This just in. The tale is told here: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner given trigger warning in case it upsets students,” by Craig Simpson, Telegraph, November 21, 2022:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been given a trigger warning by academics for depicting the death of an albatross.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 masterpiece, charting the eerie adventures of a sailor, has been deemed potentially upsetting for students at the University of Greenwich.
The poem, which hinges on the eponymous mariner shooting an albatross, now requires a content warning for depicting “animal death,” according to academics at the London university’s English department.
Coleridge’s tale of a cursed voyage has also been marked for “supernatural possession” and “human death,” common themes in gothic literature.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, famous for the lines “water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” centers on an old sailor telling a stunned wedding guest about a voyage during which he shot an albatross.
The offending stanza, the content warning suggests, reads: “‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!/From the fiends, that plague thee thus!/Why look’st thou so?’—With my cross-bow/I shot the ALBATROSS.”
The ship then becomes cursed. The crew, succumbing to dehydration, then “dropped down one by one.”
Later in the poem, the curse is lifted and “Beneath the lightning and the Moon/The dead men gave a groan”. The possessed crew then begin sailing the ship to safety.
These supernatural elements may be upsetting to students, according to the content warnings, along with themes in numerous works of gothic literature – which is defined by its focus on the macabre.
Other works taught in The Literature of the Gothic module have also been given warnings. Mary Shelley’s short stories “On Ghosts” and “The Mortal Immortal” come with a warning for references to suicide, and Lord Byron’s 1813 poem The Giaour, about the murder of a concubine, has been given a content advisory for violence and murder.
Trigger warnings perform a great service: they alert us to scary or offensive content that might lead to fear and trembling. Some have been known to be permanently scarred from their encounters with texts that set off deep emotion of an unwanted kind. No one should be forced to listen to tales of violence, or even death, like that of the ill-fated albatross in Coleridge’s poem. However, therapists agree that if we are properly warned well in advance, with the trigger warnings that should now be considered indispensable, we should be able to withstand any psychic shock. I tried it out myself. Thanks to that trigger warning quoted just above, I knew that if I dared to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – and I could have backed out at any time, no one was forcing me, but I was determined to go ahead — I would eventually come across the murder of an innocent bird. Would I be able to withstand the anxiety that I, a sensitive soul with a ready tear, in short, a Man of Feeling — was sure to experience? I had been preparing myself all week, imagining different birds – seagulls, sandpipers, Atlantic puffins, Emperor penguins – that might breathe their last in a line of four, or possibly only three, iambs.
So when I came across the line “With my cross-bow/I shot the ALBATROSS” I was ready. And I withstood the line’s shock, manfully.
It occurs to me that we ought to have trigger warnings on a great many texts that so far have escaped notice.
Take the high school student who is assigned Hamlet. That innocent student doesn’t know what to expect from such a recondite text. He (or she), needs to have at the ready a copy of Trigger Warnings for Dummies, where he (or she) simply turns to the entry for Hamlet and finds this:
Hamlet. Mother-and-brother-in-law incest. Murder most foul of father even before play begins. Killing of elderly courtier (Polonius). Graveyard scene with poor Yorick’s skull. Hamlet’s girlfriend goes mad, drowns herself (“there is a willow grows aslant a brook”). Mother accidentally poisoned. Uncle deliberately killed. Much unnecessary violence with a total of eight deaths (Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Hamlet. Reading the play without trigger warning leads to poor results on norm-referenced personality tests including the NEO-PI, the 16PF, the OPQ, and the FFPI-C.
But let’s not stop there. Many other plays by Shakespeare deserve trigger warnings. Here are just a few:
Richard III. Makes light of people with disabilities (hunch back). Child abuse: smothering of the two young princes in the Tower, King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. King Richard has a very scary dream, then is killed at Battle of Bosworth Field. Among the consequences of reading without trigger warning include failing grades on the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory.
Antony and Cleopatra. Sexist portrayal of Cleopatra, who deserves our respect as a career woman (queen). Racist depiction of brown-skinned Egyptians rowing the barge she sat in, that “like a burnished throne, burned on the water.” Cleopatra’s suicide by asp’s poison harms image of all reptiles. Antony falls on his sword (unpleasant to watch). Obvious negative consequences for Cohen’s kappa coefficient.
