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(M)Othering the Nation: Guilt, Sexuality and the Commercial State in Coleridge's Gothic Poetry Robbie B. H. GoA In an intriguing, if cryptic, notebook entry of 1799, Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks of "Commerce and its Effects disguised as a Fairy Tale" (CPW, I: 616). It is not clear if he is referring to the spell which commerce and its commodities are supposed to exert on human participants, although he does say in the poem "Religious Musings" that commercial man is "Toy-bewitched,/ Made blind by lusts" (CPW, I: 114), while in the Lay Sermon he uses the term the "sorcery of wealth" to describe the dominance of commerce over all other aspects of human life (199). This quality of enchantment attributed to commerce, would also seem to fit into Coleridge 's poetics, what in the Biographia Literaria is described as that "magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination" (II: 16). His own poem "Christabel" accords with this definition , as a "supernatural" poem that "pretended to be nothing more than a common Faery Tale" (CPW, II: 6-7, 238). Magical narratives which also convey some essential truth about the (in its own way magical) power of commercial relations, would go some way to relate the "world-historical" Coleridge (Shaffer 56, 101), who, as Storch puts it, "marshals all the resources of the mind, including the imagination , towards an understanding of the human condition in historical terms" (449), with the poet of a "querulous egotism" (Watson 51) whose JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.3 (Fall 2003): 270-291. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. (M)Othering the Nation 271 "introverted" poetry expresses, in Butler's terms, the "elevation of the self's truth" (83). The Biographia maintained that the magical power of the imagination could rescue "the most admitted truths from . . . impotence " by producing "the strongest impressions of novelty" (I: 82), thus establishing the basis of a poetics which was also a politics of the commercial state. Coleridge's various and rather desultory prose comments on the evils of England's economic condition, in writings like The Watchman, his essays for the Morning Post, the Lay Sermons and elsewhere, form a backdrop for the gothic romance which emerges in the poetry—a romance in which the anxieties of the commercial state are played out in the psycho -sexual terms of desire, repression, alterity and regression. Not incidentally , this pairing of commerce and the miraculous tale bears more than passing resemblance to William Godwin's account of the relationship between his gothic novels and his political ideas: in his preface to his 1805 novel Fleetwood, Godwin describes the "miraculous" and "surprising" elements in his novels as a reinforcement of the politics of his PoliticalJustice , both kinds of discourse working in different ways "to effect a grand and comprehensive improvement in the sentiments" of men in society (xvi). Clemit insists that the Godwinian novel is a "consciously political form" intended to oppose the values of "aristocratic culture" (14); she thus passes a considerable part of the political burden from Godwin's explicit treatise PoliticalJustice (which in any case undergoes a series of revisions and retractions), to the novels' literary mechanism and their sentimental influence. Godwin's profound but problematic influence on Coleridge is evident from as early in the latter's career as the 1795 Bristol lectures, and Coleridge's gothic project both derives from and distinguishes itself from Godwin's attempt to depict "things as they are" in the fantastical form of the gothic novel. This literary project can thus be seen in terms of the "channeling" of "desiring production," the "coding" and "decoding of flows" of economic and political desires, which Deleuze and Guattari (9-10, 240) attribute to the capitalist state. In this formulation, the gothic, with its neurotic sensualization of the affairs of the state, its imagination of the perverse psycho-sexual drama of power, is a prime example of such literary codes, "so true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy" (12). In the case of Coleridge, poetry is a means of articulating a sentimental response to the evils and...
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