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Kenneth Grahame's Literary Paganism

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Kenneth Grahame's Literary Paganism Idle Worship: Kenneth Grahame’s Literary Paganism Jeffrey Swim A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in English Literature Supervisor: Dominic Manganiello Graduate School of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Jeffrey Swim, Ottawa, Canada, 2016 ii Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 - Kenneth Grahame’s critical Legacy 3 - Method and Approach 6 - Grahame’s Literary Paganism 7 - Overview of Thesis Chapters 17 Chapter One: “No Such Lamentable Cleavage” Kenneth Grahame’s Pagan Critique of Human Progress - Introduction 19 - Part one: “Flat and Virtuous Lives” 21 - Part Two: “Fitting out a Lord of Creation” 24 Chapter Two: “Thank the Gods That Such Things Are”: Idleness, Aesthesis, and Escape in Pagan Papers - Introduction 33 - Part One: Idleness and the Pagan Aesthetic 34 - Part Two: Retreat and Renunciation 45 - Part Three: “A Pause in Sorrow” 50 Chapter Three: “One Must Stoop”: Stature and Play in The Golden Age and Dream Days - Introduction 54 - Part One: “You Have Played Enough” 57 - Part Two: “One Must Stoop to See It” 68 iii - Part Three: “I shall explain that you are converted…” 71 Chapter Four: “There’s the Real Life for You!” Harmony and Habitat in The Wind in the Willows - Introduction 76 - Part One: “Summoning, Warning, Enticing, Repelling” 78 - Part Two: Growth, Development, Hope 89 - Part Three: Friend, Helper, Healer 94 - Part Four: Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride 98 Afterword - Brief Recap: 102 - “Slow Criticism”: 104 - Ecocriticism: 104 - Pagan Criticism: 105 Bibliography 107 iv Abstract In this thesis, I explore the works of Kenneth Grahame in light of what some critics have deemed “literary paganism”. I argue that Grahame employs certain “pagan” tropes in order to launch a critique of modern culture. Grahame upholds a classical vision of leisure that rejects the ideology inherent to urbanization. His challenge to modernity relies on a literary persona indicative of an alternative attitude to that of the middle class fin de siècle urban culture. His short stories add to this critique in their presentation of childhood as a pre-converted pagan existence which en-kindles a sense of disappointment with routinized adult life in the modern city. The Wind in the Willows embodies Grahame’s vision of true leisure as it is depicted in both the River Bank animals and their wetland ecosystem itself. By paying close attention to the pagan themes in Grahame’s writing, we gain a comprehensive view of his often misunderstood body of work. v Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude for all those who have supported and encouraged me throughout the writing of this project. In no specific order, I wish to thank my examiners Paul Heintzman and Anne Raine, Graduate Director Lauren Gillingham, Professor Alan West, and Professor Craig Gordon, who was always willing to lend an ear and offer insight and support. I would also like to thank my mother and father; my partner and “editor and chief” Meagan McDonald; Ben Miller, Lim Lung Chieh, and Sammy Hacker for helping me develop my ideas and offering many helpful suggestions. Acknowledgement is due also to the snapping turtles of Mud Lake, the resident goats of the Ottawa Agricultural Museum, and the frogs and toads at Brewer Pond. I must also thank my loyal cat Travis (now deceased) whose gentle purring and soft white fur provided much needed consolation. A profound debt of gratitude is owed to my supervisor Dominic Manganiello, who has worked tirelessly to curb my rambling thought process and whose suggestions have greatly clarified the often tangled mess that is my writing. His patience, generosity, and insight have informed this project. Swim 1 Introduction “You must please remember that a theme, a thesis, a subject, is in most cases little more than a sort of clothes-line, on which one pegs a string of ideas, questions, allusions, and so on, one’s mental undergarments, of all shapes and sizes, some possibly fairly new, but most rather old and patched; and they dance and sway in the breeze, and flap and flutter, or hang limp and lifeless; and some are ordinary enough, and some are of a rather private and intimate shape, and rather give the owner away, and show up his or her peculiarities. And owing to the invisible clothes-line they seem to have some connexion and continuity” - Kenneth Grahame (quoted in Green 239) 1859, the year of Kenneth Grahame’s birth, was a year of wonder on the land, from the sea, and in the heavens1. Big Ben chimed for the first time (The Canadian Press 2009); the sea-horse was put on display at the London Fish House (Holdsworth 25), and the world witnessed the biggest solar storm in recorded history (Guhathakurta 165). During his lifetime, technological innovation promised to make