Ángulo, perfil y borde de las fracturas
5.9. Paleodieta de la población de El Espinoso
While a recognised Welsh geography informs the Arthurian Gothic of Philipps and Wardle, across the border in England another branch of Arthurian Gothic was laying its foundations in women’s writing. Rather than a realistic landscape, the fantastical setting of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (wr. 1798–1800; pub. 1816) struck more than one female writer as an appropriate site for an encounter with Arthurian personae. This connection might at first seem strange. After all, as Robert Miles has summarised, ‘Christabel’’s status as a Gothic tale is universally accepted’, but there is nothing openly Arthurian about its supernatural
medievalism.126 Coleridge, like his contemporaries Keats and Shelley, had only a cursory interest in Arthurian romance, preferring instead to foster a vaguer ‘medieval “atmosphere”’ in poems such as ‘Christabel’. 127 Sir Walter Scott, however, soon saw an opportunity to merge figures from ‘Christabel’ with Arthurian themes by using the name of Christabel’s father, ‘Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine’, in his metrical romance, The Bridal of
Triermain.128 Women poets also arrived at similar connections. On two separate occasions,
Coleridge’s ‘lovely Lady, Christabel’, was given new Arthurian surroundings by female poets attempting continuations or reimaginings of Coleridge’s unfinished work.129
2.4.1. E.H. McLeod
The true horror of the Arthurian Gothic reaches a blood-thirsty peak in a ballad by the once- popular novelist, E.H. McLeod. Innocuously entitled ‘Song’, the ballad appears within ‘Rosamund; or, The Ghost Story’, a novella itself collected within McLeod’s exploration of ‘fashionable characters’ in a series entitled Tales of Ton (1821–22). Like Philipps, the details of McLeod’s biography remain largely lost to literary history, but she appears to have spent
126 Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2002), p. 176.
127 Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer, The Return of King Arthur: British and American Literature since 1800 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), p. 36. Coleridge includes a (Spenserian) allusion to Merlin in ‘The Pang
More Sharp than All’ [1807 and later; then 1822–25 and later], in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (London: Routledge, 1976–2001),
XVI: Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text): Part 2, ed. J.C.C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 825–29 (ll. 37–41). Keats makes a particularly Gothic mention of Merlin in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1819); see Keats, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ in The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd edn (London: Penguin,
2003), pp. 312–24, ll. 170-71 (‘Never on such a night have lovers met / Since Merlin paid his demon all the monstrous debt’), and Percy Bysshe Shelley includes a prophecy, purportedly by Merlin, in his unfinished drama, Charles the First (1822), (see Charles the First, in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1905), pp. 488–507 (I.ii. 366–70)).
128 Though based on a historical personage, Sir Walter Scott encountered ‘Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine’ in
circulating manuscript versions of ‘Christabel’ before he made the same figure the hero of The Bridal of
Triermain (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1813). The work contains Scott’s only extensive poetic engagement with the
Arthurian story and it shares some parallels with the narrative of ‘Christabel’. A sub-plot within Scott’s poem sees Merlin work his magic on Arthur’s illegitimate daughter to put her into an enchanted sleep, which has some similarities with Geraldine’s enchantment of Christabel while she sleeps.
