A central idea to Foucault’s Panopticism is the systematic ordering and controlling of human populations through subtle and often unseen forces. I liked his whole idea of discipline, which is the way to organize society. The goal of the modern society is to put things in order and keep them there. Nothing seems to suggest a connection between Coleridge’s “The Rime of Ancient Mariner” and Foucault’s “Discipline and Punishment.” After a class discussion I came up may be with a crazy idea, not sure if you would agree, so please respond to my thoughts.
As it has been already said, it is hard to interpret the mariner’s behavior in the poem. He is like Coleridge constantly feels guilty and tries to get rid of this feeling by telling his story to different people in different places. I believe that the mariner tells his story during the wedding ceremony not just by accident. As we all know, marriage builds a family, a family is a cell of society. May be the mariner tries to prevent the building of this cell,(disturb the wedding) because it is easier to control an individual activity then an activity of a group.
Like Coleridge believed in supernatural agencies, so Foucault believed in power of mind over mind. The mariner tries to tell the story to a big audience. He wanted to make sure that he was heard and seen by a large amount of people and eventually he will be forgiven. So in the modern society, in attempt to achieve their goals, people try to discipline themselves and if they do so, they will be rewarded
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This is an interesting reading, Vera. I completely agree that the fact of the "confession" happening at a wedding is significant. I think you are right: the mariner's story, hsi very presence, serves as a disruptive threat to the wedding on some level (even though his audience is a wedding guest, not the groom). I think there are two ways to go with this:
1) the way you went - by keeping the wedding-guest out of this collective celebratory space, the mariner is able to more easily extend a disciplinary mechanism (his confession) to him.
2) on the other hand, the nuclear family, and it's functioning as a little replica of disciplinary units is, I think Fucault would argue, itself a disciplinary unit. People getting married are doing what hey are supposed to do: coming together to produce more workers and to be a witness to each other's behavior: to hold each other accountable. SO, maybe we could also say that the mariner himself represents a disruptive force (e.g. killing the albatross) that needs to be disciplined (e.g. confession) and his potential disruption of the wedding ceremony is another example of his dangerous disruptive potential.
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