Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

Peter Melville, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007) viii + 199 $65.00 Based on the Derridian assumption that hospitality always entails the risk of exposing both the guest and the host to "the constitutive violence of their relationship" (6) , Peter Melville's Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation argues that "Romantic hospitality anticipates and even exceeds the Deriddean commentary" (13). Focusing on a fascinating choice of texts, ranging from Rousseau's Emile and Second Discourse to Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and Perpetual Peace, from Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Melville explores scenes of hospitality in Romantic writing in which the most characteristic effect is "disorientation" (32). For Melville, the uninvited arrival of the Mariner at the wedding banquet, the interruption of Coleridge's dream of "Kubla Khan" by the man from Porlock, and the "stranger" at the door of young Coleridge's classroom in "Frost at Midnight" are all "surprise" visits which "function as reminders that there is no resolution in which otherness is finally received or accommodated" (105). [...]he is equally convincing on "The Rime," which, he says, "raises questions concerning the nature of competing obligations: where do the Mariner's obligations lie in the end, toward the familiar or toward the strange and the unknown?" (110-11) Not only does the Wedding Guest move from guest to host; he is also "held hostage, as it were, in his host-age of the Mariner's tale" (111).