Maternal-Child Bonds and Resistive Embodiment in Sara Coleridge’s Writing

Abstract

As the daughter of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Coleridge has long been of scholarly interest. This essay explores Coleridge’s sophisticated perspectives on embodiment, illness, and motherhood and the infringement of medical authority on maternal authority. Drawing on transcriptions of unpublished manuscripts of Coleridge’s “Diary of Her Children’s Early Years” and letters to her husband during her convalescence in Brighton in 1832, this essay argues that Coleridge’s experiences of illness and disability play a foundational role in her development of strategies of resistive embodiment in her writing. These techniques counter the normalizing effect of medical discourse and open new avenues for disabled mothers to bond with their children through writing. As such, this essay demands a reassessment of Coleridge’s contributions to literary discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability, as well as her adaptation of her father’s theory of embodied imagination.