Reflections on the Lovely Lady Christabel

Lorrie Millington: Lady Christabel (1983)

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, my knowledge of the English Romantic poet Coleridge is fairly limited; I know he was pals with Wordsworth; I know he helped introduce the English-speaking world to German idealism; and I know he was fond of opium. 

 

If pushed, I suppose I would also admit to knowing he was an influential literary critic and dreamed at one time of establishing an egalitarian community on pantisocratic lines. 

 

Oh, and I know of course that he's the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (completed in 1797, but not published until 1816). 

 

However, it's the long narrative poem Christabel that fascinates me at the moment and which I would like to briefly reflect on here ... 

 

II.

 

Christabel consists of two parts; the first writen in 1797 and the second in 1800. [1]

 

The story concerns a central female character - Christabel - who one day goes into the woods to pray by a large oak tree. There, she encounters a strange young woman named Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by men on horseback. 

Sympathetic to Geraldine's plight, she takes her home with her and they spend the night together, sharing a bed (this despite a number of supernatural signs that Christabel might have been well-advised to take as warnings). 

Whilst Christabel remains somewhat enchanted by Geraldine, she gradually begins to realise the latter's malign (possibly inhuman) nature. Her father, however, is completely enthralled by the latter and orders a grand procession to celebrate her rescue.

 

Somewhat frustratingly, that's where the (unfinished) poem stops; it appears that Coleridge couldn't quite make up his mind about how to end it.    

 

III.

 

This poem appeals to me for its queer gothic character, founded upon a number of perverse and supernatural elements, and I'm not surprised to learn that Shelley and Byron were both obsessed with Christabel. If it gave the former nightmares, the latter was delighted by its sapphic undertones (the relationship between Christabel and Geraldine is implicitly sexual).   

 

Other writers who have fallen under the poem's spell include Edgar Allan Poe [2], Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [3], Renée Vivien [4], and A.S. Byatt, who names a fictional romantic poet Christabel in her award-winning novel Possession (1990).  

 

Unsurprisingly, Christabel also became favourite reading amongst feminists; the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, for example, named her daughter in honour of the poem's eponymous heroine (though she might have been more appropriately named Geraldine in my view) [5].   

 

 

IV.

Finally, a brief note on the image used to illustrate this post ...

Initially, I was going to reproduce Julia Margaret Cameron's 1866 photograph named after Coleridge's poem and depicting the titular character [6]. 

But then I remembered that in an old photo album kept in a box in the attic, I still had a picture sent to me by the artist, model, dancer, and writer Lorrie Millington [7] over forty years ago, of a mannequin named Lady Christabel with whom she shared a house in Leeds. 

 

In the summer of 1984, I began writing a 20,000 word novella entitled 'The Girl in the Mystery Castle', about Miss Millington and her relationship with the lovely Lady Christabel and it has always been my intention to one day complete this tale.

 

However, as this now seems very unlikely, I have decided to share the photo here ...

 

If one looks closely enough, one will see that Christabel is wearing a wig that has been braided pirate style and has an Apache war stripe painted across her nose, the reason being that Lorrie and I were both Ant People back in the early-mid '80s.   

 

Notes

 

[1] Coleridge planned on adding three further parts, but these were never completed. The work was published in a pamphlet in 1816, alongside Kubla Khan and another poem, The Pains of Sleep (written 1803). Christabel can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[2] Poe's poem 'The Sleeper' (1831) is said to be inspired by Christabel. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.

 

[3] Le Fanu based the character of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein, on Geraldine. See my post of 13 April 2020 on the topic of vampiric lesbianism in which I discuss Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872): click here.  

[4] Vivien's 1904 novel L'Etre Double, a lesbian romance, was also inspired by Coleridge's poem Christabel. See my post of 9 October 2013 in praise of sapphic decadence in which I discuss the work of Renée Vivien: click here.

 

[5] I'm not a fan of the militant idealism and the terrorist tactics advocated by Pankhurst, which invariably collapse into the black hole of fascism. See the post dated 17 February 2024 on suffragettes and the BUF: click here. 

 

[6] For more details and to view the photograph, please visit the Met Museum website: click here. And for a post dated 23 June 2023 written with reference to Cameron's photography, click here.  

