ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Coleridge's references to his poem's disturbingly ambiguous status and his reviewers' scandalized responses to the poem. It proposes that men of letters reacted hysterically to Christabel because they saw the fantastic exchanges of Geraldine and Christabel as dramatizing a range of problematically invested literary relations, including those between writers and other writers, and among authors, readers, and books. By feminizing the problem, critical discourse on Christabel both played out and displaced the excessive charges of these literary relations: it cast impropriety as generic impurity, and then identified this impurity with dangerously attractive feminine forms. The chapter argues that the feminization of the terms of the debate on Christabel repeats a strategy habitually adopted by high culture when defending its privileges. Christabel can be located in the context of Coleridge's writings on a variety of ghostly exchanges between observers or readers and representations.
