Anya Taylor. Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce.

Rzepka, Charles J.

Anya Taylor. Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 219. $74-95.

In Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce (now in its second printing) Anya Taylor's aim is two-fold. First, she wishes to evoke from Coleridge's love poetry, much of it appearing for the first time in J. C. C. Mays's recent Poetical Works, a heretofore "overlooked" master love-poet and Dionysian "man of joy, whose energy radiates outward to all his activities, the precocious and passionate lover, the devoted observer of women" (i). Second, she wishes to defend Coleridge against long-standing charges of cowardice and fecklessness for not seeking a divorce when it was clear that his marriage to Sarah Fricker had become a loveless wreck and he had fallen deeply in love with Sara Hutchinson, soon to become Wordsworth's sister-in-law. Taylor achieves her second aim by spelling out the legal impediments and practical impossibility of obtaining a divorce in the England of Coleridge's day, and the chapter in which she does so surpasses every other legal analysis of this sad topic. She succeeds as well in her first aim, but her avowed partiality for her subject leaves us with a portrait in which the darkness of Coleridge's lapses of character in sexual matters is often lost in Taylor's incandescent enthusiasm for his erotic joie de vivre. Nonetheless, she offers perceptive and original interpretations of the poetry that anyone teaching or writing about it will be obliged to take into account.

The central strength and importance of Taylor's book lies in what she has to say about the divorce laws in this period and how they apply, or do not, to Coleridge's case. Of all the Protestant nations of Europe, only England made the dissolution of marriage practically impossible for ordinary citizens and excruciating even for the rich and connected. Just at the time that Coleridge was falling in love with Sara Hutchinson, the House of Lords began a debate extending over several months, from March to May of 1800, concerning the divorce and adultery laws then in force. Those inciting the debate sought, first, to rescind the legal requirement that wronged husbands expose themselves to repeated public humiliation by proving their wives adulterous--and themselves cuckolds--before three separate tribunals, ecclesiastical, civil, and legislative (this being the House of Lords itself). Second, the reformers sought to increase the severity of punishment for adulterous wives by forbidding them to marry their lovers after a divorce was granted and by making adultery a criminal as well as a civil offense.

Of crucial relevance to Coleridge's situation is the fact that only husbands had legal standing to seek a divorce, and only proof of the wife's infidelity (often provided by a seducer paid off by the husband) gave adequate grounds for a positive judgment. Because women at this time had no legal standing before the law except through their husbands, the only way in which a woman could sue for divorce was under the more relaxed laws of Scotland and only if her husband was caught in flagrante delicto, as Hazlitt later contrived to be caught with a prostitute, thus enabling his wife to release him to marry Sarah Walker. Coleridge considered such a shabby ploy degrading, and would have been a villain of the worst dye had he contrived a charge of adultery against his innocent wife just to be rid of her. Even leaving aside such ethical questions, pursuing a suit for divorce through the crooked byways and arcane protocols of the law was prohibitively expensive for all but a few wealthy gentlemen.

Not only did Coleridge's conscience restrain him from initiating divorce proceedings, but it also, to his credit, prompted him to sympathize with women victimized by the current laws. He advised single women to remain unmarried if at all possible so as to retain control over their wealth and property instead of ceding it to their husbands, as the law then required. Taylor's detailed knowledge of the legal pitfalls and exigencies of the divorce law, of the political and ideological controversies surrounding marriage, and of the poet, his works, and his critics, makes this chapter both a delight and a necessity for anyone working in and around this thorny question. However, she tends to overestimate its relevance to the controversy regarding Coleridge's behavior towards his wife and his beloved over the many years when the one became the incessant torment of his life and the other its constant temptation.

The most contentious moral questions raised by Coleridge's marital difficulties have only partly to do with his ability or inability, willingness or unwillingness, to obtain a divorce once he knew that his marriage wouldn't work. Why, for instance, knowing from the start that he did not love Sarah Fricker and believing that marital sex without love was tantamount to fornication, did he marry her anyway? Why, knowing and believing these things, did he continue to have sexual relations with the wife he did not love, even impregnating her with their third child, after he had fallen head over heels for another woman? Choosing sides in the long-standing and irresolvable feud between the partisans of Sam and Sarah, Taylor refuses to acknowledge the pertinence of such questions even as she cites evidence supporting the most damning replies to them.

Coleridge's "error in judgment" in marrying Sarah "will always remain a mystery," writes Taylor (21), before going on to cite Coleridge's letter to Southey written in December 1794 from London, where the rash Pantisocrat was for all intents and purposes hiding out: "to marry a woman whom I do not love--to degrade her, whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low desire.... These Refinements are the wildering Fires, that lead me into Vice. Mark you, Southey!--I will do my Duty" (31). It is legitimate to ask, "Duty" to whom or to what? Not to God, if that duty would lead him into vice, nor to Sarah herself, if her own eternal salvation counted for anything. Perhaps (saddest to contemplate) he meant his duty to Southey and Pantisocracy, weak reeds both, as it turned out. In any case, whatever "mystery" may yet attach to the obligation Coleridge had in mind, the moral compromises it demanded were, and remain, crystal clear. "Eyes wide open," Taylor writes, "he enters a marriage that he foresees will be whoredom mixed with indifference.... He foresees the corruption of his own soul, and the degradation of hers" (30). If foreseeing, then also culpable: fully aware that eros without philia will leave only "low desire," the poet agrees, for whatever reason, to make his wife his whore. This "erotic Coleridge" is probably not what Taylor meant by her title. In any case, "eyes wide shut" would better describe the facts of the matter.