129 Coleridge, ‘Christabel’ (written 1797–1800, pub. 1816), in Poetical Works I (Poems, Reading Text: Part 1),
most of her writing life in southern England, in parts of Essex and Norwich.130 Within a series of inset narratives, McLeod’s Arthurian ‘Song’ is presented as the composition of a male knight, Sir Halbert, who performs the mock-medieval ballad to an attentive audience of female listeners. The heroine is a recognisable ‘Christabelle’ and the ballad repeats several Gothic motifs from Coleridge’s poem, including the sound of a ‘blood-dogs [sic] bay’ and a ‘darksome wood’ (l. 46, 42).131
Pledged to marry a ‘craven, cowardly wight’ she does not love (l. 9), Christabelle flees her court with a knight she believes is her lover. In a tribute to the Arthurian story, McLeod names him Sir Gawaine, a name that she had presumably picked up from Percy’s ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawaine’ in the Reliques.132 However, when Christabelle notices blood on his hands, she asks the knight to affirm his identity and, obediently removing his visor, he replies:
“In blood I embrace my destined bride: One kiss to thy lips, ere in death we part,
And then my sword shall pierce thy false heart!” “’Tis not sir Gawaine!”– his haught rival stands, With uplifted dagger, and blood-reeking hands; And quick to the breast of the ladye it rushed,
And down her pall garment the life-blood it gushed! (ll. 65–71)
As Christabelle bleeds to death, the villainous doppelganger reveals that it is Gawaine’s blood that stains his hands, for, as he tells the dying Christabelle, he made a pledge that: “[i]f thou couldst not love me (and such thou hast said) / The blood of my rival I ween should be
130 Otherwise known as ‘E.H.P.’ (see the title page to McLeod’s Geraldine Murray (London: A.K. Newman,
1826)). The author’s signature is ascribed to Fingringhoe Hall, Essex, in an address ‘To the reader’ in McLeod,
Belmont’s Daughter: A Fashionable Tale (London: A.K. Newman, 1830). By 1824 her location had moved to
Norwich (see ‘Preface’ to McLeod, Principle! A Fashionable Tale (London: A.K. Newman, 1824). McLeod’s works are now little-remembered, but they were evidently popular in their time; all three series of the Tales of
Ton as well as her other later novels, Geraldine Murray, and the aforementioned Principle!, are held in the
Corvey Library (Cardiff, UK). She is also the author of Geraldine Hamilton; or Self Guidance, A Tale (London: Richard Bentley, 1832).
131 Miss [E.H.] McLeod, Tales of Ton; The Second Series, 4 vols (London: A.K. Newman and Co., 1821), vol.
3, pp. 19–22 (ll. 46, 42). All further references are to this edition and are subsequently given in parentheses. Compare Coleridge, ‘Christabel’, in Poetical Works I, ll. 12, 25.
132 It seems likely that this was McLeod’s main source. She follows Percy’s spelling of Gawaine’s name, and
shed” (ll. 80–81). Like Philipps’s intertextual use of a superficial Arthurian framework, McLeod’s gruesome ballad apparently owes little to Arthurian medieval romance besides the use of Gawaine’s name, invoked as a heroic exemplar. The pastiche of Coleridge’s poem is a close one, as McLeod unabashedly redeploys selections from Coleridge’s verse. The
medieval Catholicism of ‘Christabel’’s world, established by the narrator’s cry of ‘Jesu Maria shield her well!’, is echoed by McLeod’s version of the heroine, who also asks ‘Jesu Maria!’ to ‘shield me from harm!’ (l. 58).133
Coleridge’s own ‘Christabel’ can be linked back to Arthurian romance, if only indirectly. Parallels between the figure of the loathly lady, and the shape-shifting Geraldine lead Caroline Franklin to list Percy’s ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawaine’ (along with ‘Sir Cauline’ and ‘The Child of Elle’) among the ballads from the Reliques that provided Coleridge with the inspiration for ‘Christabel’.134 In a far less sophisticated way, McLeod also mines the Reliques for material: her ballad’s refrain, ‘the squire of low degree!’, is taken from the title of a romance listed in Percy’s ‘Essay on the Ancient Metrical Romances’.135 By 1821, Sir Gawain’s name had been widely popularised by the Reliques, and women writers were keen to follow Coleridge’s example by scouring Percy’s anthology for names that could give a medieval cast to their Gothic writing.
2.4.2 Anna Jane Vardill’s ‘Christobell. A Gothic Tale’ (1815)
Numerous poets were inspired by ‘Christabel’ to pen their own imitations of Coleridge’s poem; Arthur Nethercot mentions James Hogg’s imitation, ‘Isabelle, by S.T. Coleridge’ (1816), as well as several other hack works that are as melodramatic and burlesque as
133 Coleridge, ‘Christabel’, in Poetical Works I, l. 53.
134 Caroline Franklin, [Headnote to ‘Christabel’], in The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse, ed. Caroline
Franklin (London: Longman, 2011), pp. 279–80 (p. 279).