Macbeth. Unkind to Scottish people, depicted variously as witches, ghosts, and killers. The play violates the Equal Protection Clause of the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
Othello. Racist depiction of the main character, a Blackamoor who cannot control his childlike emotions and is easily deceived by the motiveless malignity of a clever white man (Iago). Spousal abuse (death of Desdemona). Unkind words about Muslims, when Othello says “Say, that in Aleppo once/Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk/Beat a Venetian and traduced the state/I took by the throat the circumcised dog/And smote him thus.” To be avoided unless large parts of both Othello’s dialogue and monologues are rewritten. Coefficient of the radius increases according to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
King Lear. Significant elder abuse throughout. Main character, a senior citizen, depicted as suffering from senile dementia. Miscarriage of justice (Cordelia is hanged). One obvious consequence among unforewarned readers is the increase in Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
The Tempest. Subalternity and racism. Slavery described in positive terms: Caliban, the brown-skinned product of the witch Sycorax and the devil, is rebellious and spiteful, and depicted as deserving his enslavement to the wonder-working white man and Duke of Milan, Prospero. Not recommended for readers below the age of 25 or above the age of 65.
Children’s stories, too, need to include trigger warnings.
Jack and The Beanstalk. Giant makes murderous threat: “Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum/I smell the blood of an Englishman/Be he alive or be he dead/I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” Even a single reading likely to cause trauma. To be avoided .
Ferdinand. Makes light of cruelty to animals (bulls in bullfights). Anti-Hispanic messaging. Without trigger warning, the Keirsey Personality Sorter of listeners may be negative.
Three Little Pigs. Scary stereotype of a Big Bad Wolf. 78% of young listeners to whom the story was read without trigger warnings exhibited subsequent signs of PTSD and registered significant increase in Keirsey Personality Disorder.
This is just a tiny sample of the thousands — nay, hundreds of thousands — of texts that will require trigger warnings. All of us – parents, educators, caregivers, psychiatrists, juvenile court judges – need to roll up our figurative sleeves and get to work, protecting our children, our college students, our nuclear families, our senior citizens, from the scary stories that are all around us, embedded in texts that we once, in the innocent past, read without a trigger warning, and thought nothing of it. Now we know better.
Phil Copson says
I feel that Mr Fitzgerald is not treating the subject of Sudden Animal Deaths In Serious Tomes – or “SADIST” for short – with the seriousness which it deserves.
My nieces were most upset to be told about a bear who firstly got his head stuck in a hunny-pot and then became entrapped in a tight-fitting burrow.
They subsequently had to be taken to the therapist no fewer than four-and-twenty times following their accidental exposure to a pie-related mass extinction event involving blackbirds.
I hope to have better luck with “A 101 Dalmatians”….
tim gallagher says
Brilliant comment, Phil. Yes, how fragile are people these days if they are actually upset by poems like the “Ancient Mariner”. It is pathetic. How are they ever going to cope with life and the problems it sometimes brings. I often hear these reports like this one about the “Ancient mariner” and think, no, it can’t be true, it has to be an April Fools’ Day type joke. I hope your nieces are recovering from all that trauma they have faced.
Keith O says
“Dear woke pussies, what are you offended by today”?
No wonder the world is going to crap when this sort of drivel is being force fed to students from kindergarten all the way to university.
Students need a healthy reality check to realise that the world really isn’t a “safe space” and you might get your precious feelings hurt.
tim gallagher says
Exactly what I thought, Keith O, as I said just up above. What a weird world we are living in these days.
gravenimage says
From the Annals of a Trigger-Happy World
…………………………………….
Good grief–really, “triggered” by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Look, I’m vegan, but I’m not such a snowflake that just reading about the fictionalized death of an animal is traumatizing to me.
And Hugh Fitzgerald has some comedic examples of trigger warnings on Shakespeare and fairy tales–but you really cannot spoof this stuff any more. TCM and METV now have trigger warnings on Popeye cartoons (this is not a joke, but should be).
Wellington says
A nation or civilization dependent on snowflakes cannot last very long.
wpm says
The left wants young children many under the age of 15 some as young as 6 to permission to castrated themselves either chemical or by surgery ,but they want to shield college age student from classic works of fiction ?? The left really lives in a inverse perverted mind set.