 

[7] For a post dated 18 April 2015 written in memory of Lorrie Millington, click here.

You'll Never Turn the Vinegar Into Jam: On the Figure of the Tiger in the Philosophy of D. H. Lawrence

Most of their time, tigers pad and slouch in burning peace.

Yet they also drink blood. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although I wouldn't name it as one of Lawrence's totemic animals, nevertheless the tiger often appears within his work and held an important place in his philosophical imagination as one of the great realities of reality; i.e., a living thing that has come into its own fullness of being: 

 

"The tiger blazed transcendent into immortal darkness." [2]

 

"The tiger is the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute." [3]

 

For Lawrence, in other words, the tiger is physical perfection and counters the bodiless idealism of those who, like Shelley, sought pure spiritual consummation: 

 

"The tiger was a terrible problem to Shelley, who wanted life in terms of the lamb." [4]  

 

 

II. 

 

In the the first essay of the Genealogy, Niezsche argues that it's perfectly natural for lambs to hate and fear tigers, wolves, and eagles. But mistaken to believe that they are morally superior to those animals that prey on them; the latter are not evil and act out of instinctive necessity, not cruelty.    

 

To expect fierce and powerful carnivores to lie down with meek and mild herbivores is as absurd as thinking you can turn the vinegar into jam; "a tiger is a tiger not a lamb, mein herr" [5] and cannot behave otherwise (and nor can the lamb - a creature which acts from weakness, not goodness).   

 

What's more, Lawrence argues that just as the tiger requires the lamb for sustenance, the lamb needs the tiger; for only the juxtaposition of the tiger "keeps the lamb a quivering, vivid, beautiful fleet thing"  [6]. 

 

Take away or exterminate the tiger, and all you're left with is a flock of letzte Schafe; happy, but little more than woolly clods of meat. Fear and suffering are vital principles; they help concentrate the soul, in man as well as lamb. 

 

Thank God, says Lawrence, for the tigers who liberate us from the "abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep" [7]. And not only does he affirm the spirit of the tiger, he dreams of becoming-tiger and of making the tiger's way his own:

 

"Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until [...] in the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire ..." [8]   

 

 

III.

 

Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he soon starts to oscillate from one pole of delirium to another and concede that the tiger's way - the way of the flesh and becoming "transfigured into magnificent brindled flame" [9] - is not the only form of ecstasy. 

 

Man can also become-deer, become-lamb, or, indeed, become-Christian, and move beyond the tiger, finding consummation not in the devouring of those who are weaker, or even in the negative ecstasy of offering non-resistance and being eaten oneself, but in acknowledging otherness:

 

"The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all the multitude of others is God, and this is the great God, greater than the God which is Me. God is that which is not-me. 

      And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'

      God is that which is Not-Me. In realising the Not-Me I am consummated, I become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my neighbour as myself." [10]

 

But then, having said that, Lawrence warns of the danger of pushing this ideal too far; of becoming too selfless whilst, somewhat paradoxically, identifying oneself with all that is other, like Walt Whitman, who aches with amorous love and insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone and everthing to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum [11]. 

 

For this path ends in nihilism and the triumph of the Machine and it's a "horrible thing to see tigers caught up and entangled in machinery [...] a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell" [12].   

  

IV. 

 

Ultimately, Lawrence's sharp-clawed feline philosophy can probably be best construed as tragic in the Nietzschean sense; one which understands according to the desire of death as well as according to the desire of life and is true for all things that emerge from the matrix of chaos, including "the tiger and the fragile dappled doe" [13].  

 

The former is a blossom of pure significance, born of the sun. But the tiger, like the leopard, needs to quench herself with the blood (or soft fire) of Bambi, so that she too might know tenderness when nursing her young and dreaming her dreams in stillness:

 

"For even the mother-tiger is quenched with insuperable tenderness when the milk is in her udder; she lies still, and her dreams are frail like fawns." [14]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A misremembered couple of lines from 'Glory', by D. H. Lawrence; The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University press, 2013), p. 430.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 270. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge Univrrsity Press, 1994), p. 117. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature (First Version: 1918-19), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen , (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 214.

 

[5] I'm quoting here from the brilliant Kander and Ebb song 'Mein Herr', from the musical Cabaret (1966). 

