SOURCE: "The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge," in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 317-46.

In the following essay, Paglia argues against strictly moral interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and rather insists that in the poem, "Jehovah has been obliterated by the vampire mother who rises from the slime of nature."

Literature's most influential male heroine is the protagonist of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wordsworth was the first to notice the Mariner's passive suffering. In the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth lists the "great defects" of the poem: "first, that the principal person has no distinct character .. . secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon." Bloom speaks of the Mariner's "extraordinary passivity." Graham Hough equates the ship's motionlessness with "complete paralysis of the will." George Whalley goes further: "The Mariner's passivity is...