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'Betwixt-And-Between': Liminality in Golden Age Children's Literature

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'Betwixt-And-Between': Liminality in Golden Age Children's Literature ‘Betwixt-and-Between’: Liminality in Golden Age Children’s Literature by Emma Hayes BA(Hons) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University August, 2018 Acknowledgements I have been incredibly lucky to have had the support offered by many people throughout the process of completing this thesis. I am especially grateful to my Principal Supervisor, Professor David McCooey, for his invaluable insight, expertise, and unwavering support throughout this project. I would also like to thank my Associate Supervisor Dr Kristine Moruzi for her expertise throughout the final stages of my project. I would like to thank Associate Professor Cassandra Atherton, who offered me valuable insight into my project and guidance as my Associate Supervisor (and briefly as my Principal Supervisor) in the middle phase of my candidature. Dr Leonie Rutherford also offered me guidance in the early stages of this project in her role as Associate Supervisor. I would also like to acknowledge the generous financial support I received in completing this project through an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship (Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship). I also received insight and encouragement as a member of the Children’s Literature HDR research group. I would like to thank the staff at the Deakin University Library, especially Marion Churkovich, Lorraine Driscoll and Angela Kirk, who assisted me in sourcing numerous texts. I would also like to thank Robyn Ficnerski who offered me invaluable support and assistance throughout my candidature. Finally, as I feel I don’t have enough words to thank them, I would like to dedicate this thesis to my family. I am so very grateful for their endless love and encouragement, and I would never have been able to complete this project without their support. I would like to especially thank my brother Christian, who has been an endless source of love, support and laughter, and my Mum Sharon, not only for her unwavering love, care and support, but for introducing me to Golden Age texts in the first place. List of Publications Some of this material has appeared in earlier versions in the following publications: McCooey, David and Emma Hayes. “The Liminal Poetics of The Wind in the Willows.” Children’s Literature 45 (2017): 45-68. Print. Hayes, Emma. “The Secret Garden and the Gaze.” The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature 19.1 (2016): n. pag. Web. 4 Nov 2016. Republished in the 20th Anniversary edition of The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature: Hayes, Emma. “From our Fourth 5 Years: The Secret Garden and the Gaze.” The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature (twentieth- anniversary edition) 20.1 (2017): 42-47. Web. 8 July 2018. Abstract Golden Age Children’s Literature is characterised by its emphasis on ideas of liminality. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) depicts its eponymous character as a ‘Betwixt-and-Between’ (17). This state of being betwixt- and-between is emblematic of many Golden Age children’s texts that thematise the liminal in myriad ways. In particular, depictions of liminal space – such as borders and thresholds – necessarily evoke liminal characterisation. Indeed, the ‘Betwixt- and-Between’ status of Peter Pan and numerous other Golden-Age protagonists finds its parallel in Victor Turner’s theory of the liminal. For Turner, liminal subjects are ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (95). Turner asserts that the liminal is characterised by a ‘peculiar unity’: the ‘coincidence of opposite processes and notions in a single representation … that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both’ (99). This thesis will discuss the significance attached to this ‘peculiar unity’, and its implications for Golden Age texts, by addressing five spatial domains: domestic spaces, domesticated natural spaces, pedagogical spaces, the British Empire and, finally, fantastic spaces. The thesis will demonstrate how the emphasis on liminality in each of the five spatial (and increasingly abstract) domains reflects social changes that occurred throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Contemporary anxieties become metonymized into representations of interstitial or contested space; and liminal characterisation functions as a means through which the texts negotiate uncertainties. For example, the Golden Age’s evocation of liminality highlights changing ideas of childhood: Marah Gubar reads Golden Age child protagonists (and child readers) as ‘artful collaborators’, rather than ‘primitive naïfs’ (6). This thesis contributes to the critical discourse on Golden Age Children’s Literature by explicitly highlighting the key role evocations of the liminal play in both representations of place and characterisation. Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 The Golden Age of Children’s Literature ....................................................... 4 Liminality in Golden Age Children’s Literature .......................................... 13 Place as a Thematisation of the Liminal ....................................................... 23 Chapter One: Domestic Spaces ...................................................................... 29 The Public and Private Home: The Railway Children .................................. 34 Interconnected Domestic and Public Space: Anne of Green Gables ............ 43 Re-establishing Primogeniture: The Secret Garden ..................................... 49 Chapter Two: Domesticated Natural Spaces ................................................ 58 The ‘Friend and Helper’: Representations of Pan in Edwardian texts for Children ......................................................................................................... 62 ‘Scope for imagination’: Natural Spaces in Anne of Green Gables ............. 71 Missel Moor and Liminality: The Secret Garden ......................................... 76 From the River Bank to the Wild Wood (and home again): The Wind in the Willows .......................................................................................................... 83 Chapter Three: Pedagogical Spaces .............................................................. 9 2 Dramatising the Liminal: Angela Brazil’s Girls’ School Stories ................. 99 School as Preparation for Empire: Stalky & Co. ......................................... 114 Chapter Four: Empire .................................................................................. 137 Mediated Liminality: The Secret Garden ................................................... 142 Idealised Liminality: Kim ........................................................................... 154 Chapter Five: Fantastic Spaces ................................................................... 170 Fantastic Portals: The Psammead Trilogy and Puck of Pook’s Hill ........... 178 ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’: The Fantastic and Death .......... 185 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 201 References ...................................................................................................... 206 Introduction After the eponymous Peter Pan flies from his home (13) in J. M. Barrie’s 1906 text Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, he is never the same again. Having left his mother and flown to Kensington Gardens after Lock-out Time (15), Peter soon realises that he is shunned by all of the other inhabitants of the gardens – such as fairies and birds (15) – and flies to the island in the Serpentine which is inaccessible to humans (16). As he consults the wise crow, Solomon Caw, Peter learns that he has become a ‘“Betwixt-and-Between”’ (17). Peter is neither a human nor a bird and must live on the inaccessible island until he is able to build a boat (23-7). Peter remains a ‘“Betwixt-and-Between”’ (17) for the rest of the text. As a canonical work of children’s literature, Barrie’s text itself occupies a betwixt-and-between status: the text of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens comprises sections of Barrie’s earlier text for adults, The Little White Bird (1902), which were removed and published separately as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in 1906 (Hollindale, xix). The alterations between the two editions were, as Peter Hollindale notes, ‘minor’ (xix), and largely consisted of removing references to earlier sections of The Little White Bird (xxix). This elision of difference between the adults’ and children’s text is significant: like its eponymous protagonist, the canonical children’s text of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens occupies an in- between status and resists easy classification as it exists betwixt-and-between adults’ and children’s literature. This in-between status is emblematic of numerous Golden Age children’s texts. For example, Peter Hunt highlights this difficulty in categorising Golden Age children’s texts as he discusses Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). Hunt posits that ‘The Wind in the Willows may be the greatest case of mistaken identity in literature: it is commonly accepted as an animal story for children – despite being neither an animal story, nor for children’ (vii). It is by no means coincidental that both Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and The Wind in the Willows, which resist
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