Politics of Affect in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

This paper analyzes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in terms of Coleridge’s imaginative plea for a modification of consciousness about racial slavery prevalent in the then British society. What lends muscle to the plea is the use of gothic supernaturalism, which helps bring about a transformation in the Mariner. The gothic-actuated transformation, this paper claims, derives from Coleridge’s own ambiguous attitude to English imperialism—an ambivalence which results into systematic portrayal of the violator as the rightful beneficiary of the reader’s sympathy. The paper concludes that the poem’s turn to the affect of moral sentimentalism intends to make the reader of Coleridge’s time acquiesce in accepting colonial guilt as the spiritual politics of quietism, thereby averting the possibility of a violent reaction both from the hapless victims and some conscientious victimizers. There was not much thrust on an economic and political upgrading of the status of the slaves; instead, the affects of outrage, disgust, horror, and shame were evoked in the white anti-slavery texts so that the ugliness of imperialism and the concomitant slavery were criticized without really writing them off.