Pleasure-domes

A clue in the Newsday Saturday Stumper — “Less-than-stately pleasure dome” — gave me a new way to think about Citizen Kane . The answer, SNOWGLOBE, made me realize that Charles Foster Kane’s snow globe is something of a pleasure-dome within a pleasure-dome, one enclosed world within another, a Xanadu within a Xanadu. And just as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s full vision of Xanadu is beyond recovery, so too is the world represented by Kane’s snow globe.

If I were a certain kind of person, and I guess I am, I might go further and suggest that the pleasure-dome of Kane’s snow globe is a substitute for what might be called the primal pleasure-dome: not the maternal breast (which doesn’t enclose) but the all-providing world of the amniotic sac. When the water breaks, that world is lost. No wonder Kane’s snow globe breaks when it falls to the floor of his bedroom.

I couldn’t leave this idea sitting in a comment, could I?

[Coleridge’s prose introduction to “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream,” an almost certainly apocryphal account of the poem’s composition, may be found here. It should accompany any printing of the poem. And in case anyone needs to see, the snow globe appears at two other points in Citizen Kane .]