August 2009 LET THEM RUN WILD

LET THEM RUN WILD: CHILDHOOD, THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY STORYTELLER, AND THE ASCENT OF THE MOON by Val Czerny A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL August 2009 Copyright by Val Czerny 2009 ii Acknowledgements My greatest intellectual debts are to the professors who comprised my dissertation committee. Dr. Oliver Buckton expanded my scholarly horizons by suggesting “wild” texts and theoretical approaches to explore, and I am grateful for his time, expertise, and receptivity to tales of adventure—all of which enlivened my desire to analyze narratives that have drawn and continue to draw both children and adults as their readers. Dr. Jane Caputi assisted me in my treatment of the “wild,” helping me to sharpen my focus and discover ways of unearthing fresh, non-linear-driven meanings in concepts that have come to possess assumed, static significations and in narratives which acknowledge relationships that extend beyond the ordinary. And Dr. Taylor Hagood provided solid advice; timely, excellent suggestions in terms of theoretical avenues to explore; and a gracious encouragement of my pursuits—especially those involving conjectural inquiries into the mysterious, subterranean songs that wordlessly communicate and transform. I was especially fortunate to be able to work with such exceptional professors who demonstrate a love of learning, scholarship, and teaching; a passion for and an excellence in conveying the written word; and a heartfelt desire to provide advice and guidance to emerging scholars and educators like me. I want to acknowledge as well the love, support, and encouragement I received from my mother, Jo Cerny, my sisters Karen and Jackie and their families, and Ted and Maureen Unton. Finally, I extend gratitude to Mike Luzzi, who helped make this adventure wondrous. iv Abstract Author: Val Czerny Title: Let Them Run Wild: Childhood, the Nineteenth-Century Storyteller, and the Ascent of the Moon Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Oliver Buckton Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Year: 2009 Drawing from literary criticism, ecological philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the wisdom of the female principle—or what Paula Gunn Allen perceives as “Her presence,” the “power to make and relate”—this interdisciplinary study challenges dominant assumptions that habitually prevail in western cultural thinking. Let Them Run Wild investigates alternative, “buried” articulations which emerge in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives that especially engage an audience of both children and adult readers. Recognizing the fictions inherent in linear-driven thought, these articulations celebrate narrative moments where reason is complicated and re- conjectured, where absence is affirmed as presence, and where tale-tellers disappear behind the messages they relate. By spotlighting legendary characters, Chapter One, “The Jowls of Legend,” explains how “wild consciousness” resists legendary status. Chapters Two and Three v discuss the interweaving journey of the wild arabesque in the Arabian Nights and untamed desire within Anne’s transformative language in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Chapter Four, examining the death drive in Frank Norris’s The Octopus, describes how it is reconceived in E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. Lastly, the Epilogue explores Juliana Ewing’s “Lob Lie-By-the-Fire,” tracing the manifestation of the female principle through its most wild activity—not hindered by gender—of service rendered through mystery and adventure. Wild consciousness advances through the collective identity of what Frederic Jameson has called the “political unconscious” and commissions older, better approximations of ideology through willing, spontaneous service. It acknowledges Homi K. Bhabha’s articulation of “cultural hybridity,” while, simultaneously, it directs such hybrid constructions of history, space, and negotiation outward toward a wild “otherness” that is not a projection, but a distinct, yet allusive, herald of wonder. Consequently, what feminist critic Elaine Showalter has characterized as the “wild zone,” customarily understood as a borderland space, is further reinterpreted as a borderless, expressive, timeless calling forth of receptive minds to engage in wildly compassionate, nonsensical acts and cunning, non-heroic feats in order to transform the inert, polemic systems that define our western collective mind. In short, this study refigures what Vandana Shiva identifies as cultural “patents on life,” where “civilization” becomes small—a mere idea in a forest’s deep heart. vi Let Them Run Wild: Childhood,The Nineteenth-Century Storyteller, and the Ascent of the Moon List of Figures.................................................................................................................. viii Prologue...............................................................................................................................1 Introduction........................................................................................................................31 Chapter One: The Jowls of Legend: “What a Terrible Big Mouth You Have!” .............116 Chapter Two: Wild Nights: Scheherazade’s Disappearing Appearance .........................181 Chapter Three: The Silent “E”s Speak: Anne, Entwine, Fate, Woodbine.......................239 Chapter Four: Tracks, Tentacles, and Thirsty Monsters: Tracing Terrestrial Tides in Frank Norris’s The Octopus and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children...................304 Epilogue...........................................................................................................................382 Works Cited.....................................................................................................................405 vii Figures Figure 1. Showalter: Defining the “Wild Zone”...............................................................85 Figure 2. Rearticulating Wild Expression ........................................................................96 viii Prologue “I got up slow,” he explained, “because if tha’ makes a quick move it startles ’em. A body ’as to move gentle an’ speak low when wild things is about.” —Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden1 “Then the voice returns— Lest limbs be reddened and rent—I spring the trap that is set—As I loose the snare you may glimpse me there—For surely you shall forget! Row nearer, Mole, nearer to the reeds! It is hard to catch, and grows each minute fainter. Helper and healer, I cheer—Small waifs in the woodland wet— Strays I find in it, wounds I bind in it—Bidding them all forget! Nearer, Mole, nearer! No, it is no good; the song has died away into reed-talk.” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows2 Nowhere but in the western world of the twenty-first century could the notion of what is “wild” be more misconstrued. We live in a culture where “wildness” is either disparaged or praised—condemned as destructive or celebrated as creative. To be a “wild” child, for instance, is to be too untamed, too uncontrollable, too unfocused, and too irresponsible. Yet many times the same child whose “wildness” causes distress and the need for wearisome supervision is later praised for the very activities that once heightened worry and concern. The “wild” child, as a more tame adult, becomes that creative, energetic being from the past who simply could not help getting into mischief. We talk about wild “abandon” as that which is dangerous to our sanity and prosperity, but we also praise it as exciting and liberating. A wild spirit, like a wild fire, 1 cannot be contained and so must either be subdued or, in a more receptive, open-minded manner, be allowed to range free without restraint. No matter how much pandemonium results due to its participants, a wild party is later perceived as the event to be remembered, or, more often by the neighbors, as a disruptive, raucous meeting of dissolute, undisciplined carousers who make far too much noise. A person who is deemed “wild” is, in some way or another, flamboyant. And regardless of our perspective about that flamboyance, a wild character, under the attentive eye of the western, twenty-first century, gets noticed. “Wild” or unusual thinking, too, is sought after in twenty-first-century capitalistic endeavors. Yet, despite the business-related, profit-producing conferences and workshops that prod employees and managers to brainstorm together and conceptualize “outside of the box,” and despite the influence of innovative thinkers who continue to advance technological, cutting-edge designs to provide us with more ways to experience the world around us, we know very little about what it means to think wildly. Beyond doubt, we know how to celebrate that which gets noticed, but know little to nothing about responding to that which is marked by absence. On the other hand, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s character, Dickon—who emerges in The Secret Garden (1911)—knows how to sense presence in what appears to others as absence, and having a wild spirit, he is capable of “mov[ing] gentle an’ speak[ing] low when wild things is about.” Lacking a twenty-first-century mindset, Dickon does not take one side of a dualistic approach and make it his perspective. He does not attempt to regard flamboyance in the wild and then either seek to tame it or praise it for its abandon, creativity, mischief, or

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