      To expect a tiger or leopard or lion to lie down with its prey is, says Lawrence, as vain as hoping "for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat". See 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 49. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature ... p. 214. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 42.

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 117.

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ibid., pp. 119-120. 

 

[11] I have discussed Walt Whitman and his fatal idealism elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 121.

 

[13] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 38. 

 

[14] Ibid., p. 48. 

 

 

For a related post which anticipates this one and in which I evoke the spirit of the Champawat Tiger, click here.  

 

 

Evoking the Spirit of the Champawat Tiger

Head of the Champawat Tiger

 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? [1]

You might think that due to the enormous size of Russia, China, and India there would still be plenty of room for the tiger in this world. But you'd be wrong. Over the last century, tigers have lost more than 93% of their historic range and have been eradicated from Western and Central Asia, the islands of Java and Bali, and large areas of Southeast Asia and China. 

 

What remains of their range is cramped and fragmented and, thanks to habitat destruction and human encroachment - not to mention poaching - the global wild tiger population is now estimated to number a pitiful 5,500 individuals, with most populations living in small isolated pockets [2].

 

So, good news then, that in the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan native tiger populations are currently thriving due to a concerted effort to safeguard their habitat and create so-called wildlife corridors allowing them to roam about with a degree of freedom. From subtropical jungles to subalpine forests, tigers in Bhutan seem to have been given a fighting chance. 

 

However, despite this, their long-term survival is by no means guaranteed and one must keep things in statistical context. Thus, whilst celebrating a 27% increase in Bhutan's tiger population since 2015, it's important to recall that the starting figure was only 103 adult animals, meaning there are now still only 131 tigers in Bhutan. 

 

And - surprise, surprise - local farmers worried about their precious fucking livestock are not happy even with this tiny number. 

 

And whilst our friends in China continue to believe that various tiger parts have magico-medicinal properties, the illegal killing of tigers will continue. Snared, shot, and butchered by poachers for their bones, skins, and other body parts, tigers remain big business. 

 

Just as depressing is the fact that there are now more captive-bred tigers than wild creatures; living in zoos for our entertainment and on factory farms where they are reared for slaughter and human consumption as if they were cattle rather than majestic beasts of prey. 

 

If I could, I would summon the spirit of the Champawat Tiger to come and strike fresh terror into the heart of Man and gobble up his children [3]. Shelley, for whom the tiger was a terrible problem, wouldn't like it, but, as D. H. Lawrence pointed out, we can't live life exclusively in terms of the lamb [4].

 

 

 'A tiger knows no consummation unless 

they kill a violated and struggling prey.'

 

Notes

[1] William Blake, 'The Tyger', Songs of Experience (1794): click here. 

      According to D. H. Lawrence, the spirit of the tiger, burning bright in the forests of the Blakean night, is "the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute". See 'The Lemon Gardens', in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 117.

 

[2] A century ago, that number was probably closer to 100,000. Thus, not suprisingly, the tiger is officially listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List.

 

[3] The Champawat Tiger was a beautiful Bengal tigress responsible for an estimated 436 human deaths in Nepal and the Kumaon district of India, during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Famed for her bloodlust, she is credited in the Guinness Book of World Records with preying upon more people than any other single animal. 

      Sadly, she was shot and killed in 1907 by the great white hunter Jim Corbett. However, before damning him to eternal torments in some hell ruled by felines, let us remember that Corbett eventually put down his rifle and picked up a camera, becoming an outspoken naturalist who advocated for the protection of India's wildlife, particularly its endangered big cats. In 1968, one of the five remaining subspecies of tigers was named after him: Panthera tigris corbetti. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature (First Version 1918-19), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 214.  

      Lawrence goes on to say: "We must admit that only the juxtaposition of the tiger keeps the lamb a quivering, vivid, beautiful fleet thing. Take away the tiger and we get the sheep of our pasture, just clods of meat."  

 

 

 For a follow up post to this one in which I expand upon Lawrence's tiger philosophy, click here. 

