Answering The Borderers in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Abstract

This essay argues that The Borderers shaped Coleridge’s conception of the Mariner’s moral situation and development in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Both texts were engaged with the idea of Necessity, an idea central to the Godwinian political theory which Wordsworth was still pondering in 1796–1797 and to the Priestleyan Unitarianism which grounded Coleridge’s religious and political attitudes. In The Borderers, Wordsworth presents Rivers as a case study in the moral contingency promoted (in his judgment) by Godwinian Necessity. In “The Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge borrows the moral impasse in which Wordsworth leaves Rivers, and then dramatizes an alternate, One Life version of Necessity accommodating the Mariner to its own providential design. The essay concludes by speculating that Coleridge found The Borderers so brilliantly pertinent to his own case against Godwin because Wordsworth, in conceiving his tragedy, had read and used Coleridge’s early criticisms of Godwin.