A Study Of The Sexual Politics In The Female Gothic Poetry Christabel

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is among the remarkable Romantic poets and literary critics in British literature. His poetic gift is confirmed in the three representative poems Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The former two poems seem to have gained more attention than Christabel ever since they were published. Maybe the less focus for Christabel is due to the incompleteness of itself: Coleridge planned to construct Christabel in five chapters, but he only finished two chapters. Therefore it resulted in such an situation: there are fewer research articles about Christabel than the other two poems; and the present reviews about Christabel is limited in the analysis of religion and mysticism elements with Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner together and there is few articles focusing on Christabel alone. Therefore, the study of Christabel is quite potential.Besides those above,Christabel has distinguished gothic features, and it can be included in the genre of gothic literature. And there are several new branches of the research of gothic literature in the twentieth century, and Female Gothic is one of them. Female Gothic not only means a genre of gothic novel but also a kind of literary critical method that combibes both the genre approach and Feminism critical method in analyzing the gothic text."Sexual Politics"is the name of a monograph by the U.S literary critic Kate Millet, and also means a critical perspective that was adopted to analyze the literary text in this monograph by Kate Millet.This thesis discusses what the female gothic elements are in Christabel, and on the other hand explores how the sexual politics is expressed in Christabel.This thesis consists of three chapters with one introduction and one conclusion.The introduction first introduces the background information of Christabel, and then scans the previous studies on this poem. Based on this, it proposes central argument of the thesis and expatiates the research method and values.Chapter One analyzes the Female Gothic features of this narrative poem from four aspects: setting, character, plot, narrative features.Chapter Two discusses how the sexual politics is expressed in Christabel. The two main characters in this poem: Christabel and Geraldine actually represent the angel and the devil in men's eyes; besides that, the arrangement of plot in this poem is also influenced by the consciousness of gender.Chapter Three makes an analysis of Christabel and her compromise, and struggle towards the patriarchy; at the same, it also presents the subversive theme behind Geraldine.The conclusion points out that Christabel not only display the features of the gothic literature in settings, characters, plot, and narrative features, and also reflects the issue of sexual politics that women's attitude towards the patriarchy is contradictory: comprise, and at the same time, confront.