Things only get worse after Coleridge meets Sara Hutchinson. Madly in love with "Asra," he continued to cohabit with his wife in London from December 1799 to March 1800, leaving her pregnant upon their separation and her return to Bristol. "These facts," writes Taylor, "suggest that as irritating as it was to live in close quarters together in London, and as passionately as he loved another woman, he and his wife still had sexual relations" (128). No "mystery" here, either. It's exactly as the poet foresaw, only now the moral culpability is much worse: he continues to make Sarah the "instrument" of his "low desires," while vigorously pursuing his elective affinities elsewhere. Would it be unfair to ask in addition why, knowing that he could not get a divorce (Taylor makes this undeniably clear), Coleridge apparently indicated to Sara Hutchinson that he would (87)? Or why he encouraged her over the course of many years to think that their relationship stood the slightest chance of success without one?

This is not to say that Sarah Fricker could have been easy to live with, although invoking Levinas to suggest that her "unpleasant face" may have provoked Coleridge "to harm" her (26) surely over-reaches in an attempt to render "she asked for it" philosophically respectable. (For Levinas even unpleasant faces are sacred.) For those of us who see plenty of blame to go around and no point in measuring it out, Taylor's unwavering sympathy for her lover-poet in his marital misadventures distracts more than it edifies. That sympathy, however, is also the source of her critical strength. Coleridge's "lingering charm to doddering female scholars like myself," Taylor writes disarmingly, "lies in his attentiveness to women's bodies and expressions, his hilarity, his recognition of the difficulties inherent in women's lives, his own difficulties in love ... and his humility toward being a person" (5). Her attraction to and appreciation of these facets of Coleridge's character enable her to read both old and new works with great and, in some cases, unprecedented finesse. In all matters literary, Taylor's critical mind trumps her enchanted heart. Her decipherment of the marginalia that Coleridge wrote in a copy of Thomas Browne's Works alluding to his and Sara's mutual passion, for example, is superbly responsive to the imagined scene of shared reading that the poet evokes in his lover's mind from a distance of several hundred miles while living in Malta. The chapter on Christabel bristles with insights into the psychology of adolescent gifts and the sources of Coleridge's profound empathy for and understanding of their situation. And scattered everywhere, in higher or lower concentrations, are readings of the love poetry that resoundingly affirm the "erotic Coleridge" of her title, a vigorous, energetic, expansive, humorous, and deeply passionate figure that will put readers in mind of Richard Holmes's tireless tramper of stormy Cumbrian peaks and enthusiastic acolyte of perceptual and psychical mysteries.

One of the finest of Taylor's explications, in my opinion, comprises several pages of "Sara Hutchinson: Love and Reading," the chapter she devotes to the love poetry written during the early years of the Hutchinson affair, beginning with "Love," which Mays believes was inspired by Coleridge's first encounter with Sara at Sockburn-on-Tees in late 1799. Taylor observes that "Love" is constructed, like several better-known Coleridge poems, as a framed narrative: a male wooer tells the story of a spumed knight's rescue, at the cost of his own life, of the lady who rejected him. Noting how, by "watching her reactions, and pausing and speeding up his performance to stir her response to him," the teller deploys the resources of that performance to seduce his fair listener, Taylor expands her analysis by citing a signal influence on Coleridge's framing structure, the canto from Dante's Inferno describing Paulo's seduction of Francesca through their shared reading of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. "The canto illustrates 'the contagion of literature,'" she writes, with the shared text itself functioning as a "pander, pimp, go-between ... joining the lovers in the frame story as well as the lovers within the tale." This scene of shared reading as seduction becomes the emblem of Coleridge's and Sara's relationship, in life, letters, and literature. "'Love' is the first of many poems to 'Asra,'" Taylor observes, "that recreate a shared activity--reading, singing, story telling, writing, and revising--that unite their minds and voices as well as their bodies as they lean together" (84). Her reflections on the Browne marginalia comprise but one example among many of the ubiquitous power of this mise en scene in the written record of their relationship. Her analysis of its shifting lineaments in poem after poem is compelling.

Taylor's most persuasive case for Coleridge's uncanny sympathy with women and concern for their welfare, however, depends not on the erotic ebullience of his poems to "Asra," nor on his youthful reactions to female beauty, tinctured as they are with sheer voyeurism, but on the more moderate and settled--and erotically disinterested--responses to women's constant presence, friendship, and requests for advice that characterized his later years. In Chapter 10, "Communities of Women: Developing as Persons," Taylor gives us the Sage of Highgate as advocate for and advisor to young single women, a supporter of liberal education for girls as well as boys, and of suffrage for women as well as men--a kind of avuncular advice columnist who eagerly anticipates the day when women will have wider scope for the exercise of their free agency. The material Taylor offers as evidence for this more sober manifestation of an "erotic Coleridge" not only illuminates and makes more persuasive the younger version she introduces in her early chapters, but also suggests that Coleridge himself became an example for his young admirers to follow in "developing as persons." In the final analysis, Taylor's portrait rings true despite its subject's grave lapses in matters of the heart. When we view these lapses as corroborative and include them in full charioscuro, its authenticity is only enhanced.

Charles J. Rzepka

Boston University