The Shamming Self: The Mariner’s Persona in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Abstract

This paper focuses on the psychic apparatus of Persona in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner which Jung calls “only a mask of the collective psyche.” The Mariner’s journey in the familiar social surrounding, the “kirk” and the “light-house”, are images which symbolize ordinary social set up. Initially, the journey is a plain sailing as the Mariner and his peers are unconsciously conscious of a set of values that are ordinarily taken for granted. In the land of the “mist and snow” (symbolic of the unconscious), however, they come face to face with a situation that defies the normal parameters of their habitual social character. A temporary social acceptance (the Mariner’s surrender to the alternative judgments of his peers) is bargained at a very high price. The modern man’s claustrophobic isolation and with it the loss of identity are dilemmas resulting from one-sided consciousness. Man’s vital faculties (like those of the Mariner) suffer deathblows when they are wilfully strangulated in unnatural pursuits of meaningless recognitions. Our examination of the Mariner’s traumatic woes will yield extensive correspondences with contemporary social and civilizational debacles.