By marrying the tropes of fever and slavery, “The Ancient Mariner” also explores slippages between the walled-off categories of self and otherness. In the heat of the poem’s fever, the mariner is identified with Englishmen and slaves,27 even though yellow fever underscored what were perceived as natural differences between Britons and Africans in how their bodies weathered forces of nature. The mariner’s implied nationality and the wedding guest’s response to his “long, and lank, and brown” body links him to British sailors who had been yellow fever victims (226). Because these victims were (according to the Caribbean traveler Robert Renny) “exposed to the burning sun, and a sultry atmosphere by day; chilling dews, and unhealthful vapours by night; obliged to conform themselves to new manners, new employments, new food, and new clothing,” their bodies took on a ghostly, unnatural appearance. They became “irritable and weak” and were thus “readily affected” with the fever.28 During this time, there was also an acute awareness that yellow fever (or “imported contagion”) traveled by way of sun-scorched mariners and soldiers from one tropical shore to another.29 When mariners arrived home, people were naturally afraid of touching these potentially unclean victims of seafaring diseases. It is thus not surprising to find this fear erupting in the opening lines of “The Ancient Mariner.” Who can blame the wedding guest for voicing an immediate prohibition against bodily contact, ordering the mariner to “Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!” (11). Like the British seaman whose body changed color in the heat of a yellow fever outbreak, the ancient mariner’s shadowy weakness and brown “skinny hand” emerge repeatedly throughout the poem, as if to remind readers that yellow fever took its name from its ability to change the skin color of European victims.
But in the poem’s infected environment, the very markers that identify the mariner as a British sailor (the “brown hand”) also designate him a slave. He is linked to the bodies of Africans not only through his color, but also through his health. When the mariner assures his listener, “Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding Guest! / This body dropt not down,” he acknowledges his own immunity to the fever that struck down all two hundred shipmates, an immunity that aligns him with the alterity of the slave (230–31). For when medical writers, such as Henry Clutterbuck, M.D., observed that infectious fevers were “communicable from one individual to another, either by actual contact, or by the effluvia escaping from the bodies of the sick,” they were referring to communication between European and European, not European and African.30 The wedding guest’s fear of touching the Mariner’s “skinny hand, so brown,” then, also demonstrates a fear of “losing self in another,” of being infected and thus profoundly changed by the alterity carried in the blood under dark skin (229).
Boundary-dissolving, a process that “The Ancient Mariner” articulates so powerfully, is the vehicle by which the poem arrives at the distanced imagination. But the proximity of disease and the recognition of how easily national and personal boundaries could break down was also a central issue in the early nineteenth-century medical search for the origin of yellow fever. Medical experts agreed that every disease had its own geographical habitat. For example, Dr. Thomas Beddoes—Coleridge’s friend and correspondent—voiced a common opinion when he said “small-pox, yellow fever, and the plague” came from a certain “effluvia” produced in the air of hot regions.31 Tropical climates—Africa and the Caribbean particularly—were thus carriers of disease, and natives of Britain and America who came in contact with these climates could carry the disease back with them and so become foreigners in their homeland. The search for yellow fever’s origin could help reestablish borders between “self” and “other,” between “us” and “them,” between British and African, which yellow fever itself obliterated.32
The search for origins, it seems, was everybody’s business. In 1802, a writer named William Deverell published a book proposing to locate yellow fever’s origin through a study of Milton, Virgil, and “thence to [the poetry] of Homer, and to the times when the temples of Egypt were founded; and I think it will be seen that the same or a similar disease, arising from the same causes and in the same places, prevailed in each of those ages.”33 Using the Aeneid, Deverell established a one-to-one correspondence between Ortygia and Britain, Cyclades and the Caribbean, and “the tabida lues, affecting both animate and inanimate nature” was “most clearly a West Indian or American fever.”34 Coleridge also had an interest in the origin of epidemic disease. He located the origin of smallpox—the seafaring disease most closely associated with yellow fever—and demonstrated its coincidence with commerce, war, and the movement of Africans:
Small pox … was first introduced by the Abyssinians into Arabia when they conquered the Province of Hemyen [Yemen]; & they called it the Locust-plague, believing it to have originated in the huge heaps of putrefying Locusts in the Desart.—From Arabia it was carried by Greek merchants to Constantinople—& from thence by the armies of Justinian in his Gothic War to Italy, Switzerland, & France. (CL, 2:455)
Coleridge’s theory supports the period’s belief that, though the instigators of most diseases came from nature, from heaps of putrefying locusts, from “effluvia” of hot climates, or from “decomposing vegetable matter,” the growth of disease turned truly epidemic only through cross-cultural interaction.35
III
During the early part of the nineteenth century, a radical change took place in the cross-cultural interaction between Britons and Africans. Up until the late eighteenth century, most segments of society accepted, without too many questions, racial hierarchies that placed white Europeans in a superior position to people of color. These hierarchies naturalized the slave system: Africans were considered inferior, and so slavery was justified. But things changed in the 1780s and 1790s. Largely because of the abolitionist movement, but also because of increased slave uprisings, the majority of British people, for the first time in centuries, began to consider Africans as moral others instead of “things.” Coleridge articulated a fairly common opinion in an article intended for the Courier where he wrote, “A Slave is a Person perverted into a Thing; Slavery, therefore, is not so properly a deviation from Justice as an absolute subversion of all Morality.”36 As one can imagine, this “subversion of all morality” by the British brought with it an overwhelming sense of guilt. Coleridge and other writers began to see European guilt in the same way doctors saw yellow fever’s black vomit: as a primary symptom.
Guilt defined Britain as a sick society. And nowhere is the guilt of slavery and the punishment of disease more apparent than in abolitionist literature. Helen Maria Williams’s 1788 Poem on the Bill Lately Passed presents a vision of slavery where the “beams direct, that on each head / The fury of contagion shed.”37 The “beams” in this case radiate from the “guilty man” in charge of a slave vessel. While Williams located the origin of contagion in the guilt of British slave traders, Coleridge located the origin of slavery in the guilt of the British consumer. Slavery, he contended in his 1808 review of Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was “evil in the form of guilt; evil in its most absolute and most appropriate sense.” Guilt, wrote Coleridge, because of its psychological proximity, “will make an impression deeper than could have been left by mere agony of body” (SWF, 1:219).38 Further, guilt was national, and authorized by acts of legislature (SWF, 1:219–20). When it came to matters of slavery, Coleridge saw the British nation as a body. “Great Britain is indeed a living body politic,” he wrote. “London is the true heart of empire. No pulse beats there, which is not corresponded to proportionally through the whole circulation” (SWF, 1:236).
Those