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The Queer and His Children: A Reborn 1860-1917

by Mark C. De Cicco

B.A. in English, May 2002, Fordham University M.A. in the Teaching of English, August 2004, Columbia University Teachers College M.A. in and Culture, August 2006, University of Amsterdam

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of and of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 15, 2016

Dissertation directed by

Judith Plotz Professor Emeritus of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Mark C. De Cicco has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of February 29, 2016. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

The Queer God Pan and His Children: A Myth Reborn 1860-1917

Mark C. De Cicco

Dissertation Research Committee:

Judith Plotz, Professor Emeritus of English, Dissertation Director

Maria Frawley, Professor of English, Committee Member

Daniel DeWispelare, Assistant Professor of English, Committee Member

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© Copyright 2016 by Mark C. De Cicco All rights reserved

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Dedication

The author wishes to dedicate this work, with , to Sarah, Charlie, Bianca, and

Judith.

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Abstract of Dissertation

The Queer God Pan and His Children: A Myth Reborn 1860-1917

This dissertation traces a literary and cultural of the ancient Greco-Roman god

Pan, informed by queer theory, as the figure was reimagined in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I begin with an overview of Pan’s mythological origins, and the god’s appearances in and Roman and culture. I track the ways in which Pan was variously interpreted over the centuries, with an emphasis on the figure’s reception in English literature. The chapters that follow focus on English literary representations of Pan in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Each chapter is thematically organized around the lifecycle of the god: Pan and the queer child; the mature, Anglicized Pan of “Deep ;” and the queer Gothic Pan, an apocalyptic god associated with and the Christian Devil. The coda deals with Pan’s rebirth in the Edwardian movement. I examine works in a variety of genres, from to children’s literature to Gothic horror. Authors studied include Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, , J. M.

Barrie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Saki, , , and E.

M. Forster. I argue that each of these writers adapts a queered and queering Pan, whose appearance in a work has disruptive, disorienting effects. Disorientation, as Sara Ahmed argues, forces a reorientation towards new, unexpected, queer possibilities. In the literature of this period, Pan opens a gateway to these disorienting possibilities, forever changing the English literary landscape.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv

Abstract of Dissertation...... v

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: The Queer Children of Pan: An Edwardian ...... 30

Chapter 2: Pan’s Queer England: Deep England, National Identity, and Hybridity in Kipling’s ...... 105

Chapter 3: The Queer God Pan: Terror and Apocalypse, Reimagined ...... 189

Coda: “‘Come careering out of the night / Of Pan:’ and the Quickening of and Myth” ...... 256

Bibliography ...... 274

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Introduction

The “Pan Craze”1: A Queer Phenomenon

The narrator of Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (1930) looks back on the

“Cult of Pan” that flourished in Britain and the West for several decades around the turn of the century:

Thirty years ago in literary circles God was all the fashion….then God

went out…and Pan came in. In a hundred his cloven hoof left its

imprint on the sward; him lurking in the twilight on

commons, and literary ladies in Surrey and New England, of an

industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their to his rough

embrace. Spiritually they were never the same again. (122-123)

This period’s fascination with Pan might initially seem baffling to a modern reader. Pan could be found anywhere and everywhere in the literature and popular culture of this period, from children's stories to Gothic horror, in painting, , and , in advertisements on posters and in periodicals, and even on books of matches. This fascination bordered on a mania that can rightly be deemed a “Pan craze.” It is easy to ask “why Pan?”—why such a strikingly widespread obsession with a minor ancient

Greek god, and why specifically at this ? I believe the late Victorian and Edwardian attraction to Pan can in part be explained by drawing upon a modern parallel. Pan, an often monstrous being of unlimited possibility (the very name “Pan” has been—albeit incorrectly, according to modern scholars—etymologically associated with the Greek

1 Jill Owens refers to the surprisingly intense cultural fixation with Pan in Britain and elsewhere in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a “Pan craze” (120).

1 word meaning “all”2), speaks to the common desire to break free from societally restricted boundaries. And though Pan may at be monstrous and terrible, he is also monstrously attractive.

These attributes connect Pan to boundary–bending beings of fiction like , , and that have (re)found popularity in recent years. Like them, Pan is an opening to discourse on power and freedom: namely, freedom from societally- imposed restraint, be it sexual, behavioral, or otherwise. Pan, like the modern incarnation of the or , is in part fed by what Foucault terms “ars erotica”: erotically-tinged art that functions as a kind of release valve for repressed sexual tension

(Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I 69-70). He represents a discourse that is at times forbidden, but desired and secretly encouraged by those in the know. Pan’s power as an image is not solely due to the figure’s sexually liberated nature, though in many manifestations of the god—and particularly the monstrous—this is a significant factor.

Transgressive behaviors and sexualities, resistance to the changes wrought by modern civilization, nostalgia for nature and a lost idyllic past, an undercurrent of repressed desires, and an antipathy to anyone or anything that would seek to exert repressive control over individual will feed the power of Pan, a figure with what we might today term “queer” origins in ancient . As a kind of monster dancing along the borders of human and animal, god and mortal, man and boy, Pan is what Jeffrey Cohen calls a cultural body, born at a “metaphoric ” and “an embodiment of a certain

2 For centuries it was assumed that the name “Pan” was etymologically related to the Greek word pan, meaning “all.” However, as John Boardman notes in : The Survival of an Image, Pan’s “name does not derive from the Greek pan, but comes from the root pa-, a contracted form of pa-on meaning herdsman; the same root is found in the English word ‘pasture’” (26-27). Nevertheless, the association between the god Pan and “all” has long been established in literature and art, and is therefore a valid point of entry for interpretation.

2 cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place” (“Monster Culture” 4). Like our modern monsters, Pan’s “body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy…giving them life and an uncanny independence”—in this case, an independence from exacting social mores (4). As Cohen puts it, “monsters are our children,” and though individually they are an uncanny reflection of their parents, the nature of their birth and the fact of their occurrence and recurrence across time and in different cultures links monsters as diverse as Pan, the , the Martian invader, the ghostly child, the returned dinosaur, and so on (20). The genetic makeup of such monsters may vary, but the process of their creation is related. Every period and culture shapes the monsters that they deserve and secretly desire (4). Pan is as much a product of the anxieties of the times in which he appears as Grendel or the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are for theirs. The - god is a kind of monstrous, queer double looking back out of the —a raging

Caliban, and a Foucauldian “other Victorian” who, like , refuses to be silent or to sit still for a moment. And yet to define Pan strictly as a monster, or merely as a sexual or behavioral rebel, would be inaccurate and reductive. The cult of Pan was a phenomenon of its time and place, and dealt with the peculiar conditions of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Therefore, in order to successfully theorize the Pan phenomenon beyond the general we must dig deep into the distinctive, latent fears, anxieties, and desires of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain which birthed this cultural moment. As

John Boardman argues, Pan “has often been evoked to express much that seems relevant to various aspects of society and human behaviour, and in using him each author and commonly reveals more about themselves than about the god” (7). Pan is the shadowy mirror image of a period of great change and upheaval—an image of desire and

3 terror, pleasure and pain, seen through a glass darkly.

For many Victorians and Edwardians Pan represents resistance to the changing modern . Sometimes this resistance functions as a monstrous fantasy of and destruction, but just as often Pan acts as a symbol of nostalgia for an idealized, mythologized past that is just slipping from living memory. In On Living in an Old

Country, Patrick Wright analyzes the way that mythical or nostalgic visions of the past live on in the present. In literature, this can occur when “the political rationality of modern social organization—of industrial capitalism and the liberal consensus of mass democracy” is replaced “by a magic which is presented as the deeper reality underlying the mechanistic of modernity” (italics in original) (108). This replacement/effacement of societal marks of normative modernity, alongside the unveiling of a deeper reality rooted in magic or the , is a theme that links the works of many of the writers of this period who “awaken” the figure of Pan. For them,

Pan and his magic are potent symbols of rebirth into harmony with nature, and of resistance to the smothering, stultifying demands of heteronormative society. Pan’s resistance to hegemonic power can be liberating and restorative, but sometimes his subversions of civilization and positivism prove terrifying. Thus in paradoxical fashion typical to Pan, by the late Victorian period the figure had become, in the popular imagination, as much a symbolic savior, healer, and liberator as he is a monster. This dichotomy echoes throughout Pan literature.

Pan’s journey from to England at the cusp of the modern age is a strange one. Attempting to trace it is a bit like trying to catch a glimpse of the god himself—he is constantly pulling out of sight with the of a laugh, drawing one

4 deeper into the darkening woods, where myth, history, and art blend in the outline of a hoof-print. Others have sought to sketch Pan’s literary history before, most notably in the

1969 volume Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times by Patricia Merivale.

Merivale ambitiously attempts to trace the origins and various manifestations of the Pan phenomenon in English literature. Though this is an excellent bibliographical resource, it is a flawed work, partially undermined by the author’s palpable disdain for much of the literature,3 and her dismissal of works which I believe to be central to the

Pan oeuvre, like Barrie’s Peter Pan writings.4 Merivale tends to overlook the nuance in the Pan works of writers like Arthur Machen, , E. F. Benson, and even E. B. Browning and early E. M. Forster. She also makes what I see to be a serious error by leaving out of her discussion Pan-influenced figures (i.e. characters only partially based upon, or influenced by, attributes of the ancient god Pan, but who are not generalized Pan “clones,” per se) in the literature of the periods that she studies, most notably Kipling’s Puck, Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Dickon from Burnett’s The Secret

Garden. Though Merivale points us in fruitful directions, she ultimately fails to make some of the more difficult connections between Pan and contemporary cultural issues and movements. A more up-to-date, critically, theoretically, and historically grounded analysis of this material is needed. In this dissertation I propose a wider understanding of

Pan figures5 than Merivale allows: my reading of Pan figures is not limited to the

3 Merivale discounts most literature dealing with Pan in English as unoriginal and “second-rate” (225). She is even critical of D. H. Lawrence—whom she otherwise admires—and his Pan literature: she refers to these works as “one of his worst novels” (The Plumed ) and “two of his least successful short stories” (“The Last Laugh” and “The Overtone”) (218). 4 In spite of being “the most famous Pan in modern English literature,” Merivale furnishes Barrie’s Peter Pan with only “a parenthetical comment” consisting of one paragraph (152). It is my intention to remedy this oversight. 5 I define “Pan figures” as fictional characters that exhibit Pan-like attributes, including: 1) physical characteristics typically associated with the Greco-Roman god Pan, or related like , Dionysos,

5 classical form of the goat-god, but rather encompasses a range of attributes associated with , , Dionysos/Bacchus, the Celtic Puck, the Christian Devil, and of course the Greco-Roman Pan.6 It is my goal to provide an analysis of alternative currents of literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, represented by depictions of the god Pan and other Pan-like figures. I will achieve this through a study of several central aspects of

Pan that have been overlooked by previous critics, thematically linking my analysis through a queer theoretical lens.

Pan is, and has been since antiquity, a queer figure. Within a normative society,

Pan functions as a focal point for imaginatively alternative . In this dissertation I aim to show how, in Victorian and Edwardian literature, Pan functions as a byword for queer figures informed by the classical past. As I have argued elsewhere,7 a great deal of the literature of this period is inherently queer in a triple sense: it is a literature of the unusual or odd occurrences, it depicts powerful non-normative forces, and/or it is sexually queer.8 The literature of Pan is no exception. In applying this broader

Silvanus, etc.; or physically similar creatures like satyrs and fauns. E.g., Hairy goat legs and hooves, horns, human torso, goatish features, androgynous features. 2) behavioral and other characteristics related to the ancient god. E.g., a Pan figure might: rustic, hypnotic music, be a , be panic inducing, inspire fear and terror, be indescribably ancient but and/or eternally youthful, have a closeness to animals and nature, be a force of healing, possess a wild, animalistic sexuality, have the ability to charm/enchant/hypnotize (especially with music), inspire amnesia, be attractive/compelling in some way, though it might be difficult for someone to define exactly why this is so. Finally, Pan figures are queer through a resistance to norms, through subversion and subversiveness, and through an inherent . Pan figures exists between : between mortal/immortal, material/spiritual. Pan can be a god of opposed dualities. Experiencing Pan firsthand is often indescribable. Pan figures echo these physical, behavioral, and other characteristics. 6 Contrary to Merivale’s insistence that the conflation of Pan with fauns, satyrs, etc. is a post-classical phenomenon that is somehow untrue to the Pan myth, art historian John Boardman remarks that “a certain readiness for mutual contamination between Pan and satyrs, Silens and fauns” occurs frequently in and literature (9). 7 See my article ““More than Human”: The Queer Explorer of the Fin-de-Siècle” in The Journal of the in Arts 23.1. 8 In taking this approach to the word “queer,” I am are in some ways returning to the popular understanding of the word at the turn of the 20th century: according to the OED, “queer” refers to something peculiar, eerie, and sexually transgressive (the modern sexual sense of “queer” came in use around 1914 in the USA—see OED entry for more on this).

6 understanding of queer theory, I acknowledge my debt to William Hughes and Andrew

Smith, whose pioneering collection of essays Queering the Gothic (2009) shows some of the many ways in which queer theory can be used to open new avenues of criticism through a wide array of works and ranging from to Jackson.

This approach is further developed by Ardel Haefele-Thomas in her 2012 book Queer

Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. As Thomas argues, “unlike the gender specificity found in gay and lesbian theories and historiographies, queer theory— especially given the historical definitions of ‘queer’—supplies room for multiple, potentially polyvalent positions, conveying gender, sexuality, race, class and familial structures beyond heteronormative (and often bourgeois) social constructs” (3-4). As reflected by his frequent physical configuration as a sexually ambiguous man/beast , Pan stands both inside and outside heteronormative society. He is a transgressive figure that functions as a counterweight to what Foucault describes as “a Victorian regime” that “restrained” and made “mute” a “hypocritical sexuality” (History of

Sexuality Vol. I 3), and to a larger civilization that threatened to sever humanity’s links to nature and to other living things. Like Haefele-Thomas, I to give voice to Foucault’s

“other Victorians”—those whose voices are repressed by hegemonic powers, while also pushing back against “the idea that Victorian culture was monolithic in its disdain for those who were ‘other’” (Thomas 2). As historians like Peter Gay and other scholars have long argued,9 it has become something of a cliché to say that Victorians were uniformly sexually repressed. However, this is not to say that sexual and behavioral repression was nonexistent. Societal pressures to conform with regards to marriage, sexuality, class, etc.,

9 See, for example, Love in the Time of : Sexuality and Desire Among Working-Class and Women in 19th Century London by Francoise Barret-Ducrocq.

7 did exist, and were powerful, and the consequences of flouting moral codes were serious, as the trials of the 1890s illustrate. The pressures of conformity led nonconformists down queer avenues that were not always accepted or understood by society at large. In the period’s literature some of these queer avenues lead to Pan, a figure of queer resistance to hegemonic power, categorization, and social norms.

In the introduction to Shakesqueer, Madhavi Menon argues that queer theory

(incidentally, much like Peter Pan and many other literary Pans) “recognizes the absurdity of limits” (7), be they sexual or otherwise. Pan’s ultimate queerness lies in this rejection of limitations and restrictions. In every manifestation of the figure that I discuss in this dissertation, Pan is constantly expanding and expansively defying categorization.

Like Menon’s understanding of queerness, the literary Pan “is not a category but the confusion engendered by and despite categorization” (7). My analysis of the goat-god in the chapters that follow reveals myriad connections, points of convergence, overlap, and subtle undercurrents that, taken together, aim to provide the reader with enough grounding to appreciate this remarkable literary and artistic figure. Pan is a transcendent being that, like queer theory itself, can be found at “the intersection between life and death, text and pleasure, sex and politics, human and animal” (8). He is a queerly unstable figure of transition, existing both within and without, in physical and spiritual form, as child and adult, mortal and immortal. Queer theory is ideally suited for the study of this remarkably mutable figure that disrupts and defies attempts to control and categorize. Queer theory provides the language and conceptual framework that, though unable to tame Pan, can help us to understand him. In this dissertation I thus aim to build on the work of previous scholars by applying my own hybrid queer theoretical

8 framework to an analysis of the liminal, hybrid god Pan and his spiritual children: those untamed figures of jouissance and terror over whom Maugham reminisces.

The Queer God Pan: An Outline

For the purposes of this dissertation, I will focus my analysis on some of the most frequently encountered and thematically related incarnations of Pan in English literature.

These incarnations of Pan are not always named as such, nor are they presented as a uniform block of characters. Rather, the Pan figures (as I term them) that I will analyze come in a variety of forms: young and old, male and female, animal, human, , and . They are linked by their mutual lineage from the ancient god Pan and related gods like Dionysos and Bacchus, or mythical creatures like the faun or , and the common characteristics rooted in ancient or traditional models that they display. Pan figures are inherently queer, non-normative beings: they are creatures of powerful, unlimited will, with a greatly heightened sensitivity to nature and to other living things. They fiercely challenge conventional, heteronormative restrictions regarding behavior (which is sometimes, but not always, sexual), and are resistant to modernity, industrialization, and the exploitation of the land and people. They share a deep, symbiotic bond with nature and old places of mystical or mythical history. Finally, the Pans of fiction serve variously as nostalgic or horrifying reminders of what humanity once was, and might still be.

The sheer number of texts and variations on the Pan theme in this period are remarkable (as Merivale has already shown), and so some paring down is necessary to maintain focus. The figures I will spotlight form a coherent narrative thematically (rather than chronologically) linked through the figurative “lifecycle” of the god Pan—his origins, childhood, mature adulthood, apocalyptic decline and death, and ultimate rebirth.

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The second part of this introduction (“The Great Pan Lives”) explores Pan’s queer origins in antiquity, and the figure’s cultural connections to 19th century Britain. I provide a brief overview of a selection of noteworthy depictions of the god in ancient Greece and , and begin to connect these origins to the development of the reimagined Pans of

Victorian and Edwardian Britain (a topic that I will expand upon in later chapters when discussing different manifestations of Pan). The focus of this section will be on the queer characteristics of classical depictions of Pan, incorporating notable examples from both literature and visual culture. As I shift attention to the 19th century Pan revival in Britain,

I will also begin to theorize why this phenomenon occurred at this time and in this place.

This search for origins will the stage for the next three chapters, which examine literary manifestations of the god Pan in the second half of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th.

In Chapter One (“The Queer Children of Pan: An Edwardian Fantasy”) I will look at the most prominent examples of child Pans that appear in Edwardian literature. In a reading informed by Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, I will examine the phenomenon of queerly powerful Pan children in J. M. Barrie’s ,

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, E. M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic,”

Saki’s “The Music on the Hill,” E. F. Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too Far,” and

Algernon Blackwood’s “The Touch of Pan.” A distinctive offshoot of the literary trope of the powerful late Victorian and Edwardian child found in many works of contemporary literature from Thomas Hardy to Edith Nesbit, Pan children are distinguished by the mystical touch of the ancient Pan that colors their character. Through contact with nature, magic, and the god himself, the queer Pan children in these works do not grow up, but

10 rather grow queerly “sideways,” as Stockton puts it, growing in experience but remaining physically unchanged as children. Through a union with magic and the natural world,

Pan’s children queer childhood by challenging conventions of innocence and experience, and by resisting the very conception of childhood as a road to normative adulthood.

These Pan children are monsters or saviors, and frequently both at once—a conception that typically depends upon other characters’ receptivity to the child Pan’s power and influence. The latent queer sexuality10 of these children is a notable factor at work within some of these characters, occasionally emerging in subtle or shocking fashion, and will be examined when relevant. However, it is the disruptive, monstrous dangers of unlimited possibility open to characters like Peter Pan, which variously threatens to destroy or save the bewildered adults they encounter, that is the queer heart of these works. In their search for natural authenticity over artificiality (which, as Perrot argues, they find in Pan [156]), the children in these works challenge the modern adult world, subverting moldering dictates of propriety and order through the ancient powers of Pan.

These powers emerge in different guises: the classical “panic” of Forster, Burnett’s

“ magic,” and Barrie’s eternal childhood reflect varied expressions of the subversive capabilities imparted to the children of Pan. The child Pan is closely related to both of the next two manifestations of Pan examined in this dissertation. Benevolent child-savior

Pans like Burnett’s Dickon share much in common with the adult, restorative, and eminently English Pans of Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, and especially

Rudyard Kipling, whose works are the focus of Chapter Two. The monstrous Pan children of Saki and Benson are, for their part, childlike reflections of the more sinister,

10 This latency is a form of repression which, as Foucault argues, is a feature instilled by the educational systems of the 19th century.

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Gothic, deathly Pans discussed in Chapter Three.

In Chapter Two (“Pan’s Queer England: Deep England, National Identity, and

Hybridity in Kipling’s Puck Books”) I will examine the height of the Pan phenomenon: the adult, Anglicized Pan, a radical outcropping of the Victorian and Edwardian cult of nature, and a hybridized representation of national identity. This is a mature nature god of

“Deep England”—a quasi-mythical rural English past—who queers conceptions of

English identity by embracing subversive, hybridized understandings of Englishness. The allure of the countryside, small towns, and rural places and spaces—Pan’s English gardens—are aspects of a restorative, unifying presence that helps to forge connections between nature, individuals, and the history of the land. Pan brings to the fore often surprising connections that stretch across time and peoples, and helps to paint a portrait of a hybridized spiritual union that embodies the British nation, past, present, and future.

The Anglicized Pans of Kipling’s Puck books and Grahame’s The in the Willows herald both an escape to nature and a rebirth to a brighter future, reflected by a past in which people coexisted harmoniously with nature and with each other. In both these works, the hybrid ancient Greek/English Pan character is a messenger of unity rather than of strife. In the Puck books in particular, Kipling mythologizes a hybridized history of

England and Englishness, which is ultimately disseminated through the Shakespearean

Puck, an Anglicized Pan. Puck is the vehicle for an alternative understanding of history, national identity, and Englishness as hybrid. I will also look at the way that Pan and the concept of Deep England are presented in the essays “Pan’s Pipes” by Robert Louis

Stevenson and “The Rural Pan” by Kenneth Grahame. Pan in these works is a nature deity most closely related to earlier incarnations of the goat-god in Romantic and early

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Victorian poetry. He is the descendant of the Pans found in Shelley and Keats, of Mathew

Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” and of Wordsworth’s pantheistic of Nature. I draw a link between such earlier, classically-inflected Pans and the more Anglicized Pans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This will help to highlight the continuity in representation of Pan figures throughout the long 19th century. It will also help to foreground the long English tradition of Pan, which in this period merges with older, native figures of myth and legend (such as Robin Goodfellow and Puck) to create a thoroughly English Pan who prefers the “‘, Ash, and Thorn’” (Kipling, Puck of

Pook’s Hill 9) of England to the groves and cypresses of the Mediterranean. The

Anglicized Pan is rooted in hybridized mythologies which embody a sense of national character rooted in the English landscape.

To flesh out these readings I apply Sara Ahmed’s theory of queer, alternative pathways (from her book Queer Phenomenology) that open to link people with nature, with queer others, and with their own queerer, hybrid selves. As Perrot argues, “the mythical figure of Pan offered a vision of mankind’s archetypal communion with nature and an escape from the representation of historically determined individualism” (155).

Pan/Puck is in this way representative of a late Victorian metaphysical yearning for wholeness, conceptions of which are concordantly expressed in the philosophy of Walter

Pater (namely, in Studies in the History of the , as well as his essays on

Greek mythology) and the fiction of Oscar Wilde (155-156), whose eternally youthful, -Peter Pan, Dorian Gray, embodies the part endlessly seeking the whole. As fictional creations that draw on ideas from many sources, the English Pan’s hybrid origins and malleable nature simultaneously define and queer the meaning of

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Englishness. The mature, hybrid English Pans enable an exploration of the complex interplay between mythologized images of history, nation, and nature, the construction of national identities, and the education of younger generations. This imagined return to the native and the natural coincides with a period perceived by many as one of crisis and decline, as newer nations like and the came to challenge the

British Empire as world powers. The English Pans of Kipling, Grahame, and Stevenson are an artistic response to this sense of crisis, offering an imaginative remedy to the ills of society. This chapter’s examination of the English Pan’s place in contemporary popular culture will reveal how these writers engaged with these central societal concerns, and how they imaginatively sought to remedy the challenges faced by their nation and people during this transformative period.

In Chapter Three (“The Queer God Pan: Terror and Apocalypse, Reimagined”) I will turn to a Pan darkly transformed: the apocalyptic figure I call the “queer Gothic

Pan.” This decadent, sinister, anti-normative, anti-hegemonic Pan is harbinger of violence, death, and the end of days. A recurring symbol of the latter half of the 19th century, this figure first emerges in Britain in the mid-century poetry of Elizabeth Barrett

Browning. I examine the dark turn that this figure takes in the British imagination through a critical analysis of depictions of the god in a selection of literary texts by

Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, and Arthur Machen, which together will illustrate Pan’s progression into a figure of increasing horror, terror, and violence. This Gothicization climaxes with the diabolical Pan of Machen’s “The Great

God Pan.” These monstrous visions of Pan owe a clear debt to ancient literary and mythological sources, including Longus and , as well as to medieval Christian

14 traditions associating Pan with the Devil. The queer traditions of a sexually and behaviorally transgressive Pan are thereby reimagined to fit the uniquely queer conditions of 19th century Britain. I will also consider Pan’s status as a cultural marker of what J. K.

Puar calls “queer times.” This refers to a period in which, after long repression, queer, transgressive ideologies (here, embodied by Pan) become incorporated into heteronormative society. In these works, Pan is an apocalyptic harbinger of death, end times, and potential rebirth into new, queer possibilities. This fatalistic envisioning of Pan can be read as a prophetic, concentrated refraction of the soon to come world-shaking reckoning of the First World War. The monstrous Pan thus echoes the past and the future simultaneously

I conclude this dissertation with a coda (“‘Come careering out of the night / Of

Pan:’ Aleister Crowley and the Quickening of Art and Myth”) that looks at the apocalyptic Pan’s rebirth as a sexually queer, liberatory figure in the performative magical ceremonies of Aleister Crowley. As Eksteins notes, during this period there was a movement to view art as an “aestheticization of life” (194-195). For Crowley, Pan is an aestheticization of the cultural anxieties of this period. In Crowley’s magic Pan is no longer a myth or a fiction but rather an actual living entity, and a herald of apocalypse in the word’s original sense of revelation or unveiling. Crowley’s reified Pan has a central role to play in humanity’s rebirth into a new, queered age liberated from sexual and social mores. Through Crowley’s dramatic-ceremonial, deeply sexualized - performances venerating Pan, the god makes the transition from art to life as a realization of Paterian and Wildean aesthetics, and the symbol of a new era freed from the weight of old moralities and .

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Through each of these chapters I aim to show that Pan is the queer at the banquet, hauntingly reminding 19th century Britain of its repressive sins against nature and humanity. By tracing a history of the queer god Pan, I aim to unravel some of the and anxieties, fears and desires, of a turbulent era in British history, as they are played out imaginatively in the pages of popular writings. As a first step towards these goals, I believe it would be helpful to seek out the origins of the hoofed god who invaded the imaginations of so many writers of this period. Who was this hybrid man-goat-god, the queer anthropomorphic Pan?

The Great Pan Lives: Queer Origins

“A Multiplicity of Pans”11

In March of 2015 news sources from around the world reported on the discovery in Israel by University of Haifa archeologists of “a mask of unnatural size, in the form of the god Pan/Faunus” (U of Haifa). The first clue that this mask, “larger than a human head” (Jerusalem Post) might be an image of Pan was, according to Dr. Michael

Eisenberg of the University of Haifa, the revelation of “small horns on top of its head, slightly hidden by a forelock’” (U of Haifa). Dr. Eisenberg and his colleagues believe that this find is further evidence of the veneration of Pan during the Roman era in and around the ancient city of Antiocha Hippos in the Galilee, the ruins of which are not far from where the mask was found. What makes this find particularly interesting is that it was discovered outside of the ancient city:

‘The mask was found nearby the remains of a basalt structure with thick

walls and very solid masonry work, which suggested a large structure

11 Boardman 32.

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from the Roman period. A Pan altar on the main road to the city, beyond

its limits, is quite likely. After all, Pan was worshipped not only in the city

temples but also in caves and in nature. The ancient city of Paneas,12 north

of Hippos-Sussita, had one of the most famous worshipping compounds to

the god Pan inside a cave. Because they included drinking, sacrificing and

ecstatic worship that sometimes included nudity and sex, rituals for rustic

gods were often held outside of the city,’ Dr. Eisenberg explained. (U of

Haifa)

Nudity, sex, and drinking; ecstasy and . The god Pan has since ancient times been a symbol of the alternative and the risqué, the wild and the queer, his worship often occurring outside of cities, closer to nature and away from civilization and societal restrictions. The goat-god has a long and complex history that merges strands of mythology, , and ancient traditions. In antiquity, Pan was considered a relatively minor deity in the Olympian , and a latecomer to boot. According to some ancient sources Pan was the last of the Greek gods to be raised to Olympian status alongside his more famous brethren like , , and . However, his origins before being raised to are obscure. Philippe Borgeaud notes that there were “at least fourteen different versions” of Pan’s genealogy, and “the uncertainty [over his origins]…got worse as time went on” (54). According to Herodotus, “the had forgotten where Pan was reared,” and it was only due to the impetus of Roman scholars during the reign of Emperor (14 to 37 AD) that Pan’s genealogy was

“rediscovered” and coalesced around one story: Pan was believed to be to be the child of

12 The Huffington Post reports that “the city [Paneas] was located within the region known as the ‘,’ named after the deity [Pan], and housed shrines and temples in his honor” (Blumberg, “Researchers Uncover Ancient Mask of Pagan God Pan in Northern Israel”).

17

Hermes (Roman , messenger of the gods) and a ,13 who may have been a or possibly even the wife of ’s , depending upon which source you read (54). His elevation to the Olympian pantheon came about because the baby Pan made Dionysos smile (which apparently was enough in those days to get you a ticket to

Olympus). Dionysos (Roman Bacchus) was the god of wine, fertility, intoxication, and revelry (March 100), and in traditions dating back to antiquity Pan is often depicted accompanying Dionysos14 while playing the reed pipes.

One of Pan’s distinguishing features is, of course, this reed instrument—the so- called “Pan-pipes”—which are common to visual and literary depictions of the god from antiquity to the present day. Pan’s association with music, and particularly rustic music

(as embodied by these pipes) places Pan in a curious state of contention with Apollo, who is associated with more elevated musical forms (as reflected by his , a more complex linked to more refined music).15 By the Roman period, Pan also came to be associated with the Italian god Faunus, a mischievous but overall friendly god of the woods and forests who was “considered responsible for strange and sudden forest noises”

(Morford and Lenardon 634). This characteristic dovetails with Pan’s ability to inspire

“pan-ic” fear in his enemies, or in those who intrude upon his domains. Due in part to his anthropomorphic depictions as goat–man–god, Pan was also sometimes conflated with

13 Unfortunately, the circumstances in which and Penelope conceived Pan, as well as those surrounding Pan’s birth, remain a mystery (Borgeaud 210). 14 As is often the case, artistic depictions pick and choose from different (or make up new ones entirely). And so we have the fresco “Seilenos Nursing Dionysos” featuring a baby Dionysos with a mature Pan in the background, despite the story of Pan’s elevation to Olympus as a baby thanks to the adult Dionysos’ intervention. 15 The tension between the “highbrow” music of Apollo and the more popular tastes of Pan is reflected in the well-known tale of the judgment of King in ’s Metamorphosis (11.146-193). In this story Pan and Apollo engage in a musical contest judged by Timolus and observed by Midas. Timolus judges Apollo to be the winner, but Midas, delighted by Pan’s rustic music, disagrees and argues vociferously in Pan’s favor. Accordingly, Apollo punishes Midas’ “stupid ears” by transforming them into those of a donkey (l.173).

18 satyrs, the hybrid man-goat or man-horse followers of Dionysos. This, and the affinity between Pan and Dionysos (not to mention both gods’ penchant for revelry and mischief), led the goat-god to be considered a member of Dionysos’ “train of ecstatic followers” (March 101). In later periods Pan would be conflated with Dionysos as well, most notably in Renaissance painting and .

Pan’s slippery origins reflect the multiplicity of his natures, and the array of his accepted roles among gods and . God of shepherds and soldiers, woods and nature, rustic music and fertility, companion of nymphs and satyrs, follower of Dionysos and sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy of , the god Pan functions as a crystalline lens scattering light in many directions. The goat-god’s hybrid, multi-form nature, and his adaptability as an image provided artists with a broad palette of shades to work with when depicting him, ranging from childish innocence to intense panic terror.

These qualities of cultural plasticity are integral to the figure’s wide appeal across millennia.

Pan and Queer Sexuality in Antiquity

Pan is variously depicted in ancient visual arts and literature as an ugly old man, a hybrid man-goat (particularly in ancient statuary), and as a beautiful young man (e.g. Pan and , wall painting from Pompeii, 1st century AD [Boardman 28-29]). In whichever physical form he takes, sexuality—and particularly queer sexuality—has long been an integral aspect of Pan imagery in mythology, literature, and the visual arts. Put simply, Pan has always been queer. In and frescoes in Pompeii, for example, Pan is depicted as a deity of fertility with a monstrously oversized erect , and can often be found engaging in queer sexual activities or encounters. A notable wall-painting from

19

Pompeii depicts a horned, goatish Pan undressing a reclined, sexually enticing (Boardman 40). One of the most infamous visual depictions of Pan is on an ancient Greek from the late 5th century BC (Borgeaud 133), in which a goat– headed Pan with a , erect phallus is seen pursuing a shepherd boy, seemingly intent on raping him. This frightening image of violently non–normative sexuality between man and god would be echoed nearly 2,500 years later in fin-de-siècle envisionings of the god like Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan.”

