Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 52

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either softly or raucously celebrating sexuality, Rich states, ‘we romanticize at our peril what
it means to love and act against the grain’.3 There is an acknowledgment here of the
isolation, self-hatred, and potential mental breakdown which accompanies ‘going against the
grain’. In Rich’s poetry this image of isolation is painfully apparent. In ‘The Demon Lover’, a
title taken from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, the poet wishes to denounce her sexuality; the
narrator asks ‘how much longer, dear child/do you think sex will matter?’4. Her truth is sorrow
because the narrator and the demon lover are ‘almost/never touching’.5 Rich presents a
demon character to reflect her ‘sin’, a kind of evil that makes her ‘seasick’. The want for love
combined with a feeling of enforced shame is described here as ‘this to-and-fro’.6 When she
is seasick she ‘drop[s] into the sea’, she is invisible, insignificant.7 Yet it is not an ocean. The
‘sea’ image connotes the small, prejudiced community she is in which is not unlike the
‘small-town girls’ who ‘gape at you’ in lesbian singer-songwriter Janis Ian’s ‘At Seventeen’.8
If she were in an ocean, she would be more insignificant, but perhaps safer because of this.
The sea is also a pun on ‘see’; she is the observed in whatever she does because sexuality
is her core being. She is experiencing a justified paranoia because of this injustice.
The silence and sin of lesbian existence influences Rich’s poetry but Coleridge’s
‘demon lover’- who is also found in ‘Christabel’- reveals that lesbianism was written about
poetically before it was truly or openly spoken about.9 The ‘demon lover’ in ‘Christabel’ is
Geraldine, the lesbian ghost. She haunts ‘Christabel’, just as Kubla Khan’s demon ‘haunts’ in
‘the deep romantic chasm’.10 This chasm’s ‘slanted’ queerness echoes the phallocentric idea
that lesbian existence is perverse. It is almost/never at the tip of Her tongue, remaining the
‘Great Silence’ – or never acknowledged. Geraldine is sexually ‘perverse’ and this is
reflected by the psychologically gothic nature of the poem. The lesbian ghost casts a ‘spell’
on ‘sweet Christabel’; she is predatory and an apparition.11
In a psychoanalytical reading of the poem, Geraldine and Christabel are one, this is
the intimacy of the two women. Freud argues that ‘homosexual tendencies’ are ‘unnatural’
since, he emphasises, the ‘social disadvantages’ of homosexuality are ‘a danger’ to the
subject and the subject’s family.

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This is why there is an internal conflict within the

‘sweetness’ of Christabel, who sleeps and dreams with Geraldine. They are double. The

3

Ibid., 217.
Ibid., 32.
5
Ibid., 33.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Janis Ian, Between the Lines (Columbia, 1975).
9
Richard Holmes ed., Coleridge Selected Poetry (London: Penguin, 1996), 230.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 106.
12
Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” in Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl, Freud on Women (London: Vintage, 2002), 246.
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