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In spite of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's claims that he always had in mind the completed narrative of "Christabel," he never finished the story. Yet "incomplete" as it is, the poem has been a source of fascination-and an enigma-to its readers for almost two hundred years. For while they have been intrigued, drawn to read the poem again and again, a certain unintelligibility remains, problems and ambiguities that challenge their abilities to understand the poem itself and, perhaps, even to understand their responses to it. "Christabel" resists all attempts to impose determinate meaning. It remains unsettled and unsettling.
Many of the problems that most confound readers' expectations derive from the assumptions with which they are accustomed to make sense of a narrative. An obvious problem is the fragmentary nature of the poem and the seemingly unrelated conclusion to part 2, frustrating the desire for closure. Perhaps the most puzzling question, however, and the one giving rise to most critical debate, is the identity and significance of the central character, Geraldine, and the nature of her relationship with Christabel. While earlier readings emphasize in these two characters a bipolarity of good and evil,l many later readings of the poem prefer a psychosexual interpretation of their relationship, with Geraldine representing repressed desire, Christabel's unassimilated, possibly homoerotic, sexuality.2 Kathleen M. Wheeler, emphasizing language, finds both moral and psychological interpretations unsatisfactory: Geraldine "is a force neither of evil nor desire, but of disruption, or . . . the meaningless at the heart of all language and meaning."3 She points to the poem's unreliable narrative voice and "the difficulty of narration or communication of meaning and, more basically, the difficulty even of describing in factual terms what is happening, much less assigning value or meaning or interpretation to descriptions."4
The failure of "Christabel" as narrative, especially the inability of the narrative voice to describe clearly what happens, has not been fully addressed by previous studies and will be my focus here. This essay will first point out typical problems with the narrative that appear early in the poem and then show how Julia Kristeva's theories of poetic language and abjection may explain these textual aporias and others that appear throughout the text. I will then argue that the narrator becomes increasingly...