Such manifestations of Pan as both erotic threat and sign of sexual freedom reveal an underlying queer history of the ancient god. Though Pan was associated with fertility as both a friend and antagonist of Aphrodite and (with whom he has been depicted in ancient statuary), in The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, Borgeaud argues that in antiquity Pan stood for more than mere heterosexual love and fertility. He posits that Pan

“unquestionably…is attracted to young men” (73), often violently and irrationally so, as exemplified by the aforementioned Greek vase. Indeed, Pan has been depicted on Roman sarcophagi and in the writings of ancient Greek (3rd century BC) as enduring flagellation by young male Arcadians and satyrs, which likely had “an erotic implication” (73). Ancient Greek slang points to further examples of queer or non- normative sexuality associated with the god. For example, the term “to honor Pan” was in ancient Greece an expression used to refer not only to “male homosexual practices” (75), but also to signify bestiality (221). As part beast himself, Pan was thought to indulge occasionally in sex with herd animals like or . Yet another slang phrase, “to act like Pan,” referred to several men sexually sharing one woman (76). Such examples of Pan’s sexually queer behavior abound in ancient literature and art. statuary

20 depicts a goatish Pan caressing the boys and Olympos as he teaches them to play reed pipes (Boardman 36-37). As in Theocritus, Pan (and also , a Roman fertility god sometimes associated with Pan) is depicted in Pompeian art as creeping up on the shepherd boy Daphnis, while there is an Alexandrian story that describes Pan’s attempted rape of a cross-dressed (which unsurprisingly fails, as Pan awakens Heracles and barely escapes the ’s wrath) (Borgeaud 76).

Not only are many of Pan’s sexual exploits queer, but as Borgeaud argues, his heterosexual attempts16 are “disordered,” “lacking in assurance,” and “ultimately sterile”

(75). Boardman adds “in his relationships with women [Pan] had little luck; when they did not turn themselves into reeds or a tree in the nick of time, they were folk like the totally elusive nymph Echo” (37), whom Pan could never catch, pursue her as he might.

Even Pan’s devotee Chloe in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe warns that “Pan is a god of love and is unreliable” (italics are mine) (172). These unfulfilled, unconsummated heterosexual forays are lacking in what Lee Edelman terms futurity, or generative potential, a key aspect of sexuality that delimits the heteronormative (which ultimately seeks to reproduce) from the queer (which cannot reproduce and therefore focuses on other things, like pleasure).

Other Faces of Pan

Interestingly, Pan has not always been depicted as a male. John Boardman lists a number of examples of female Pans17 depicted in ancient art, and argues that “they show no less interest in sexual matters than do their” male Pans (34). And yet Pan’s ambiguous

16 Namely, his failed individual attempts to woo the nymphs Echo, , and , each of whom ends up metamorphosed after rejecting Pan’s advances and denying consummation of his (Morales 253). 17 In Chapter One I will examine an early 20th century example of a female Pan: Elspeth in Blackwood’s “The Touch of Pan” (1917).

21 nature stretches beyond gender and sexuality. Pan has also (seemingly paradoxically) been linked to both forces of good and healing as well as to evil and death.18 These associations arise from different interpretations of the Pan mythos. Pan’s panic-inducing power and his connections to Dionysian sex and revelry, combined with his monstrous appearance—shaggy fur, horns, and cloven-hoofs—made Pan a palimpsest on which the

Christian Devil was overlaid during the .19 However, another equally influential line of interpretation focuses on Pan’s beneficence as a healer and protector, particularly of animals and nature. This duality leads to some interesting parallels between Pan and .20 One of the primary sources of both the good and evil Pan traditions can be traced back to ’s story of the death of Pan, which has been interpreted as coinciding with the death of Christ during the reign of Tiberius. Pan’s death in Plutarch’s story was read by some later writers as representing the death of and the rise of (thus equating Pan with the Devil in the form of the old pagan religions), and by others as paralleling the death of Christ (thus turning Pan into a of Christ the savior).21 W. R. Irwin notes that a fourth century bishop,

Eusebius Pamphili, “suggested that by Pan one should understand Christ….This view became more or less the accepted one and was strongly reinforced, centuries later, by

Rabelais,” and continued to live on in the work of early 20th century German classicists like Salomon Reinach and Gustav A. Gerhard (159). In English letters, Irwin also observes that Spenser, Milton, and have all variously remarked on the persistence

18 This dichotomy will be examined in the particular context of the child or childlike Pan in Chapter One. Chapter Two focuses on Pan’s more benevolent as a symbol of rural England and Englishness, while Chapter Three returns to Pan’s terrifying features in a more Gothicized context. 19 A phenomenon visualized, for example, in medieval Italian art depicting the Devil as horned, shaggy, and goat-footed (e.g. frescoes by Giotto, late 13th/early 14th centuries). 20 W. R. Irwin terms this phenomenon “the syncretion of Pan and Christ” (162). 21 For a 19th Century example of this, see the section on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Pan poems in Chapter Three.

22 of the Pan myth after the rise of Christianity (162).

Among other ancient sources, Merivale makes particular note of Longus’ Pan in

Daphnis and Chloe (2nd-3rd century AD) as the spiritual ancestor of the terrifying Pans of

Swinburne and Machen (172-173). Both Longus and Herodotus depict Pan as a god of soldiers, directly intervening in battle on the side of his adherents by inflicting panic terror on their enemies. Several centuries earlier, Theocritus’ (3rd century BC) helped to popularize a bucolic vision of Pan as a benevolent healer,22 while also hinting at his queer sexuality and potential to inspire panic terror. Finally, two of the most famous ancient sources of the Pan myth are works: Ovid’s Metamorphosis (early 1st century AD) and ’ (2nd century AD). The more playful, lighthearted characterizations of Pan in these works stand them as predecessors of both

Kipling’s Puck and Barrie’s Peter Pan. Later in this dissertation I will return to some of these ancient sources to illustrate the line of descent between these depictions of Pan and their Victorian and Edwardian successors. For now it will suffice to acknowledge Pan’s deep and varied cultural heritage as the fountainhead of later reimaginings of the figure.

A God Reborn, or Bringing Pan into the 19th Century

These ancient incarnations of the god Pan influenced, to varying degrees, the god’s later reappearance in the 19th century. The fascination with Pan in the 19th century did not emerge out of nowhere, but was rather based on a sustained interest in the figure that seemed to snowball as the century progressed. Pan had for many centuries attracted writers and scholars. There was a notable revival in interest in the god during the

Romantic era, a time in which he was often depicted as an inspirational spirit of nature.

22 Incidentally, a link between the illegitimate brothers Rickie (born deformed) and Stephen (a Pan figure) in Forster’s The Longest Journey is that they have both read and enjoyed Theocritus.

23

Over the 19th century interest in Pan grew again into another, more widespread phenomenon which peaked during the fin-de-siècle and the period just before the First

World War. As Merivale shows in her exhaustive Pan bibliography, the growing popularity of Pan or Pan-like figures in 19th century British literature can in this way be traced from Keats’s “ to Pan” to E. B. Browning’s “The Dead Pan” and “A Musical

Instrument,” and finally to culminate with the explosion of Pan stories and poems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.23 The almost obsessive interest in Pan during this period is in part rooted in the Victorian and Edwardian interest in classicism. By the Victorian era, a classical education was considered essential among upper and middle classes, of whom “more…read ancient Greek and Latin than German or French” (Marr 8). Some of the most influential ancient sources of Pan stories—Theocritus’ Idylls, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and the of

Herodotus and Plutarch—were often read untranslated by the well-educated. Aside from being some of the most popular and widely read works of Greco-Roman literature, they are the root source material for later writers who sought to re-imagine Pan in England and beyond in the 19th and 20th centuries. This literary source material was supplemented by visual images of Pans found on then-recently discovered ancient and paintings, several of which I have referred to in this introduction. These intersecting images of

23 In addition to classical sources like Plutarch, Ovid, and Theocritus (in the 19th and early 20th centuries often read in the original Greek and Latin, though available in translation), contemporary English-language compilations of mythology were also a source of information about Pan for writers of the period. One of the most commonly referenced sources on ancient mythology in use during the latter part of the 19th century through the early decades of the 20th was ’s The of Myth and Legend (first published 1855). This extremely popular volume could be found on the bookshelves of most English writers at the time. Bulfinch’s entry summarizes the most common Pan traditions, including his connections to “all” of Nature, the nymphs, and the parallel Latin Faunus and Sylvanus. Bulfinch also refers to “an early Christian tradition” linking the death of Pan to the birth of Christ (154). Another popular resource on ancient mythology (particularly for the fin-de-siècle and early 20th century) was Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published 1890). It includes a detailed summary of the famous (or perhaps infamous is more accurate) Plutarchan story of the death of Pan—an important point of reference for many writers of the period.

24 literature and art, conceived in the classical world, would then be infused with the specific conditions of 19th century England, giving birth to a new generation of Pan figures that speak specifically to a late Victorian version of Puar’s “queer times” in which transgression surfaces as an alternative kind of social norm. The result of Pan’s incursion

(or re-cursion) into normative society is a struggle—often life or death—with ancient, previously unseen forces unleashed by the god.

As should be clear by now, Pan is far from a typical classical god. The revived

Pan emerges at a time when modern life, to many at the time, seemed to exist in an

Arnoldian state of anarchy, lacking a guiding principle, and marked by impersonal, self- absorbed laissez-faire capitalism and hypocritically stringent social regulation. This was a period in which dystopic and apocalyptic works of literature became popular across the literary spectrum: there were lowbrow invasion thrillers like The Battle of Dorking by

George Tomkyns Chesney (1871) and The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

(1903) (which both revolve around German invasions of Britain); early -fiction novels like The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G.

Wells, which expose the fragility of the human condition; and even early Modernist works like E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (first published 1909), an eerily prescient work which imagines a future in which humans have completely lost touch with nature, familial relationships, and even physical contact, only communicating with other people through machines. Such works reflect a widespread feeling, in the

Western world at the turn of the 20th century, that humankind had sinned against nature in the name of civilization. They had betrayed their natural inheritance in exchange for a fleeting sense of power and an image of modern grandeur. The disregard for the natural

25 world reflects a disregard for the bodily, for the physical, and for the sexual, and undermines the psychological harmony of mind and body. There was a sense that a reckoning was coming, and all would have to pay for humanity’s collective crimes.

Enter Pan, whose wide array of characteristics (healing, musical, sexual, terrifying, satanic, etc.) make him an attractive and liberating imaginative figure ready to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of modern civilization. The idea of liberation—the appeal of a figure free from the increasingly heavy shackles of civilization—unites most

(if not all) depictions of the god during this period. For these reasons Pan became at this time a focal point for resistance against hegemonic forms of power and repression.

According to this view, Pan functions as a social, and indeed societal, critique. His re- emergence in the late 19th century can perhaps best be explained as a sign of disenchantment and disappointment with modern life and society—a reaction against the rise of industrialization, urbanization, and civilization more generally. Pan represents an intense yearning for a sense of wholeness, and for a time when people were connected to the earth in a symbiotic relationship, as exemplified by Forster’s Eustace in “The Story of a Panic,” or by Peter Pan’s connection to . This yearning is nostalgic and pagan, a desire to loosen the ascetic restrictions that Foucault argues came into being during the Christian era: Pan is a way to break free from “a long period of harsh repression, a protracted Christian asceticism, greedily and fastidiously adapted to the imperatives of bourgeois economy” (History of Sexuality Vol. I 158). He stands for a heightened awareness of nature, and of the physical needs of the body (e.g. pleasure, sexual or otherwise) that had long existed beneath the surface, but of which polite society would rather not speak. As Foucault argues, the pressure to conform to sexual behavioral

26 standards during the 19th century served “to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative” (History of Sexuality Vol. I 37). By contrast, the Victorian and Edwardian Pan is simultaneously an opening up of discourse on taboo subjects, and a critique of established forms of power—a critique of sexual repression, of capitalism, imperialism, the church, urbanized society, and of positivist science and technology. Pan is thus not only a symbol of nature or freedom, but also a figure representing specific sorts of desires and longings—for example, sexuality unfettered from social constraints, or a paganistic and unity with nature. In a way a counterpoint to Thesis VI of Jeffrey Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

(i.e. “Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire” [16]), the era’s fascination with

(and fear of) Pan reveals a desire for Pan. Pan thus reflects not only the fears and anxieties of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, but is also a critical commentary on the way that this very society perceives itself. Writers as diverse as Forster, Barrie,

Grahame, Burnett, Kipling, and Machen all concern themselves with this issue, and interestingly all locate a response to societal malaise in Pan figures of various sorts, who awaken others to alternative possibilities, bring harmony with nature, and/or provide physical liberation and emotional release. Through Pan, humanity can reconnect with the physical and the natural—and often the hidden supernatural—worlds.

Pan’s connection to nature is central to his appeal to writers and audiences of this period, and comes at a time when writings about nature, the countryside, and rural topics were feeding a new appetite among the middle and upper classes for “a literature that offered an escape from the streams of modern life” (Wiener 49). This conception

27 of escape is crucial to understanding both the “return to the land” movement and its offshoot, the Pan phenomenon. For Victorians and Edwardians the countryside had become a “ escape hatch” for what were seen to be the “urban crises” of the time: weary, weakened bodies shuffling around overcrowded grey cities, breathing smoggy

(Born 374). According to this frame of mind, the countryside provided a kind of release valve for the tensions inherent to modern life. And yet the English countryside, too, seemed to be coming under threat. As cities crept outwards, and railways and telegraph lines girded the land, the natural world seemed in retreat (though perhaps only temporarily, if Pan had anything to say about it). This was an era in which, as Ruskin describes in his “Storm-cloud” lectures, the natural world darkened and threatened in ways unknown to previous generations. For writers of this period, Pan is an embodied link to the alternately terrifying and soothing natural world—a lifeline to a sentient nature who might shield us from her wrath. Pan stood for solidarity with both nature and humanity. He is an expression of an idealized classical past that holds out the promise of escape from modernity and a return to simpler times. And yet Pan, like nature, is unpredictable and dangerous—and this gray area, this tipping point between benevolence and danger, is often the backdrop for Victorian and Edwardian tales of Pan.

Conclusion - The Death and Life of Pan

Almost two millenia before this period, Plutarch wrote that Pan was dead.

However, other classical sources said that Pan was only sleeping, and would awaken if and when people reconnected with nature. The innate desire to awaken Pan can be seen as a desire to waken the dormant natural self that has been sedated by modern life. To see and experience Pan is in effect a counterweight to industrialization, modernization,

28 positivist science, and the decline in religious endemic to the transition to the modern industrial age.24 In Victorian and Edwardian Pan literature, the amorphous, benevolent/demonic figure of Pan, ancient god of the natural wilds, represents a rallying point for opponents of the anarchy of modern life and the strictures of normative, conformist living. Through the return to nature (and consequently the entrance into a more “natural” state of being), humanity might find this lost guiding principle, and the figure of Pan was, for many, the key to this return. In the chapters that follow, I hope to illuminate this elusive figure and to explore the promise and threat that he poses as an imaginative symbol.

24 In The Age of Empire (264-267), Eric Hobsbawm describes “the dramatic retreat of traditional religion” in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (264).

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Chapter 1: The Queer Children of Pan: An Edwardian Fantasy

Introduction

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries many distinctive varieties of Pans emerged in British popular culture. Appearing in diverse forms and genres, these Pans imaginatively disrupt and subvert modern society. It is my goal to identify, analyze, and contextualize several of the most important manifestations of the ancient god Pan in the period’s literature. In Chapter Two, I look at how apprehension over British national identity is dealt with through hybrid Pan figures adapted to distinctly British settings in works like Kipling’s Puck books and Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. In Chapter Three I consider the gothicization of Pan as a violent monster prefiguring degeneration, criminality, and apocalyptic end of days. I conclude with a coda looking at Pan as a figure associated with utopian liberation and reinvention in the context of the Edwardian magic revival. In the present chapter I examine Edwardian literary depictions of Pan- like25 children, adolescents, and young adults.26 This mixture of childish and “Pannish” characteristics embodied in a child is a phenomenon unique to British Edwardian literature.27 From a broader cultural context, the child Pan is a manifestation of the

25 By Pan-like, I mean a person exhibiting characteristics typically associated with ancient mythology and literature of Pan. These include the fickle temperament and aloofness common to the Olympian gods, but more specifically a carefree sense of joy and celebration of youth, a love of mischief and pranks, a deep connection to nature and especially to animals, the ability to inspire panic terror and/or confusion, and the potential for heartless brutality. 26 William Greenslade has also used the term “the child of Pan” in reference to Eustace in Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” (150). For simplicity’s sake I will hereafter refer to Pan-like children as “child Pans,” “Pan children,” or “child(ren) of Pan.” I use these terms interchangeably. 27 Though ancient art and literature occasionally depicts youthful Pans, aside from the story of the infant Pan’s arrival on Olympus in “The Homeric Hymn to Pan” I have not uncovered any other examples of child Pans prior to the 19th century. Some ancient examples of youthful adult Pans include a 1st century AD Roman fresco of Pan and the Muses (see Boardman 41), and Longus’ 2nd-3rd century AD literary work Daphnis and Chloe.

30

Edwardian literary trope of the powerful child.28 Edwardian literature is rife with such characters who, as Humphries notes, “no longer [need] to respect the adult agenda” and actively “seek to subvert or dissent from that agenda, even when they seem to conform”

(183). The recurring trope of the child Pan is a distinctive figuration that amplifies the possibilities of the powerful Edwardian child.

Child Pans can be found widely in British popular literature of the early 20th century. Their depictions are to some degree an amalgamation of the different Pans found elsewhere in contemporary literature: like their adult counterparts, child Pans alternatively function as a restorative force of healing and unity, and as a disturbing, monstrous force actively working to subvert the fictional worlds and characters around them. In both scenarios child Pans present what I believe can be described as a queer and queering alternative to adult narratives, methods, and ways of being. The child Pan throws adults off kilter, rejects the status quo, and resists hegemonic domination through fantastical means that defy logic and positivist rationality. The child Pan’s queerness is rooted in resistance to and disruption of adults and adulthood. It is in particular resistance to the pressures of normative society—the unwillingness to submit to “the strictures of the adult world” (Gavin and Humphries 6), and confine themselves to what they see as a narrowed sense of adult-oriented identity—that makes child Pans such powerfully queer figures: at once attractive liberators and monstrous outcasts.

This chapter focuses on two distinctive manifestations of the child Pan in

Edwardian literature—the monstrous child Pan and the restorative child Pan—and shows

28 Gavin and Humphries argue that Peter Pan (the most well-known child Pan) “best expressed, and entrenched, the Edwardian cult of childhood…Peter Pan himself…embodies the ultimate in child autonomy and agency by refusing to become an adult” (16). I feel that this argument can be broadened to include other examples of child Pans, who are almost uniformly disruptive and subversive to the modern adult world.

31 that though they may differ in method, both share a disruptive and transformative role in their respective narratives. The study of such queer and queering child characters is an area that has only recently begun to receive significant critical attention.29 I aim to bring several Edwardian works of Pan literature into conversation with queer theory in ways that will be illuminating in both directions. I will begin by assessing the general role of the child Pan in the period’s literature before moving to an analysis of monstrous and benevolent child Pans in popular Edwardian works, including Barrie’s Peter Pan,30

Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” (1911), Forster’s

“The Story of a Panic” (1904), Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too Far” (1912), and

Blackwood’s “The Touch of Pan” (1917).31 In these fictions the child Pan works to queer particular children and adults by subverting normative lives, social relationships, and in , and offering them previously unseen and unattainable possibilities for those select few receptive to alternative ways of life. Finally, I aim to shed light on how these figures function within the larger late Victorian and Edwardian Pan phenomenon, and how they queer the representation of Edwardian childhood.

Searching for Pan’s Children

29 Notably in Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley’s essay anthology Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004), and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the 20th Century (2009). I am particularly indebted to Stockton, who analyzes the ways in which children are queered, and how queer children have been depicted, in literature and film since the 1890s. 30 In keeping with recent critical convention (see Glenda Hudson’s “Two is Beginning of the End: Peter Pan and the Doctrine of Reminiscence”), and unless otherwise stated, I use the title Peter Pan in this chapter “to refer comprehensively to all four major texts by Barrie in which Peter Pan is a character” (Hudson 314). Where necessary, I will refer to the individual works in this group: the (1902), several chapters of which were expanded into Peter Pan in (1906), the play Peter Pan (first performed in 1904, but not published until 1928), and the novel Peter and Wendy (1911). I will primarily focus on Peter and Wendy which, according to Zipes, was Barrie’s attempt to provide a “‘definitive’ text” of the story (xxv). 31 These are not the only works featuring child Pans written during this period. Other notable works include The Blessing of Pan by Lord Dunsany (1928), E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907), and The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys by Forrest Reid (1905). As I have stated elsewhere in this dissertation, rather than catalog every example of Pan in the literature of the long 19th century, I have elected instead to focus my study on a selection of works that, I believe, are representative of popular trends.

32

One of the challenges in this task is finding links connecting child Pans in very different works. There are substantial differences between, for example, Peter Pan,

Forster’s Eustace from “The Story of a Panic,” and Burnett’s Dickon. However, I believe that such diverse Pan-inflected characters share a multifaceted queerness that allows them to be brought together under the umbrella term “child Pans.” I define queer child Pans as children exhibiting odd, disruptive, or subversive characteristics typically associated with the ancient Pan. This connection to the traditions of the ancient god—the way that these characters mingle and fuse with the mythological Pan—is what distinguishes the child

Pans in these works from other representations of powerful Edwardian children. The touch of Pan heightens the disruptive and disturbing nature of these children, giving them the ability to depart from well-worn paths of normative growth and enter alternative avenues of queer “sideways” growth.32 These queer children of Pan are not limited to the confines of rational, scientifically explicable phenomena, nor to the linear progression of time. Sedgwick’s term “multiply transitive” (Tendencies viii) is a useful descriptor, for the child Pan crosses into different spheres at will, offering new possibilities and ways of being that are appealing but which run counter to existing societal standards. The multiply transitive Pan children are liberating, but they are also dangerous. In a word, the children of Pan are queer, and the fantastical possibilities open to them, and to those select few chosen as their companions, are beyond those of “normal” children or adults.

Echoing in artistic form commonly held contemporary notions regarding children and childhood, the child Pan simultaneously soothes and heightens anxieties over the fate of children in the modern world. S/he becomes in the process a powerful, shadowy über-

32 Queer sideways growth is a concept used by Kathryn Bond Stockton to describe the experiential development of queer children in ways not limited to normative “growing up.”

33 child who alternates between reflecting adults’ best hopes and worst fears regarding children.

The child Pan of Edwardian literature has not yet been the primary focus of an academic study.33 I believe an analysis of this phenomenon is long overdue. Such a study will provide insight not only into Edwardian literature and culture, but also into childhood studies and children’s literature, queer theory, modernism, Gothic studies, and the literature of the fantastic. Like his amorphous mythical ancestor, the child Pan appears and reappears in a variety of genres, styles, and guises, and speaks to an array of contemporary issues. Both every child and none, desirable and frightening, a sign of hope and a nightmare, the child Pan’s contradictions reflect the manifold nature of the ancient

Pan, who more than any other figure of Greco- resists clear delineation. The child Pan, heir to the ancient god, is the queerly hybrid and of an increasingly anxious and uncertain era.

A Brief Genealogy of the Child Pan; or, A Boy and his Shadow

Child Pans like Barrie’s Peter Pan or Burnett’s Dickon combine elements of other

Pan types discussed in this dissertation34 and present this amalgamation in the form of an innocent (or not so innocent) child. In popular British literature of the late 19th and early

20th centuries it is possible to identify two broad branches of child Pans sharing a linked genealogy. First, there is the benevolent child Pan who heals and restores those who have become alienated from life and nature. This invigorating child Pan, tonic for an anxious

33 Though some scholars, like Patricia Merivale and Jean Perrot, have touched on the topic of child or childlike manifestations of the ancient Pan, I have been unable to find any works that address this topic in depth. 34 For example, the child Pans discussed in this chapter share some of the restorative, back-to-nature characteristics of adult English Pans like Rudyard Kipling’s Puck in his two Puck books, as well as some of the disruptive and dangerous powers of Gothic Pans like Arthur Machen’s in “The Great God Pan.”

34 age, has a darker shadow: the contrarian child Pan, a mini-monster and child-terror.

These two branches do not divide neatly, however. On the contrary, there are many instances of overlap and crosspollination between the two figurative bloodlines. The monstrous child Pan, for example, can be restorative and heal those he tempts to join him in his revolt against the adult world (e.g. the mischievous and violent Peter Pan has a benevolent side, providing the parent-less with a home and a sense of belonging), while the benevolent child Pan can be heartless at times, leaving death, chaos, or destruction in her or his wake (e.g. in Blackwood’s “The Touch of Pan” Elspeth liberates Heber from a suffocating life by disrupting social conventions and leaving normative adults in a chaotic state). The genealogy of the child Pan is therefore not composed of two diverging lines of descent, but rather of familial strands that come together and apart, interweaving and separating unpredictably. Though this complex patchwork quilting partially thwarts any attempt (including my own) to neatly classify the child Pan, I believe that this instability of classification is one of the things that makes these unpredictable, magical children so fascinating. These unstable figures address anxieties—particularly over the future—during an unstable time when widely perceived certainties of Victorian Britain were coming apart at the seams. In the field of science,

Darwinian evolution and geological discoveries regarding the age of the earth were undermining traditional biblical beliefs, while rising industrial, naval, and colonial powers like the United States, Germany, and even Japan—which in a few decades had gone from a feudal society to crushing the modern European military of Russia in the

Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905—posed new threats to British imperial, military, and economic dominance. Britannia may have continued to rule the waves, but the question

35 on the minds of public figures as different as Charles Masterman and Winston Churchill was for how much longer this might hold true.

In this context, the child Pan can be read as a fantasy of anxiety—but also of hope—over the fate of the Edwardian child in a rapidly changing world. Unlike many adults (in fiction or reality), the child Pan can effectively cope with change, even if only by means of resistance or escape. Rather than being disrupted by a changing world, the child Pan is often the one who causes the changes. S/he is a rebel seeking to disrupt narrow-minded adults who cannot accept that which is strange or different, or would cause them to alter their perspective. The two interconnected lineages of the child Pan, monstrous and benevolent, are united thematically by a conception of disruption and resistance in various forms: for example, child Pans share a resistance to the adult world, its social mores and rules, and a desire to overthrow the limitations of a merely positivist view of the natural world. This resistance to rational attempts to control, dominate, dissect, and categorize the subject is the heart of the child Pan. The child Pan also reflects a new understanding of childhood as a uniquely powerful state of being. Uncorrupted by the chaotic and dehumanizing effects of modernity and the cares of adulthood, the child

Pan remains closer to the inherent “magic” of the natural world and to an animalistic inner self. This magic is expressed through a symbiotic connection to nature that reacts and grows alongside child Pans like Peter Pan or Dickon. The child Pan is unshackled by anxiety over tomorrow and lives exclusively in the now. At a whim s/he can pull away to a magical realm outside of adult intervention, be it a far-off Neverland or a secret garden hidden in the midst of an adult world. Such characteristics align the child Pan with the aims of queer theory, which seeks to bring critical attention to the marginalized and the

36 dissenting, the outsiders and the resisters. Queer theory provides theoretical language for free expression of self without fear of repression, helping to reveal narratives that are disruptive to a structured sense of progression, teleological or otherwise. Like the child

Pan, the queer peeps through cracks in the edifice of civilization, telling stories of fantastical possibility beyond the scope of positivism. In the section that follows I will show how theoretical explorations of the queerness of children can be put into conversation with a study of this era’s child Pans. I will then consider what the narratives of these fantastically queer figures can tell us about the society that produced them.

The Queer Children of Pan: A Vision of Edwardian Childhood

I will begin by clarifying my usage of queer theory, and specifically the term

“queer,” in relation to Pan and to childhood studies. I will also contextualize this manifestation of the Pan phenomenon within evolving perceptions of childhood during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This overview will help to illuminate intersections between understandings of childhood during this time and the concurrent fascination with Pan. Queer theory will be the lens used to focus upon the disruptive or subversive aspects of the child Pan.

It is the goal of this dissertation not to focus solely on manifestations of sexual queerness in connection with the Pan phenomenon, but rather to make use of a broader application of queer theory.35 As Gabrielle Owen puts it, “Queer describes…not only gay or lesbian, but ways of being that fall outside of intelligibility, fall outside of definition, outside of what is usually understood as reality” (italics in original) (258). Queer theory is invested in breaking the confines of everyday reality and in exposing gaps in assertions

35 I do not deny the sexual queerness of child Pans; rather, I argue that it is only one aspect of their queerness.

37 of monolithic, black and white truths. Queerness is concerned with crossing over, or existing in what Sedgwick calls a “multiply transitive” state (Tendencies viii). The child

Pans of literature cross over barriers erected by adults—barriers which attempt to funnel children into normative, unmagical adulthood, where instead of flying they will worry about worldly matters like Mr. Darling’s “stocks and shares” in Peter Pan (Barrie, Peter and Wendy 6), or obsess over disease and mortality, like Mr. Craven in The Secret

Garden. Child Pans like Peter or Dickon provide other receptive characters with an alternative to or deviation from a linear path—an escape from the confines of physical, rational reality and into the realm of the magical and the fantastical. Queerness is also about the unusual, disruptive, or different; that which goes against the grain, whether in action or in unacted desires. Specifically, the child Pan pushes against what Halberstam calls “the narrative coherence” of growing up: in other words, the linear progression of

“—early adulthood—marriage—reproduction—child rearing—retirement— death” (Dinshaw et al. 182). Child Pans instead inhabit an in-between queer state which

Halberstam describes as “the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility” (182). The child Pan is an example of Stockton’s queer child who grows “sideways” rather than “up” into normative adulthood—a growth that is expansive in experience but which cannot be chronologically or sequentially mapped, nor contained or measured by logic, science, or rationality. Peter Pan, that most famous child Pan, exemplifies this sideways growth into an alternative life which diverges from expectations, and which breaks with understandings of the teleological progression of one’s lifespan. This divergence makes room for a powerful being that, as I argue, is not only queer, but can potentially push the boundaries of childhood into the

38 realm of the monstrous.

The queer child Pan reflects changes in the perception of childhood between the

Victorian and Edwardian eras. Straddling the turn of the 20th century, s/he is a figure of the past and the future, and an embodiment of hope and anxiety over the fate of childhood in a rapidly changing world. S/he reflects continuity and yet also a break with the past, shattering social norms and reorienting those s/he encounters toward new, queerer possibilities. At the same time, the child Pan restores the willing and able to the ancient vitalities of the earth. At once of a particular time and timeless, the queer child of

Pan beckons the reader to abandon modern society’s “mind-forg’d manacles” in order to escape to a Neverland or secret garden where dichotomies like health/disease or innocence/experience do not exist. The child Pan—restorative, monstrous, or both at once—is a figurative third way; a queer alternative for those lost and uncertain at a crossroad in their lives. The child Pan reveals to them previously hidden or invisible escape routes that defy logic or rational conceptions of possibility.

Gabrielle Owen remarks that “queer lives are often defined by impossibility, both in ideological ways and in lived, material ways. Impossibility is a condition of existence, something that must be negotiated” (258). The child Pan negotiates impossibility for us, lifting the of the impossible or implausible, and allowing those s/he touches to experience a queered life of unlimited possibility. The queer child Pan is thus a figure of fear and hope, monster and savior. By understanding the appeal and dangers of this call to fly away and forge one’s own path freed from social, rational, or scientific limitations,

I believe that we will gain greater insight into the currents of fear and hope running through the culture which produced these remarkable figures. The queer child Pan

39 continues to speak to us across time, with a voice as loud and cocky as Peter Pan’s echoing in Hook’s ears.

Pan and Victorian and Edwardian Childhood

Child Pans are a part of a larger cultural movement that reimagines how the child is depicted in literature and art. By embodying characteristics of the ancient Pan in the form of a child, Barrie, Burnett, and others make use of the god as a vehicle for the fantastical expression of evolving Edwardian conceptions of childhood. The child Pan is the hybrid product of this union—an artistic symbol reflective of these changing perceptions. Let us begin by considering the figure’s origins in Victorian and Edwardian conceptions of childhood: what about this era’s evolving understanding of childhood might lead to fantastical creations like child Pans?

