathy, and feeling. Burke's view of the feminine was criticised by the contemporary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued that it amounted, when used to define women's social role, to a prescription for libertinism. Burke's views, she asserted, rendered women helpless, ill-educated beings. Valued (if at all) only for their bodily appearance and compliance, they were rejected when their looks faded because men found them mentally dull. No longer entranced by their beauty, men became contemptuous of the very weakness they had encouraged women to adopt. They cast them off, to replace them with other mistresses whose weakness was still attractively accompanied by beauty. In the process, both men and women were degraded. Inequality was perpetuated; men became tyrants, women became victims. Coleridge was briefly a friend of Wollstonecraft. He was, in the 1790s, a political enemy of Burke. But he was not a feminist. Despite his political differences from the Reflections on the Revolution in France, he often viewed the feminine in a way similar to its author. And, according to a number of recent critics, he adopted a Burkean view of the feminine in his poetry. His poetry and poetics, it is suggested, borrowed a gendered sublime and beautiful, in order to empower the masculine and disempower the feminine. The male poet, it is argued, was the principal beneficiary. He became sublime, whereas he made of the female a beautiful but subordinate muse. Marlon B. Ross, for instance, sees Coleridge as participating in male Romanticism's struggle for a transcendent 'power of self-possession, a power that is repeatedly willed in the poetry by both overt and subliminal appeals to the virility and masculinity of his creative project'. Ross's view of male Romanticism has as its test case Wordsworth's poetic treatment of women. For Mary Jacobus too, Wordsworth's poetic power was gained at the expense of the feminine, and at women's cost. She shows that in Wordsworth's poetry Dorothy is enlisted as a muse, only for her insights and words to be absorbed into Wordsworth's contemplation of his own superior genius. For Anne K. Mellor, Wordsworth's silencing of Dorothy was replicated by Coleridge in 'Kubla Khan'. The treatment in that poem of the Abyssinian maid is paradigmatic of the procedure of male Romantics: they effect a 'total absorption' of the feminine which leaves it - and the women who feature in their work - 'conquered' and 'enslaved'. Margaret Homans declares that Wordsworthian Romantic poetry 'states most compellingly the traditional myth . . . of woman's place in language as the silent or vanished object of male representation and quest'. The male Romantics, in other words, far from being opponents of the gender inequality which Burke, and the social order he defended, perpetuated, were complicit with his defence - and with the social order itself (at least in so far as it concerned women). They were not, in this area, radicals, and if they were not libertines they were, in their poetry, conquerors. In what follows I want to take issue with the idea that Coleridge participates in a conquest and enslavement of the feminine. By investigating the poetics of 'Kubla …