The Broken Heart Knows No Country

A short guide to D. H. Lawrence country

by Bridget Pugh (Nottinghamshire 

Local History Council, 1972)

I. The View from Walker Street

In a letter to Rolf Gardiner written in December 1926, Lawrence provides a fairly detailed description of the East Midlands landscape in which he grew up; the so-called country of his heart - a phrase much loved by those who would forever tie Lawrence to Eastwood and fix his work within a literary tradition of English Romanticism.  

It is, for me - as for all those who prefer to think of Lawrence as a perverse European modernist, writing after Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud rather than Byron, Shelley and Keats - another of those deeply unfortunate expressions.

Like his self-description as a priest of love, I really wish he'd never said it. But, say it he did. And so let's examine this phrase and see if we can interepret it in a manner that doesn't serve a depressingly provincial purpose - as if the view from Walker Street was the only one that shaped Lawrence's perspective upon the world.

II. The Savage Pilgrimage

As is clear from much of his writing - particularly his letters - one of Lawrence's driving obsessions was to stage an angry engagement with England, whilst also making good his escape from the place of his birth in all its perceived dullness. 

His savage pilgrimage is usually said to begin after the War and refer to a period of voluntary exile. And whilst it's true and important to recall the fact that Lawrence left Britain at the earliest practical opportunity - only returning for brief visits, the last of which was in 1926 - I think we find this schizonomadic desire to flee from the suffocating familiarity of home from the start.

The fact is, Lawrence always hated Eastwood and couldn't wait to get away - first to Nottingham, then to London and to Cornwall, before drifting with Frieda around Europe, America and Australia. In 1913, he once confessed as much to his sister Ada, telling her that he should be glad if the town were one day blown off the face of the earth. 

We shouldn't forget that nostalgia is a type of disease - not a sign of health - and that if Lawrence occasionally displayed symptoms of homesickness he was essentially sick of home: 

"It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in ... Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, [Eastwood], I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion."

That's the Lawrence I admire: refusing to belong to any community or region; a singular individual who is no longer their Bert - and probably never was.

And as for the heart to which memories of childhood landscapes are said to belong, well, like Lawrence, I would prefer for it to be broken rather than preserved in formaldehyde; for it's wonderfully liberating to abandon the past and to find new things to treasure, new people and places to love, within the dawn-kaleidoscopic loveliness of the crack.

See: 

D. H. Lawrence, letter to Rolf Gardiner, 3 Dec. 1926, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V. March 1924 - March 1927, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

D. H. Lawrence, [Return to Bestwood], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 15. 

Punk bonus: Stiff Little Fingers: Gotta Gettaway (Rough Trade, 1979): I'm sure this is how the young Lawrence felt (it's certainly how I felt at 16): click here to play on YouTube.

The Owl of Minerva

Photo of  the poet-philosopher Simon Solomon,

by Sara Larsson (2015).  

simonsolomon.ink

Here we are then at the fag end of another year; drifting about in that awful grey twilight zone that lies between Boxing Day and January 1st. Naturally, one reflects with a certain sad shyness on the twelve months past.

Indeed, according to Hegel, one is condemned as a critical thinker to do nothing but look back with large eyes and a sharp beak on historical events and ideas. For philosophy is a retrospective practice par excellence – ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only when dusk begins to fall’ – as he put it so beautifully.

In other words, philosophy cannot legislate for the future or even legitimately analyse the present, because it understands only with hindsight; it doesn’t appear until life has unfolded and already completed its processes. Like anatomy, philosophy presupposes a corpse.

Perhaps that’s why so many philosophers choose to ignore Plato and turn to poetry, which is a form of thinking and speaking the truth that has maintained something of its prophetic or visionary character – something alien to the world of pure reason. Poetry memorializes the past, but it also responds to the nowness of the moment and anticipates the day after tomorrow (or the god who is coming).

The thinker-as-poet, who challenges the divide between metaphor and concept and the separation of the real and the imaginary, does far more than simply play with words from behind a fool's mask, or frolic on rainbows. Theirs is a thinking which, as Heidegger says, is the topology of Being; i.e., that which tells Being the whereabouts of its actual presence (in things).

Like Lawrence, I think it a great pity that philosophy and poetry have been kept in an antagonistic relationship for so long; it's been damaging to both our intellectual and emotional life. We should value those writers who further textual promiscuity and remember Zarathustra's eagle, or Shelley's skylark, not just Minerva's wise old owl ...