In Britain, childhood has, since at least the early modern period, been the subject of often contradictory philosophies. According to Lucy Hamilton, scholars identify two lines of thought regarding childhood “very loosely identifiable as ‘Original Sin’ and

‘Original Innocence’” (31). Hamilton posits that the Puritans promoted a view of children as tainted by Eve’s Original Sin (31). In order to erase this taint, the child had “to be educated or beaten into individual redemption and the salvation of society” (31). This understanding of childhood blames the child for deviance from norms, and divides responsibility for its remedy between society and the child herself. By the late 18th century, new conceptions of childhood based on Rousseau had begun to supplant the

“Original Sin” theory. “Rejecting [the] biblical injunctions” of their Puritan forebears,

Romantics viewed childhood as an idyllic stage of innocence “before entering the prison of experienced adulthood” (31). Under the influence of Darwin, this understanding

40 shifted yet further away from the biblical during the Victorian period as “evolutionary theory…fed into various strands of Victorian discourse concerning children” (31). As

Hamilton summarizes, “each child could be seen to recapitulate man’s journey from savagery to cessation….the child was innocent and savage simultaneously. It was the role of the surrounding adults to preserve the innocence or ‘manage’ the savage so that the inevitable progress of humankind towards ‘perfection’ might continue” (31). This acknowledgment of the innocent and the savage within the child presages the ambiguous nature of the Pan child, who often exhibits both at once.

The Victorian period saw an explosion of discourse regarding childhood. As the

19th century progressed a growing awareness of the unique features of childhood began to influence pedagogical, medical, and philosophical thought, and to shape public policy in

Britain. Though it would be inaccurate to claim that the Victorians invented childhood, the Victorians arguably did more to color modern appreciation of childhood as a distinctive state of being than any of their predecessors. As Frost summarizes:

On many issues [regarding childhood], Victorians continued innovations

of the early modern period, especially the eighteenth century….All the

same, the Victorian era was crucial to the development of modern

childhood. The amount of attention to children’s needs, range and number

of reforms, and the many parliamentary acts to increase the legal rights of

children all point to the significance of the nineteenth century in

improving children’s status….[E]ven if the ideas or impulses were not

new, their implementation and reach were innovative and had far-reaching

effects. (10)

41

Over the centuries many thinkers from Locke to Rousseau had contemplated the concept of childhood as a unique state of being36 (Gavin 4-5). However, there were limitations: even for Rousseau, the child was considered a kind of that needed to be civilized through instruction (Carpenter 7). In Britain as late as the 18th century, “the mainstream of English child-rearing…worked along lines laid down by

Locke, practised moderation in all things, and gave children virtually nothing to stimulate their imaginations” (7). In Britain it was only in the mid-19th century that the distinctive needs and potentials of children would finally be appreciated on a societal level through legislation that sought to shape children into productive adults. The passing of child labor , the expansion of schooling (for example, the founding of industrial schools for working classes under age 14, and then gradually from the 1870s to 1914 compulsory schooling for all children under 14), and the development of youth reformatories (which replaced juvenile prisons or workhouses) were an attempt to ameliorate the lot of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable members (Frost 34, 38, 97, 135-136). Childhood was recognized as a unique period in one’s life with specific needs and vulnerabilities to be addressed.

However, the flip side was that these vulnerabilities could also be exploited. By institutionalizing school, the state was able to exert a level of control over its youngest subjects heretofore impossible at this scale. Changing public attitudes and legislative developments did a lot of good, shielding children from exploitation and hardship. Yet there was also an underlying violence done to children, who were universally being molded into “proper” citizens of a modern industrial society. This was, in a sense, an

36 For more on understandings of childhood in Britain since 1200, see Gavin (ed), The Child in British Literature.

42 attempt at social conditioning: inscribing instructions for a productive life onto a

Lockeian tabula rasa on a national scale, by way of an approach that takes into account new understandings of childhood. Such a social project was deemed beneficial to all in that it was believed that the influence of school could counteract the ill effects of poverty, unrest, and degeneration that provoked anxiety among the upper classes. The powerful late Victorian and Edwardian children found in many works of literature from this period can be read as an artistic response to—and critique of—the state of children in the modern world. These powerful children are typically liberating figures, though they can be uncanny and frightening as well. Hardy’s “Little ” from Jude the Obscure, for example, has been so conditioned by the hard realities of poverty that he seems a child in name only. His method of liberation is literally an execution of power, killing his siblings and himself so that they are no longer a burden to the adults Jude and Sue. Other contemporary powerful children, however, like Nesbit’s “Railway Children” or Kipling’s

Kim give child characters potent agency and abilities in a more life-affirming and constructive manner.

Such powerful, willful children are reflective of an evolution in perceptions of childhood as the 20th century dawned. One of the most striking changes in literary and artistic depictions of children between the Victorian and Edwardian eras “is a rejection of the child-as-victim ” (Gavin 12) (which we find, for example, in Dickens’s Oliver

Twist and Great Expectations [10]) and instead a movement “towards a construction in which children hold virtually all the power” (12). Adapting some elements of an idealized

Romantic perception of childhood as “a state longed for, or inspirational” (Gavin 9), and subtly twisting the Victorian literary trope of the innocent but doomed “heavenly child”

43

(Wood 117), the Edwardians reimagined childhood as “its own distinct realm, an

Arcadian world apart, unreachable by adults who often desperately long for it” (Gavin

12), and superior in some ways to adulthood (11). Though Peter Pan is perhaps the ultimate example of the powerful child in Edwardian fiction (Gavin and Humphries 16),37 he is also a Pan, and this makes him different than other powerful children. I read Pan children as a fantastical offshoot of the powerful late Victorian and Edwardian child.

They share the potential for benevolence or monstrosity that other powerful children display, yet they are distinctive in their own right. For example, they are far more dependent on fantasy, imagination, magic, and the irrational than the hyper-rational Little

Father Time or even Kim, whose transformative abilities might seem magical but are grounded in the boy’s familiarity with the ways and peoples of a real place, . Most significantly, child Pans are overtly connected to the ancient Arcadian god: by name, , and/or characteristics typically associated with Pan, chief among these a symbiotic connection with nature. In short, these powerful Pan children are defined by fantastical imaginative or magical capabilities and a deep kinship with the goat-god.

Writers like Barrie heighten childhood’s of magical distinctiveness and superiority by melding the powerful Edwardian child of literature with features of the ancient Pan. This blending transcends the mythological Pan and the idealized Edwardian child, creating in the process a queerly fantastical being—and a monster—who taunts adults by stirring in them impossible desires that center on this transformative child. Like the , the child Pan torments adults with something they can never possess, be it a lost childhood that can never be recaptured, or a life freed from the weight of limitations like

37 As opposed to the powerless child of Victorian fiction—see p. 11 of Gavin and Humphries’s “Worlds Enough and Time: The Cult of Childhood in Edwardian Fiction.”

44 regret and aging. The unlimited possibilities that the child Pan mischievously holds out of reach reflect the beholder’s queer desires for alternative ways of being, and frequently drive those who encounter the child Pan to madness or death. The Pan child’s monstrous effect is largely due to his ability to break through the ordinary and expose the extraordinary, a revelation too much for most adults to bear. And yet to the receptive few, the child Pan opens previously unseen avenues that run chaotically “Betwixt-and-

Between” (Barrie, Kensington Gardens 172) the ordered pathways of the modern world, revealing the magic beneath ordinary life. Pan’s queer children offer the tantalizing possibility of a fantastical yet dangerous queer life to those who dare to fly away with them to Neverland.

As fictional figures, they are literature’s reaction to contemporary attempts to mold childhood and the child into “proper” normative citizens. The child Pan is in part an imaginative, alternative counterpoint to mainstream methodologies of child-rearing and development, building on the child-oriented approaches of the Victorian era. It is a fantasy of the child grown all-powerful through the imagination and the acceptance of the irrational. The child Pan is a radical reenvisioning of a liberated childhood in which the imagination, magic, and intimacy with nature actively work to subvert modern power structures like school, adult authority, and social norms. Pan children do not go to school—they do not need to. They are not training to be upstanding citizens, have no concerns over money or traditional learning, they never go hungry for long, and they never have to do real work. Pan children reflect an alternative form of childhood which emphasizes the liberation of children from structured upbringings. As cultural figures,

Pan children imagine utopian spaces freed from the worries and strictures of the adult

45 world. The freedom that they enjoy is an expression of power and a reveling in rebellion against the controls imposed upon children generally. The child Pan is a natural progression of the Pan mythos, skewing, amplifying, and distilling until we are left with a group of liminal, magical children who harness the chaotic but vibrant powers of the ancient Pan. These queer children of Pan are perched between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, desire and terror. They upend dichotomies, reorienting the normative individual toward queer possibilities, and are prescient of a modern sense of liberated and empowered childhood. Exhilarating, attractive, and potentially deadly, they call out to the queer child within the normative adult, promising liberation and eternal youth.

Growing Sideways in Neverland: The Promise and Danger of the Queer

Child Pan

Whether monstrous or benevolent, child Pans share a number of distinctive features: they are, first of all, physically and developmentally frozen in time, caught in an eternal moment of youth, , innocence, gaiety, and heartlessness. As magical figures, they hold out a promise of , but in order to experience this utopia one must make a sacrifice: one’s old way of living, reason, family, or even one’s life. Sometimes this price is paid to the god Pan himself, while at other times it is extracted by the Pan child. This sacrifice is required in order to enter Pan’s Neverland-Eden—and one defies

Pan or his children at one’s own peril. The child Pan also exhibits a preternatural connection to nature and to animals, and is sometimes more like an animal than a child.

This animalistic behavior can be monstrous in its effect on others, yet it can also remind

“normal” humans of their own animal nature, and that they, too, are an integral part of the

46 natural world. Finally, the child Pan actively subverts and disrupts the status quo, whether via undermining the adult control over children, or simply by rejecting established ways of doing things and offering queer alternatives.

Pan’s queer(ing) influence turns the straight line of development into a circle: an endless loop of childhood experience. To receptive children and select adults, Pan offers an alternative to the strictures of adulthood and responsibility, and to the industrial society that this sort of living supports. Those receptive become Pan-like themselves, and in doing so find escape in wild natural spaces untouched by the modern world. These living spaces exude magic and inspire the imagination in those who welcome its influence. Child Pans are the rulers of these hidden Neverlands which, in order to be entered, require the subject to experience what Sara Ahmed refers to as a “queer orientation” (70), a revelatory experience that shifts one’s perspective from normative pathways of growth, exposing previously unseen or closed off possibilities and experiences. Child Pans are rebels, upending adult norms and reorienting the young in order to banish the follies of their elders from the queer Neverlands that they have carved from their imagination or out of wild nature. Reoriented from the straitjacketed rational world, the children of Pan find asylum in a queerly eternal childhood, shielded from encroaching adulthood. This queer childhood, removed from the end goal of growing up, becomes as Stockton puts it, something like the “pointless” candy in Roald Dahl’s Willy

Wonka (243). Like that candy, this fictional eternal childhood does not need to have a point—that is what makes it queer. Unlike real life queer children, who will likely grow up to become queer adults, the queer children of Pan never grow up. For child Pans, childhood itself is queer: it is the be all and end all of existence.

47

The queer childhood of these youthful Pans frees them from responsibility to their families, to their society, and even to the chronological course of time. It is this freedom that makes them so attractive; however, this attraction works differently for children than it does for adults. Child Pans have a profound influence on the young, who are unable to resist their advances. The spaces and possibilities that s/he reveals provides other children with the opportunity for untrammeled sideways growth that can restore health and vitality. This queer sideways growth is powerfully revitalizing and invigorating, turning sickly or physically and emotionally weak children into potent figures exuding health.

Just as significantly, Pan’s queer sideways growth sustains a supernatural youthfulness by protecting and restoring the innocence and imagination of childhood from the stultifying grip of adults. Pan’s queer children halt the sequential progression of time, extending indefinitely an eternal moment of childhood. Their queer sideways growth does not track time or make room for aging, nor is it accompanied by the loss of childhood innocence that occurs through normative growth. This queer growth reifies the child’s imagination, opening new Ahmedian orientations that are expansively panoramic in experience yet narrow in physical or emotional developmental scope. The queer spaces opened by Pan’s sideways growth transgress the adult world by providing alternative experiences of childhood that defy adult mores, particularly regarding traditional notions of development. The children of Pan thus queer contemporary normative conceptions of the child, of childhood, and what it means to grow into adulthood. Though potentially restorative, Pan children pose an existential threat to modern societies which accept as bedrock principle a conception of childhood as a straight road to adulthood. The children of Pan instead follow a bending path, queerly reoriented to see childhood as an end in

48 itself.

The Terror from Neverland: the Monstrosity of the Pan Child

The queer children of Pan are morally ambiguous and constantly in motion. For them to cease moving would be to cease existing. They are transitive beings, moving between reality and fantastical Neverlands, physical and spiritual realms, or more ambiguous divisions like good and evil. Child Pans bend these boundaries to their unfathomable will, appearing to outsiders variously as angelic, demonic, or both. They are capable of terrifying and killing as easily as they might heal and restore. Tempered by a powerful attractiveness, the monstrosity of the child Pan is made up of a composite mixture reflective of the figure’s resistance to categorization. Defying the rationality of the adult world, the child Pan promises permanent escape via the rejection of a normative lifestyle and a movement across physical, spiritual, and moral borders to a secret space hidden from adults, where disorienting new rules and possibilities apply. The queer children of Pan are united by their ability to throw adults off kilter, disorienting them through a combination of terror, desire, and sheer confusion. It is this ambiguous admixture that gives the queer children of Pan more than a whiff of monstrosity.

Fantastically abnormal, Pan children are often as frightening as they are attractive.

Pan’s panic fear inducing potential is the outward manifestation of an underlying monstrosity that has, in stories dating back to Longus and Theocritus, threatened any who dare intrude on his domain. Though Pan’s sanctuaries are typically beautiful natural spaces, Pan’s domain can be destructive and terrifying if intruded upon by the uncomprehending or envious who seek to establish hegemony over this space or its inhabitants. In the case of the Pan child, it is adults who run the gravest risk of terrifying

49 and deadly consequences. Only when adults let go of their attempts to exert control over

Pan’s secret gardens can there be harmony between the queer child of Pan and the normative adult. This letting go is extraordinarily difficult, however, for those adults who desire an impossible return to the innocence and beauty of lost childhood as embodied by the child Pan.

Much like the Pan of antiquity, many of this period’s child Pans appear as monsters to their enemies. They can inflict panic fear, suffering, and death upon those who challenge them. Failure to relinquish control and respect Pan and his surrogate, the queer Pan child, can be dangerous, as Barrie’s Hook and Saki’s learn all too well.

Though potentially terrifying and disruptive to adults resistant to Pan’s piping call, those exceptional adults who embrace the children of Pan, like Mr. Craven in The Secret

Garden, or the grown up Wendy in Peter Pan, find themselves reborn and reoriented toward a new understanding of childhood, life, and existence. Their eyes opened, they now perceive life imbued with an essential magic.

Pan’s children undermine rational, materialist understandings of the world in favor of the fantastical. Magic, the imagination, and unfettered emotional responses, especially regarding nature, reign supreme. Those who resist or who cannot accept the arational Pan flee in panic terror, and run the risk of being destroyed by their fear or by

Pan’s direct intervention. In the disbeliever, the encounter with Pan causes a crisis in one’s faith in religion and scientific fact. This crisis can result in several possible outcomes: in acceptance of Pan and other non-rational or magical possibilities, overturning previously held and valued beliefs; in denial and desperate, panicked resistance; in jealous desire and resentment; in madness and death; or in some

50 combination of these. The dangerous intersections where Pan’s queer spaces and the rational, materialist adult world meet reflect an era of spiritual crisis in which belief and unbelief, pseudoscience and science, the imagination and the material, clashed over the direction of Western civilization. Just as the spiritualist movement shadowed positivist science in contemporary culture, the monstrous Pan child acts as a dark mirror of the civilized Edwardian. Monstrous and primitive, liberated and appealing, Pan gives voice to an undercurrent of ambiguous feelings about the times, from social manners to science and rationality. He is the specter of alternative possibility haunting the fringes of the modern industrialist system and threatening to disrupt it. Pan has an uncanny ability to appeal to one’s deepest desires, while also unleashing dark fears and panic anxiety.

In the sections that follow I examine several illustrative examples of the ambiguous monstrosity of the child Pan in Edwardian literature. This culminates with a reading of Peter Pan as the central child-monster of the Pan phenomenon.

Paying the Piper: The Monstrous Child Pan’s Blood Price in Saki, Forster,

and Benson

Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” (1911), E. F. Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too

Far” (1912), and E. M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” (1904) are short stories featuring deadly, monstrous child Pans. These tales share several common themes: the juxtaposing of nature and civilization, the consequent defiance and/or embrace of nature, social complacency and the threat of disruption to social order, concern over physical health, and finally, the need for blood sacrifice. Some or all of these themes are present in each work, but the last—blood sacrifice to Pan—is central to all three stories and is the overarching link to the other themes. My analysis will thus focus on the notion of blood

51 sacrifice in relation to the monstrous child Pan, and will draw connections to the other themes where applicable. This will help to sketch a portrait of this dark figure, with whom an encounter results in chilling death: a blood price paid to Pan.

Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” is not one of the author’s best known stories.

However, Stern argues that this tale, along with “-Ernest,” is most evocative of a powerful sexual energy in the author’s body of work (284). What makes the “The Music on the Hill” unique, according to Stern, is that it “concentrates its eroticism in a savage, even pagan, figure” (284). That figure is a dangerous but attractive boy Pan. The story focuses on Sylvia Seltoun, a city-dwelling young woman who has recently married and moved to the English countryside with her husband, Mortimer. While rambling through the woods and fields near her new home, Sylvia encounters a mysterious boy and discovers a shrine to Pan. Notwithstanding her Silvan namesake,38 Sylvia’s appreciation of nature is, like the “would-be artist” Leyland in “The Story of a Panic” (Forster 1), superficial and aesthetic: “she looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch….Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of Art appreciation at the landscape” (Saki 180). However, she has not counted on the “somber almost savage wildness” of the rural countryside, which she had not experienced in her earlier urban life (180). She is now exposed to a “wild open savagery” in which “there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things” (180). Sylvia’s

38 The name Sylvia is derived from the ancient Roman rustic wood god , who the Romans also associated with the Greek Pan (March 116). Interestingly, Bulfinch recounts a tale based on events in ’s of “Silvia, daughter of Tyrrheus,” the herdsman to one of the Latin kings of central (249). Silvia’s pet stag is mortally wounded while hunted by ’ Trojans, and “had only strength left to run homewards, and died at his mistress’s feet” (249). Saki’s short story, which concludes with Sylvia Seltoun being gored by a stag pursued by hunting hounds, appears to be an ironic retelling of the ancient tale.

52 dispassionate complacency begins to break, as she “almost shuddered” at these thoughts

(180). Mortimer notices this change in his wife and tells her about Pan: “‘the worship of

Pan has never died out….Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn’” (180). Sylvia dismisses Mortimer’s musings, but later, while wandering through the countryside alone, she hears “the echo of a boy’s laughter, golden and equivocal” (181). This “untraceable echo was added to her other impressions of a furtive sinister ‘something’ that hung around Yessney [her new home]” (182). Though at first glance of this laughter seems an ordinary boy, looks are deceiving. Saki’s child Pan physically appears to be a youth, “‘brown-faced and rather handsome, but a scoundrel to look at’” (182). However, the boy’s hybrid monstrosity and otherness is hinted at when Sylvia refers to him as having the appearance of “‘a gipsy lad’” (182). Gypsies are often treated as a real-life monstrous other in European folktales, so it is unsurprising that Sylvia tries to rationalize the boy’s queer appearance in this way.

Sylvia later encounters a shrine in the woods, with “a small bronze figure of a youthful Pan” standing on “a stone pedestal” in a hidden grove (182). At the sight of a bunch of grapes (which are “none too plentiful at the manor house” [182]) offered to the god, she feels “contemptuous annoyance,” and “angrily” snatches them away from the shrine. This sacrilege against Pan will eventually cost Sylvia her life. On the way home, she experiences a brief panic: “a sharp feeling, of something that was very near fright”

(182). She spots “across a thick tangle of undergrowth a boy’s face…scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes” (182). This beautiful and threatening,

53 laughing and scowling boy is a manifestation of the ancient god, one of those surviving children of Pan of whom Mortimer spoke. Mortimer, who appears to be more sensitive to the possibility of Pan’s existence, later warns his wife: “‘I’ve heard it said that the Wood

Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them…I should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm’” (183).

Ignoring her husband’s warning, Sylvia continues to wander the woods. On one such ramble not long after her desecration of Pan’s altar, Sylvia hears “a low, fitful piping, as of some reedy ...coming from the depth of a neighbouring copse” (183-184). A “fat

September stag” with “huge antler spikes” appears in the distance, pursued by hounds, moving closer and closer (184). When it becomes clear that the great beast is headed straight for her, Sylvia is overcome by “wild terror at her own danger” (184). As “the pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet,” the boy Pan appears “a few paces aside, knee-deep in the whortle bushes,” unheeding her cries for help (184-185). As she is mortally gored by the stag, Sylvia is haunted by “the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death” (185). We can only assume that, like Benson’s Frank Halton, it is the horror of confronting Pan directly, the encounter with an overwhelming spiritual force that has been conducted to the physical world in the form of a child. This boy Pan, handsome, laughing, and musical, is a human conduit to the more sinister aspects of the ancient Pan.

In this story, the child Pan is vengeance and horror, bringer of panic and violent death. Significantly, he is also a queerly sexualized terror who demands devotional observance. According to Stern, the queerness of Saki’s boy Pan is reflected in Sylvia’s husband Mortimer’s deference to Pan (285). Mortimer, who is nicknamed “‘Dead

54

Mortimer’” by “his more intimate enemies,” and described as feeling an “unaffected indifference to women” (Saki 179), comes alive when speaking of Pan: according to

Sylvia, “it was at least something new and hopeful to hear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy and conviction on any subject” (180-181). Stern argues that Sylvia acts as though she suspects a queer intimacy or attraction between her husband and Pan, and suggests that her hostility to the boy Pan is because she “sense[s] his status as her competitor” for Mortimer’s affections (285). By refusing to submit to the boy Pan, Sylvia becomes a target, “and so he kills her into the properly submissive posture” (285). This death is also sexualized as the boy Pan watches her be impaled on the phallic “huge antler spikes” of the stag (Saki 184). This reading of the ending can be understood as a sexual sacrifice to a jealous and spiteful queer god. It is, moreover, the Pan child who ensures this payment in blood due to Pan. Sylvia’s defiance of Pan’s “mesmerizing” powers

(Stern 285), her inability to appreciate nature, and her violation of Pan’s secret garden shrine39 mark her, like or the narrator of “The Story of a Panic,” as a foe to the free expression of imaginative possibility, whether it be flying through Neverland or experiencing nature through union with ancient spirits of the land. Sylvia represents the disconnected, decadent, unspiritual, materialist adult world against whom the child Pan stands opposed. The monstrous child Pan amplifies the violent (and often sexually violent) tendencies of the ancient god, like his ability to inspire panic terror and wreak vengeance on his worshippers’ enemies. In this case, rather than reorienting the subject to new, alternative possibilities, the queerly monstrous child denies the normative adult redemption or the ability to change. Gatekeeper to alternative spaces of worship and ways

39 Described as “an open space in a copse, further shut in by huge yew trees” (182), Pan’s natural shrine would not be out of place in Burnett’s secret garden.

55 of living with nature, the monstrous child Pan blocks entry into Neverland like a Cerebus, and abandons normative adults to a kind of , bereft of spiritual or rational comfort.

Eustace, Forster’s child Pan in “The Story of a Panic,” and the rejuvenated Frank

Halton in Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too Far,” share some similarities with Saki’s sinister boy. Like him, Eustace and Frank are human stand-ins for the goat-god, and physical conduits to a supernatural Pan. Through them one can connect directly to Pan.

However, in order to achieve this unity with Pan, a sacrifice must be made: either one’s own death is required (as with Frank) or the death of another (for Eustace, it is the servant

Gennaro). This sacrifice is required in order to step beyond the threshold of rational, physical reality, and into the monstrous and fantastical.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s fifth thesis in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” is entitled “The

Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible.” Cohen argues that “the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes….[The monster] declare[s] that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded, that one is better off safely contained within one’s own domestic sphere than abroad” (“Monster Culture” 12). Moreover, the monster’s role is to prevent “mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual)” and to delimit

“the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself” (“Monster Culture” 12). As human conduits to a mystical entity, the monstrous child Pan is warden of the borderland between the normative physical world and a fantastical spiritual realm. The price of entry into the spiritual realm is blood, whether it be a claim of revenge (as in Saki), or a price to be paid for physical and

56 spiritual communion with Pan (as in Forster and Benson). The monstrous child Pan will take his due before fully lifting the veil to the queerly immaterial. Yet before this price is paid, the subject typically receives some glimpse of the queer space beyond. The brief glimpses of the infinite possibilities offered to living beings prior to full acceptance into

Pan’s realm usually causes overwhelming panic and fear in adults.

“The Story of a Panic” is the best known work of this batch of three tales of monstrous Pan children. Though this work, like most of Forster’s corpus, has not lacked critical attention (including several studies dealing with Forster and Pan40), this work has not yet been contextualized in an analysis dealing specifically with monstrous child Pans.

The story depicts a group of British holidaymakers in Italy around the turn of the 20th century. The narrator is an adult member of the party resistant to the possibility of the fantastical, and unsympathetic toward Eustace, a sickly boy of fourteen. The story opens with the tourists on an outing in the Italian countryside. Eustace is seen carving a wooden whistle, which he then begins to blow, sounding what the adults describe as an

“excruciating,” “earsplitting and discordant” note (5). This piping noise appears to summon Pan, who causes a panic in the adult characters. They experience first “a fanciful feeling of foreboding,” and then become “terribly frightened” as “all the channels of sense and reason were blocked” (6). As the narrator recounts, this

was not the spiritual fear that one has known at other times, but brutal,

over-mastering, physical fear, stopping up the ears, and dropping clouds

before the eyes, and filling the mouth with foul tastes. And it was no

ordinary humiliation that survived; for I had been afraid, not as a man, but

40 See Greenslade’s “‘Pan’ and the Open Road: Critical Paganism in R. L. Stevenson, K. Grahame, E. Thomas, and E. M. Forster,” Varty’s “E. M. Forster, Arnold Böcklin, and Pan,” and pp. 180-186 of Merivale’s Pan the Goat-God.

57

as a beast. (6)

Adults are humbled by the Pan child, prostrated in fear before the power of the ancient god conducted through a boy’s form. Pan extracts sacrifice, fear, and humiliation from the conformist adults, upending their world and leaving them unmoored from all they had thought certain, like castaways on a roiling .

For Eustace, however, the touch of Pan proves physically invigorating and restorative. Before his encounter with Pan, Eustace is described in abhorrent terms: he is

“indescribably repellent” (1), with a “peevish, discontented frown” (8), his “feet shuffling up the dust and his shoulders stooping forward….his features were pale, his chest contracted, and his muscles undeveloped” (2). After his encounter with Pan, Eustace is transformed: his “sluggish blood” has “thaw[ed]” and his “stiffened muscles” have begun to “loosen” (10). Even the narrator’s language changes: Eustace “stepped out manfully, for the first time in his life, holding his head up and taking deep drafts of air into his lungs….Eustace was at last taking some pride in his personal appearance” (10). Whether or not Pan’s influence is benevolent or monstrous depends as much on one’s sensitivity to the god as it does on one’s openness to alternative possibilities.

The adults do not see the boy’s new, queerly invigorated state of being as an unalloyed good, however. Though they do not accept the existence of Pan as a real entity, the adults do interpret this newfound influence guiding Eustace as monstrous and evil. As

Greenslade argues, the adults see Eustace’s “metamorphosis into the child of Pan” as a threatening “libidinous excess” characterized by “energies [that] transgress or ignore the norm” (150-151). To them, Eustace is “getting too uproarious,” “scurrying in front of us like a goat” (Forster 11). He now wears a “disquieting smile, which always seemed to be

58 without adequate reason” (8). He springs and leaps, laughs and shouts heartily, startling the stiff English tourists. He begins “saluting, praising, and blessing the great forces and manifestations of Nature” (16). The adults find this queer talk “all absurdly high faluting,” “pitiable conversational doggerel,” and dangerous: as the artist Leyland observes, Eustace’s words are “‘a diabolical caricature of all that was most holy and beautiful in life’” (17). While for Eustace this has been a liberating moment of queer sideways growth into alternative avenues of expression and existence, for the adults it is a sign of grave illness that must be cured. In order to bring Eustace back to his old, weak self, they try to keep him indoors in a room with barred windows. Fortunately for the boy, the servant Gennaro, who has himself experienced “‘the first night’” after contact with Pan, knows that Eustace must spend it out of doors or else he will die (21). Though bribed by the English adults to help capture Eustace, ultimately Gennaro himself for the child. He sneaks Eustace outside and then suddenly drops dead to the

“still resound[ing]…shouts and the laughter of the escaping boy” (23). In spite of

Gennaro’s death, Forster’s story ends on a more optimistic note than Saki’s. Thanks to

Pan and the Italian servant’s sacrifice, Eustace escapes the stifling company of jaded adults and lives freed of cares and social pressures for the first time. Though monstrously disturbing, panic-inducing, and deadly, Pan’s influence on Eustace is beneficial, turning a passive, restrained child into an active, animalistic being exuding vibrant life.

The effect of the Pan child in Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too Far” differs from Forster’s in that unlike Eustace, who appears to have achieved a new level of freedom via his transformation into a child Pan, Frank Halton does not survive the touch of Pan. Frank, age thirty-five, formerly a painter of note, has for some years given up

59 painting even though his “‘old pictures fetch huge prices’” (Benson 109). Frank has retired to the country and discovered a deep connection to nature and to Pan that has fundamentally altered and rejuvenated him. The story opens with Frank receiving a visit from Darcy, an old artist friend with whom he once shared a studio. Darcy gradually discovers that the changes his friend has undergone are more mysterious than they first appear. Frank draws inexorably closer to forces that he cannot comprehend, resulting in his horrific death at the hoofs of Pan. Here it is Frank, a pseudo-child Pan, rather than an outside observer, who is made to sacrifice his life to the god.

Benson’s Pan story has received comparatively little critical attention over the years. This may in part be due to the notion that Benson was more of a popular rather than literary writer. Despite the author’s enduring popularity, particularly as a writer of ghost and horror stories, there have been very few scholarly studies of Benson’s work; regarding “The Man Who Went Too Far” specifically, my research has only unearthed one scholarly article by Nicholas Freeman, and a brief discussion in Merivale’s Pan the

Goat-God. Yet, as Hensher puts it, “the vast Benson oeuvre always turns up something with a powerful period atmosphere,” and this fact alone makes his works evocative and worth reading. “The Man Who Went Too Far” is rife with atmosphere. Mystery, , paganism, foreboding, and powerful queer sexual energy: the story microcosmically evokes these key elements of the Edwardian Pan phenomenon. As

Freeman argues, for Edwardians Pan was a “multivalent symbol” that “could liberate and terrify, instruct and destroy” (24). This story in particular, “spiced with plentiful homoeroticism and on transgression” (25-26), wholly embodies these sentiments. Any study of literary Pans would be incomplete without examining this

60 fascinating work.

Benson’s tale, like “The Story of a Panic,” is haunted by the shadow of an unseen

Pan who exerts a powerful influence over a child Pan. As in both Saki and Forster’s stories, Pan hovers just outside of sensory perception. On occasion, he lets his presence be felt, for example through the sound of rustic pipes being played. While in Forster the piping comes from Eustace’s carved whistle, in both Benson and Saki it is the sound of actual pipes. To Frank, this music is “‘the sound of life….the voice of Nature. It [is] the life-melody, the world-melody’” (113). As in the other stories, the sound of Pan’s piping precedes the intervention of a powerful and terrifying monstrous force, and the onset of panic in the listener. As Frank describes: “‘for the moment I was terrified, terrified with the impotent horror of nightmare, and I stopped my ears and just ran from the place and got back to the house panting, trembling, literally in a panic’” (113). Though Frank, like

Eustace, accepts Pan’s power over him, the potential for fear and terror is never banished, and culminates dramatically at the end of the story.

Pan’s influence over Frank is not limited to the emotionally or spiritually disturbing, however. Though chronologically thirty-five, Frank physically appears much younger. There is a parallel here between Frank and Wilde’s Dorian Gray as men who mysteriously maintain boyish youth. Yet while both revel in physical experience, Frank is not a hedonist. Rather, he is a seeker: a pilgrim in search of knowledge and spiritual renewal through Pan and nature. His youth is merely a byproduct of this , which leaves him “without other thought or desire or aim except the hourly and never-ceasing communion with the joy of nature” (Benson 119). Frank’s youth is a sign of his thralldom to Pan, who at the end of the story will exact a blood price for this gift. It is Pan who has

61 reversed time for Frank, and allowed him to live in a youthful, idyllic at-oneness with his natural surroundings—his own private Neverland—rejuvenated and uncannily maintaining the appearance of an adolescent. As the narrator describes him, Frank’s face

would have led you to believe that he was a beardless lad still in his teens.

But something, some look which living and experience alone can give,

seemed to contradict that, and finding yourself completely puzzled as to

his age, you would next moment probably cease to think about that, and

only look at this glorious specimen of young manhood with wondering

satisfaction. (107)

The passing of chronological time seems to exert no power over the Pan child.