135 Thomas Percy, ‘Essay on Ancient Metrical Romances’, Reliques (1765; facsimile repr. 1996), vol. 3, pp. i–
McLeod’s own.136 Most intriguing, perhaps, is an imitation that appeared in the European Magazine more than a year before the original ‘Christabel’ was published, offering ‘a sequel to a beautiful legend of a fair daughter and her father, deceived by a witch in the guise of a noble knight’s daughter’.137 Published under the initial ‘V.’, ‘Christobell, A Gothic Tale’ was for a substantial time thought to be by Coleridge himself, seeking anonymity in an attempt to ‘sound out public reaction to this ending’ to the eerie tale.138 Later, Hogg was put forward for authorship, but at the beginning of the twentieth century its writer was firmly identified as Anna Jane Vardill (1781–1852), a poet, satirist, and a regular contributor to the European
Magazine.139
The diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson, Vardill’s friend, reveal how she came to encounter Coleridge’s poem – and write her own sequel – before it appeared in press. ‘Christabel’ was widely circulated in literary circles in manuscript form prior to publication, and, on 19 December 1814, Crabb Robinson recorded that he ‘[t]ook tea with the Flaxmans, and read to them and Miss Vardill Coleridge’s Christabel, with which they were all
delighted’.140 In continuing Coleridge’s famously obscure poem, Vardill made one major addition of particular significance to Arthurian Gothicism. At the centre of her narrative is Merlin, whose quest it becomes to quell Geraldine and restore order to Langdale Hall. It is
136 Arthur Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine: A Study of the History, Background and Purposes of Coleridge’s
Christabel (1939; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 36–37.
137 ‘V.’ [Anna Jane Vardill], ‘Christobell, A Gothic Tale’, EM, 67 (1815), 345–46 (p. 345). See also Megan A.
Stephan, ‘Vardill [married name Niven], Anna Jane’, in ODNB <http://www.oxfordnb.com/view/article/45865> [accessed 27 January 2011].
138 Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine, p. 37.
139 Vardill’s authorship of the poem was first proposed by William A.E. Axon (see Axon, ‘Anna Jane Vardill
Niven, the Authoress of “Christobell,” the sequel to Coleridge’s “Christabel”. With a Bibliography’,
Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 2nd Series, 28 (1909), 57–85). Several decades later, Donald H.
Reiman also arrived independently at the identification of Vardill as author (see Reiman, ‘Christobell; or, The Case of the Sequel Preemptive’, Wordsworth Circle, 6:4 (1975), 283–89 (287)). Reiman’s lack of knowledge of Axon’s previous research was noted by Richard Haven in a rejoinder article, ‘Anna Vardill Niven’s
‘Christobell’: An Addendum’, Wordsworth Circle, 7:2 (1976), 117–18.
140 Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 2 vols (Boston:
Merlin alone, it seems, who has the power to expose Geraldine’s true identity as the ‘Witch of the Lake’ and exorcise her from the domestic setting.141
Vardill’s continuation begins with the most Gothic of ceremonies: the raising of the dead. In the vault where Christobell’s ‘noble mother’ is buried (ll. 3, 17), a silver-bearded Merlin performs his magic and the matriarch is ‘waken’d by the mighty spell’ (l. 18). Her first words are addressed to the magician:
Merlin, Merlin! I know thee well!
Tho’ a minstrel’s cloak is around thee flung, And a holy hood on thy brow is hung!
The dead and living obey thy spell (ll. 40–43)
This undead mother then tells Merlin that her daughter’s fate will be decided the day that she marries (ll. 44–46). Like Arthur in Bannerman’s poem, here Merlin plays the role of the Female Gothic heroine, whose quest it is to find and restore the mother figure.