modern life more convenient, more comfortable, and more efficient than ever before: the telephone, electric lamp, typewriter, vacuum cleaner, Caterpillar tractor, refrigerator, and of course, the motor car were all produced between 1859 and 1932 (Hudson 115-6). In an age of such technological progress, Grahame’s work, which is often associated with a kind of wonder and whimsy, expresses deep disillusionment with the emerging modernized world. In “The Romance of the Rail”, for instance, he writes that “the crowning wrong” of industrialism is its “annihilation of the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer begins to work at the point where vision ceases” (22). Grahame suggests that the train itself poses a threat to the imagination: once we can overtake the horizon we may inevitably desensitize ourselves to wonder. 1 This year was also a productive one for English literature. Along with Grahame, that annus mirabilis saw 2 Advancements in transportation are not the only stifling aspect of modernity. Grahame writes contemptuously on the intrusive nature of certain social institutions which seem to affect aesthetic appreciation in negative ways. In “Cheap Knowledge”, for example, he complains that public libraries have begun to produce in their patron a “cloyed and congested mind”, which is due in part to the atmosphere. Grahame writes that the “the stillness and the heavy air, the feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these other readers” in the Library “combine to set up a nervous irritation fatal to quiet study (331). For Grahame, then, the “progress” is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the subject is dazzled by modern inventions, such as the railroad. Such technological innovations can make wonder obsolete, dulling the imagination. On the other, standardized tastes, which are promoted and upheld by seemingly innocuous institutions such as public libraries coerce the individual into a willful complacency with industrialist utilitarianism. Under such conditions, Grahame worried that the human spirit was becoming a servant of what I will call the urban industrial complex.2 In this thesis project, I will examine four of Grahame five major publications: Pagan Papers, The Golden Age and its sequel Dream Days, and, of course, his most famous work, The Wind in the Willows. My central interest is in the rhetorical style and ‘pagan’ content of Grahame’s work. These aspects of his writing have received some very insightful scholarly attention by Lois Kuznets, Peter Green, Patricia Merivale, and more recently William Greenslade. A more detailed consideration of these defining features of Grahame’s writing will serve to increase scholarly understanding of his 2 Grahame never refers to such a threat explicitly, but as I will demonstrate later in this project, by careful study of his prose essays, we can uncover the source of his anxiety. 3 literary endeavors, as well as to shed some light on his earlier works which have received scant critical attention. In this introductory chapter, I will outline some of the main trends in relevant scholarship, present the defining attributes of Grahame’s literary paganism, and briefly summarize each chapter of my thesis. Kenneth Grahame’s Critical Legacy3 Jackie C. Horne and Donna R. Wright’s Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: A Children’s Classic at 100 (2010) is the most recent full length study of Grahame’s work, and as the title suggests, the essays in the collection deal solely with Grahame’s enduring animal tale as a staple of “children’s literature”4. Along with the several fascinating engagements with Grahame’s work in light of certain contemporary scholarly issues, the collection is notable for a thorough introduction which covers trends among critics who have explored Grahame’s writing. First and foremost is the “biocritical” interest inherited from Grahame’s most influential biographer, Peter Green (XVII). Critics who adopt this approach “analy[se] the novel in terms of Grahame’s unhappy life”, for they see reflected in Grahame’s depiction of the River Bank world, the ideal place to which he could “escape [from] his deeply disappointing personal troubles” (XVIII). Another focal point of criticism lies in the attempt to determine more precisely the nature of Grahame’s narrative strategies with regard to his child-audience (Horne 3 Three biographies have been published since Grahame’s death, the first by Patrick Chalmers in 1933, the second, and by far most influential, by Peter Green (1959), and Alison Prince’s An Innocent in the Wild Wood in 1994. There have also been two broad studies of Grahame’s work, the first by Eleanor Graham in 1963, and another by Lois Kuznets in 1987. 4 There is a dearth of scholarly material directly concerned with his pre-Willows publications. I have tried to incorporate what has been written on these works, where it is relevant.
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