Frank, like other Pan children, is as physically developed as he will ever be. This period of extended youth queers both time and sexuality. Puzzling and attractive, inexplicable and yet strangely satisfying, Frank’s appearance and actions are charged with animalistic homoeroticism.

The third person narrator of the story, who states that he is a friend of Darcy’s, claims to have based his story on Darcy’s account. This builds a level of distance between the narrator and the events described, and leaves unclear whose words the narrator is using when describing Frank. The ambiguity over the source of Frank’s description makes it difficult to ascribe definitively to Darcy the possibility of erotic attraction to Frank. Nevertheless, whether coming from Darcy, interjected by the narrator, or both, Frank’s body and his physicality are repeatedly depicted in a homoerotic and sexually charged manner. He is first described as “a young man, or so he struck the beholder, of great personal beauty, with something about him that made men’s

62 faces to smile and brighten when they looked on him” (106). Frank’s physical activity is described sensually as well. His swimming is depicted as an orgasmic sexual union with the river: he “splashed and divided” the water, giving out

a great shout of ecstatic joy, as he swam up-stream with the foamed water

standing in a frill around his neck. Then after some five minutes of limb-

stretching struggle with the flood, he turned over on his back, and with

arms thrown wide, floated down-stream, ripple-cradled and inert. His eyes

were shut, and between half parted lips he talked gently to himself.

“I am one with it,” he said to himself, “the river and I, I and the river.”

(107)

Frank’s sensuality, and his preternatural connection with nature and his body, electrifies Darcy: Frank “stood there like some beautiful wild animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, and drinking in the scented warmth of the air” (117-118). He flings himself on the grass,

burying his face in the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in

wide-armed ecstasy, with his long fingers caressing and stroking the dewy

herbs of the field….his caressing fingers, his half-buried face pressed

close to the grass, even the clothed lines of his figure were instinct with a

vitality that was somehow different from that of other men. And some

faint glow from it reached Darcy, some thrill, some vibration from that

charged recumbent body passed to him. (118)

Frank’s freedom and willingness to give in to this sensuality, exemplified by the lustful stroking of the grass, attracts Darcy. Pan has liberated Frank spiritually and

63 physically, allowing him to express himself in ways that would seem abnormal in other circumstances. Darcy finds Frank’s queer ability to let go and enjoy physical sensations to be compelling, to the point that Darcy feels Frank’s sensuality energizing his own body and mind. One night when Darcy cannot , Frank enters his room and hypnotizes Darcy to sleep with fantastical talk:

the whole strange talk he had had was under a spell of suggestion from the

extraordinary vivid boy who had once been a man; all his own excitement,

his acceptance of the incredible had been merely the effect of a stronger,

more potent will imposed on his own. How strong that will was, he

guessed from his own instantaneous obedience to Frank’s suggestion of

sleep. And armed with impenetrable common sense he came down to

breakfast. (115-116)

Darcy tries to resist, telling Frank the next day “in a voice prickly with reason” that he “‘talked an amazing quantity of nonsense last night’” (116). However, the sight of

Frank’s queerly youthful body undermines Darcy’s reason: “in the morning light Frank looked even fresher, younger, more vital than he had done the night before, and the sight of him somehow dinted Darcy’s armour of common sense” (116). The man/child Frank disorients Darcy with his body (much like Mortimer is mesmerized by the boy Pan, according to Stern’s reading of Saki), which opens Darcy’s mind to new, queer orientations made possible by Frank’s union with Pan. In this sense, Pan uses Frank’s preternaturally youthful and beautiful body as a wedge to pry open the doors of reason, thus revealing magical, queer alternatives to rationality.

Frank’s queerness is not limited to the sexual, however. “The miracle of Frank’s

64 youth” (118) can be understood through Stockton’s reading of queer children who grow sideways rather than up. As Frank puts it,

“quite true my body has become young. But that is very little; I have

become young….Think what youth means! It is the capacity for growth,

mind, body, spirit, all grow, all get stronger, all have a fuller, firmer life

every day….A man reaches his prime, and remains, we say, in his prime

for ten years, or perhaps twenty. But after his primest prime is reached, he

slowly, insensibly weakens….But I, when I reach my prime—I am

nearing it—ah, you shall see.” (110)

By remaining young Frank’s ability to learn and grow experientially, emotionally, and creatively, expands without the physical decline and social pressures inherent to the aging process. By remaining an adolescent Frank rejects the demands and physical limitations of heteronormative society, and removes himself from the rat race of mundane modernity. Frank need never find a job, or marry, or have children to whom he must be responsible. It is this essential queerness, this rejection of aging, responsibilities, and the passing of sequential time, and the embrace of an eternally youthful, momentary existence, which most clearly aligns Frank with both Stockton’s queer child and the other queer children of Pan discussed in this chapter.

The touch of Pan can create a child monster or savior, and sometimes both at once. For most of the story Frank appears to be a savior, attracting Darcy to his liberated, sensual existence alongside nature. Frank that his contact with Pan, which has given him this queer pseudo-adolescence and enhanced sensitivity to the natural world, is building toward something spiritually great and spectacular:

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“There will be a final revelation,” [Frank] said, “a complete and blinding

stroke which will throw open to me, once and for all, the full knowledge,

the full realisation and comprehension that I am one…with life. In reality

there is no ‘me,’ no ‘you,’ no ‘it.’ Everything is part of the one and only

thing which is life. I know that that is so, but the realization of it is not yet

mine. But it will be, and on that day, so I take it, I shall see Pan. It may

mean death, the death of my body, that is, but I ’t care. It may mean

immortal, eternal life lived here and now and forever….I shall preach such

a gospel of joy, showing myself as a living proof of the truth, that

Puritanism, the dismal religion of sour faces, shall vanish like a breath of

smoke, and be dispersed and disappear in the sunlit air.” (114-115)

Although aware that it could mean his death, Frank is hopeful that spiritual consummation with Pan will result in a new, heightened level of existence, beyond the ordinary and freed from the constraints of repressive religious and social ideas.

Nevertheless, this child Pan is not a savior of humankind but is rather thrall to a monstrous god who will have his blood price. Whether or not Frank achieves personal liberation is left ambiguous;41 however, it is clear that he a frightful death. In the middle of the night, Darcy awakens to “a scream of supreme and despairing terror,” and to Frank’s “quivering sobbing voice” crying out for mercy not to Pan, but to the Christian

God: “‘Oh my God, oh, my God; oh, Christ!’” (121). Darcy then hears “a little mocking, bleating laugh” (121). Rushing outside, he sees Frank sitting up on a hammock in the

41 The narrator suggests a ghostly purgatorial ending for Frank during the story’s prologue: “His ghost they will tell you ‘walks’ constantly by the stream and through the woods which he loved so, and in especial haunts a certain house, the last of the village, where he lived, and its garden in which he was done to death. For my part I am inclined to think that the terror of the Forest dates chiefly from that day” (106).

66 . Darcy notices an “an obscure dark shadow” lying across Frank’s body, and senses “some sharp and acrid smell” that grows “more intense” as he steps closer (121).

As Darcy closes in, “the black shadow seemed to jump into the air, then came down with tappings of hard hoofs on the brick path that ran down the pergola, and with frolicsome skippings galloped off into the bushes” (121). The monstrous Pan has returned for his child, taking his spirit and leaving the body a shell. The process leaves Frank’s “face a mask of horrible contorted terror” (121-122), with “terror incarnate and repulsion and deathly anguish ruled dreadful on his smooth cheeks and forehead” (122). Frank’s chest is marked by “strange discolorations…as if caused by the hoofs of some monstrous goat that had leaped and stamped upon him” (122). Though in death the horrified expression on Frank’s face fades into a serene smile as of “a boy tired with play” (122), this does little to allay Darcy’s anxieties. Frank’s death casts a pall over the ideas of liberation through the Pannish, childlike existence that he had expressed earlier. Frank, queer child of Pan, has instead returned to his monstrous father.

Like Forster’s story, Benson’s is less concerned with the actual monstrosity of child Pans than with the risk of horror and death that they are prone to experiencing, particularly when striving for liberation through the ancient god. Though the allure is strong, the potential costs are high. Benson and Forster’s child Pans are gamblers playing a thrilling and terrible Russian roulette. They could potentially free themselves from the constraints of a puritanical modern Britain; yet they risk losing their lives, or killing others, in the gamble. Though Saki’s story does not share this emphasis, all three stories consider the dangers that the child Pan poses to others, be they observing, partaking, or interfering in the mysteries of the ancient god. And in each story, the price of admission

67 to these mysteries is paid in blood. In the next section I will look at the dangerous games of another boy Pan that, as I argue, is at once openly monstrous and yet attractive, restorative and yet destructive: Peter Pan.

Peter Pan, Monstrosity, and the Child Pan Phenomenon

Although Peter Pan is not a Gothic horror story like Benson’s “The Man Who

Went Too Far” or Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” it is a monstrously queer tale. Let us begin with some broader questions—who is the queer Pan child named Peter, this monstrously charming rebel seeking to subvert the adult world? What is it about him that has made him so compelling a character for over a century? As attractive as Peter is, he also possesses some of the darker attributes of his ancient namesake. The popular image of Peter Pan as a mischievous but innocent eternal child is an oversimplification that

Barrie himself remarks upon in relation to the famous erected in

Kensington Gardens in 1912:42 he complained that “‘it doesn’t show the Devil in Peter’”

(qtd. in McGavock 43). Barrie gives Peter not only relatively innocuous characteristics of the ancient Pan, like his playful, tricksterish qualities and his close connection to nature, but also some of his sinister features, including the ability to inflict panic terror, a lack of compunction regarding acts of violence, and the ability to very suddenly and intensely disrupt one’s thoughts and emotions. In Barrie, these disruptive and terrifying characteristics are consistently counterpointed by glimpses of Peter’s joyous, carefree nature.

Peter Pan is without a doubt the most well-known example of the child Pan, and, I believe, one of the most fascinating and complex. As a queer child, he serves as the

42 Erected in 1912, the statue was commissioned in 1902 by Barrie, and sculpted by Sir (Royalparks.org.uk).

68 ultimate example of what Stockton calls the child “queered by innocence” (“Eve’s Queer

Child” 186). Children queered by innocence are “estrange[d]” from “the adulthood against which they must be defined” (186). To them, “sex itself seems shockingly queer,” and indeed any “approach to normal couplehood” is “suspended” indefinitely (186).

Peter, for example, cannot play at—let alone comprehend—being father to the Lost Boys and husband to Wendy’s mother/wife. Instead, he queerly chooses to be Wendy’s son while remaining father to the boys. Peter’s queerness is expansive, growing outwards and influencing others so that they, too, are reoriented to new, queer possibilities. In Peter’s queer family, the other characters accept the unusual state of affairs because of Peter’s overwhelming charisma, imaginative capabilities, and force of will. Children and some adults find Peter so attractive and persuasive that he can imaginatively warp their perception and experience of reality. In short order he convinces the Darling children not only to abandon their families and run off with him, but also that they can fly, that the fantastical Neverland is a real destination, and that do exist. Once in Neverland,

Peter’s imagination and will are so powerful that the Darlings and the Lost Boys are persuaded to play along and even to want to believe that their “make-believe” meals are real food (69), that Slightly is a doctor (61), and that John’s is a chimney (63), even when the children seem to know better.

That the children in the story actually disappear from the “real” world upon flying away to Neverland, and that all the things that they see and experience in Neverland— flying, fairies, chimney-, and so forth—appear to be really happening, raises many questions regarding the line between fantasy and reality, and between different levels of fantasy. For example, though the children play at being Wendy’s children, their battles

69 with the pirates appear to be real, and the children appear to be in real peril of their lives while Captain Hook is around. There is no easy way of explaining what should be understood as real or fantasy. Perhaps the best way of approaching this is to consider

Peter and Neverland as inextricably linked. Neverland cannot exist without Peter, and vice versa. Peter is the only one who seems to be able to actually shape and change what happens in Neverland through his imaginative vision, be it a chimney-hat or an imaginary meal. Like the ancient Pan in the wilds of , Peter is the master of his sanctuary

Neverland, and if any dare to doubt his imaginative vision, he is quick to punish or chastise them into submission:

The difference between [Peter] and the other boys at such a time was that

they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were

exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had

to make-believe that they had had their dinners.

If they broke down in their make-believe he rapped them on the knuckles.

(61)

Here Peter is a disciplinary force, not merely policing the borders of the possible

(as per Cohen’s fifth thesis in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”), but expanding them.

Stick around Peter and make-believe will become as queerly real as Neverland appears to be. He has simply to put a hat on top of a roof and call it chimney, and poof—“smoke immediately began to come out of the hat” (63).

Even when there is no overt threat of violence, the children feel queerly compelled to follow Peter’s imaginative lead, as in this passage describing Wendy’s cooking and their meals:

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The cooking, I can tell you, kept her nose to the pot, and even if there was

nothing in it, even though there was no pot, she had to keep watching that

it came aboil just the same. You never exactly knew whether there would

be a real meal or just a make-believe, it all depended upon Peter’s

whim….Make-believe was so real to him that during a meal of it you

could see him getting rounder. Of course it was trying, but you simply had

to follow his lead. (69)

Peter’s ability to compel others to share in his queer, overwhelming visions of imaginative excess is an echo of the mythological Pan’s ability to overwhelm those who encounter him with awe and panic fear. As in ancient stories depicting this monstrous aspect of the god, Peter is capable of exerting his will over others whether or not they voluntarily submit to him in a manner that, though matted by a veneer of charm and playfulness, is disturbing in its tyranny and potential for violence, as exemplified by poor

Slightly who, due to his “chapped knuckles” (61) remains anxious and on edge when negotiating Peter’s . Peter forces his queer visions onto others, and woe to those who might disagree.

It is, however, in Peter’s interactions with adults like Hook and the pirates where the charming, compelling veneer actually heightens Peter’s monstrosity by making the terror that the pirates feel even more frightening because Peter enjoys inflicting it on them. For example, when Peter sneaks on board Hook’s ship, he playfully terrorizes the pirates while hidden in of the ship’s cabin, crowing with pleasure as he kills them one by one when they enter: “…of a sudden the song was stayed by a dreadful screech from the cabin. It wailed through the ship, and died away. Then was heard a

71 crowing sound which was well understood by the boys, but to the Pirates was almost more eerie than the screech” (125). The pirates, who believe the old sailor’s superstition that “‘the surest sign a ship’s accurst is when there’s one on board more than can be accounted for’”43 (Barrie, Peter and Wendy 127), hover on the edge of panic terror while

Peter is having a grand old time. Later, during the climactic final battle with Hook and the pirates, Peter fights ferociously and without mercy. Suddenly, however, this vicious and terrible aspect of Peter is inexplicably interrupted:

Hitherto [Hook] had thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker

suspicions assailed him now.

“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily.

“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that

has broken out of the egg.” (130)

Peter is a slippery creature: one moment he is a shadowy, pirate-killing, - wielding fiend, and the next he whimsically claims to be a living expression of youth and untrammeled joy. This counter punctuation of joy and terror only heightens the pirates’ fear; and yet, for the reader such moments cause hesitation and reflection. This morphing, contradictory Pan child is intrusive and impossible to ignore. Peter is neither good nor evil, but beyond dichotomous categorizations. He is something new, transitive, and queer: a child that is not quite a child, a monstrosity that is not quite a monster. He is an

über -child possessed of stereotypical childhood traits in fantastically exaggerated form.

Charming and tyrannical, joyful and wicked, with incredible powers of imagination, he is like a warped mirror image depicting a monstrous ten foot tall child. Depending on the

43 The pirates are convinced that Peter, who is making horrifying noises and killing pirates in the dark, is the Devil himself. See Zipes p. 232, footnotes 4 and 5 to Chap. XV of Peter and Wendy, and McGavock pp. 44 for more on Peter as a devil and/or haunting presence.

72 beholder’s perspective, this image can be either frightening or hilarious, but it will always grab one’s attention, for it needs it in order to exist. Peter Pan without an audience would be a sad little boy living in his imagination. Those who heed his crow, adult or child, become enraptured (like Wendy) or obsessed (like Hook).

Despite the appeal of Peter’s siren call of youth and joy, some critics read him as a dead child, while others (pointing to his origins in Barrie’s earlier novel Peter Pan in

Kensington Gardens) read Peter as a child stolen away to fairyland, a common motif in

European . Peter is in either case a lost child: forever lost to his parents and to the normative “real” world, and blessed/cursed with a queerly eternal childhood.

Hollindale describes Peter’s state as “the death-in-life of perpetual youth” (xiv).

While the allure of an eternal childhood free from adult concerns cannot be denied, there is also something frightening and monstrous about the possibility. Peter’s very existence seems a living curse against adulthood, as illustrated in this passage from Peter and

Wendy:

…[Peter] was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who, as usual, were

spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed

intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He

did this because there is a saying in the Neverland that, every time you

breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them off vindictively as

fast as possible. (98-99)

Peter believes that this act of sucking in air vampirically sucks the life out of adults. In many respects the contemporary monster that Peter Pan most closely resembles is indeed the vampire. Like a vampire, Peter has to be let into one’s home by invitation:

73 in the case of the Darling household, leaving a window open for him to enter. Peter can change his size and shape, which he does in order to fit through a hollow tree trunk he uses as a door to his underground home. Like Polidori’s Lord Ruthven or Le Fanu’s

Carmilla, Peter possesses a powerful personal magnetism that other characters find intensely attractive or repulsive, and sometimes both at once. Like Stoker’s on board the , Peter stalks the dark spaces of the pirate ship, killing the crew (who believe him a devil) one by one. Finally, like most vampires, Peter remains youthful forever and (for a while, anyway) has no shadow. As Baum remarks “absence of a shadow is symptomatic of the dead (rather, the undead), who feed upon the living” (73).

Peter feeds off of others—not by drinking their blood, but rather by drinking their affection (which he does not return equally)44 and in the case of many adults, their hatred

(which he returns in spades). Given these parallels there is little wonder that the classic

1980s vampire movie The Lost Boys borrows its title from Peter’s rebellious band of lost magical children.45 And yet like those vampiric boys of B-cinema, one cannot help but find Peter, that cocky little despot-king of Neverland, appealing and attractive despite being repulsed at some of the wicked things that he does. This queer admixture of attraction and repulsion for Peter reflects an inherent monstrosity which, like Cohen’s description of the monstrous, “quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” (“Monster Culture” 4). Peter is the focal point of both desire and paralyzing fear.

Try to name all the characters who want to be with or possess Peter and you will rapidly run out of fingers on which to count. And though the number of characters who are in

44 Peter generally does not express affection or adoration for others the way that Wendy, , , or the other children do for him. 45 It should be noted that in Victorian and Edwardian horror stories featuring Pan, the god is often vampiric in that he drains the life out of victims (see Machen or Benson).

74 deadly fear of Peter is a bit smaller, if you add those who are a little afraid of him—like

Slightly, who has had his knuckles rapped by Peter all too often—you would find that the lists are almost identical. To love Peter is to fear him, and vice versa.

Peter’s queer childhood is closely linked to the perception and development of

Peter’s monstrosity. While to other characters the queer possibility of an eternal childhood is both attractive and horrifying, for Peter the sense of horror is somewhat tempered by his inability to remember much beyond the present moment. This ability to queer the past and future by shattering the boundaries between the two allows Peter to live entirely in the present. Unlike the vampire, whose eternal life has left her or him filled with memories of triumphs and , Peter’s memory is fleeting. He is not consciously bothered by the cares of yesterday because there is no yesterday for him (the key exception being when Peter sleeps and occasionally suffers nightmares, which unconsciously resurrect memories of his lost mother). Peter’s forgetfulness keeps painful memories in check,46 and is essential to maintaining Peter’s queer state of eternal childhood. Memory is, after all, what allows one to learn from past mistakes. From childhood each new memory builds upon other memories, over time sequentially constructing an edifice of experiential learning. Our adult selves are in many ways the sum of these memories and a pain-staking sequential learning process. Peter sidesteps such chronological growth by not being physically capable of memory. Instead, he grows through his imagination in a much more active, willful, and temporary fashion. When he is hungry, Peter imagines a meal, and his belly grows full. When he wants a chimney, a hat is reimagined as a chimney, and smoke issues forth. This is queer sideways growth—

46 See also Gavin’s essay “Unadulterated Childhood.” Gavin notes that Peter recalls painful memories of the mother who supposedly abandoned him “only when provoked” (168).

75 against the grain, momentarily expansive, sensorial, and fleeting. Possessed of an unusually powerful imagination, and the ability to avoid being in the grip of past events,

Peter is the ultimate queer child, able to maintain his childlike status eternally.

Peter’s Shadow: Hook and the Eternal Boy

While the queerness of Peter’s eternally frozen childhood is part of what makes him a monstrous figure, it is paradoxically also what keeps him from becoming an even more horrifying monster like Hook. While Hook is around as a foil, Peter’s monstrosity can only go so far. It is only forcefully directed against adults who either defy his will or seek to control him. This heroic monstrosity is harnessed to Peter’s status as champion of the Darling children, the Lost Boys, the Indians, and the other denizens of Neverland who resist Captain Hook’s authoritarian adult-ness. His ability to terrify Hook and the pirates while thrilling Hook’s child captives further reflects the slipperiness and liminality of

Peter’s queer nature. Peter is a creature dwelling on gray borderlines: between life and death, monster and hero, child and fairy-spirit. Peter’s queer childhood is a blessing and curse, making him into a heroic figure of resistance, and keeping him young, full of joy, and attractive, but it also makes him frightening and monstrous, and a target for adults seeking to impose hegemony over him or other children.

Peter’s monstrosity is fluid and mutable. After defeating Hook, it creeps inwards, nearly conquering Peter and turning him into a second Hook. I read his near transformation as a momentary surrender to the monster within the queer child. If queerness is understood as something lacking clear definition and which cannot be easily classified, then Peter’s metamorphosis into Hook, Jr. can be read as a victory of a normative, hereditary, traditional Gothic monstrosity over the queer, difficult to classify

76 hybrid child-fairy-monster Peter Pan. From this perspective, Hook’s obsessive hunt for

Peter is a quest for a monstrous heir to take the place of the father.47 If Peter is the ultimate example of a queer child, Hook is the ultimate example of a monstrous in children’s fiction. Hook’s monstrosity aligns him with literary Gothic traditions. Like villains from Manfred in The Castle of to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Hook is filled with painful thoughts and memories of regret and failure. He has “a presentiment of his early dissolution” and “a gloomy desire to make his dying speech, lest presently there should be no time for it” (Barrie, Peter and Wendy 118). He laments his unquenchable “ambition” and the fact that “‘No little children love me!’” (118). As in

Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, the reader is made to feel sympathy for the brooding villain, here described by the narrator as “James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure”

(132). One of the most revealing windows into Hook’s character is found in “Chapter

XIV: The Pirate Ship” in Peter and Wendy:

But there was no elation in his gait, which kept pace with the

action of his somber mind. Hook was profoundly dejected.

He was often thus when communing with himself on board ship in

the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone. This

inscrutable man never felt more alone than when surrounded by his dogs

[the other pirates]. They were socially so inferior to him.

Hook was not his true name....he had been at a famous public

school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments….He still

adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he

47 It seems no coincidence that, in a tradition dating back to the earliest performances of the play Peter Pan, the same would play both Hook and Mr. Darling, the play’s two central father figures (Birkin).

77

retained the passion for good form.

Good form! However much he may have degenerated, he still

knew that this is all that really matters. (117)

Hook’s obsession with “good form,” and his feeling that Peter exhibits “bad form” is a notable instance of the enduring effect of the disciplining of children.

According to Barrie, Hook once attended Eton,48 and its rules and traditions which “clung to him like garments” could never be forgotten (117). Even in his last moments, Hook’s mind returns to his schooldays and proper dress: “and his shoes were right, and his waistcoat was right, and his tie was right, and his socks were right” (132). His last words in the novel are a jeering cry of “bad form” directed at Peter, who has just delivered an ungentlemanly kick to send Hook over the ship’s side to the awaiting crocodile (132).

Peter, the antithesis of the disciplined, proper schoolboy exhibiting good form, reflects a liberated, undisciplined understanding of childhood opposed to the values driven into

Hook during his schooling. Yet Hook’s attribution to himself and to Peter of diametrically opposite characteristics—Hook signifying good form and discipline, Peter as bad form and rebelliousness—belies a symbiotic relationship between the two characters. The two are connected by their monstrosity. The monstrous villain Hook is the shadow of the innocent boy Peter, and the monstrous queer Pan child is the shadow of the long-suffering, sensitive Hook. Hook and Peter are shadows of each other—two sides of the same coin. But like a trick coin with two heads, the two are more alike than different. This is best illustrated in both the novel and the play when Peter nearly

48 On July 7, 1927, J. M. Barrie delivered a speech at Eton College entitled “Captain Hook at Eton,” which details Hook’s boyhood years at the school (Barrie, M’Connachie and J.M.B. 108). In the play, when Hook goes over the side of the ship to his death, he is last heard “murmuring Floreat Etona” (Barrie, Peter Pan 5.1), Eton’s Latin motto.

78 transforms into Hook.

This moment is worth lingering over, for it is here that Peter submits to his purely monstrous side, nearly abandoning the eternal childhood that that had kept him “betwixt and between” monster and child. After Peter causes Hook’s death he seems to channel

Hook’s brooding spirit. In the play, the tableau scene following Hook’s death is described in just two sentences in the stage directions: “The curtain rises to show Peter a very

Napoleon on his ship. It must not rise again lest we see him on the poop in Hook’s hat and cigars, and with a small iron claw” (Barrie, Peter Pan 5.1). Peter has taken over

Hook’s ship, replacing Hook and the pirates with himself and the Lost Boys. He inhabits

Hook’s spaces, claims his former possessions, and even his physical characteristics.

Because this scene in the play is less descriptive than the one in the novel, the reader/viewer is left with the impression that Peter has indeed become Hook, at least for a time. Peter’s monstrous transformation into “Captain Pan” (Barrie, Peter and Wendy 134) is described in further detail in the novel:

They all donned pirate clothes cut off at the knee, shaved smartly, and

tumbled up, with the true nautical roll and hitching their trousers.

It need not be said who was the captain….[Peter] piped all hands

and delivered a short address to them; said he hoped they would do their

duty like gallant hearties, but that he knew they were the scum of Rio and

the Coast, and if they snapped at him he would tear them…

Some of them wanted it to be an honest ship and others were in

favour of keeping it a pirate; but the captain treated them as dogs, and they

dared not express their wishes to him even in a round robin. Instant

79

obedience was the only safe thing. Slightly got a dozen [lashes] for

looking perplexed when told to take soundings. The general feeling was

that Peter was honest just now to lull Wendy’s suspicions, but that there

might be a change when the new suit was ready, which, against her will,

she was making for him out of some of Hook’s wickedest garments. It was

afterwards whispered among them that on the first night he wore the suit

he sat long in the cabin with Hook’s cigar-holder in his mouth and one

hand clenched, all but the forefinger, which he bent and held threateningly

aloft like a hook. (134-135)

This scene in which Peter uncannily impersonates Hook is notable given that in the rest of the story care is taken to point out that Peter’s memory is fleeting. Though later he claims to have forgotten Hook (“‘I forget them all after I kill them’” he states

“carelessly” after he returns to Wendy a year later [146]), it is clear that for a time he cannot forget Hook—in fact, he seems as obsessed with Hook as Hook had been with him. It is this inability to forget Hook which nearly turns Peter into a full-fledged adult monster like his forebear. As Baum summarizes:

The tyranny of Hook is subsumed by, and resumed by, the tyranny of

Peter. Peter becomes Hook by assuming his characteristics, first

mimicking the captain’s voice, then the clock which signifies the

encroachment of Hook’s and Peter’s shared adversary; by commanding

Hook’s ship, pacing the decks like a small Napoleon; and finally…by

sitting ‘on the poop in Hook’s hat and cigars, and with a small iron claw.’

(85)

80

In replacing Hook, Peter is in danger of becoming the same clawed monster that he vanquished. Why this does not ultimately occur, and how Peter seems to forget Hook, is never explained. Perhaps Barrie wanted a happier ending for his beloved character.

Perhaps growing up into Hook would break Peter’s spell over us. Better that he continues to grow queerly sideways: as a queer child, Peter Pan is the revenant of the child abandoned or neglected by modern society. He is a reflection of the hungry, lonely “street arab,” whose plight was surveyed and brought to light in late Victorian and Edwardian

Britain by reformers like Charles Booth and Benjamin Seebhohm Rowntree. Like some of those children born into poverty, Peter uses the powers of his imagination to construct himself a meal, a family, a mother, a home. Peter Pan evokes regret, guilt, and desire in adults, from Hook who cannot possess him, to the Darlings who cannot find him or their neglected children, and to the adult Wendy who can no longer fly off to Neverland with him. Peter Pan compels adults to acknowledge their sins against children, be it on a personal or societal level. Adults react to their guilt over the treatment of children in different ways. Mr. Darling is so ashamed that he sleeps in the doghouse. Mrs. Darling and later Wendy feel a mixture of remorse and embarrassment at having become adults.

Hook reacts with fury and hatred, lashing out at the innocent child that he can never become or hope to control. All of these adult reactions to Peter are mixed with desire for the lost child—an unfulfilled longing within them that Peter brings to the surface. This is part of Peter’s monstrosity: he haunts adults with desires, longings, and regrets that can never be alleviated. Yet this monstrosity—this monsterization of the child into a queer

Pan child—is accompanied by sympathy for a motherless boy and admiration for the careless sense of joy and fun that Peter exudes. Though monstrous, he remains an

81 attractive and exciting figure. Peter Pan is more than just a child, and more than just a fictional character. As Julia Briggs remarks, “in several crucial ways Peter is never an actual child, but the age’s construction of the child, the sentimental or nostalgic memory of the little boy lost, purified and released from the less lovable or more troubling characteristics of childhood” (189-190). Heartless and cruel yet sympathetic and attractive, asexual and yet queerly desirable to both adult and child, Peter Pan has a disruptive effect on whomever he encounters. In this ability to disrupt, strike fear, and imbue others with desire, the queer child Peter Pan is a cousin of contemporary Gothic monsters like the vampire or the monstrous Pans of Machen or Benson. These Pans share a queer, transitive existence: they remain betwixt and between worlds, emotional states, life and death, monster and mortal, adult and child. The queer child Pan carries this transitive ambiguity—a queerly ambiguous monstrosity—which is part of what makes him such a fascinating character.

A Benevolent World-Shaker: Restorative Child Pans

Nearly as often as we find monstrous child Pans in Edwardian fiction we also encounter benevolent versions. The child Pans that will be examined in this section are generally gentle beings who seek to bring harmony between people and nature, to encourage feelings of love, and to revitalize those receptive to their entreaties. At the same time, these child Pans peacefully (and often mischievously) subvert adult authority through non-violent resistance and by setting examples of alternative behaviors and ways of living that provide models for others who feel constrained by the demands society places upon them. Where Peter Pan would draw a sword and slay an oppressive adult pirate, Burnett’s Dickon instead quietly flouts authority and helps win over the skeptical

82 with a smile and a gesture toward one of his animal companions.

I will focus on two distinctive examples of the benevolent Pan child: Burnett’s

Dickon from The Secret Garden and Blackwood’s Elspeth from the short story “The

Touch of Pan.”49 These two child Pans, male and female, exist in a queerly sideways state of experiential growth, growing expansively outwards but never “up,” inviting others to join them in a spiritual blossoming.50 In these stories Dickon and Elspeth find kinship with others who also yearn for liberation from the stifling domination of social order.

They are rebels, but they are peaceable rebels, undermining adult authority with displays of physical and emotional vigor and love, while offering their new friends the healing touch of nature. As resistant to oppressive domination of misguided adults as Peter Pan or

Saki’s unnamed boy, these gentler Pans win us over with affection, attraction, and their childish, Pannish charm.

A Wild Child: Algernon Blackwood’s Nymphish Pan

Until fairly recently there has been a dearth of scholarship on Algernon

Blackwood. As with Benson, this may in part be due to the perception of Blackwood as a genre writer, chiefly of horror and of children’s stories. In Blackwood’s case, at least, this has fortunately begun to change over the last few years, as a number of scholarly articles

49 There are other examples of benevolent child Pans, such as Stephen Wonham in Forster’s Longest Journey. Though not a child, Stephen maintains a childlike nature, much like Benson’s Frank Halton. Nevertheless, though childlike, I feel that Stephen veers too much on the side of adulthood to be a child Pan. He falls more easily into the overlapping field of benevolent adult Pans. For a more general discussion of benevolent Pans in 19th and early 20th century British literature, see Chapter Four of Merivale’s Pan the Goat-God. 50 A key difference between the Pan children and their companions is the way that they develop and grow. Dickon and Elspeth, as Pan children, have already achieved equilibrium. Though they experience a great deal, they do not grow up or change significantly over the course of the works. Their companions, on the other hand, undergo transformations both physical and spiritual. Mary and Colin physically change and begin to grow up, while Mr. Craven and Heber are reborn, freed of their pasts. The Pan children in these works are timeless. While others change and develop around them, they remain the same, recalling imagery of an eternally youthful Greek god.