The action then obediently shifts forward to Christobell’s wedding day, enlisting several familiar images from Coleridge’s original in the process, including a ‘grey dog’ (l. 47), Christabel’s ‘silver lamp’ (l. 54), the ‘oak tree’ under which she discovers Geraldine (l. 27), and the ‘matin-bell’ (l. 86).142 Merlin, now disguised as Sir Leoline’s trusted minstrel, Bard Bracy, escorts Christobell and her ‘own true knight’ (l. 61) to the ‘ancient hall’ (l. 83) where her father and Geraldine are waiting. Merlin is a ‘ghostly’ (l. 74) guide for Christobell, and, noting his disconcertingly ‘soundless stride’ (l. 100), she becomes ‘cold and pale’ at the sight of his ‘shadowy face’ and strange ‘mutter’d words of gramarye’ (ll. 93, 89, 97). Though his actions will eventually lead to the poem’s positive resolution and the restoration of order,
141 ‘V.’ [Anna Jane Vardill], ‘Christobell, A Gothic Tale’, l. 125. All further references are to this edition and
are subsequently given in parentheses. The poem is currently listed in Nastali and Boardman’s Arthurian bibliography, but Vardill is not identified as author (see The Arthurian Annals, vol. 1, p. 82). The bibliographers cite Nethercot’s description of the poem as ‘well intentioned but appalling’ (Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine, p. 37).
142 These similarities and others are documented extensively by Reiman in ‘Christobell; or, The Case of the
Merlin, like Geraldine, is an unstable, liminal figure who disturbs the boundaries between the living and the dead.
When the party of three reach the hall, they observe Geraldine sitting at Sir Leoline’s side (l. 106). Still in his disguise as Bracy, Merlin presents the pair with a ‘goblet of crysolite’ (l. 126) that he explains is a gift from Geraldine’s father, Sir Roland de Vaux. What follows leads to Geraldine’s unmasking. When Sir Leoline fills the cup and offers it to his (in more than one sense) ‘stranger-guest’ (l. 114), ‘the crysolite chang’d as she touch’d its brim – / And the gem on its sapphire edge grew dim’ (ll. 133–34). As the cup transforms, so too does Geraldine:
There sits a dame of royal mien,
But her lips are pearly, her locks are green; The eyder-down hides her speckled breast, The fangs of the sea-wolf clasp her vest: And those orbs, once bluer than western skies,
Are shrunk to the rings of a serpent’s eyes! (ll. 157–62)
Vardill’s lines offer a more complete realisation of the horrors of Geraldine’s supernatural body than we are party to in Coleridge’s finished poem (in which her bosom is, famously, ‘a sight to dream of not to tell!’).143 By painting Geraldine’s ‘speckled breast’ and mutated form in vivid colours of blue and green, Vardill forces the reader to confront the true horror of Geraldine’s visual appearance.
Vardill successfully sustains to the end of the poem not only its Gothic horror, but also its Arthurian framework. It concludes with a dramatic speech from Merlin, defining Geraldine as his longstanding enemy for ‘three hundred years’ and cursing her to hell:
Witch of the lake, I know thee now! Thrice three hundred years are gone Since beneath my cave,
In the western wave,
I doom’d thee to rue and weep alone,
And writ thy shame on thy breast and brow.
But thou and thy envious friends in vain Have risen to mock my power again:– The spell which in thy bosom worketh, No holy virgin’s lip can stain;
The spell that in thy false eye lurketh, But for an hour can truth enchain: Not ev’n thy serpent eye could keep Its ire near guiltless beauty’s sleep: – The Spirit of Evil could not dare
To look on heav’n, – for heav’n is there. Thy hour is past – thy spells I sever, –
Witch of the lake descend for ever! (ll. 163–80)
By naming Geraldine as the ‘Witch of the Lake!’ and establishing her as Merlin’s
longstanding foe, Vardill encourages her readers to associate Geraldine with Vivian, who is first aligned with the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle (c.1215–35).144 Vardill would have had access to popular accounts of Vivian’s imprisonment of Merlin given in Gregory Lewis Way’s Fabliaux (1796, 1800, 1815), and John Dunlop’s recent History of
Fiction (1814).145 In particular, the notes to Way’s modernised Arthurian poems, compiled by
George Ellis, describe ‘Viviana and Mourgue’ as ‘witches’ and ‘scholars of Merlin’: like Geraldine, Vivian is described as ‘young and beautiful’ but also ‘cruel’.146 Vardill alludes, perhaps, to Vivian’s imprisoning of Merlin in his ‘cave / beneath the western wave’, but ultimately this version of the story will end differently: Merlin will retain his magic, and the Gothic framework requires that the final resting place for the incarnation of ‘Evil’ can only be hell. Conventional boundaries are restored at the end of the poem: between ‘heav’n’ and
144 See Carolyne Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition
(London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 5.
