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In light of trauma theory, this article reads Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a traumatic narrative mirroring the shame-ridden experiences of a trauma survivor. In the beginning of the poem, the Mariner is ignorant of who he is, unable to recognize his fears and desires as his own or distinguish himself from his surroundings. It is the killing of the albatross that first enables him to identify himself, and it is his bloodsucking, to speak. But what follows his self-determining, self-inaugural act is, paradoxically, the presence of otherness and occurrence of the trauma. The trauma the Mariner suffers is the retroactive effect of converging two factors in order to cope with the impasse of his meaningless universe: the killing of the albatross and the curse in the dead mariners’ eye. The killing becomes a trauma by deferred action only in later connection with the curse so as not to sink in nothingness. After his seven days of deep suffering, the breaking of the curse begins when the Mariner blesses and puts into a different meaning the beauty of water-snakes with its rich attire well joined with the death-fires. That blessing is a moment of his first step toward self-abreaction, and the albatross falls off his neck. But the Mariner is not free; he is yet to fully put his story of trauma, the mystery of the shooting of the albatross and all that follows, into his sense of self and the world. His telling of the tale postpones abreaction of the trauma indefinitely, each telling postponing it yet again. The Mariner is now subject to traumatic repetition of his experience, because his traumatic event has been met with no corresponding and proportionate discharge of affect into words. At an uncertain hour when his agony returns, he is doomed to retell his ghastly tale repetitively in order to bring about the revival of the affect which was originally attached to the trauma.