83 and books have appeared on the author’s works.51 “The Touch of Pan” deals with many of the same themes as other more famous Pan works, including a strong sense of unity with nature, liberation from societally imposed restraints, and subversion of normative social structures. However, this tale is noteworthy in several ways, foremost for featuring one of the few female Pans. Moreover, unlike “The Story of a Panic” or Peter Pan, in which the rigidity of supposedly civilized people is more implicitly or indirectly critiqued, “The Touch of Pan” is very direct and explicit in its criticisms, specifically of upper class British society. It is a fascinating addition to the Victorian and Edwardian Pan corpus, and has to my knowledge not yet been given the in-depth critical analysis that it deserves.52 It is my hope that this chapter does something to fill this gap.

“The Touch of Pan” tells of how the Pan child Elspeth frees a young man named

Heber from the grips of a decadent and stultifying upper class society. This is achieved through reconnection with nature and direct contact with a mystical Pan. “The Touch of

Pan” takes place over the course of an evening in which a “house-party…of that up-to- date kind” (Blackwood 160) is held by Elspeth’s parents. Heber is attending this party primarily so that he might have a chance to see Elspeth again, whom he has met “once or twice, though never yet to speak to” (159). Elspeth “woke a secret joy and wonder that almost involved a touch of awe” (159) in the sensitive Heber, who is “instinctively without analysis” (159) smitten with her. This teenaged girl, whose odd behavior has caused her parents to believe that she “‘was not all there’” (159), manages to enrapture

Heber “when all the London beauties left him cold” (161). The story focuses on the

51 David Punter’s “Pity: Reflections on Algernon Blackwood's Gothic,” Anthony Camara’s “Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows,’” and Susan Johnston Graf’s Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Fortune are all recent scholarly works that provide Blackwood’s oeuvre with some much-needed attention. 52 Merivale, for example, only briefly touches on the story in Pan the Goat-God. See pp. 191-192.

84 meeting of Elspeth and Heber, and the blossoming of their relationship, against the backdrop of the party. Elspeth’s connection to Pan, and her invitation to Heber to join her in Pan’s natural, liberating celebration of life, is juxtaposed against the stale artificiality, corruption, and immorality of the party, where upper class dissipation is reflected in the socially sanctioned “final fling” (160) between (Heber’s fiancée) and Heber’s cousin.53

Elspeth, like other child Pans, exists in a queer betwixt and between state. A teenager, she is neither a young child nor yet an adult, and is repeatedly referred to as a

“girl.” Though she attracts Heber, a mature man of thirty, she is physically small and light enough for him to throw in the air like a child (Heber “tossed her off and caught her neatly as she fell” [166]) and for him to carry on his shoulders (“the girl sway[ed] this way and that upon his shoulders” [167]). Even Elspeth’s age is murky: “she was, perhaps, sixteen—for, though she looked it, eighteen or nineteen was probably more in accord with her birth certificate. Her mother was content, however, that she should dress the lesser age, preferring to tell strangers that she was childish, rather than admit that she was backward” (160). Elspeth remains poised between childhood and adulthood. Though receptive toward Heber’s advances—even initiating her own—she acts like a child, for example holding out her foot with the expectation that Heber will tie her shoelaces.

Elspeth’s queer between-ness extends to the perception of her mental state as well. Her childlike behavior has caused her to be deemed an “idiot,”54 a term that at the time

53 The house party, and the opportunity it presents for adulterous affairs, is reflective of what Marr refers to as “a real dilemma” in upper class Edwardian society: “at the top end of the social scale, adulteries were so frequent they were taken for granted by the hostesses organizing country-house weekends” (50). 54 The understanding of the term “idiot” here is similar to that of Wordsworth’s poem “The Idiot Boy” (1798). For more on the cultural history of terminology related to mental illness (like “idiocy” and “lunacy”), see History of Madness by Michel Foucault, especially Part Two, Chapter I “The Madman in the Garden of Species.”

85 denoted mental disability. Even Elspeth’s parents question their daughter’s mental health:

“her case was a mild one, possibly; the title [of idiot] bestowed by implication rather than by specific mention. Her family did not say that she was imbecile or half-witted, but that she ‘was not all there’ they probably did say” (159). Elspeth’s parents carefully position their daughter between madness and reason, as does Heber. “The Touch of Pan” pointedly opens with an explanation of Heber’s understanding of the then-medical terms

“idiot” and “lunatic”:

An idiot, Heber understood, was a person in whom intelligence had

been arrested—instinct acted, but not reason. A lunatic, on the other hand,

was some one whose reason had gone awry—the mechanism of the brain

was injured. The lunatic was out of relation with his environment; the idiot

had merely been delayed en route. (159)

This distinction is significant, for Elspeth is considered, in contemporary terms, to be an “idiot” rather than a “lunatic,” which means that she is not suffering from an illness or a condition in which some part of her has been damaged; rather, she is by nature different, odd, queer. An idiot, then, is betwixt and between madness and reason—a queer third way that allows one a broader scope of experience than the purely reasonable, minus the stigma of madness. Were Heber to consider Elspeth a lunatic, her view of the world could be construed as a byproduct of mental illness. Instead, it is presented to

Heber as a viable alternative to the ossified upper class lifestyle in which he has lived.

The ambiguity of Elspeth’s mental status in this way provides space for interpretation.

Elspeth’s social standing, too, is ambiguous. Throughout the story it is implied that Heber, who was “born into an artificial social clique” (159), is of an established

86 upper class family. He has a “distinguished cousin” (164) and is engaged to marry “the daughter of a duchess” (159). He has lived his entire life among “the whole vapid set” of

“folk [who] believed themselves the climax of fine living” (160). Elspeth, on the other hand, is described as the “young Cinderella of a parvenu family” (161). “Her millionaire parents” (161), “having collected much metal and achieved position, proceeded to make a loud noise of sorts with some success” (159-160). Elspeth and her parents, in other words, still stink of new money. Striving to escape their presumably middle-class roots, they are as yet not fully a part of the upper class. Elspeth thus exists in a queer state of multifaceted between-ness: between child and adult, reason and unreason, ability and disability, middle and upper class. As with other child Pans, such an amorphous, undefined state of being is a perfect storm for queer sideways growth. Elspeth’s between- ness allows her to turn away from predefined, chronological pathways leading to normative life, instead allowing her to live eternally in the moment, freed from responsibility to the society that her parents strive to join.

Elspeth’s parents are shackled to the expectations of their social milieu, which requires them to chastise and put distance between themselves and their queer daughter in order to be accepted by high society. Part of this attempt to woo the upper class establishment involves holding the “‘distinguished’ party” that is the backdrop of the story—and to which Heber, his fiancée, and his male cousin, as native-born members of the aristocracy, have been invited. Heber, however, feels alienated from this social milieu. Unlike his cousin or his fiancée, “Heber had always loved the simple things.

Nature, especially, meant much to him….the thought of a mountain valley in the made his feet lonely in the grandest houses. Yet in these very houses was his home

87 established” (159). Before meeting Elspeth, Heber’s dissatisfaction had no recourse; it is only after meeting her that he knows that there is an alternative to his vapid social world, and that Elspeth is the key to a more fulfilling, happier life. From the start the reader is told (and reminded repeatedly) of Heber’s disdain for the stifling artificiality of modern society, and of his desire for something different than what is expected of him:

[Elspeth’s] millionaire parents afflicted him, the smart folk tired him.

Their peculiar affectation of a special language, their strange belief that

they were of importance, their treatment of the servants, their calculated

self-indulgence…. Their open immorality disgusted him, their

indiscriminate lovemaking was merely rather nasty; he watched the very

girl he was at last to settle down with behaving as the tone of the clique

expected over her final fling—and, bored by the strain of so much

modernity, he tried to get away. (160)

As in other works of Pan literature, the trappings of civilization are the root of alienation and decay, and the turn to Pan and nature is presented as a potential restorative solution. Heber’s modern world is confining, governed by strict rules of speech and behavior, yet hypocritically it includes clauses allowing for immoral “flings” like the one between Hermione and his cousin. It is rife with self-conscious affectations, all claustrophobically enclosed indoors in the parlors and bedrooms of vulgar and

“pretentious” great houses (160). In these surroundings Heber “felt hungry for trees and fields that were not self-conscious” (160), and so steps outside and encounters Elspeth alone for the first time. By no coincidence he finds this Pan child leaning against the statue of a satyr in the garden. If the indoors belongs to the society set, the outdoors

88 belongs to Pan and his followers, like the satyr, Elspeth, and (soon) Heber, too.

The attraction between Heber and Elspeth is instantaneous. Notably, the sexual aspect of this attraction is secondary to a deep kinship between the two. This is a kinship of like rejecting discordant modernity for something simpler, purer, and more animalistic: “they were akin, as and animals were akin. They belonged together in some free and open life, natural, wild, untamed” (164). Thought, reason, and the cerebral chatter and coquetry of the parlor are pushed aside in favor of instinct and animalistic joys in nature and in physical vitality. Animalism is a central to all Pan children. Elspeth is repeatedly compared to animals of various sorts, beginning with her

“rabbit, not-all-there expression” (160), or the way that she leans against the statue’s pedestal, her “hip-line showing like a bird’s curved wing” (161). When Heber looks at

Elspeth “he thought of a panther standing upright….Wild animal or bird, flashed across his mind: something untamed and natural” (161); and again later when he sees her “he felt her as clean and sweet as some young fawn that asks plainly to be stroked and fondled” (162). This animalistic attraction and kinship comes to a head during a surreal sequence in which Elspeth leads Heber into the woods. There, they transform into a satyr and a nymph. Their “modern garb” (161) is exchanged for animal “skins of tawny colour,” their skin turns “a sweet dusky brown” (166), and “two small horns” suddenly appear, hidden “in the thick curly hair behind, and just above the ears” (167). Thus altered, they engage in an orgiastic celebration of life with other nymphs and satyrs:

…a riotous glory of wild children who romped and played with an

impassioned glee beneath the moon. For the world was young and they,

her happy offspring, glowed with the life she poured so freely into

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them....Yet, for all the untamed riot, there was a lift of beauty pulsing

underneath. Even when the wildest abandon approached the heat of orgy,

when the recklessness appeared excess—there hid that marvellous touch

of loveliness which makes the natural sacred. There was coherence,

purpose, the fulfilling of an exquisite law: there was worship. The form it

took, haply, was strange as well as riotous, yet in its strangeness dreamed

innocence and purity, and in its very riot flamed that spirit which is divine.

(168)

There is a mystical, religious tint to the language used to describe this scene which differentiates the more reverent of Pan’s disciples from the decadent excesses of the indoor partygoers. This outdoor celebration is a liberating rather than confining experience that rejoices in unity with the natural world, with each other, and with the divine spirit of Pan, who appears to his followers in a passage emphasizing both the ancient god’s overwhelming grandeur and his benevolence as the of nature:

There was an instant of subtle panic, but it was the panic of reverent awe

that preludes the descent of deity….There was a footfall from far away,

treading across a world unruined and unstained….The footfall came

nearer, treading a world grown soft with worship….There was a sense of

intolerable loveliness, of brimming life, of rapture….But He came with

blessing. With the stupendous Presence there was joy, the joy of abundant,

natural life, pure as the sunlight and the wind. (169)

Pan pays special attention to Heber and Elspeth, who he seems to have singled out: “to two, in particular, He came so near that they could feel his breath of hills and

90 fields upon their eyes. He touched them with both mighty hands. He stroked the marble breasts, He felt the little hidden horns” (169). Pan brings the two together, wrapping

Elspeth’s arms around Heber, an action that sanctifies their union as a marriage through and with Pan. This entire scene of play-orgy-worship-marriage cuts Heber’s ties to the modern world and liberates him to enjoy life in an eternally present moment. No longer will he concern himself over social mores and expectations, fears and anxieties over the past or future. The now is all that matters, and it is to be spent with the childlike Elspeth.

This scene of Pan worship is the queerest moment in the story, for it depicts the

Ahmedian instant when Heber’s shifts, bringing new, alternative possibilities into focus that transcend the normatively acceptable or imaginable. It is also the moment when this story transcends the limitations of genre. Up to this point it is a well-written and interesting but unexceptional period piece about a young man grown tired with the mundane. The orgiastic but not vulgar scene of Pan worship, and the god’s appearance to the young couple, provide a strong neopagan flavor, while the flowing and descriptive language bestows the scene with a dreamy, surreal vividness. Moreover, it gives solemnity and physicality to Pan, who until now had been more of an idea than a living entity. I would argue that this sequence lifts the story from strange to sublime. Pan becomes a tangible being capable of broadening the scope of his followers’ consciousness and of what they perceive as possible. He gifts his worshippers with an expanded sense of self that lifts the barrier between “I” and “you.” It is a profound moment that lends this story a mystical gravitas that separates it from other strange or uncanny tales of the period. Heber and Elspeth are one with each other, and they are one with Pan. This is a moment of liberation but also of mischievous rebellion against the

91 status quo of a self-centered society.

This sense of rebellion and queer difference is also evident in one of the final scenes shortly after Heber’s induction into the cult of Pan. Elspeth mischievously suggests that they “‘peep upon that other world where life hangs like a prison on their eyes’” (170). Like Peter Pan peeping into the Darling’s window, these two children of

Pan amuse themselves at the hapless doings of those who have never been to Neverland.

Heber and Elspeth first spy on the goings-on at the party through a window into the

“heavy mansion” (170). Heber reacts with astonishment and estrangement, as though he is looking on a scene from a half-forgotten distant past, when he was an altogether different person: “he recognized the world to which outwardly he belonged; he understood; a little gasp escaped him; and a slight shiver ran down the girl’s body into his own” (170). Elspeth and Heber see through the shallowness of the “modern” upper class coquetry and morally vacuous social rules. As Elspeth remarks, “‘See…it’s ugly, it’s not natural. They feel guilty and ashamed. There is no innocence!...The forward ones, the civilised….We are the backward!’” (170). The descriptions of the partygoers reflects this hypocritical sense of civilization, with the shallowness and sense of entitlement that comes along with it: “they all pretended,” they are “unclean,” they “artificially…ape wild beauty” (170) with fake , wigs, and “ridiculous, untaught jewel[s]” (170-171); the women are “calculating but nowhere glad; the men experienced, but nowhere joyous”

(170). Most damningly,

pretended innocence lay cloaked with a veil of something that whispered

secretly, clandestine, ashamed, yet with a brazen air that laid mockery

instead of sunshine in their smiles. Vice masqueraded in the ugly shape of

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pleasure; beauty was degraded into calculated tricks. They were not

natural. They knew not joy. (170)

The touch of the Pan child Elspeth has, for Heber, laid bare the unclean falsity of modern life. Through Elspeth and Pan, Heber is saved. After peeping through the window, the couple next spy on Hermione and Heber’s cousin, who have come outside for a better opportunity to engage in their immoral “final fling” before Hermione is to be married. This scene illustrates the ambiguous nature of the benevolent Pan child, who retains the potential for mischief. While Heber is reborn and revitalized through contact with Elspeth, Hermione and Heber’s cousin will be subject to disruption and panic through her influence. This subversive, mischievous element reveals the kinship between the benevolent child Pan and her mirror, the monstrous child Pan. Upon spotting

Hermione and her lover emerging from the house, Elspeth is gleeful in her desire to disrupt the decadent pleasures of the partygoers: “‘Oh Pan!’ She cried in mischief. The girl sprang from his arms and pointed. ‘We will follow them. We will put natural life into their little veins!’ ‘Or panic terror,’ he answered.” (171)

The uneasiness of the two partygoers outside of their artificial environment becomes apparent as they enter a small copse. Hermione becomes sensitive to any noise, and the two feel that they are being watched. Hermione in particular is “nervy” (172), jumping at every sound, though she tries to play along according to socially prescribed rules: she “‘know[s] the moves in the game as well as he did’” (172), feigning vulnerability and massaging Heber’s cousin’s ego, while he attempts to convince

Hermione that he her when he merely after her. Hermione cannot escape a sense of guilt at their actions, and neither can escape the discomfort that they feel in their

93 natural surroundings. Their attempts at a fling are finally frustrated by the sounds presumably made by Heber and Elspeth as they watch. Hermione panics, crying out “in terror” (173), and the two sneak off back to the house “afraid, guilty, ashamed, with an air as though they had been detected” (174). As they leave, a wind gusts and blows

“through the wood as though to cleanse it, swe[eping] out the artificial sent and trace of shame, and br[inging] back again the song, the laughter, and the happy revels” (174).

Nature banishes the adulterous pair from Pan’s edenic garden, and leaves it for the Pan children in the “sweet moonlight that held the world in a dream until the dawn stole up and sunshine took the earth with joy” (174). That this final sentence in the story concludes with beautiful natural imagery and with the word “joy” is reflective of the inherent optimism of the Pan child. This optimism counter-punctuates the story’s negative depiction of high society, and by extension civilization. Elspeth and Heber are beacons of hope in a world drained of sincerity, where artifice and the playing of vacuous social games have replaced genuine interactions. The touch of Pan not only brings Heber back to nature, it also restores his ability to feel and to express his feelings honestly. With that restoration comes renewed physical vitality and youthfulness. Elspeth and Pan help

Heber escape a life on rails that offered little true choice in how to live or whom to marry. By inviting Heber to join her in this queerly sideways life, they are able to live

“that happy, natural, vagabond life called idiotic, unmindful of that world the majority of reasonable people live only to remember” (159). Elspeth and Heber will do more than just remember, they will feel and experience vividly. This is the power of the benevolent child Pan: to allow one to escape a confining environment and to find true joy in an unfiltered, honest experience of life.

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In the next section, we will look to a boy Pan who helps bring a pair of lonely, sickly children, and a brokenhearted adult, back to life through the benevolent magic of nature.

Queering the Garden: “‘Th’Big Good Thing’”55 and the Holy Pan Child in

Burnett’s The Secret Garden

Along with Peter Pan, The Secret Garden is widely considered a classic of children’s literature. It is in many ways the ultimate Edwardian children’s novel, perhaps more so than even Barrie’s creation. Peter Pan, with its self-consciously fantastical style, seems aimed as much toward adults as to children.56 The Secret Garden, on the other hand, though enjoyed by adults, feels like it is written for children. It has a sense of earnestness, goodness, hope, and innocence that, for all its merits, Peter Pan lacks. These characteristics are not unique to The Secret Garden or to children’s literature; yet I feel that the appeal of such idealistic sentiments makes The Secret Garden more accessible and universal to children than either the didactic works of a century earlier, or the more recent branch of darker works enjoyed by children, like Caroll’s Victorian Alice books or the Edwardian Peter Pan.

The Secret Garden is the story of a young girl named Mary, whose popular and well-to-do but neglectful parents die in a cholera outbreak in India. Mary is sent to

England, where she has never been, to live in Yorkshire with her widowed uncle, Mr.

Craven. A sickly and ill-tempered girl, Mary gradually buds and comes to vigorous life thanks to the influence of a Pannish local boy named Dickon Sowerby and through the

55 (Burnett 161) 56 Holmes notes that Barrie scholars Hollindale and Jack both affirm “that Barrie’s first Peter Pan manuscript was clearly intended for adults” (149). For more on this, see Jack’s essay “The Manuscript of Peter Pan” and Hollindale’s introduction to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy.

95 discovery of her deceased aunt’s locked up garden. Mary also discovers that she has a cousin named Colin hidden away in the rambling Misselthwaite Manor, and that he is even sicklier and more ill-tempered than she had been. Just as Dickon and the garden help to restore Mary’s health, Mary and Dickon work to bring Colin back to life and to help Mr. Craven heal from the psychological wounds left by his wife’s death.

Mary and Dickon are illustrative of Burnett’s wide range of interests and inclusive form of . Dickon is a spiritually hybrid creature, part pagan Pan and part Christ child. These two aspects of his character, though central, only paint a partial portrait, however. Dickon’s Pannishness is further colored by a mélange of influences that reflect

Burnett’s complex spiritual beliefs. As Gerzina summarizes:

Over the years [Burnett] began to draw from a variety of books, lectures,

popular theories, and meditations to develop a system uniquely her own. It

combined optimism, in the form of a willful ignorance of the ugly or

painful; a fascination with the powers of the mind; and a conviction that as

science progressed, it would find that even greater intellectual and

spiritual powers were possible. (xxv)

This admixture helped to produce a novel that features a “potpourri of

Christianity, , paganism, and science” (xxv), and a character like Dickon who is spiritually and physically powerful and restorative, though in unconventional ways that are often subversive or disruptive toward the status quo.

Though Mary may be considered the protagonist of the novel, and Colin the focus of its dénouement, Dickon is at the epicenter. Without Dickon to serve as an ideal, and without his nurturing and impetus to set the others onto a path to healing, Mary—and

96 subsequently Colin and Mr. Craven—would remain ill, and life would not be restored to the garden. I believe it no coincidence that Dickon frequently displays characteristics commonly associated with Pan, particularly in the god’s role of deity of nature and wild spaces, and his association with a unity or mystical oneness with the pan-all of creation.

All the strands of regeneration, growth, and spirituality in this novel come back to

Dickon; and behind Dickon is the invisible touch of a unifying Pan. Dickon is an echo of

Pan experienced through the filter of Edwardian childhood. He is a child of a in which magic, science, religion, and nature merge and coalesce into a unifying, restorative all that—peacefully, though not without ruffling feathers—overthrows the trappings of a tired, physically and morally ill age.

Dickon the Pan Child

Dickon is in an unusual Pan figure, and The Secret Garden an unusual work of

Pan literature, in that the name “Pan” is never once mentioned. However, Dickon’s Pan- like qualities are displayed or alluded to throughout the novel. In Dickon, the pagan characteristics of Pan merge with other sensibilities drawn from Christianity, , and other sources to create a queerly hybrid child character: an innocent, mild-mannered rebel child who disrupts a gray modern world inhabited by adults, all while he heals and revitalizes the next generation of child inheritors of the earth. This revitalization begins within Dickon before spreading by example to the other children and adults, and parallels the awakening of the earth in spring. As Mary tells the reviving Colin after returning from the outdoors,

“I thought it had come the other morning, but it was only coming. It has

come, the Spring! Dickon says so!”…

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“That’s fresh air,” she said. “Lie on your back and draw in long

breaths of it. That’s what Dickon does when he’s lying on the moor. He

says he feels it in his veins and it makes him strong and he feels as if he

could live forever and ever. Breathe it and breathe it.

She was only repeating what Dickon had told her, but she caught

Colin’s fancy….and he did as she told him, drawing in long deep breaths

over and over again until he felt something quite new and delightful was

happening to him. (Burnett 114-115)

Dickon seems to speak for a sentient Nature. He alone knows when spring has truly come—even if Mary suspects it to be so, it cannot truly be considered spring until

Nature (via Dickon) says that it is. According to Mary, when Dickon speaks, “‘you feel as if you saw things and heard them and as if you were standing in the heather with shining and the gorse smelling like honey—and all full of bees and butterflies’” (85).

Like Pan, described by Bulfinch as “a symbol of the universe and of

Nature” (152), Dickon is at one with nature, and seeks to bring this unity to his followers.

When nature awakens after the , Dickon feels it within. The children emulate

Dickon, themselves awakening and coming closer to nature, and the adults follow the children. This is an expansive growth process that begins with the Pan child and brings life, healing, and a sense of unity to whomever it touches.

Though Burnett never refers to Dickon specifically as a Pan in the novel, in correspondence before the book’s publication Dickon is described in Pan-like terms.

Clearly referring to Dickon, who in the novel is able to “‘charm foxes and squirrels and birds’” (Burnett 85), in a letter Burnett describes one of her characters as a “‘Faun who

98 charms wild creatures and tame ones’” (qtd. in Gerzina xxxviii). Like Grahame’s Pan in

Wind in the Willows, Dickon is a friend to all living creatures, preternaturally able to soothe wild animals: “the little bushy-tailed [fox cub] rose from its place under the tree and came to him, and the rook, cawing once, flew down from its branch and settled quietly on his shoulder” (Burnett 92). Also like Pan (and many other Pan children),

Dickon plays music on a rustic pipe. As Mary remarks, “‘He played on his pipe and they

[the animals] listened’” (85). Like Peter Pan, Dickon enchants those whom he encounters; however, unlike Peter (who wants to replace his lost mother), Dickon’s motivation for gathering followers is not self-centered, but is rather a promise of liberating hope, health, and healing.

As in Peter Pan, the theme of having or not having a mother is central to The

Secret Garden. In the same letter mentioned above Burnett refers to “‘a moorland cottage woman who is a sort of Madonna with twelve children—a warm bosomed, sane, wise, simple Mother thing’” (qtd. in Gerzina xxxviii). This is without doubt Dickon’s mother

Susan, who is likewise described in the novel as a loving mother living on the moors in a

“cottage which held twelve children” (Burnett 52). The juxtaposing of a Christian

Mother-Madonna with her pagan-faun son is reflective of a new variety of Pan child created by Burnett: gentle and sanctified by nature and animals, he is a mixture of Christ child and pied-piper calling to other children, colored from the same palette as the mystical, healing adult Pan57 of Wind in the Willows.58 That Burnett describes Susan

57 Dickon, however, lacks the frightening, awe-inspiring aura of Grahame’s otherwise benevolent Pan. 58 As of yet I have been unable to determine whether or not Burnett read Wind in the Willows (published 1908) before the publication of The Secret Garden (published 1911). However, given the popularity of Wind in the Willows, it is conceivable that Burnett was at least aware of the book. Regardless, Grahame’s Pan and Dickon seem to share a strand of the same DNA as gentle, healing pagan figures closely associated with nature.

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Sowerby as a Madonna underscores her role as a universal mother to all the children in the book. Mother and son, these two central figures are equally beatific, each filling a hole in the lives of others. For Mary and Colin, Susan is an ideal of motherhood, feeding and loving the children in the way that their own lost mothers would have wanted.

Dickon, on the other hand, feeds not only the bodies and emotional needs of the other children, but also their souls. He is the spiritual locus of the novel, and his status as the

Pan-like son of a Madonna-like woman functions as a queering of the Victorian angelic child into something pagan and more ancient, but also very much alive and of the moment. Dickon is indeed “‘like an angel” (99), as Mary puts it, but he is also “‘a wood fairy’” (71). He brings together both the Christian past (embodied by his mother) and a restored pagan present (his Pannish Arcadian life on the moors) in order to breathe future life into the garden and into Mary, Colin, Mr. Craven, the gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and Misselthwaite Manor itself.

Burnett’s

The essentially different feel of Burnett and Barrie’s works is reflected in the differences between the two Pan children, Peter and Dickon. Both are attractive and occasionally mischievous; they are close to nature and to animals, and have an infectiously joyous spirit. However, as I have argued, Peter has a deep shade of monstrous darkness to him—a heartlessness and willfulness that gives the reader pause.

Dickon, conversely, has a heart of gold. And though both are possessed of a powerfully youthful and resourceful nature, Peter feeds upon the affection and emotions of others, vampirically drawing their emotional energy inwards in order to maintain his eternal, queerly sideways existence. By contrast, Dickon expends his energies and affections

100 outwards, healing others rather than draining them, and bringing them into contact with nature’s white magic. Dickon is a physical manifestation of “Th’Big Good Thing” mentioned by Susan Sowerby, an omnipresent spirit of God present in nature. He is an emotionally generous and optimistic character, as indeed The Secret Garden is an optimistic novel.

Burnett’s most famous work builds on Victorian literary traditions while distilling them into something that, though appealing to adults, speaks to a child’s sense of wonder.

From the northern English Gothicisms of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, to the mysterious person-in-the-attic of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, to the childhood bildungsroman thematics of and George Eliot, The Secret Garden draws on the past while creating something wondrous, new, and exciting. This sense of wonder particularly extends to Dickon, who not only possesses a heart of gold, but is the heart of

The Secret Garden. Without Dickon, even the namesake garden would just be another part of the grounds of Misselthwaite Manor; mysterious perhaps, but not living, breathing, and beautiful. It is he who shows Mary and Colin an alternative way back to health, and it is he who helps guide their hands in bringing life back to the garden.

Through Dickon, natural magic—magic “‘as white as snow’” (136), as Mary puts it— returns to the garden, restoring all who have contact with it. Nowhere else in the period’s literature do we find a powerful child who is so essentially good and so willing to share his goodness. However, Dickon is not just another iteration of the angelic or heavenly child found in many Victorian works from Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Charles Kingsley’s

The Water-Babies, or George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind. There is another, deeper, mythic level to Dickon that is not present in these earlier works. Perrot

101 posits that by the late Victorian period the literary trope of the angelic child common to mid-century literature was metamorphosing into “a new type of character: the child-hero inspired by the mythological figure of the Greek god Pan” (155), a figure whose

“authentic force” gives vigor to this new heroic figure (156). In his role as catalyst and driver of positive transformation and self-discovery, Dickon is the ultimate expression of the benevolence of the powerful, heroic Edwardian Pan child, while “‘Th’Big Good

Thing’” (161) which infuses the world with life refers as much to an earthy Pan as to the

Judeo-Christian God. Through Dickon, the pagan Pan becomes pseudo-Christian, a hybridization of reconciling the god of nature and panic terror with the benevolence of Christ. In Dickon, this melding of traditions produces something new, distinct, and sublimely powerful: a benevolent, magical child infused with the restorative, rather than terrible, powers of Pan.

The benevolent child Pans in Burnett and Blackwood function as catalysts for a healing process which restores other characters. These characters may be physically and/or spiritually weak, they may feel that they lack purpose or direction in their lives, or they may simply be unable or unwilling to conform to the demands of the modern world.

The child Pan provides them with a chance for rebirth through a reorientation that brings subversive, previously unknown life possibilities into view. Though lacking in outright monstrosity, benevolent child Pans are as destabilizing and rebellious as Peter Pan.

Dickon and Elspeth embrace a Dionysian, mythical nature akin to conceptualizations popularized by Pater and Wilde (Perrot 156). In The Renaissance and Greek Studies,

Pater presents a nature “in opposition to the industrial world” that “feeds a secret longing to return to primeval forms of existence and to recover a past state of wholeness” (156).

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The child Pan embraces a Paterian-Dionysian existence “not governed by reason” and which has “a healing effect on the modern mind entangled in contradictions” (156).

Dickon and Elspeth resist the debilitating somnolence and alienation that modern life can induce in the individual, and seek to restore a sense of unity with others and with nature.

The encounter with the child Pan ultimately functions as an awakening into a new state of being for those who have gone through life as though sleepwalking.

Conclusion - Pan, Pan, Everywhere

The queer children of Pan, like literary Pans more generally, reflect a sense of dissatisfaction with the course of civilization, which in a modern industrial nation dehumanizes in smoke-spuming factories and gray crowded cities, and forces conformity and uniformity on its members through schooling and disciplining. The children of Pan are outside of civilization, returning to the living Nature that births all life. They are primal beings, liberated from the necessity of obeying adult rules and ideas about what a child should/should not or can/cannot do or be. The child Pan owes nothing to any adult, or to anyone save themselves. They are no longer required to grow up, but may grow in any way or direction that they choose. Fiercely individualistic, they nonetheless seek unity with other like-minded children or adults. This unity with others is a source of their magic, and gives them purpose in an otherwise carefree life. There is, however, a dark side to the child Pan. The blissful self-absorption and liberation from restraint that makes them attractive to others also makes them dangerous. So while child Pans may be “gay and innocent” and able to fly, they are also “heartless” (Barrie, Peter and Wendy 153) and potentially cruel, able to kill without compunction (and even with glee) or lead other characters to their deaths. This aspect of the figure reflects the continuing influence of the

103 ancient god on the development of child Pans in literature: the goat-footed god is gentle and kindly one moment, and terrifying and panic inducing the next. This complexity is one of the things that make the many manifestations of Pan during this period so powerful. The figure’s malleability allows for the creation of characters whose hypnotic appeal can come as a blessing, a curse, or some indefinite, queer mixture of the two.

Though it has been over a century since Peter Pan first appeared on the London stage, his spiritual descendants continue to reappear in popular culture. From C.S.

Lewis’s The Chronicles of to J. K. Rowling’s books and Rick

Riordan’s series, we encounter abandoned child protagonists with mysterious origins. These lost boys and girls make their way to Neverlands where they realize their unique powers or abilities, and face off against powerful, monstrous, and often seductive adult nemeses. Throughout their trials these magical children are faced with the dilemma of whether or not they will grow up and accept adult responsibilities at the cost of their childhood. I believe that the appeal of these kinds of tales reveals the depths to which the genetic code of Peter Pan, the child Pan more generally, and ultimately the enigmatic god Pan, have become engrained in popular culture. Angel or monster, the queer children of Pan and their spiritual heirs are almost always disruptive to the established order, cockily crowing in the enraged faces of the Captain Hooks and

Lord Voldemorts of their fantastical worlds.

