Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

chapter three

In the previous chapters, the impossibility of hospitality emerged as a major theme of this study. I argued that, in principle and in practice, hospitality is doomed to self-contradiction and failure. In this chapter, I continue this line of inquiry by turning to the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Primarily , I propose that reading Coleridge yields an opportunity to begin discerning the complexities of what we might call a Romantic poetics of failed hospitality. As we shall see, hospitable failure is a subject to which Coleridge returns so often that it would be difficult not to think that the theme of the welcome was ever very far from his mind. i A Mouse in the House Coleridge’s collected works are extensive, elaborate, and most undeniably diverse, thus making it difficult to parse the schematics of a consistent principle or theory of the hospitable relation. The reader who would attempt to do so would do well to heed the warnings of H.J. Jackson, who, in her attempt to register Coleridge’s“attitude towards women,”admits that Coleridge“did not achieve consistency” in his writing, “and on the whole there is something reassuringly human about the moments of imprecision and even of confusion” that we find therein (578). Not unlike the works of Rousseau, many of Coleridge’s texts leave the theme of the welcome inconclusive and unsettled. And while this is not exactly a failing in and of itself (we remem99 chapter three Colderidge and the Poetics of Hospitable Failure …oh, foul breach of the rites of hospitality! I mean to assassinate my too credulous guests! —“To Joseph Cottle” (c. 1797) J 03_coleridge 3/1/07 12:10 Page 99 ber that Rousseau’s “unsettled” theory of hospitality is as productive as it is problematic), there is nevertheless a certain pattern in Coleridge that reiteratively tropes the hospitable encounter in the language of failure. This pattern is by no means authoritative. As I have said, Coleridge’s works are much too heterogeneous to be reduced to a single pattern of repetition and representation . I do maintain, however, that the theme of the failed hospitable encounter—which remains strangely unproblematized in Coleridge criticism —surfaces in many of his most distinguished and widely read works of poetry and prose. That being said, I begin my analysis of this pattern in a much less distinguished and familiar place, namely, in a letter from Coleridge to Joseph Cottle , circa April 1797—a letter to which Richard Holmes’s biography, Coleridge: Early Visions, draws our attention in ways that are of great importance to this discussion. It needs to be said that the letter in question is not really a letter in the strictest sense, at least not in the sense that it is a complete letter. As Earl Leslie Griggs, editor of Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, points out, the letter is“obviously a composite of several letters”which Cottle reconstructed for printing in his Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey of 1847. The logic of this reconstruction, as Griggs speculates, follows Coleridge’s interests in the life of domestic animals and humanity’s ethical duties toward these creatures. First, Coleridge’s letter asks Cottle to “Remind Mrs. Coleridge of the kittens”—an odd request that the letter fails to explain except by setting it in apposition to another request (a warning, really) regarding George Burnet’s tainted “smuggled spirits” (Letters 322).1 The implication is, perhaps, that Mrs. Coleridge’s“kittens”are as“execrable” as Burnet’s brandy, the“smack”of which has left Coleridge swearing to have done with the stuff for “half a century” (322). In any case, Coleridge seems, at the very least, to be concerned about the handling of these mysterious kittens , and it is a concern that extends by the end of the letter to a “mad dog” that Coleridge claims has run through the village of Nether Stowey the previous day, causing much distress for man and animal alike. (In addition to striking fear in Coleridge’s neighbours, the dog has“bit several [other] dogs” throughout its reign of terror [322].) As if to quell the flames of this tremendous scandal, Coleridge assures Cottle that he has not only urged the farmers to be “attentive” in the future to the curious complexities of dog-life, but has also generously promised to prepare for these men a precautionary manual detailing “the first symptoms of madness in a dog” (322). While jocular in tone...