145 See John Dunlop, The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of
Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age, 3 vols (Edinburgh: James
Ballantyne and Co., 1814), vol. 1, p. 181. Robert Southey later gave a summary of the Merlin and Vivian episode in the notes to his introduction to Le Morte Darthur, but his edition was not yet available at the time Vardill was writing (see Southey, ‘Introduction’, to [Sir Thomas Malory], The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng
Arthur; of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table [etc.], 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and
Brown, 1817), vol. 1, pp. i–xxxix (pp. xliii–xlviii).
146 George Ellis, [Notes to ‘The Mantle Made Amiss’], in Fabliaux or Tales; Abridged from French
Manuscripts of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries by M. Le Grand, Selected and Translated into English Verse, with
a Preface, Appendix and Notes by the Late G. Ellis, Esq. A New Edition, corrected, trans. G.L. Way, ed. George
hell; good and ‘Evil’; true and ‘false’; ‘virgin’ and whore. Female sexuality is removed – castrated, even, in the poem’s final ‘sever’-ing of the feminine – and banished to the netherworld.
Vardill’s tetrameter rhyming couplets detract from the terror – and, indeed, often the seriousness – of Merlin’s address, but in the moments when the poem breaks from its regular metre (as in the lines ‘I doom’d thee to rue and weep alone, / And writ thy shame on thy breast and brow’), the full power of Vardill’s Merlin is realised. Antecedents of the moralism, as well as several of the motifs which Tennyson would later bring to the Arthurian story, particularly in ‘Merlin and Vivien’ (1859), can be glimpsed in the impassioned address of Vardill’s Merlin. Vardill’s ‘Witch of the Lake’, with her serpent-like eyes, anticipates Tennyson’s ‘wily’ Vivien, who clings to Merlin ‘like a snake’ with a ‘snake of gold’ in her hair.147 Called ‘inept and downright risible’ by some critics, Vardill’s poem deserves to be better known as a complex pastiche that succeeds in casting a Gothic light over the Merlin and Vivian story in anticipation of Tennyson’s later management of the narrative.148 Vardill’s moral compass may be more simplistic (the Witch of the Lake is finally reduced to nothing more than the ‘Spirit of Evil’), but her Merlin is both a triumphant hero and a threatening ghostly wanderer whose ‘grammarye’ is simultaneously powerful and terrifying.
Arthurian Female Gothic, then, can be sensational (as in McLeod’s and Vardill’s poems), but it can also be a guise for more serious antiquarian endeavours, as the poems by Bannerman, Smith, and Betham demonstrate. The association of the Gothic with a faux medievalism is both an opportunity for the female writer interested in King Arthur, but also a double-bind, as any considered engagements with contemporary romance scholarship had a tendency to be subsumed under the label of domestic gothic. What draws this small corpus together, however, is its focus on the rewriting of patriarchal narratives, whether that involves
147 Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Merlin and Vivien’, in Idylls of the King, ed. J.M. Gray (London: Penguin, 1996),
pp. 142–67, ll. 147, 240, 886.
continuing Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, creating an onomastic back-story for the site of one’s family home in Wales, or crafting a note asserting the ‘right to appropriation’ of legendary stories. As Diane Long Hoeveler writes:
The originating fantasy that empowers the female gothic [...] is a need to rewrite history from the vantage point of a beleaguered daughter intent on rescuing her mother – and by extension her future self – from the nightmare of the alienating and newly codifying patriarchal family.149
In Arthurian Female Gothic, however, the role of the ‘beleaguered daughter’ is just as likely to be played by Arthur or Merlin as it is by a non-Arthurian female figure. Male Arthurian