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Chapter 2: Pan’s Queer England: Deep England, National Identity, and Hybridity

in Kipling’s Puck Books

Introduction - Queer Hybrid Histories: Pan and Deep England

In the groundbreaking book On Living in an Old Country (1985) Patrick Wright coins the term “Deep England”59 to refer to an idealized, near-mythical image of rural

England that has long had a hold on the British public. March-Russell explains that Deep

England refers to “a vague yet resonant cluster of images that envisage a myth of the

English countryside as essential and timeless (the real England, as it were, in contrast with the towns and cities)” (29). This understanding of a “real” England,60 seen through a green-tinted lens of rural mythology, “reif[ies] the cause and effect of history,” making real a sense of history that is at once mythical and historical (29). Deep England is an idealized conception of a nation in which this mythical English past lives on in the present as an engrained national image. The power of this image has since the second half of the 19th century attracted not only writers, artists, and intellectuals, but also social commentators, savvy politicians, British tourism authorities, and even beer brewers and tea vendors who have turned “Merrie Olde Englande” into successful marketing

59 The concept of Deep England is paralleled in the cultural discourse of other nations as well. Notably, in 1988 sociologist Michel Dion published La Profonde, which he describes as a “‘radical critique of the dominant conceptions of the world and the State’” (qtd. in Hegy 309). The term “la France profonde,” or ‘deep France,’ refers to “the hidden, mysterious, or deep side of France” (309), specifically located in the rural countryside as opposed to the city. In the years since the publication of Dion’s influential book, “la France profonde” has become a common term referring to the unique features of rural France, and can be found not only in scholarly works but also news articles, travel books, blogs, etc. 60 My usage of “England” rather than “Britain” follows that of Alun Howkins’s, who explains that the ruralist phenomenon of the period resonates most strongly in an idealized image of southern England, which came to stand in for Britain as a whole, despite the foreignness of the image to many in the British Isles (Howkins, “Discovery” 62-63). This, of course, is not to discount the influence of England’s historically dominant political and cultural position within Great Britain in promoting such an image. The preeminent place given to England (and particular to southern England) within the national consciousness goes back to the Anglo-Saxon period. For more on the northern-southern divide during the Anglo-Saxon period, including economic, political, and cultural tensions, and the political prominence of southern England, see chapter 8 (“”) in Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (2013).

105 campaigns.

On a more basic level this mythologization of history threatens to sentimentalize a supposedly simpler past. Modern politicians, particularly those of a conservative bent like

Margaret Thatcher and John Major, frequently adapt this approach to potent rhetorical effect (March-Russell 29). Major’s oft-quoted speech about Britain as a nation of “‘long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’” (“Who Do We Think We Are?”) typifies a sentimentalized England that does not match the experience of the majority for whom Major claims to speak. Rather, as March-Russell notes, a closer reading of the Orwell essay61 paraphrased by Major reveals that “the cozy images of warm beer, village cricket and old maids dissolve into a more complex history” that “transgresses these more sentimental accounts” (30). The political right is not alone in recognizing the appealing imagery of Deep England.

Though Marxist scholar Raymond Williams critiques the validity of counterpoising idyllic country and wicked city in his classic The Country and the City, he nonetheless recognizes the broad and consistently recurring appeal that the countryside has had on the imagination of Britons of all stripes through the ages. Deep England as a concept fits neatly on neither the left nor the right, transcending purely political or propagandistic considerations.

The origins of these simultaneously patriotic and subversive sentiments are intimately tied to the way that the English have viewed themselves and their country since at least the Romantic era. It is no coincidence that the Romantic, Blakean vison of an ideal England—a “green and pleasant land” and —developed in the

61 The 1941 Orwell essay referred to is entitled “The and the .”

106 public imagination concurrently with the nation’s accelerating industrialization. By the mid-19th century the nation had fundamentally changed. Growing numbers abandoned their ancestral, rural roots in favor of dangerous factories and smoggy cities, while untouched landscapes become pockmarked with mines and smokestacks. Cities drained country villages of their young folk, who migrated to work in factories in and around urban centers, while railways and telegraph poles girded the countryside, linking once- remote towns and villages to active forces of modernity and change. These changes were accompanied by a host of crises which captured public attention in the last few decades of the century: increasing dismay over urban poverty and over the despoliation of the countryside, fears of physical and moral degeneration, and anxiety over the nation’s lagging spiritual forces in a period of growing secularism. To many it appeared that modernity and industrialization came at a cost in quality of life that affected both country and city. By the late 19th century issues like urban poverty and rural decline had long been publically discussed, yet it was the unprecedented scale and visibility of such problems that had become so alarming.

Though Britain was at the height of its military, industrial, and economic power at the turn of the 20th century, all was not well in the land. A solution—“a ” (March-

Russell 29)—to the problems of this ailing society was, many believed, desperately needed. Numerous artists, writers, and social commentators of the period believed that such a cure could be found within the nation. They came to believe that reconnecting with the rural heart of the land—a restorative Deep England—would allay the ills of a suffering nation (29). During a period of looking outwards to imperial expansion and the maintenance of a vast empire, Deep England represented a turning inwards to the

107 restorative, healing powers inherent in the land. Interestingly, it would be a transformed manifestation of the imported Mediterranean god Pan—ancient deity of wild, natural spaces, associated with fertility and a robust vitality—who became, for many writers and artists, the symbolic carrier of Deep England in popular culture, and consequently the catalyst of the nation’s renewal through reconnection with the land and its hybrid history.

Pan and Deep England

In this chapter I will study the transformation of the Greco-Roman Pan into Puck, a queered hybrid god of Deep England depicted by Rudyard Kipling in Puck of Pook’s

Hill and Rewards and Fairies. I will begin by contextualizing the rise of ruralism and the

“back to nature” movement in late 19th and early 20th century Britain. During this period the question of the “condition of England”62 became one of the defining concerns of the era. Ruralism—and Pan, the movement’s literary counterpart—was a widespread (though frequently informal) reaction to this sense of crisis that sought to counteract the harmful side effects of modern industrial development. Pan thus functions as an artistic response to long-simmering national anxieties that come to a head at the end of the 19th century.

The mature English manifestation of Pan that emerges in the period’s literature is markedly queer in the sense that it disrupts and transforms accepted notions of ethnicity, nation, and mythology in unexpected and surprising ways. I argue that though Pan queers understandings of Deep England, England itself has already queered the Greco-Roman

Pan, transforming the figure into a transgressive, disruptive English earth spirit whose hybridized origins in imported and native fairy traditions reflect an

62 The “condition of England” is a term notably first used by Thomas Carlyle in the early Victorian period to refer to a growing sense of crisis in the status of the working classes in England, and which later social commentators and critics used to refer to an array of social and societal crises related to industrialization (Diniejko).

108 ethnically and culturally hybrid English people who will help to restore the nation’s spiritual, moral, and physical vitality.

The English Pans of this period function as queered artistic reflections of the contemporary ruralist movement: at once transformative, disruptive, and restorative,

Pan’s appearance in literature upends conventional notions of modernity and progress, and speaks to a desire to renew an England that many believed to be in decline. In order to illustrate this phenomenon I will briefly survey several key literary and artistic works of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that foreground Anglicized depictions of Pan, and analyze the cultural significance of this Anglicization of Pan in . This discussion will begin in the late 19th century with Robert Louis Stevenson and Kenneth Grahame, whose depictions of Pans in essays and fiction are paralleled in contemporary visual works by artists like Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley. This process of

Anglicization culminates with Kipling’s Puck, a hybridized English Pan who seeks to restore faith in the nation’s future by digging deep into its past.

Though the phenomenon of an Anglicized Pan is peculiar to this period, the origins of this figure are rooted in much earlier traditions and literature. I will therefore also touch on the ways in which the ancient Pan merges with native English traditions to create a new hybrid mythic-folkloric-literary Pan that becomes the symbolic figurehead of English ruralism. In his metamorphosis into a god of Deep England, this version of the late Victorian and Edwardian Pan takes on aspects of native English folk and fairy figures, particularly those of the Celtic puck and the English Robin Goodfellow. These fairies and of the British Isles had, of course, been reimagined 300 years earlier by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which features the character

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Puck or Robin Goodfellow, a direct antecedent of Kipling’s Puck. And yet unlike

Shakespeare’s Robin/Puck, Kipling’s Puck is also quite distinctly a Pan, and kin to contemporary fictional representatives of Deep England such as Kenneth Grahame’s mystical, healing Pan in Wind in the Willows, and other similar manifestations of English

Pans as depicted in essays by Stevenson, and images by Burne-Jones and Beardsley.

Finally, the heart of this chapter is an in-depth examination of Kipling’s literary adaptation of Pans and their relationship to a project of imperial education and the redefinition of English identity. Kipling takes a novel approach to the trope of the English

Pan as a restorative, transformative, and disruptive force, adapting the figure’s otherness to a strong sense of national identity. Kipling blends the Shakespearean Robin

Goodfellow with fairy lore and the ancient mythology of Pan to create his Puck, a new hybrid English Pan. For Kipling, Puck becomes the catalyst of a new understanding of national identity as hybrid; moreover, it is this hybridity which provides and restores strength and vigor to the English people. In the Puck books, hybridity is a force of healing, reconciliation, and a way of coming together that will build a stronger, more stable, utopian future for the nation. Though this section will focus most intently on how

Kipling’s Puck/Pan becomes the vehicle for a national historical narrative that attempts to resolve the “condition of England” crisis, I will also survey some of Kipling’s earliest forays into the Pan mythos, including the poem “Pan in Vermont” and the pre-Jungle

Books Mowgli tale “In the Rukh.” These proto-Pans reveal Kipling’s continuing engagement with Pan over a period of twenty years and across several continents. The subsequent relocation of Pan to southern England in the form of the English Puck, coming as it does after imaginative forays featuring Pans in the wilds of rural North

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America and the jungles of the Indian subcontinent, can be read as a figurative return to

England of this healing, primal spirit during the nation’s hour of need.

Into The Garden of Pan:63 Urban Decay and Rural Regeneration

A notable body of late 19th and early 20th century essays, poems, and fictions by

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, and Rudyard Kipling simultaneously sentimentalize, transgress, and transcend the era’s understandings of nation and identity through the central image of the ancient god Pan. These contemporary writers depict Pans and Pan-like characters that are inextricably connected to the English landscape. The presence of these green, earthy figures reminds the (presumed) English audience of their own deep roots in the land—a connection that modern, industrialized, urban civilization threatens to sever. Each of these writers sees the severance of this link to the land as a catastrophic loss that would hasten the decay and degeneration of English bodies, minds, and morals. To better understand the deeper workings of these currents, it is necessary to frame the Pan writings of these authors in the larger context of late Victorian cultural crisis. Recent crises, such as the plight of the urban poor (brought to the public’s attention by sociological studies like those of Charles Booth and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree64), internal weaknesses exposed by the South African War, the decline in Britain’s economic and military power relative to newer players on the imperial stage like Germany and the

USA, and agricultural depression in the last three decades of the century (Hunt xi), had by the fin-de-siècle brought to the fore fears of decline, decay, and degeneration in

British society.

63 The Garden of Pan is the title of an 1887 painting by Edward Burne-Jones. 64 For more on Charles Booth, see Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1852-1925 p. 226, and Raymond Williams, The Country and the City pp. 221-222. For more on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, see Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain: From Queen Victoria to VE Day pp. 16-22.

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Writers and public figures of the period dealt with the ramifications of these crises in different ways. Kipling and Rider Haggard, for example, became increasingly concerned with the future of the nation and of the physical and moral health of the

English people following the fiasco of the South African war (Marr 99). While some prominent imperial figures like Cecil and Lord Curzon looked outward to the frontiers of Empire for national invigoration (Trotter 58), by the Edwardian decade,

Kipling had become “increasingly convinced that the soul of the nation was in the soil and timeless agricultural ” (Marr 99), and that a reconnection with the land could help to reverse the nation’s decline. Others, like Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, and

Edward Thomas lamented the damage done to rural communities and the “rural way of life” by agricultural depression (Hunt xi). Kenneth Grahame and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays that turned a mirror inward upon a British society undergoing rapid social and technological transformations. Grahame’s essay “,” for instance, expresses trepidation over the future of the countryside which was now “under threat from suburban developments” (xi), while Stevenson’s “Pan’s Pipes” voices concern that the materialistic modern world might be causing the individual to lose touch with the potential for enchantment inherent in nature. For Stevenson, there is something within the human spirit that resists the general sense of disenchantmant that accompanies expansive scientific explanations of the natural world, and that wishes to believe that there is a magic at work: “there are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man’s experience.…Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses” (254-55). The implication is that

112 something is lost when all the magic in the world can be explained away by science. Yet

Stevenson also suggests that humanity can achieve re-enchantment by heeding the call of

Pan’s pipes and returning to nature uninhibited by science:

So we come back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making

the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen

invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a

gracious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract,

tell ourselves that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket. (255)

For Stevenson, Pan is a symbol of nature’s magical hold on living things—a hold which he and others believe to be essential to the future of humanity. For all of the aforementioned writers, the English countryside, with Pan as its icon, represents something steady, immutable, and spiritually renewing during a period of dizzying change.

Ruralism, in its most formal manifestation expressed as going “back to the land” or “back to nature,”65 was seen by many prominent thinkers and social commentators as a cultural escape from this period of crisis. Interestingly, it would be the image of an ancient Greek god—Pan—that became most intensely associated with this green pathway to freedom. At once radical and conservative, the rural mythology of Pan resists external physical change or disfiguration of the landscape, and yet embraces internal, personal transformation. No level highway, the ruralist path coils and twists away from the cities and suburbs that crept across the land, wending toward Pan’s green glens. Pan’s evolution in the arts from ancient Arcadian shepherd deity into Anglicized earth spirit is

65 For a more detailed discussion of the origins and development of the “back to the land” movement, see Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925, pp. 225-231.

113 revelatory of a deeply felt desire among English intellectuals, artists, and social activists for societal regeneration through this return to the rural. The first stirrings of the ruralist movement began in the wake of the enormous economic, demographic, and social changes brought about by the rapid intensification of industrialization and urbanization in the latter half of the 19th century. From midcentury on, Britain’s factories grew in size and number, attracting workers from rural areas within the British Isles, while Britain’s relatively liberal society attracted immigrants and exiles from more repressive regimes in continental Europe, and, increasingly, from across the Empire. Cities expanded, telegraphs and railways crisscrossed the countryside, and the modern suburb was born.

The railways became a particularly potent symbol of industrialization, connecting previously remote rural towns to visible forces of modernity and change. These changes were swift and dramatic. For example, between 1848 in 1854, the number of railway passengers in Britain doubled, while freight traffic increased 2.5 times in the same period

(Hobsbawm, Capital 209). This growth would only accelerate as the century progressed.

By 1880, a majority of Britons—56.2 percent—lived in cities or towns with more than

5,000 people, and by 1910 this number would reached just under 70 percent (Bairoch and

Goertz 288). Rural villages and communities were emptying, as young folk moved off to work in cities and burgeoning factories (Howkins, “Discovery” 67). The decline in agricultural workers during the 19th century was particularly sharp in Britain. By the

1880s British workers laboring in agriculture amounted to only about 17 percent of the total number of workers in all areas, while in other European nations and the USA this number was between 30 and 45 percent (Hobsbawm, Empire 20). As rural communities shrank, an entire way of life seemed increasingly under threat.

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Not everyone saw the expanding grip of modern industrial society, with its vast factories, smokestacks, and soot-blackened cities, as evidence of progress, however.

Ambiguous (and often downright negative) feelings about modernity were widespread.

Many intellectuals, artists, and writers believed that the connection to the land, and specifically to the English countryside, was gradually being lost, and with it English identity itself. In “The Rural Pan,” for example, Kenneth Grahame remarks that

to-day the iron horse has searched the country through…bringing with it

Commercialism, whose God is Jerry, and who studs the hills with stucco

and garrotes the stream with the girder. Bringing, too, into every nook and

corner fashion and chatter, the tailor-made gown and the eye-glass.

Happily a great part is still spared…in which the rural Pan and his

following may hide their heads for a little longer. (70-71)

Pan and his ruralist followers are being pursued by the “growing tyranny” of a modernity that “has invaded” the countryside and brought about enormous societal changes, most of which Grahame sees as pejorative (71). Grahame laments this invasion of the rural, which threatens to consolidate the modern world’s hold over “the last common, spinney, and sheep-down,” and to “drive [off] the kindly god [Pan], the well- wisher to man” (71). This language of invasion and conquest underscores the serious regard Grahame held for this issue. Grahame and other ruralists were in a sense at war with modernity, fighting for the existence of a natural world that until relatively recently had been intimately connected to life in England. They feared that this connection between humanity and nature was in danger of being lost forever. This loss, they believed, would have dire consequences for the nation’s future.

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One of the most serious consequences of the growing disconnection with the countryside was the fear that something essentially English was gradually being ceded and forgotten over the course of civilized progress. The ruralist movement sought to counter this existential threat to the English nation and people. More than mere nostalgia, the desire to reconnect with nature—to get “back to the land”—was seen as a means of reversing the negative, depressing, degenerative side effects of urban industrialism.

Going back to nature meant achieving spiritual and physical renewal on the individual and national level. The rural was seen as the key to this renewal, and by the end of the century, Pan had become the enduring mythological embodiment of the rural, and a symbol of its power to heal a troubled nation.

Crises and Renewals: The Past and Future of a Nation

“The ideology of England and Englishness,” states Alun Howkins, “is to a remarkable degree rural” (“Discovery” 62). The origins and development of the ruralist movement that so powerfully captivated the imagination of the British public in the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries is the subject of Howkins’s classic article “The

Discovery of Rural England,” and the subsequent book Reshaping Rural England: A

Social History 1850-1925. This widespread and surprisingly persistent cultural phenomenon is centered on the conception of the “English ideal” as rural (62). Even though England “has been an urban and industrial nation” since at least the mid-19th century, and consequently “the experience of the majority of its population is, and was that of a urban life” (62), the perception of a “true” or “real” England as rural, traditional, southern, nonindustrial, and still in touch with the natural world, has remained surprisingly unchanged. As Howkins puts it,

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What our rural image does is present us with a “real England.” Here men

and women still live naturally. The air is clean and personal relationships

matter (especially between employer and employee), there is no crime

(except “quaint” crime like poaching) and no violence….It is an organic

society, a “real” one, as opposed to the unnatural or “unreal” society of the

town. (63)

Howkins argues that this potent ruralist “strain emerges within English politics and ideas in the 1880s which linked the rural to a general crisis in urban society” (63). By the late 19th century the idealized image of rural England became a kind of cultural and societal panacea that many believed would cure the ills of urban decay, and counter the widely perceived decline in British fortunes in comparison with other rising world powers. Despite the nation’s vast industrial growth since the beginning of the century, by the 1870s Britain’s manufacturing base “was gradually losing ground in world markets to

American and German competition” (Howkins, “Discovery” 64). By 1913, the economic and industrial growth of both Germany and the United States would surpass Britain’s

(Hobsbawm, Empire 46-47) as the nation fell from first to third largest manufacturing nation (Keegan 61). Britain’s inability to keep pace with competition on a global scale contributed to a larger sense of decline. To many of those in positions of power or influence (most of whom had attended public schools, where the were still an essential part of curriculum), Gibbon’s description of the decline of the provided a deeply disconcerting parallel (Howkins, “Discovery” 65). Many saw Britain, like Rome, as decaying inside and out, its people degenerating in crowded cities, and its national vitality sapped by endless colonial skirmishes and conflicts on the frontiers of

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Empire. The South African War in particular would heighten attention given to the potentially degenerative side effects of urbanization, particularly on the working class and poor.

By the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, the British Empire had nearly reached its greatest extent (only to be surpassed post-WWI with the occupation of former German colonies and Ottoman territories), and its height of wealth and power. Yet all was not well in the land. Today we tend to see the Edwardian era under the rosy lens of fiction and film: a long “golden summer of garden parties, sunny days at the seaside surrounded by machines…[and] raucous evenings at the music-hall” (Beckett and Cherry

14). However, these idyllic caricatures are only a small part of the picture. The reality was much more complex. By the turn of the century, “the economic and social forces which underpinned mid-Victorian stability were shattered” (14). Extreme poverty was rampant: “every town had places where the children were literally shoeless and where people were withering…from malnutrition” (Marr 3). British defeats at the hands of the

Zulu at the battle of Isandhlwana (1879), and costly face-saving victories like the Second

Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80) and the Sudan Campaign of the 1880s and ‘90s exposed cracks in the imperial system. But it was the South African War of 1899-1902 that truly exposed the internal rot and inherent weakness of the British Empire. Despite having the largest navy, and an army that (though relatively small in comparison to those of other great powers) contemporary observers considered one of the finest in the world, Britain had nearly been defeated by untrained South African farmers and ranchers. Locally raised

British regiments were outperformed by dominion forces from Canada, Australia, and

New Zealand. The British working-class recruit from the city was on average shorter, less

118 fit, and inexperienced in outdoor activities essential to soldiering (like riding and shooting) than his counterparts from the rest of the empire (Brendon 230). Military historian Fremont-Barnes notes that “the army discovered such a shocking level of health and fitness that it had to reject almost one-third of the men on the basis of their poor physical condition” (23). As Kipling acerbically remarks in the poem “The Islanders,”

British efforts were hampered by both the unfit soldiers of an urban society and the foolish politicians who put them there: “Sons of the sheltered city – unmade, unhandled, unmeet – Ye push them raw into battle as ye picked them raw from the street” (qtd. in

Marr 99). Kipling, Rider Haggard, and others were disgusted by the dreadful condition into which they believed Edwardian Britain had fallen (99).

This critique cut across the ideological spectrum, from radicals like Charles

Masterman to members of the Conservative Party like Winston Churchill. In 1901,

Churchill wrote

that the American labourer is a stronger, larger, healthier, better fed, and

consequently more efficient animal than a large proportion of our

population, and this surely a fact which our unbridled Imperialists, who

have no thought but to pile up armaments, taxation and territory, should

not lose sight of. For my own part, I see little glory in an Empire which

can rule the waves and is unable to flush its own sewers. (qtd. in Keegan

61)

The challenges of competition, expansion, and maintenance of a colonial empire, epitomized by the debacle of the South African War, exposed a need for national regeneration (Trotter 57), which Kipling and others of his mindset believed could be

119 found by turning “to the origins of Empire, the Heart of England” (66). For writers like

Kipling and Grahame, the cult of nature (and the figure of Pan, by this time one of its central artistic images) was a means of regeneration and restoration to counteract the ill effects of modern urban and industrial life.66 This turn to originary myth was, moreover, a way to reconnect with a perceived native English spirit and national characteristics that helped to forge the power of the English nation and people. Like-minded observers of contemporary decline believed that a return to the rural would provide the renewal necessary to restore Britain’s place on the imperial stage. The back to nature movement that emerged in the mid-Victorian period, and matured by the end of the century, was thus equally a return to native sources of power rooted in the land and peoples of

England, and a “means of redefining ‘Englishness’” (Wiener 49) in a period of great societal change. Finally, it was a way to counter the fatalistic pessimism of decline and fall that gripped many in England at the time.67 These movements thus sought to reverse, reinvigorate, and transform a nation that some believed was dangerously peering over an .68 Such discussions of decline and fall versus rebirth and renewal form the subtext to a long-running debate over urbanization and ruralism, city and country, which

66 The back to nature movement coincides with Robert Baden-Powell’s nascent Boy Scout movement. Baden-Powell, a hero of the South African War, founded the Boy Scouts in 1908 in order “to transform ‘pale narrow-chested, hunched up, miserable specimens’ who smoked, loafed, soaked and practised self- abuse” into healthy young men and pillars of empire (Brendon 231). The rebirth of imperial strength hinged on reconnecting the young with the natural world. Childhood, nature, and empire became further entwined. 67 This sense of apocalyptic pessimism is most forcefully expressed by social critics like Charles Masterman (aka C. F. G. Masterman). In The Condition of England (1909), Masterman, a politician, journalist, and social commentator, warns that in this modern age, when the nations of the world resemble “an armed camp, heaping up instruments of destruction” (289) in order to bolster an illusion of security, the reality is that “humanity—at best—appears but as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock, beaten by wind and wave; which cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning” (303). Masterman was not alone in his concerns, and his dark warnings were frequently echoed in literature and social discourse from the last decades of the 19th century until the First World War. 68 Gavin and Humphries argue that “Edwardian fiction, in a world less certain of its boundaries, saw itself as having a role in redressing declines in moral and physical health” (9).

120 continues to the present day.69

The Que(e)rying of Ruralism: Theorizing an English Pan

By the late 19th century the ancient god Pan had come to be the defining symbol of Deep England. Though Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats had referred to Pan as a benevolent spirit of nature and embodiment of the natural landscape, their Pans are more generically connected to nature (or perhaps more accurately

“Nature”) rather than England specifically. By the close of the century, however, Pan had become far more than a generic nature god: in the literature and art of the period he now embodied the restorative heart of England itself. Pan emerges in the midst of a period of civilizational crisis and soul-searching as a rallying cry for disruption of the established order, and rejuvenation through deeper, more meaningful interaction with the natural world (more precisely, the English countryside) and with England’s rural past.

I believe that the English Pans of Stevenson, Grahame, Kipling, and the alternative interpretation of history as multiform and hybrid presented in Kipling’s Puck books, can best be described as queer. Pan queers by enabling transformative moments and experiences that compel a reconsideration of one’s beliefs and preconceptions,

69 The centrality of this debate to our understanding of English culture continues to the present day. Many modern authors and critics, including Raymond Williams, Martin J. Wiener, and Patrick Wright, have devoted books, chapters, and essays to the study of the countryside and the rural, and their complex relationship to industrialization and the urban. From a scholarly standpoint, this area of study seems to peak from the 1970s through the early 1990s, interestingly coinciding with a period of economic, social, and political turmoil in the that culminated with Thatcherism and a conservative ascendancy. Like the late Victorian and Edwardian ruralists, modern British conservatives have displayed a tendency to look back upon an idealized “golden age” of the nation—a nation made up of small-town communities rather than a monolithic welfare state. Critics on the left, too, have idealized the rural as a balance against the ever-encroaching hand of industrial capitalism. For recent scholars, the study of this ruralist ideal is perhaps a comforting common ground that both left and right can eagerly embrace, despite the differing reasons that bring them to the English countryside. Thus a Marxist critic like Raymond Williams, and a Tory politician like John Major, can sound remarkably alike when waxing poetic about a rural English ideal. For more on this topic, see The Country and the City by Raymond Williams (1973), English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit by Martin J. Wiener (1981 and 2nd edition 2004), and On Living in an Old Country by Patrick Wright (1985 and 2nd edition 2009).

121 thereby reorienting the subject toward a future of potentially limitless possibility. In order to open one’s eyes to this potential, the English Pan freezes time and forces one to live in the moment; in this eternalized moment one grows “sideways.” Sideways growth, according to Stockton, is expansive and rich with imaginative possibility, and not limited to preexisting expectations of what growth is supposed to be or to mean. The English Pan of literature and art subverts modern ideas of progress, transgresses behavioral norms and expectations, and, particularly in the Edwardian works of Kipling, presents a hybridized understanding of the nature of English identity. This is a literature of rebellion against limitations. It features essays and stories of people who resist categorization and transcend social expectations, and experience a sideways, expansive growth into new, hybridized identities. Pan becomes a symbol of an alternative, utopian Deep England and a more open, inclusive, and hybridized understanding of Englishness.

In Kipling’s works, as well as in those of Grahame and Stevenson, Deep England is an idealized utopia that is simultaneously here but not yet here. Like contemporary depictions of Pan, this idealized England lingers on in the margins of perceptible reality, at once tangibly real in the present and existing in a dreamlike, mythical past and potential utopian future. In the fictions and essays of these writers, one can experience this marginal and hybridized England that never was/always has been through interaction with Pan and his natural magic. As the active embodiment of the English earth, the fictional Anglicized Pans give agency to a threatened natural world, and give speech to seemingly lost voices from the history of the British Isles. By opening these previously closed avenues of perception, the Pan figures in the works of these authors queer normative understandings of metaphysical concepts such as time, space, and reality, and

122 disrupt traditional conceptions of ethnicity, identity, and nationhood. Nostalgic and future-oriented, real and unreal, idealized, magical, at once hybrid and eminently English, these Anglicized Pans are an expression of the kind of queer utopian desires described by

José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Pan becomes a queering and querying link that questions, disrupts, and transforms the contemporary path of industrial modernity, imaginatively seeking to reconnect the

English with England in a time when vital bonds with nature and the land were in danger of being severed forever. The Pan figures in this literature project such an alternative, utopian image of a rural Britain that (supposedly) once-was into the present and future.

That this idyllic past may never have existed is irrelevant, for the fictional Pan’s utopian dreams transcend reality and history.

The English Pan also queers by altering one’s sense of past, present, and future. In the same moment he may turn back the clock and look ahead to the future, subverting one’s sense of teleological, diachronic temporality. Through Pan, the individual may experience history in the present, and the past in the future. Pan shows that the seemingly distant, pre-industrial past—greener, rural, and filled with physically and morally vigorous figures—lives on in the present, providing hope for a liberatory utopian future.

As Muñoz argues, “queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain” (1).70 Pan offers a glimpse of this future by queering the past and present. In the literature of Pan, the goat- god provides an aesthetic key that opens a gateway to the future. This future is seen via a mirroring of a reimagined past. It is this sense of a generative future—a pan-green, pan-

70 Muñoz goes on to say that “the aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (1).

123 ethnic hybrid England—that Kipling imagines in the Puck books. This future-England exemplifies the sense of “futurity and hope” which Muñoz argues is central to a queer and queering aesthetic project that looks ahead to potentialities just over the horizon (11).

The English Pan thus enables individuals to reconstruct connections to history, land, and nation, while encouraging them to live up to their full potential as human beings. As a figure heralding a queered utopia, Pan disrupts one’s anticipated interactions with the modern industrial world of the present by offering up alternative ways of living, alternative ways of understanding identity, nation, and history, and an alternative future.

The English Pan shows that these concepts are all one—a unified, utopian Pan-all that for

Kipling is mirrored in the hybridized identity of the English people of the past, present, and future.

These queering characteristics are essential to our understanding of both Pan and the cult of nature with which he is so closely associated. Greenslade notes that “British writers of the late Victorian and Edwardian period found in the cult of nature imaginative resources for resisting the modernizing of Britain, through a particularly symbolic geography which was far from nostalgic: it was sometimes furtively, sometimes openly and contemptuously, disruptive” (145). Pan (as the closest thing to an artistic emblem of this cult of nature) becomes, in much of the literature associated with this movement, the disruptive and transformative lens through which the reader or other characters are reoriented toward new, queer possibilities. Greenslade posits that “the cult of nature celebrated forms of redundancy, eccentricity, and sheer uselessness. Such values were increasingly prized as inimical to the rapid modernizing of Britain into a mass, industrial society after 1870” (145). Values like these—which validate activities supposedly

124 antithetical to modern progress, be they archaic rural lifestyles and habits, or

Wordsworthian contemplation of nature—are examples of what Stockton terms

“unproductive expenditure” in a modern industrial society (243). Such ruralist values and activities are in effect “sideways journeys” (243) that lead one to eye-opening queer avenues of growth that belie the myth of industrial progress as indubitably positive.

Unlike modernity, ruralism does not promote endless forward progression, offering instead these alternative paths of personal experience that expand sideways rather than simply forwards. In the Pan literature of the time, the goat-footed god functions as a guide down these queer paths of sideways growth. With Pan showing the way, even a simple wander through country paths, as described in essays by Stevenson and Grahame, or childhood play and storytelling, as engaged by the children in Kipling’s Puck books, become activities subversive of modern industrial society. Such works may be read as examples of what Stockton calls “the Wildean embrace of wasting time” (243) opposed to engaging in supposedly productive work. This queer wasting of time provides opportunities for experiential and spiritual growth, and for reconnection with the natural world.

If the cult of nature is read as a queer alternative to the modern, then Pan, godhead of the movement, becomes a queer nexus through which understandings of history, identity, and nation become disoriented and reimagined in a way that offers new, queer possibilities for the English land and people. Entering Pan’s queer nexus reshapes

England and transforms one’s conception of Englishness. As the ultimate manifestation of the English Pan, Kipling’s Puck books in particular harness this figure as a transformative, disruptive, and restorative force that queers the interpretation of history

125 and ethnicity, and reveals a fundamental hybridity at the heart of Deep England.

Pan and Rural England in the Arts

In the late 19th century the once-Mediterranean god Pan was adapted and transformed into a symbol of rural England by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson,

Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, and by artists like Aubrey Beardsley and Kipling’s uncle, Edward Burne-Jones.71 Their images of Pan or Pan-like figures are intimately linked to the natural world and to the land, enticing humanity to abandon the distractions of modernity in favor of a return to nature and to a truer sense of self, stripped of the unhealthy distractions of an urbanizing society. In their works, Pan embodies the tension between the reality of the English present and the utopian dream of an idealized Deep

England. They depict Pan as the queering and querying projection of an unreal, mythologized past, onto the modern, industrialized present of the late 19th century. Their

English Pans function as a source of transcendent, transformative healing, and of the promise of rebirth into a utopian future.

Burne-Jones’s Pan paintings (including and Pan [1874] and The Garden of Pan [1887]), for example, feature , vulnerable-looking human figures in green landscapes overcoming their shyness, fear, and hesitancy, in order to accept Pan’s call to renewal through nature. In both paintings, Burne-Jones’s Pans are perched on rocky outcroppings out of whose cracks burst green growths. Pan flowers atop the crags with music and blessings for the reverent, awed humans who timidly looked upwards at him, entranced. This is Pan the benevolent; earthy and mystical, he is an elusive but tangible god of nature. The humans, stripped of all signs of modernity, are reborn through Pan’s

71 Voller notes Angus Wilson’s claim that Kipling modeled the character Puck on Burne-Jones (88). Voller argues that Puck can be read as an artist in his own right: he describes Puck as “a creator figure” and “an artist whose medium is history” (82).

