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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts the Graeco-Roman God Pan and Decadence 2018

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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts the Graeco-Roman God Pan and Decadence 2018 Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Literatures in English Mgr. Eva Valentová The Graeco-Roman God Pan and Decadence Dissertation Supervisor: doc. Michael Matthew Kaylor, Ph.D. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Eva Valentová 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. Michael Matthew Kaylor, Ph.D., for his kind help and invaluable insights, which made the work on this project intellectually stimulating. I would also like to thank Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D. for his encouragement and patient guidance in my publishing efforts. He has helped me to become a better writer. 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 4 2. The Phenomenon of Decadence ......................................................................................... 7 3. The Betwixt-and-Between God Pan ................................................................................. 40 4. The Awful God Pan: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan ............................................ 52 5. The Liberating Pan: E. M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” and “The Curate’s Friend” 80 6. Pan as a Spirit of Nature and Psychopomp: Forrest Reid’s The Garden God and “Pan’s Pupil” ..................................................................................................................................... 110 7. Pan as an Androgynous God of Ecstasy in Victor Benjamin Neuburg’s Poem “The Triumph of Pan” .................................................................................................................... 140 8. The Betwixt-and-Between: Peter Pan as a Trickster Figure ........................................... 163 9. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 194 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 199 Abstract .................................................................................................................................. 208 Anotace .................................................................................................................................. 211 3 1. Introduction The motif of the Graeco-Roman god Pan experienced a remarkable upsurge of interest in the nineteenth century, not only in children’s literature (Perrot 155), but also of the literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in general. Indeed, Patricia Merivale notes an “astonishing resurgence of interest in the Pan motif” between 1890 and 1926 (vii). What is more, Patricia Merivale also points out that it was an exclusively Anglo-American phenomenon: “Even before Nietzsche, the Germans, for instance, seem to have preferred the weightier figure of Dionysus (the Bacchic nightmare of Mann’s Death in Venice is the logical outcome of this preference); there is no clear equivalent to the Anglo-American Pan cult” (222). The present thesis analyses the use of this motif in selected works from fin de siècle and Edwardian period and explores its relationship to Decadence. The phenomenon of Decadence is already a well-researched subject although the existing research has not yielded any clear definition yet due to the highly contradictory nature of the phenomenon. Some of the major studies covering this topic include Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987); David Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995); Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999) by Liz Constable et al.; Charles Bernheimer’s Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (2002); and Kirsten MacLeod’s Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle (2006). These and other studies of Decadence are used in the theoretical part of the thesis, which is a metastudy of Decadence. In other words, it aims to present a relatively coherent picture of the phenomenon. The works mentioned above are all general studies of Decadence, which (except for MacLeod who focuses on British Decadence) often give a lot of space to French literature where the movement originated. Moreover, they leave out the study of the god Pan, 4 which was a motif especially prevalent in Anglo-American literature. And yet there is a major study of the god Pan and that is Patricia Merivale’s book Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (1969), a literary history of the Pan motif, where she traces the appearance of Pan in literary works beginning with classic Greek literature and ending with the fiction of the early twentieth century. However, since it covers such a vast range of literature, the book has rather the character of an overview. In the present study, I take a different approach. I have restricted the analysis to five authors from the period of the turn of the century and conducted in-depth studies of their works dealing with Pan. The analytical part starts with the study of Arthur Machen (1863- 1947) as he was the most influential author dealing with the Pan motif due to his famous novella The Great God Pan (1894), which has become a classic of the horror genre. Correspondingly, Merivale addresses the novella in the chapter on the “Sinister Pan.” However, my analysis problematises this classification by considering Machen’s original idea behind writing the story. The Great God Pan is the most typically Decadent of the analysed works. The analysis continues with E. M. Forster’s (1879-1970) short stories “The Story of a Panic” (1904) and “The Curate’s Friend” (1907) from the collection The Celestial Omnibus (1911), featuring Pan and a faun respectively. Compared to Machen, Forster was more politically engaged, and his short stories represent a challenge to the heteronormative bourgeois conventions. In his political views, the liberal and atheistic Forster was a complete opposite of the more orthodox Machen. After this follows the chapter on Forrest Reid (1875- 1947), Forster’s close friend. The analysis focuses on his novel The Garden God (1905), a lyrical story about a Platonic love between two boys, one of whom is an incarnation of Pan, and the short story “Pan’s Pupil” (1905) about an encounter of a boy with the goat-god. Reid’s intensely lyrical prose belongs to the tradition of Uranian writing. The subject of the next chapter is Victor Benjamin Neuburg’s (1883-1940) poem “The Triumph of Pan” (1910). 5 Neuburg was not a very well-known poet, having been largely overshadowed by Aleister Crowley, with whom he was closely associated. In the poem, Pan, who is referred to as the hermaphrodite, challenges the boundaries concerning gender and sexuality. The analysis concludes with J. M. Barrie’s (1860-1937) novel Peter and Wendy (1911), which is chronologically the last work, but whose origins stand at the beginning as the play Peter Pan was first staged in 1904. Here, I explore the link between the iconic hero of children’s literature with the archetypal trickster figure. The reason I have chosen these five writers is that their works are representative of different aspects of the god Pan. These are indicated in the headings of the individual chapters. It needs to be said that the headings do not capture all the aspects of Pan that are expressed in those works, but rather those that are foregrounded. Pan is closely connected to Nature in all of them, which goes against the traditional understanding of Decadence as an aesthetic of artifice. In most of the works analysed here, Paganism and Christianity are juxtaposed, particularly in Neuburg, Reid and Forster, who all rejected their Judeo-Christian background (Neuburg came from a Jewish family). Machen, on the other hand, was an orthodox Anglo-Catholic. What is central to Forster’s, Neuburg’s and Reid’s works is homoeroticism with which the Pan motif is closely associated. Last but not least, in all these works, Pan is a transgressive and liminal figure, a characteristic that is epitomised by his half- god/half-goat nature. Since the thesis deals with literary history, the principal methods I have used are close reading and contextual analysis, taking into account how the works had been shaped by the authors’ lives, examining their relation to literary Decadence, as well as situating them within a broader sociocultural context of the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Britain. The biographical aspect of the analyses is particularly important in the case of Machen and Reid, whose works were to a considerable extent autobiographical. My ambition in writing the present thesis is 6 not to provide another comprehensive account of Decadence. Instead, in the words of Liz Constable, my aim is to “offer local response” (290). 2. The Phenomenon of Decadence Decadence is a highly complex phenomenon, which does not have a clear definition. Commentators have long struggled to restrict the scope of the phenomenon and identify its key features, but the effort to accommodate Decadent works, which were characterised by great variety and often contradictory qualities, into a unified and coherent characterisation of Decadence was not an easy task, often leading to frustration. Moreover, what did not make the task any
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