126 touch. Aubrey Beardsley’s fin-de-siècle Pan figures share this tangibility and strong sense of physicality. Beardsley practically made a name for himself as an illustrator of Pans, fauns, and satyrs. His works featuring overt Pan figures include frontispieces for Kenneth

Grahame’s Pagan Papers, Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light, and Farr’s The Dancing Faun (all published 1894),72 as well as illustrations like

“Pan Reading to a Woman by a Brook” (1898),73 and at least two images of (presumably) female satyrs (1892-1898).74 Beardsley’s Pans are remarkably queer images of intensely sexualized androgynous figures. They emerge like natural outgrowths from highly stylized landscapes or backgrounds, and exude all the mystery and magic inherent to an enchanted natural world of the imagination. Their hybrid human-animal features, and the harmonious ways in which they inhabit their respective landscapes suggests a fundamental connection to other contemporary depictions of rural Pans that may not be immediately apparent, coming as they do from the hand of Beardsley, the urbane child of pleasure par excellence. Beardsley’s fauns are in effect the dapper, worldly cousins of the

Pans found in Burne-Jones, Stevenson, Grahame, and Kipling. Dandies of the countryside rather than the city, Beardsley’s English Pans are the decadent counterparts of those of his earthier fellow artists and writers.

The nearly contemporary literary images of Pan that we find in Stevenson’s essay

“Pan’s Pipes” (written 1878, published in Virginibus Puerisque [1881]), Grahame’s “The

Rural Pan” (Published in Pagan Papers [1893]), and in Kipling’s Puck books (Puck of

Pook’s Hill [1906] and Rewards and Fairies [1910]) are more akin to the mystical Pans

72 Incidentally, all three books were published by John Lane’s The Bodley Head publishing house. 73 This work was considered (but ultimately unused) for the cover of an issue of the decadent literary journal The Yellow Book. 74 One of these images of a female satyr would be used as a chapter heading in the 1894 Bodley Head edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

127 of Burne-Jones than the rural dandies of Beardsley, however. In these works, Pan’s presence is felt more deeply than simply as an aspect of a mystical, unplaceable Da

Vinci-esque landscape (as in Burne-Jones);75 rather, Pan is reimagined in England as a god of the English countryside. This Pan, restored to England, beckons those both sensitive and strong enough to shake off the harmful influences of modernity. Through the lens of Pan, one can realize a complete self in which nature and civilization are balanced. These representations of Pan emphasize his ability to heal and restore. In these works, Pan became English, the patron god and symbol of Deep England. Reflecting characteristics of native traditions (like the Celtic , fairy pucks and Robin

Goodfellow, or the ) and the Renaissance, Shakespearean Puck of literature,

Pan became arguably the most widely recognized and frequently disseminated Olympian during this period. The reasons for Pan’s appeal are manifold, and frequently overlap with the ideals of contemporary ruralist movements. Peter Green argues that “Pan and paganism formed (a discreetly symbolized) opposition to the deadening Grundyism76 and heavy, puritanical Christian morality of the late-Victorian Establishment” (x). The ruralist movement promised liberation from this stifling social weight, and into this movement wanders Pan: “Half-goat, half-human musician, Pan symbolized at the turn of the century the frustrating dualisms of modern society and a divided sensibility, in which the civilized intellectual self was perforce separated from the natural, animal self” (Kuznets

179). Pan became the symbol of resistance to modern society, and a reaction against both

75 Though in Grahame’s Wind in the Willows this mystical feeling is certainly part of the experience of Pan. 76 According to the OED, Grundyism refers to The of an imaginary personage (Mrs. Grundy) who is proverbially referred to as a personification of the tyranny of social opinion in matters of conventional propriety. In Morton's play Speed the Plough (1798), Dame Ashfield is represented as constantly fearing to give occasion for the sneers of her neighbour, Mrs. Grundy. Her frequent question ‘What will Mrs. Grundy say?’ became proverbial…as expressing the attitude of those who regard the disapproval of society as the worst of evils. (OED)

128 the radical changes of industrialization and the restraints of conservative social mores. At once outside and inside English culture, as a literary figure Pan gives voice to “the sense of ‘otherness’ so long, it was felt, denied or suppressed” by Christian teachings

(Greenslade 146).

Kipling, Grahame, and Stevenson show how such new interpretations of Pan could be adapted to English settings. Their depictions show that Pan, born in the ancient

Mediterranean, could become a true child of England. The Pans in Stevenson’s

Virginibus Puerisque, Grahame’s Pagan Papers and The Wind in the Willows, and

Kipling’s Puck books lead the reader (and, in the case of the Puck books, the fictional

English children Dan and Una) along on an “Edwardian ” (Hunt xiii), a kind of adventure Hunt describes as “the rural idyll of a worried generation” (xii). Partly influenced by works like Jerome K. Jerome’s late Victorian “Thames holiday novel,”

Three Men in a Boat (1888), and provided with “a touch of the fashionably mystic, as scripted by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and [Richard] Jefferies” (xii), these late

Victorian and Edwardian works engage with an often dreamlike rural past threatened by an encroaching modernity.

The Pans in Stevenson’s “Pan’s Pipes” and Grahame’s “The Rural Pan” are seductive, powerful voices that call out from the countryside and irresistibly attract urban and suburban dwellers to the enchanting powers of the countryside. These essays firmly ground Pan in England—specifically in its southern countryside—rather than in an ancient Mediterranean Arcadia, as Pan had up to this time usually been depicted. In their

Pan essays and in Grahame’s novel Wind in the Willows, Stevenson and Grahame see rural escape along Pan’s queering pathways as not only desirable but necessary. For

129 them, such paths run through deepest England and ultimately lead to Pan, who has become an embodiment of the (specifically English) natural world threatened by industrial modernity. In Willows, for example, Pan’s rescue of the baby otter in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter exemplifies a conception of nature taking care of its own in a world of hostile threats: Grahame’s Pan is described as “the Friend and Helper”

(174) of “little animals” (179) gone astray. Though he inspires awe and fear in much the same way as the traditional, classical Pan, this Pan is more tactile, gentle, and unabashedly benevolent than the more morally ambivalent and physically intangible Pans found in classical literature. In the context of the novel, Pan’s soothing, healing presence functions as a clear counter-balance to both Toad’s frenetic adventures with automobiles and trains in and about town, and to the pseudo-urban hordes of wicked Weasels who invade the idyllic rural life of the River Bank. Grahame’s Pan embodies the spirit of a

Deep England resistant to the chaos of modern life.

The Pan of “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” thus epitomizes this first stage of Pan’s

Anglicization, in which the god is depicted as a mystical embodiment of rural, wild

England. I believe this process culminates in a second, matured stage with Puck,

Kipling’s even more overtly English Pan. In contrast with Grahame’s Pan, Kipling’s

Puck is an attempt to wed the magic of Deep England to a mytho-historical chain of events in which different peoples interact and merge to become one. The hybrid, magical- historical-mythical England portrayed in the Puck books is mirrored by the hybridized people that populate the individual stories. And though Grahame’s Willows tends to view encroaching modernity (as figured by the motorcar, the perils of the town, and the echoes of a Dickensian city in the Wild Wood [Hunt xiii]) as a threat to the idyllic lives of the

130 animals along the River Bank, in Kipling’s Puck books the future is greeted with a more optimistic long view.

Pan, Puck, and Pharaoh: Que(e)rying History, Hybridity, and National

Identity in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck Books

Kipling’s literary engagement with Pan begins in the 1890s with the poem “Pan in

Vermont” and the short story “In the Rukh,” and culminates with the Puck books:

Kipling’s Edwardian-era children’s books, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and

Fairies (1910). In this section I will identify the ways in which Pan functions as a queering hybrid entity that disrupts, transforms, and restores those who experience him. I will begin by looking at Kipling’s early literary experiments with Pans before turning to

Puck. I will also examine Puck’s hybrid roots, which blend classical mythology with

English fairy traditions in order to create something new: a hybrid English Pan who offers a key to the nation’s restoration rooted in the island’s hybrid history. The Puck books feature both overtly hybrid characters (like Puck himself and the Pan figure

Pharaoh Lee from Rewards and Fairies) and stories about the coming together of different peoples in order to form a hybrid English whole. By enabling the telling of these tales, Puck foregrounds central issues of hybridity and the construction of national identity in the context of educating the next generation of English and American children of empire. Kipling’s adaptation and application of the Pan myth to English history, and to what we might call his vision of an Anglo-American future, is emblematic of this larger project of education. The Puck books are Kipling’s school of hybrid history, with two central Pan figures, Puck and Pharaoh Lee, who embody the spirit and national characteristics of their respective nations. In Puck, Kipling crafts an English Pan, and in

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Pharaoh a closely related American Pan, and makes them each vehicles for the instruction of history and national identity to children. The kinship between these Pans reflects an

Anglo-American cultural and temporal alliance that Kipling (outside of fiction) believes is central to the future of both the burgeoning American empire and the mature British

Empire. If history is a road that leads to transformative hybridity, as Puck teaches, then the hybrid English and their American cousins are the children of the future, and the key to the restoration of Deep England.

Toward a Queer Hybridity: Pan in England, England in Pan

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha describes hybridity as “a difference

‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim of ‘in-between’ reality” (13). This in-between hybrid state is one of “borderline existence [which] inhabits a stillness of time and a strangeness of framing that creates the discursive ‘image’ at the crossroads of history and literature, bridging the home and the world” (13). The hybrid’s existence is encircled by a halo of strangeness, both in the root meaning of foreignness, but also in the meaning of unusual, out of the ordinary, and queer. The hybrid is unique and different from what came before, but is also heir to the best of multiple worlds. S/he is capable of speaking the language of the past and future, and of bridging gaps between peoples and cultures.

This liminal, borderline existence, both of and not of one tightly defined realm, is manifestly queer. In Kipling’s Puck books, the queering, bridge-building hybrid, denizen of multiple spaces, times, and peoples, becomes the focus of the imaginative, idealized world constructed around Puck, Kipling’s English Pan.

Puck’s hybrid blending of ancient Mediterranean and native British traditions is reflected in the hybrid identities of characters in the Puck books. Taken together, the

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Romano-Britons Parnesius and Pertinax, Normans and Saxons like Hugh and Sir

Richard, the Jewish Kadmiel, the Puritan Culpeper and the Anglican Marget, and the

Franco-Anglo-Romani-American Pharaoh Lee, show that the British have always been a hybrid population, and that hybridity has been a source of their strength as a nation and people. As a similarly hybrid being with origins outside of England, Puck is both forerunner and fantastical representative of the diverse peoples who would later come to inhabit the British Isles. Despite foreign origins, Romans, , Saxons, Normans, Jews, and Puck himself would all come to be considered English. This conception of a hybrid

England made up of transplanted peoples, things, and ideas, is a key feature of Pan’s queer transformation from one of the lesser gods of the ancient Mediterranean, to a traditional English fairy figure, to the Shakespearean Puck, and finally to the modern

English earth spirit and figurehead of the back to nature movements that we find in

Grahame, Stevenson, and Kipling. For all their disruptive powers and their antagonistic relationship towards modernity and industrialization, the queered Pans that we find in the works of these writers (and especially in Kipling) call England their home. Theirs are eminently English Pans—strong, vital, healing, hybrid, survivors (Kipling’s Puck, for example, is the last of the fairy folk in the British Isles), and witnesses to history and to

England’s green, mythological past. Puck is the of this simultaneously restorative and disruptive English interpretation of Pan. Voller describes Kipling’s Puck as “much more than the quintessential English sprite—he is a reification of Englishness itself” (84). More than this, I believe that Puck reifies a new and more open conception of

Englishness along with a reinterpretation of the island’s past. Puck presents a queered history that shows England, and English identity, to be deeply connected to the

133 countryside, resistant to the degenerative forces of modernity, and—centrally—ethnically and culturally hybrid. Inclusive and adaptive, this hybridized identity reflects an alternative sense of nationalism that is strong and malleable, and works as a force of , healing, and unification of peoples rather than of aggression and division.

Kipling’s Puck preaches a message of expansive hybrid identities. He is a prophet of a new understanding of Englishness—queered, hybridized, open, and pan-ethnic. This conception of hybridity is physically embodied by the hybrid figures and objects that populate the Puck books. Puck queers the history of the British Isles, and presents a new, welcoming, inclusive sense of Englishness that functions as an alternative national chronicle to the typical nationalistic, mono-ethnic narratives of the early 20th century.

This new queered narrative challenges the simple sentimentalization of conservative nationalistic narratives (which would later be adopted by modern politicians like

Margaret Thatcher and John Major), and also counters contemporary imperialist discourse concerning nation, race, and empire associated with traditional imperialists like

Cecil Rhodes. An examination of some of the hybridized characters that populate the

Puck books will thus show how Kipling’s subversive project is enacted. Nationalistic yet inclusive, Kipling’s historical characters and their narratives provide an alternative historical record to the rising tide of exclusionary nationalistic thinking prior to World

War I. Rather than denying outsiders a place in the idealized nation-state, Kipling’s version of history shows that national strength comes from variety and difference allied in common cause. Thus the hybrid Puck recounts a hybrid past to Dan and Una, the hybrid children of the future. Puck rejects contemporary nationalistic conceptions of identity as a closed-off, exclusive ethnic club. Instead, Puck causes the children to

134 understand identity as a construction oriented outward, emphasizing acceptance and amalgamation of the Other rather than an isolating turn inward. He reveals to them a communal identity that is by its nature hybrid, and the children in turn recognize the seeds of this hybridity in the individual. The Puck books make the case that one should appreciate, seek to emulate, and maintain connections to the models of a hybrid past.

Loss of connection to the mytho-historical past will sever one’s links to the land and to

Deep England itself. For Kipling, understanding England’s hybrid past of interconnected peoples, objects, and histories is essential to its future as a nation. Puck is the gatekeeper of this project of understanding, unlocking the hybrid histories inherent in the land for

Dan and Una, and by proxy the Edwardian reader.

Glimpses of “Faunus himself”: Rudyard Kipling and the Fin-de-siecle “Pan

Craze”

By the 1890s, literature and art featuring the ancient god Pan had already become a cultural phenomenon in England. Kipling published his own lighthearted take on Pan with the poem “Pan in Vermont” in 1893, written during his residence in Vermont from

1892 to 1896. In “Pan in Vermont,” Kipling relocates Pan to New England, where his traditional role as a nature god is humorously reinterpreted. In the poem Pan becomes a

“careless” (17) roving seed merchant whose plants and flowers, while beautiful and full of vitality, refuse to grow according to the gardener-narrator’s whims. This Pan seems at first glance to be little more than a huckster, selling seeds that will not grow along the garden paths and flowerbeds as “advertised” and “guaranteed” by “every standard” that he promises (14-15). Instead, he proves to be a font of wild growth resistant to the confining developmental conceptions adhered to by the would-be country gardeners, who

135 seek to play God (or gods) and create fantastical but confined gardens, filled with the idealized images that they see in Pan’s illustrated catalogues: “Such bloom hath never eye beheld this side the Eden Sword; / Such fruit marks her own, yea oversees, / That we may reach (one dollar each) the Lost !” (18-20). These lines are rife with references to biblical and classical gardens, gardeners, and fertility figures: Eden, Pomona (a nymph from Roman myth who tended fruit orchards), Liber (a

Roman god of viniculture associated with Dionysos), and the Hesperides (nymphs from

Greek myth who watched over a tree that grew golden ) (March 524, 100, 23-24).

The gardens associated with these biblical and classical references are fantastical spaces of wild natural growth that are traditionally off-limits to ordinary human beings. For a mere dollar, the Vermont Pan promises to put these mythical gardens within reach, a deal only too tempting for the gardener-narrator, who hubristically aims not only to possess but to exert his will over the growth of plants in his garden like some micro garden-god of a mini-Eden. Vermont’s Pan, however, has other plans.

Though Pan convinces the narrator to purchase seeds from his illustrated gardening catalogue, the failure of the seeds to grow is part of an instructive lesson in the ways of wild nature that the Vermont Pan teaches his customers. By selling seeds that

“did not live” (Kipling, “Pan in Vermont” 16) when planted in the strictly defined confines of a garden, Pan shows the narrator that the notion of planned, predictable, idealized growth of plant life (as depicted in the gardening catalogues, or even in the fantasies of classical mythology) is a human conceit contrary to the ways of nature.

Instead, Pan shows how it is the spontaneous, unexpected growth of “the may-

‘neath her snow,” which pops up “where his goat’s-hoof cut the crust” (27-28) of the

136 earth, which is truer to nature’s character. The budding mayflower exemplifies nature’s vigorous, uncontrollable, and rebellious character, while the unpredictable seeds that Pan sells prove that wild nature cannot be neatly circumscribed. Nature, like Pan, is a disruptive force that resists any attempt to normalize it and fit it to constant, unchanging patterns. Pan teaches the narrator that nature’s growth is queer: wild, unpredictable, disordered, and transgressing the confines of books or the neat lines of a flowerbed. In this roundabout way, Pan shows would-be gardeners that they cannot hope to control nature or expect to be able to box it in. More than just a false advertiser out to “swindle every citizen from Keene to Lake Champlain” (26), the seed merchant/Pan is the unstoppable force of a rapidly approaching spring (“the Spring is back, and Pan is on the road!” [4]), and a physical expression of nature’s wild growth: uncontainable, unavoidable, and impossible to imagine accurately on painted page or in mythical tale.

And yet in spite of the way that he lightens the pockets of New England gardeners, Pan is neither an undesirable nor an unwelcome presence. As the narrator remarks, “Forget, forgive they did not live! Believe, and buy anew!” (16). Pan is welcomed and forgiven each year because of the wild beauty that he (and by extension, nature) leaves behind, like the beautiful mayflower that sprouts from his hoof print. This is Pan the benevolent trickster, whose blessing comes accompanied by playful teasing, which is merely the price one must pay in order to experience the god’s goodness: “Pipe and we pay, O Pan”

(12). In “Pan in Vermont,” this blessing costs the narrator a few dollars which he does not begrudge.

Kipling’s productive period in Vermont would see another work featuring an explicit Pan figure. In 1893 he also published the short story “In the Rukh” in his

137 collection Many Inventions. “In the Rukh” features a Mowgli, who would later appear in The Jungle Books. Though written first, this story is chronologically last in

The Jungle Book canon. In the story, the grown-up Mowgli is repeatedly described in terms that indicate a strong affinity with the Greco-Roman Pan. Mowgli is described as

“‘like the illustrations in the Classical Dictionary’”77 (28), as “the very form and likeness of that Greek god who is so lavishly described in the novels” (36), and as the son of the

Roman gods Libitina and Priapus78 (36). Mowgli—like the classical Pan, who is often depicted with a reed musical instrument79—plays a rustic flute, piping a haunting tune that “might have been the song of some wandering wood-god” (37). Finally, Mowgli is twice referred to by Muller, the German forest warden in the story, as “Faunus himself”80

(35).

Muller is a fascinating character in his own right. With his stage-German accent, buffoonish manner, and his “majestic pink sleeping-suit” (36) we might be forgiven for considering the character to be mere comic relief. However, I believe that there is a degree of referential depth to the character. Alan Underwood posits that Muller is

“thought to have been based on an Inspector-General of Indian forests of German extraction called Ribbentrop. He was large and thickset, though not a giant in stature. It is said that his character as presented by Kipling was not exaggerated” (Underwood, “‘In

77 Alan Underwood identifies this as most likely Sir William Smith’s (1813-1893) Classical Dictionary, first published in 1844 and greatly expanded and revised in subsequent decades (“‘In the Rukh:’ Notes on the Text”). 78 The lines that refer to Mowgli as the son of Libitina and Priapus are drawn from Swinburne’s poem “Dolores.” Underwood notes that “Libitina was the of death, corpses and funerals, but in some traditions was identified with , the goddess of love and earthly delights. Swinburne – and Muller [Kipling’s character who recites the lines] – probably had the second association in mind” (“‘In the Rukh:’ Notes on the Text”). Priapus is the “son of and Aphrodite. A rustic fertility god, protector of livestock, fruit plants, gardens and male genitalia” (“‘In the Rukh:’ Notes on the Text”). 79 See, for example, the 400 BC Greek statue of Pan holding pan-pipes (Boardman 31) or the 1st century AD Roman wall painting of Pan and the Muses, where Pan is again holding pan-pipes (41). 80 Faunus is the Romanized version of the Greek Pan.

138 the Rukh:’ Notes on the Text”). Underwood also notes that Muller’s accent is a clear based on a book of German-American ballads that Kipling enjoyed (“‘In the

Rukh:’ Notes on the Text”). However, I believe that the character Muller may also be a reference to Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), the famous 19th century linguist and scholar. Müller moved to England as a young man, settling at Oxford, and gained renown through his many essays and works on the languages and religions of India (Dorson 394).

Müller took a comparative approach to mythology that sought to find common origins for mythologies from across the world (394). Today Müller is best remembered for his theory of “solar mythology.” This comparative theory asserts universal allegorical roots for the mythology of all world cultures that is based upon a primordial battle between light and dark. In essence, “Müller claimed that all classical myths were in their origin statements about the sun rising in the morning and putting the darkness to flight”

(Vandiver). Although scholars today discredit such comparative theories as reductive and prone to glossing over the unique characteristics of different cultures, at the time they were considered a revelation, and helped to garner Müller worldwide renown. Central to this theory are Müller’s “equations,” which seek to connect the gods of the Greek pantheon to supposedly equivalent figures among the ancient Vedic gods of India

(Dorson 398-399). Though today no serious scholar would, for example, attempt to equate Zeus to Dyaus, the Vedic god of the , during the late 19th century such comparative, universalizing work was common.

Through the comical Muller, who I read as a faux-Max Müller, Kipling foregrounds several scenes with Mowgli that, though avoiding any comparative connections to Indian mythology, resonate in Western artistic and literary mythologies.

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Kipling’s Muller echoes Max Müller’s equations by enthusiastically connecting Mowgli to mythical or biblical figures via two explicit analogies: Mowgli is “Faunus himself come to see der Inspecdor-General. Himmel, he is der god!” (35), and Mowgli is “ in der Garden, und now we want only an Eva!” (36). Muller, the parodic Max Müller, tries to make sense of Mowgli, a quasi-mythical wild child of the woods, by way of . This may well be Kipling simply taking a poke at the popularity of such comparative theories (one can almost see his wry smile as he composes Muller’s hiccoughy exclamations). Whatever Kipling may (or may not) have thought of such theories, it seems to me more than coincidental that a character named Muller explicitly equates Mowgli with Pan in such a Max Müller-esque way.

In the 1896 issue of McClure’s magazine in which “In the Rukh” was republished, the illustrations by W. A. C. Page are also overt in their references to classical mythology, and specifically to traditional conventions of Pan imagery. One illustration shows a beautiful, androgynous-looking Mowgli, crowned with a of white flowers, stepping forth out of a wild landscape. This image echoes numerous Pan- themed works of art, such as Arnold Böcklin’s near-contemporary Pan Frightening a

Shepherd pair of paintings, Beardsley’s seductive, sensual images of Pan figures, or the ancient Roman wall painting of a young, beautiful Pan and the Muses.81 Another image from McClure’s shows Mowgli playing Pan-pipes while his four brothers dance in a circle, and a nymph-like servant girl (whom he has Pannishly seduced) looks on, entranced by Mowgli and the power of his music. Mowgli’s pan-pipes, the Greek-looking wreath on his head, his enchanting music, his power over animals, and the numerous classical all gesture toward the classical Pan. Moreover, the mixture of diverse

81 See Boardman 41.

140 elements comprising Mowgli’s character (he is a human child raised by , accepted by other animals like a panther and a bear, yet able to inhabit human and animal spaces simultaneously, and finally he is an Indian marked with the features of an ancient Greek god, and who willingly engages in a moral form of English colonial service as a forest guard) suggest a fundamental hybridity and a transformative ability that is also evident in

Kipling’s later Pan figures. Though none of the other stories in the Jungle Books are as resonant with Pan imagery as “In the Rukh,” the Pan-like, grown-up child of nature found in this story prefigures Kipling’s later engagements with Pan in the Puck books. As a precursor to other Pan figures like Puck or Pharaoh Lee, this manifestation of an adult

Pan closely connected to nature, music, rustic living, and especially hybridity, reveals that Kipling had already begun to consider many of the same themes that would take center stage in the later Puck books.

Pan the Puck, Puck the Pan: The Origins of an English Fairy-God

Before turning our attention to the Puck books, it is worth digressing slightly to consider the literary and folkloric origins of Puck, the title character, as well as the figure’s links to Pan. Why did Kipling adopt the name “Puck” for his most Pan-like character? And what is it about calling his character Puck that causes the figure to resonate for an English audience that had by this time already been exposed to numerous

Pans, fauns, and satyrs in literature and art? Though contemporaries like Stevenson,

Grahame, Burne-Jones and Beardsley all depict figures that are explicitly referred to as

Pans, with the exception of “Pan in Vermont” Kipling is more oblique in the naming of his Pan figures. His most famous Pan, Puck from the Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards

141 and Fairies, instead bears the name of the puck,82 a type of fairy from British folkloric traditions. Despite this clear link to a British fairy I believe a strong case can be made for

Kipling’s Puck to be read as an Anglicized manifestation of the Greco-Roman Pan. This reading of Puck can be justified both overtly and circumstantially. There are, for instance, clear references to Puck as a Pan, notably in the Roman stories of Puck of Pook’s Hill. In that book, when speaking with Puck the Roman centurion Parnesius twice refers to Pan

(whom he has revered by constructing “a little altar…made of round pebbles”[Kipling,

Puck 103]) and fully ten times addresses Puck as “Faun.” As the word “Faun” is always capitalized, I believe that Parnesius is not using the more general term “faun,” which refers to a class of woodland goat-men in classical mythology (March 101), but is rather addressing Puck specifically as Faunus, the Roman version of Pan. Puck does not correct

Parnesius, suggesting Puck’s tacit acknowledgment that he is the same figure once known as Pan or Faunus. Kipling thus leaves open the possibility that in Roman Britain, the character Puck is at the very least associated with the Greco-Roman Pan. We would not then be remiss in reasoning that as a spiritual being Puck must have evolved in human perception with the times. Thus for the Roman Parnesius, Puck is Faunus or Pan, for the medieval Kadmiel he is an earth spirit, while for the children Dan and Una, who have just read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he is a fairy puck—or more accurately, the Puck depicted by the Bard.

The multiform elusiveness of the identity of Kipling’s Puck is integral to the

82 I use the lower case “puck” or “pucks” when referring to the class of fairy creatures by that name, and “Puck” when referring to a specific character by that name. As Peter Holland explains, “Robin Goodfellow, hobgoblins and pucks all belonged to the same group of fairies, a class of rough, hairy domestic spirits characterized by their mischievousness” (35). Though related, each is a distinctive type of fairy. For more on the differences between these fairies, see The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors and An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures by Katharine Briggs, and and Sweet Puck: Fairy Names and Natures by Gillian Edwards.

142 character’s status as a hybrid, unifying force. For example, Puck’s physical characteristics fit equally well within either Pan or fairy traditions. Puck’s physical appearance echoes ancient imagery of Pan in classical and Renaissance paintings, , and statuary: he has “bare, hairy feet,” and is “a small, brown, broad shouldered, pointy eared person with a snub nose, slanting blue eyes, and a grin that ran right across his freckled face” (Kipling, Puck 8). Since antiquity Pan has often been depicted in the visual arts with such impish, elfin features, regardless of whether or not he has the explicitly goatish physical characteristics with which he is equally often associated. 83 Kipling’s description of Puck also echoes traditional English depictions of fairies, specifically those of brownies, pucks, and Robin Goodfellow. For example, Edwards cites several descriptions of fairy brownies with physical features similar to Kipling’s Puck, who seems to draw a bit from each of them: brownies are variously “of very small stature,” with a “brown complexion,” their “nose may be sometimes very small,” and they are

“rough and hairy” (104-106). The overlap between Kipling’s Puck, Pan, and fairy folklore seems no coincidence. At a time when the classical Pan was experiencing a resurgence in popularity and cultural valence, Kipling fashions Puck, a reimagined

English Pan who is heir to both classical tradition and native fairy folklore.

In order better to understand the effects of this process of adaptation, some attention must also be paid to the character Puck’s roots in the fairy tradition. Though a full cultural study of pucks and related fairies like Robin Goodfellow is beyond the scope of this chapter (and such studies have already been written by Katharine Briggs and

Gillian Edwards), some background information concerning these fairies as adapted by

83 See, for example, the small, hairy, impish Pan in the classical statue Dionysos and Pan (Boardman 38) or the Renaissance statue of an elfin Pan (Pan listening to Echo) by Andrea Riccio (8).

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Kipling would be useful to illustrate how they provide color and background to Kipling’s

Puck, and more importantly to highlight points of convergence between earlier literary and folkloric traditions and Kipling’s hybridized reimagining of this character. Folklorists

Briggs and Edwards have written extensively about Puck, pucks, and Robin Goodfellow, gathering and analyzing numerous tales, traditions, and folk beliefs in their respective works on British fairies. According to their studies, Puck is a folkloric fairy figure common to many different groups in the British Isles. Known in England variously as

Puck, Pouk, or Pook (Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies 336), in Ireland as Phouka (32),

Pooka, or Púca (Yeats 140), and in Wales as Pwca (Briggs 337) or Bwca (56), Puck is traditionally considered to be a pranksterish hobgoblin or .84 As Briggs notes, “in folk tradition emphasis is perhaps most laid on Puck as a misleader” (336) in the sense that he may lead someone physically astray from their path. For a traveler to be “Pouk- ledden,” or Puck-led, for example, is to lose one’s way thanks to one of Puck’s pranks

(333). There is also a domestic side to pucks. Briggs recounts stories of pucks that, like brownies, will do one’s household chores in exchange for gifts. These tales depict pucks that are fairly harmless (provided that one does not offend or try to trick them, in which case they can be nasty). These traditional pucks are in many ways typical figures of

British fairy folklore in that they engage in common fairy activities like pranks and tricks, they are fascinated by human activities, and they are temperamental in nature.

These folkloric traditions of pucks would come to be formalized in literature

84 According to Edwards, brownies are a generally friendly and helpful class of fairies who tend to be attached to a specific place, home, or family (103-104). They are small, shaggy, wrinkled, and brown in color, and enjoy completing domestic tasks and chores for the family or household to whom they have devoted themselves (103). A hobgoblin is a related fairy creature that Edwards describes as “a rustic spirit, either in the sense that he is more often to be found in the country than the town, or that he is, unlike the courtly and polished , rather slow and simple, delighting in practical jokes and broad humour, unsophisticated in his ways” (132). Hobgoblins might also be helpful, though they tend to have “a preference for working on farms and in dairies” (130) rather than in households like brownies.

144 nowhere more influentially than in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A discussion of pucks would be incomplete without considering this play, which gives a central role to Puck (who Shakespeare also calls Robin Goodfellow), the best-known puck in British literature. Since the play first appeared in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare’s

Puck has colored virtually all subsequent renditions of the character in popular culture,

Kipling’s included.85 Regarding the origins of Shakespeare’s Puck, Briggs remarks that the Welsh Pwca’s “actions and character are so like that of Shakespeare’s Puck that some

Welsh people have claimed that Shakespeare borrowed him from stories told him by his friend Richard Price of Brecon, who lived near Cwm Pwca, one of the Pwca’s favorite haunts” (337). This is an intriguing theory, though it is also clear that Shakespeare’s Puck draws from many sources, including folkloric traditions of another fairy character, Robin

Goodfellow.

According to Edwards, Robin Goodfellow is another rustic fairy akin to brownies and hobgoblins. Typically Robin is an earthy, helpful sort of fairy, fond of merriment, and prone to “borrowing” things from humans (though he would often “repay them with gifts that made it worth their while to lend” [141]). Regarding Robin’s relationship to

Puck, Edwards notes that there is some overlap between the two: “the tricksy, more jovial if mischievous Puck, though in folk-lore a slightly nebulous figure, has many of the characteristics of Hobgoblin or Robin Goodfellow” (149). Many of the stories about pucks or Robin Goodfellow recounted by Briggs, Edwards, and others feature fairy characters by the name of Robin or Puck that could be interchangeable with each other.

Wendy Wall suggests this type of fairy story springs from “the most common fairy

85 The play has also (at least in the English-speaking world) heavily influenced subsequent depictions of fairies in popular culture. For more on Shakespeare’s fairies and their wide influence, see Holland pp. 21- 34.

145 incarnation” in folk tradition, namely tales featuring a relatively harmless but mischievous “rustic creature” or “country fay” (100). Over time, in fairy tradition these creatures “became lumped indiscriminately with hobgoblins, elves, , , fairies, and the English hobgoblin called Robin Goodfellow” (100). This mish-mashing of different figures and stories resulted in a new, hybridized tradition in Britain during the late 16th and early 17th centuries: “country folklore was blended into classical mythology, with the result that demonic spirits became less sinister, elves and hobgoblins were assimilated into the fairy kingdom proper, and domestic nosiness spread to all classes of fairies as their chief identifying feature” (101). Wall goes on to argue that these “coarse spirits,” so “oddly concerned…with the material rhythms of human work and leisure,” are a peculiarly English phenomenon (100-101). As the fairy tradition coalesced around such Anglicized figures, homegrown fairies like Robin Goodfellow (and pucks, for that matter) came to be “hailed as ‘native English’ stock,” exemplifying a “synthesis of traditions [that] had the effect of defusing national sentiment into popular legend” (101).

By the time Kipling wrote the Puck books, there had thus already been a long tradition of perceiving Robin Goodfellow and Puck as specifically English fairies.

The primordial folktale soup from which Puck and Robin emerge also includes some classical ingredients, which suggest further underlying links between these fairies, the Greco-Roman Pan, and related figures from classical mythology. Briggs and Holland note that in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the class of fairies comprising Robin

Goodfellow, hobgoblins, and pucks were commonly associated with fauns and satyrs, classical figures also associated with Pan and his friend Dionysos, the god of wine

(Holland 35 and Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck 71). As Briggs remarks, “the classical

146 tradition crept in” to English tales of pucks and other hobgoblins, resulting in folk stories and literature featuring classical satyrs with Puck-like characteristics, and vice-versa

(Briggs 71). This convergence between pucks, Robin Goodfellow, and Pan is perhaps most explicit in popular artistic traditions of these figures that physically depict all three as variations of satyrs or fauns. For example, in a popular work about Robin Goodfellow published in 1628,86 we find an illustration of the fairy “as a gigantic bearded satyr with hairy britches and hoofed feet, holding a priapic scepter in one hand and a broom in the other” (Wall 103). The broom may be distinctly English (related to Robin’s fascination with domestic chores, which he shares with brownies and hobgoblins), but otherwise this

Robin Goodfellow strikingly resembles the classical Pan, who is often portrayed with such satyr-like physical characteristics. In his history of Pan in the visual arts, Boardman argues that this image is evidence that “in Britain [Pan] was the inevitable model for a

Robin Goodfellow” (24). Fairy pucks, too, physically elide with the classical tradition, as

Briggs notes: “Puck is in many ways, particularly in outward appearances, very like a satyr” (Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 219). Given the physical similarities between

Pan, Puck, and Robin Goodfellow in English popular culture, the greatest difference between these figures seems to be one of national origin. Briggs theorizes the possibility that some English fairy stories and traditions may have been directly borrowed from

Roman mythological or literary sources, and that some of these mixed and overlapped with medieval Celtic fairy traditions (219). Over time, in literature and art Puck and

Robin adopted some features of the classical Pan, thereby becoming de facto English stand-ins for Pans, satyrs, fauns, and related figures from classical mythology. This

86 The pamphlet is entitled Robin Good-fellow: His Mad Prankes and Merry Iests. For more on this work, see Wendy Wall Staging Domesticity pp. 103-106.

147 phenomenon of associations and re-associations is echoed by Kipling in his depiction of

Puck, who in the Roman stories is associated with Pan or Faunus.

There are additionally some darker connections between Puck, Robin

Goodfellow, and Pan. There is a long convention dating back to the early Christian era of depicting the Devil with the horned and goat-footed appearance of Pan. Robin

Goodfellow, too, has been associated with darker and more evil possibilities: Wall remarks that Robin Goodfellow was “a descendent of agricultural deities sometimes attached to evil” (100), while Edwards notes that “the name Robin is often associated with the devil in British , and many allusions to Robin Goodfellow tend to emphasize the demonic or malicious side of his nature” (136). The “good” in Goodfellow might thus refer to the opposite of what the name implies, as is the case with the tradition of referring to (often malevolent) fairies as the “Good Folk” (140). According to Briggs, pucks, too, have been associated with “” and “simple-minded devils” (Anatomy of

Puck 71), and “in earlier times” (i.e. before Shakespeare’s play) the name “Puck” “was used without equivocation for the Devil” (Encyclopedia 342). The darker turn taken by

Puck and Robin Goodfellow may also hold a clue for how these figures might be read as

Pans. Briggs theorizes that the pre-Christian “lesser deities, nymphs, fauns, satyrs and so on” had, over time, “descended into being fairies” (The Fairies in Tradition and

Literature 11). Much later during the Reformation, as paranoia and fear over heresy gripped Europe, “the fairies and devils drew closer together” (11), and by “Puritan times…hobgoblins, and devils are all lumped together” (13). If one considers the ever-changing nature of oral transmission of stories, with centuries to mingle and merge with many different traditions, this “fusion” (11) theory begins to make sense. Add to that

148 mix the potent spice of religion, and I think it unsurprising that British fairies like Puck or

Robin Goodfellow, Greco-Roman figures like Pan or fauns and satyrs, and the Christian

Devil himself, might come to be cut from the same cloth. This existing overlap of ancient myth, folktale, and religion gives writers from Shakespeare to Kipling and beyond creative license to mix and morph characters with different traditions in order to create new and interesting figures that nonetheless maintain enough links to native traditions in order to be recognizable as cultural products of the English imagination. Kipling’s Puck, like Shakespeare’s Robin Goodfellow before him, is such a hybridized figure, subverting, revering, and reinterpreting older traditions.

Shakespeare and Kipling: A Puck for the Ages

That most well-known literary example of adaptable, hybridized, Anglicized god- like fairies, Shakespeare’s Robin Goodfellow/Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is an overt inspiration for Kipling’s Puck. Some attention must thus also be given to the overlap between these two characters and the fictional circles which they inhabit. Though

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in Greece, it is a Greece that resembles a magical

Deep England more than the Peloponnesus,87 with a court of fairy figures interfering and interacting with mortals in ways reminiscent of the gods of classical mythology.88 This hybrid locale, populated by hybrid fairies who echo ancient gods, revolves around the actions of Robin Goodfellow,89 literary predecessor of Kipling’s hybrid fairy-god Puck.

Shakespeare’s Puck amplifies and modifies the trickster nature of traditional fairy pucks.

87 The character , Duke of , is a representative example of this hybrid mixture of ancient Greece and contemporary England. Stanley Wells notes that though Theseus bears “the classical hero’s name, and a few of his attributes,” Shakespeare gives “him the medieval title of Duke (instead of King) of Athens…to the Elizabethan audience he cannot have been far removed from a nobleman—perhaps a duke—of their own times” (216). 88 Wells remarks that Oberon and Titania are “strongly reminiscent of classical deities” (217). 89 Robin Goodfellow is described as “a puck” in the play’s list of characters.

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He is a mischievous but goodhearted mediator between fairy and human worlds, both wreaking chaos and aiding in the resolution of the play’s love-crossed plot. The

Shakespearean inspiration for Kipling’s adaptation of Puck is clear from the first pages of

Puck of Pook’s Hill. In the bookend to “Weland’s Sword,” the opening story of Puck of

Pook’s Hill, the Edwardian children Dan and Una put on a performance of A Midsummer

Night’s Dream. They act out the play “three times over from beginning to end” before settling down for snack, when suddenly Puck appears out of some nearby bushes (8). The recital of Shakespeare’s play (acted a magical three times through) functions as a kind of spell that summons Puck, and gives him permission to reveal an alternative, hidden world of history and legend to the children. The Shakespearean Puck that the children have conjured is a hybrid figure who amalgamates the characteristics of an array of folkloric and mythological figures: he is at once a puck and Robin Goodfellow, Pan and faun, fairy and classical god. Kipling also follows Shakespeare’s lead regarding the origins of this hybrid character. Holland notes that Shakespeare’s Robin Goodfellow/Puck is the first example of an attempt to combine the related but distinct fairies Robin Goodfellow, hobgoblin, and puck “into a single spirit” (35). I believe that Kipling’s Puck merges these figures as well, the chief difference being that Kipling’s version draws more deeply from the classical well than does Shakespeare’s. Like Robin Goodfellow, Kipling’s Puck is a trickster who can manipulate one’s memory, one’s perception of reality, and even his own form. Yet unlike many of the darker, more frightening fairies of British and

European tradition, both Shakespeare and Kipling depict Puck as overall a benevolent being and friend to humanity. The tricks that their Pucks play on people (for example through shape-shifting or causing forgetfulness) tend to be either beneficial to the

150 person’s peace of mind (after all, one cannot be exposed to Puck’s magic willy-nilly without some precautions being taken, like making the children in the Puck books forget what they have seen) or relatively harmless and a source of humor (like temporarily turning Nick Bottom’s head into that of an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) rather than a manifestation of any wicked or spiteful intentions, and reflect Puck’s playful nature.

The benevolent depiction of fairies in Kipling’s Puck books is equally something

Kipling may have borrowed from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Holland argues that before this play, fairies had generally been depicted in English popular culture as potentially dangerous, frightening, or even malevolent (33-34). Though fairies might reward humans, they were beings that humans should fear or at best distrust. With A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare disassociates fairies from “ghosts and damned spirits” and the “tormenting, pinching, punishing elves” of traditional lore, and emphasizes instead “fairy benevolence” (33-34). Kipling’s fairies, like Shakespeare’s, coexist with humanity without tormenting them, and are more likely to gently guide than mislead humans. This ability to guide and assist is another way that these two Pucks parallel each other: Shakespeare’s Puck helps to bring couples together, while Kipling’s leads the children to a greater state of knowledge and appreciation for their homeland in the Puck books. As the central fairy figure in the both authors’ works, Puck is able to move between fairy and human worlds with ease, acting as an intermediary between them. The intermediary, messenger-like role that Puck plays in A Midsummer Night’s

Dream has led some critics to associate Puck with Hermes or Mercury, the Greco-Roman messenger god (Wells 217), who according to some ancient traditions was Pan’s father

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(Russell 126).90 In Kipling’s Puck books, Puck functions in a similar (though not identical) fashion as a hybridized bridge between fairy and human realms of experience.91

This hybrid ability to cross over and interact with human and fairy, natural and supernatural, is what allows Puck to drive the narrative in both the Puck books and A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, whether it is by bringing lovers together in Shakespeare, or by conjuring figures from the distant past to tell their stories in Kipling.

The storytelling aspect of Kipling’s Puck is one area in which Kipling builds upon the legacy of his predecessor. His decision to use Puck as a vehicle for the dissemination of tales of British history reveals a potentially nationalistic undertone to his adaptation of the English fairy tradition. Though Shakespeare’s play does not work to mythologize

English history like the Puck books, there is nonetheless an aspect of the Anglicization at work in the play. Rather than making use of classical , as might be expected in a play set in Greece, Shakespeare adopts an Anglicized Greek setting, and an

Olympian-esque court of English fairies to tell his tale. Read in this light, Puck and Robin

Goodfellow become English alternatives for artists traditionally reliant on figures from classical mythology. As native spirits, both Pucks provide their respective works with a distinctly English coloring that would have been to contemporary audiences. By calling his character Puck, and giving him Puck-like characteristics, Kipling feeds off of

90 Interestingly, Russell posits that not only Pan but also Hermes influenced medieval imagery of the Christian Devil. For example, ancient depictions of Hermes’ winged legs influenced “the medieval tradition of portraying the Devil with leg wings” (Russell 126). Like father, like son. 91 Puck’s hybrid nature, and his ability to interact with humans and fairies with equal ease in both Shakespeare and Kipling, could in part be ascribed to the tradition of Robin Goodfellow’s mixed fairy- human heritage. For example, in the 1628 pamphlet Robin Good-fellow: His Mad Prankes and Merry Iests, Robin Goodfellow is a “half-fairy, the son of Oberon by a country wench” (Briggs, Encyclopedia 342). As a half-fairy, Robin lives his early life as a human until Oberon grants him fairy powers and eventually takes him to Fairyland (342). Robin has thus lived in both human and fairy worlds. Though this work was published after Shakespeare's death, it is possible that the convention of Robin’s mixed heritage goes back to folk traditions already in existence.

152 this native tradition, and causes it to resonate with an English audience in a way that would not have been possible had Puck been simply called Pan. With this character

Kipling fuses aspects of native English pucks and Robin Goodfellow to the classical Pan, thereby linking the classical world to more modern British traditions in the hybrid entity

Puck. In the Puck books, the character Puck’s hybrid origins reflect the essential hybrid identity of the British people, and the hybrid histories that Puck aims to teach them.

Imagining Puck: Hybridity and National Identity

Like the Pannish, hybrid earth spirit Puck, whose mixed origins blend native and foreign traditions, English identity in the Puck books is also presented as hybrid and multi-part, flexible and capable of adapting, but also deeply tied to the land (or more accurately, the landscape of the British Isles, and southern England92 in particular, which

Kipling saw as the nation’s heart). Puck, Kipling’s English Pan, presents the reader with a series of hybrid characters conjured from the past who recount foundational tales from the history of the British Isles. This pseudo-Shakespearean character sets the stage and gently guides his actors to tell their stories, which frequently center on reconciliation and healing (Coates 45) made possible by the flexibility of their hybridized identities.

Kipling’s English hybrids are able to reconcile the past with the future. They are the saviors of rural England and of the future of the nation. Despite this patriotic subtext, these are not retrogressive or reactionary figures. Kipling’s hybrids do not resist the call of progress; rather, like the heroic medieval Jewish character Kadmiel in “The Treasure

92 In 1902, Kipling and his family moved to a 17th century home known as Bateman’s in Sussex in southern England, where he would live for the rest of his life. Sussex held a special place in Kipling's heart, and many works written in the second half of his life are set in Sussex. Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, for example, were some of the many works Kipling wrote while living at Bateman’s. For detailed discussions of Kipling’s attraction to Sussex, the significance of the region to Kipling’s writings and sense of history, and his time at Bateman’s, see Michael Smith’s article, “Kipling’s Sussex,” Hugh Brogan’s “Kipling and History,” and the entry on “Bateman’s,” all hosted by the Kipling Society website (http://www.kipling.org.uk/bookmart_fra.htm).

153 and the Law,” these characters often advance the course of societal development toward a more egalitarian, utopian future. And yet for all their forward orientation, Kipling’s hybrids never forget their connections to the spirit of the land. They remain defenders of

England because the land itself is part of their hybrid being.

The general premise of Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies is that a

Shakespearean Puck, last of the fairy folk to remain in Britain, appears to two young

English children, Dan and Una, in order to teach them about British history through a series of stories. These stories are told by an assortment of historical figures conjured by

Puck’s magic—a Roman centurion, a Norman knight, Pharaoh the smuggler and fiddler, Queen Elizabeth I, a medieval Sephardi, and so on. Each of these figures tells a tale or a series of tales that link back to overarching themes of British nationhood, identity, and cultural or ethnic hybridity. I argue that Kipling’s Pan figures—namely

Puck, and his human reflection Pharaoh Lee—connect Dan and Una, the Edwardian children of Kipling’s present (and the heirs of empire and imperial subjects of the future), both to the land they will inherit and to Britain and America’s culturally and ethnically hybrid past and potential future. Via Puck and Pharaoh, Pan is adapted to English and

American settings within the framework of a series of historical stories dealing with the unification of peoples, the construction of nationhood, and the establishment of laws and traditions. In this context Puck and Pharaoh act as the vehicle for the transmission of history and identity to the next generation of English and American children. The reimagined Pan/Puck/Pharaoh (I do not think it a coincidence that their names all begin with “P”) is thereby intimately tied to the promise and fulfillment of a national .

Pharaoh Lee: An American Pan

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In the Puck books’ two American stories, “Brother Square Toes” and “A Priest in

Spite of Himself,”93 Pharaoh Lee is a wandering Roma smuggler and musician who becomes a part of post-Revolutionary America almost by accident. As his story begins,

Pharaoh escapes capture as a smuggler in the English channel by jumping aboard a

French Republican ship headed to the New World. He blends in with the French crew, entertaining them with his fiddle. Though Pharaoh does not intentionally choose to come to the United States, in the end he wholeheartedly embraces, and is embraced by, his adopted nation. Once arrived in Philadelphia, Pharaoh’s hybridity is on full display—he is taken in by the German-American community, befriends French expatriates94 like

Talleyrand, and is even accepted by Native American Senecas as one of their own.

Pharaoh comes to embody the malleable, resourceful, and culturally and ethnically hybrid character of the young United States, while simultaneously acting as a less fantastic,

Americanized projection of Kipling’s magical Puck. If we read Kipling’s Puck as an

Anglicized reimagining of the Greco-Roman Pan, then I believe that Pharaoh, in turn, can be understood as the mortal, hybrid American heir to both Puck and Pan. Pharaoh Lee, despite being less overtly a physical reflection of the classical Pan than the faun-like

Puck, can nonetheless be termed a Pan figure in that he exhibits a number of typical characteristics associated with the ancient god. These include Pharaoh’s ability to play hypnotic, rustic music on his fiddle, his roving, carefree demeanor and exuberantly youthful spirit, his clever trickiness, and his connection to nature and the wilds of

America, which is expressed through his acceptance by the Seneca. With these three figures—the classical Pan, the English Renaissance Puck, and the revolutionary Anglo-

93 Both stories can be found in Rewards and Fairies, the second Puck volume, published in 1910. 94 As with Mowgli (and of course Pan himself), Pharaoh’s music entrances and overwhelms the listener; here it is the French expatriates who are brought to tears by his music (see Rewards and Fairies 307).

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Franco-Romani-German-Native American Pharaoh Lee, I believe that Kipling is drawing a clear hereditary line of descent and imperial inheritance, from ancient Greece to imperial Rome, to Elizabethan England at the cusp of empire, and finally to the mature

British and the rising American empires of the Edwardian present. Each of these figures is more hybridized than his chronological predecessor, a feature which allows them to survive change and disruptive circumstances: Puck blends ancient Greco-Roman mythology with English fairy traditions and outlasts all the other gods and fairies of the

British Isles, while Pharaoh’s mixed heritage and adaptability allows him to blend in wherever he goes. It is as though Pan has evolved over time from god (Pan) to fairy

(Puck/Robin Goodfellow) to mortal human (Pharaoh), at each step becoming further hybridized as he adapts to changing circumstances. History marches ever onward, and so does Pan.

The linear, teleological view of history reflected in Pan’s progression from Greece to Rome, Rome to England, and England to America, aligns Kipling with trends of historical interpretation that had become popular in the latter half of the 19th century. In

The (first published in 1837), Hegel famously stated that “The

History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of

History, the beginning” (103). And though history might end in Europe, the future lies in the New World. As Hegel puts it:

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie

before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself....It is a

land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of

old Europe….It is for America to abandon the ground on which hitherto

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the History of the World has developed. (86-87)

In Rewards and Fairies, Pharaoh Lee abandons the “lumber-room of old Europe” in favor of brighter prospects in the New World. When he returns to France on a mercantile-smuggling voyage in “A Priest in Spite of Himself,” his ship is confiscated and he cannot leave. Pharaoh sinks back into poverty until he can escape old Europe again with his ship, thanks to having charmed the erstwhile Philadelphia expatriate

Talleyrand, who has now returned to power as Napoleon’s influential foreign minister.

Pharaoh embodies a modified Hegelian historical template depicting a rising American nation that rejects the strife and social and ethnic petrification of Europe in favor of a future-oriented nation of vibrant, adaptable hybrids.

The expression of such philosophical themes in Kipling’s work is not surprising given the broad popularity of Hegelian thought through the 19th century. By the mid-19th century, Hegelian ideas had even begun to have an impact on philosophical thinking in the United States among groups like the St. Louis Hegelians, who “developed a Hegelian vision of the historical role of their nation, state, and city” (Good 452). They saw the

United States as the culmination of historical development, exemplified by American innovation in fields like technology and architecture. Around the time Kipling wrote the

Puck books, Denton Snider, a St. Louis Hegelian, witnessed some of the world’s first skyscrapers rising in Chicago. Snider argued that “the architecture from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages to Europe in the 19th century represented the spirit of nations on a spectrum terminating in the present with the American skyscraper” (Reck

670). Kipling’s Pharaoh Lee stories thematically overlap with this Hegelian view of history, which culminates with a rising America. Like Hegel, Kipling saw the future in

157 the young American nation and its people; indeed, he famously called the American with mixed roots “‘the Man of the Future’” (Knoepflmacher 752). Kipling saw this hybrid heritage as a source of strength rather than a weakness.95 For Kipling this future in

America (and also notably in the settler Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) is still closely tied to the Old World due to historic and cultural links that he (and many others) valued and sought to emphasize; however, these new lands are no longer shackled to the past. What the people of these new lands must do (as Pharaoh does) is delicately balance the lessons of the past, maintain a hybrid cultural heritage drawn from the old and new worlds, and yet not let the past dominate the future. Pharaoh achieves this, and so should the Americans (and Canadians, Australians, and so on).

This sense of a fused Anglo-American destiny was shared by many during

Kipling’s lifetime.96 Though Britain and the United States were at odds for much of the first century of the latter’s existence, by the late 19th century Anglo-American relations had gradually shifted from one of simmering animosity during the American Civil War

(notably, under-the-table British commerce and communication with the Confederacy infuriated Washington), “to a commonality of imperial Anglo-Saxon blood brotherhood and expansionism” (Plotz, “Kipling in America” 41). The United States had come to be recognized by many British imperialists as a part of the extended imperial family—an

95 According to McBratney, the positive attitude that Kipling displays toward the mixing of different ethnic groups in the Puck books diverges from the views of Victorian historians like Edward A. Freeman (149- 151). In Freeman’s The History of the Norman Conquest of England (1867-79), the author fulminates against the concept of intermarriage between English and non-English peoples (McBratney 149-151). McBratney argues that in Puck of Pook’s Hill, however, Kipling “quietly repudiates Freeman’s exclusive racial feeling. Here, his viewpoint is consistently sympathetic to the idea of the English as a mixed race” (150). Moreover, “Kipling’s depiction of Saxon-Norman relations attests to his willingness to diverge from his historical sources to strengthen his dream of a nation and empire led by ethnically hybrid agents” (151). Kipling’s embrace of English hybridity is thus simultaneously subversive of older beliefs and imperialistic in its adoption of hybridity as a political tool. 96 This line of thinking arguably culminates with Winston Churchill’s works of history. Churchill, who had an American mother, wrote the four volume A History of the English Speaking Peoples (published 1956- 58).

158 estranged prodigal son perhaps, but nonetheless both product and exporter of common culture and values. As Plotz argues, “Kipling sees the U.S., because Anglo-Saxon in heritage, as destined to fulfill that ancestry imperially” (40). For Kipling, America is a child of the British imperial mission. Equally, America is a child with the potential to fulfill the destiny that Kipling and other imperialists saw for the English-speaking peoples as an informally united bloc.

Pharaoh Lee, the American Pan, becomes a vehicle for a regenerated, reborn, hybridized nation that could function as the heir apparent to the British Empire. As Plotz notes, “the pattern that emerges” in Kipling’s works of this period “is that of a translation regni, the vision and ethic of an imperial dominion that is passing from Britain to a youthfully buoyant and curious America” (“Kipling and the New American Empire” 47).

Pharaoh embodies the grand historical narrative in which the young America played a part. Though he begins his journey to the Americas pressed into service as a sailor and then as a lowly apprentice, Pharaoh is able to reinvent himself in the New World and forge his own destiny through contact with important expatriates like Talleyrand, Indian chiefs, and George Washington. Later, like many early European settlers he finds acceptance and a home among the Native Americans, with whom he feels a special kinship. Notably, Pharaoh’s hybrid ancestry (he is of English, French, and Romani ancestry) gives him the freedom to inhabit Native American and Euro-American spheres alike. Pharaoh’s hybrid identity functions as a subtly complex reflection of the hybrid ancient god Pan, who at once displayed the characteristics of a deity, human, and animal.

Like the Romano-Britons and Anglo-Normans of other Puck stories, Pharaoh Lee, the hybrid American Pan with roots in more than one tradition, functions as a forebear and

159 prototype of a vigorous future American people, who Kipling saw as potential partners and heirs to the British Empire.

This imperial narrative of a rising American people holds historical valence outside of fiction as well. The Puck books were written in the wake of the United States’ emergence as an imperial power after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, and the consequent annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, which were

America’s first true colonies (McBratney 137). In this light, the American tales in

Rewards and Fairies reflect Kipling’s interpretation of the rise of the American nation.

At the same time, Pharaoh’s hybridized Americanization the rise of an American people with diverse roots in the Old World, as well as the concurrent development of a nascent (hybrid) American identity. A figurative child of Pan, Pharaoh embodies the resourceful, adaptable American spirit. For Kipling, it is on men like Pharaoh that the future American empire will rely, just as the British Empire has relied on the Kims and

Stalkies that inhabit Kipling’s earlier fictions.

Kipling’s turn to America as a hope for the future of the English speaking peoples is likewise closely tied to his concerns about Britain’s imperial present. Though the recent South African War of 1899-1902 was considered a military success, it was seen by many at the time as a pyrrhic victory. The long, protracted nature of the conflict exposed

British military weaknesses, and moreover achieved little politically, as British gains were largely acceded to the Boers in the years following the war (McBratney 138).

Kipling, for his part, believed that the failures of the South African war belied a systemic sense of decay and national decline in the empire. As McBratney puts it, “Kipling felt that, if the empire were to remain healthy, it needed rehabilitation at the center” (138).

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The Puck books, and Kipling’s reimagined Pan, can thus be read as part and parcel of

Kipling’s attempts to revitalize the imperial center97 in the wake of perceived decline through the infusion of the hybrid vigor of new outposts in America and the Dominions.

Pan is the vehicle of this imperial reinvigoration, making the case for a hybrid English past and an Anglo-American future.

Kipling’s School of History: Lessons in British Hybridity for Children

Kipling recognized that the hybrid American nation was by no means the first imperial power to unite different groups into one people. Rather, the motley British, and before them the Romans, had formed great nations with roots in a dozen different populations, prefiguring the Americans as hybrid imperial peoples by centuries and millennia respectively. And though the American Pharaoh Lee remains one of the most fascinating characters in the Puck books, it is rather the British (and proto-British) characters, and Britain’s hybrid history itself, that take center stage in these works.

The interpretation of history is a continuous struggle with an unruly past that often resists attempts to pigeonhole and classify it. The history of the British Isles— marked by invasion, crosspollination of peoples and ideas, and rapid transformations—is emblematic of these difficulties, particularly in the shaping of a coherent historical narrative. Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and its sequel Rewards and Fairies (1910) are, in this context, Kipling’s attempt to make sense of the disordered, morally ambiguous, and often violent course of British history, and ultimately to make this version of history palatable to children. This goal is achieved via Puck, Kipling’s hybrid English Pan, who

“is more than a link with history: he is the (re)creator of history; he is the avatar of an Ur-

97 A center which Kipling locates in rural Sussex in the south of England. See also footnote 92 on Kipling’s affection for Sussex.

161 magic that enables myth and history to unfold itself in the present” (Voller 87). Puck’s magic recreates the past in the present for Dan and Una, re-enchanting the English landscape during a time of increasing disenchantment.

As Stephens writes in Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, children’s historical fiction attempts “to foster a sense of wholeness and purpose in the relationship between people and peoples, between selfhood and otherness, and between past, present and future” (204). Kipling’s Puck books do all of this. And yet what makes them unique from other works of the period is the way that they deal with alterity or otherness, and particularly hybridity.98 I propose that rather than seeking to efface the hybrid nature of

British identity, Kipling embraces hybridity as a tool of political intervention. In the Puck books Kipling, via the magical intermediary of Puck, the English Pan, presents his readers with British identity as a form of propagative hybridity built on the transformation and transference of people and objects. This usually involves a coming together of enemies for their mutual good: Pict and Roman, Saxon and Norman, Jew and

Christian. This coming together opens a path to a hybridized future in which two or more different groups merge to eventually form one nation and people. In Kipling’s stories this is often reflected by the transference or transformation of different objects, which in turn find new, hybrid purposes and relevance in the stories. In this way the moment of hybrid transformation leads to a hybridized future. New objects are created, and new people are required to use them. If the transformation is the pivot on which Kipling’s version of history shifts forward, the new objects are the lever, and the new hybrid people are the

98 John Glendening defines hybridity as “a potentially propagative mingling of distinct human groups or their attributes, and especially of combinations in which conventional equations of power and value are destabilized” (284). I think this definition particularly resonates in Kipling’s Puck books, which revolve around the restructuring of power and power relationships among hybrid or hybridizing peoples.

162 muscle power behind the shift.

While on the one hand Kipling’s version of history glorifies Britain and empire, on the other it also celebrates the course of human progress, which is enacted through the hybridization of objects and people. Hybridization thus becomes a tool of empire and nation-building—a means of creating a national identity strengthened, rather than weakened, by the infusion of otherness. While nearly all the tales in the Puck books could be explored for insight into hybridity, I will limit this analysis to the Roman stories in

Puck of Pook’s Hill, 99 the Saxon-Norman stories in both books,100 “The Treasure and the

Law” from Puck of Pook’s Hill, which features Kadmiel, a medieval Jewish character, and finally “A Doctor of Medicine” in Rewards and Fairies, which deals with the

Puritan/Anglican divide during the English Civil War. These stories have not been arbitrarily chosen; rather, I believe that together they are most directly responsible for constructing a transformative and subversive sense of British history and identity as hybrid. This reinterpretation of British history and identity is queer in the sense that it is disrupted and reinterpreted through the lens of hybridity. Puck, the queer hybrid agent of historical reinterpretation, recounts history as transcending division by emphasizing an organic unity to the nation’s history. British identity becomes fluid, as new peoples mix and merge into an ever-evolving population. Through Puck’s queering of the historical narrative, the hybrid peoples and objects of Britain’s past are harnessed to help to prepare the children of the present for future challenges both at home and on the imperial stage.

The Puck books’ Roman and Norman stories in particular highlight ethnic, cultural, and

99 The Roman story cycle comprises “A Centurion of the Thirtieth,” “On the Great Wall,” and “The Winged Hats.” 100 The Saxon-Norman story cycle comprises “Weland’s Sword,” “Young Men at the Manor, “ of the Joyous Venture,” and “Old Men at Pevensey” from Puck of Pook’s Hill, and “The Tree of Justice” from Rewards and Fairies.

163 religious hybridity in the context of empire, concepts which speak directly to the

Edwardian audience for whom these books were written. These three themes of ethnic, cultural, and religious hybridity form the undercurrent of my discussion. They are the figurative trunk of the hybrid British tree. In the Puck books, peoples, cultures, and objects cross-pollinate and graft on to each other in remarkable ways, with the end result being the formation of the modern British people.

Colonizers and Colonized: Rome, Britain, and Empire

In Kipling’s day the British had long been fascinated by Roman history and culture. For centuries a classical education had been the norm for the upper classes, and an ideal for the middle classes; and indeed many Britons looked to Rome as an imperial predecessor and a model for their own society. Rome provided lessons in governance and politics, as well as the dangers and pitfalls of empire. Gibbon’s The History of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is emblematic of this trend of thought, and had already proven itself an immensely popular and durable work that found its way into many household libraries through the late 18th and 19th centuries.101 As a work of history, the popularity of Decline and Fall was virtually unmatched during this period. Piers

Brendon describes the hold that it had on the British imagination, particularly among the ruling classes:

Gibbon’s work exercised a peculiar fascination on his compatriots. If

everyone looks back to seek a way forward, the British looked back

especially to Rome. Their rulers were educated in the classics. Many of

101 A spate of recent histories by British authors show that Gibbon’s influence is still felt strongly among modern historians of Britain. These include works like Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (2007) and John Darwin’s Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (2012), which continue to echo Gibbon in their narrative sweep, and to draw parallels between the Roman and British empires.

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their elite had toured the scenes of antiquity. They lived in the light of the

Renaissance. Steeped in Gibbon’s tremendous (but ignoring his

admonition about the danger of comparing epochs remote from one

another), they perceived striking analogies between the two powers that

dominated their respective worlds. The Decline and Fall became the

essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory.

They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of

Rome. (xv)

Gibbon’s continued preeminence as a marker of imperial historiography is commented upon obliquely (albeit with a tweak to Gibbon) in Stalky & Co (1899), which is based on Kipling’s experiences as a schoolboy at the United Services College. There we find that housemaster King has “a complete set of ‘Gibbon’” in his office (67). An elaborate prank set in motion by Stalky, M’Turk, and Beetle (the stand-in for a young

Kipling) results in an altercation between a drunken working-class local and housemaster

King. The bombastic King is the recipient of a colorful verbal barrage, and a jagged flint is thrown through his window. It is unclear whether the flint strikes the set of Gibbon, or if Beetle discreetly adds to the damages during the ensuing chaos, but in any case the books are “scarred all along the back as by a flint” (67). I read this incident as a deflation of both King’s pretentiousness, and of Gibbon’s hallowed status in British letters.

Regardless of any ambivalence he may have felt toward Gibbon, it would be difficult to deny that Gibbon’s work is frequently echoed in Kipling’s tales of history and empire. The shadow of Gibbon typically takes the form of a lingering anxiety over potential imperial collapse, a trope often detectable in Kipling’s works. The Roman

165 stories in the Puck books, like Gibbon’s work, share a focus on the turbulence of and the beginning of what would come to be known as the “Final Crisis” of the

Western Roman Empire. Roman Britain during the late 4th century AD existed at the limits of this crumbling empire. For Romans, ’s Wall at the extreme north end of the province (just south of the modern border between England and Scotland) formed the final boundary between civilization and barbarism, and served as the point of contact between the Romans, the Celtic Picts, and the Teutonic Northmen from across the .

Much like Afghanistan in Kipling’s day, northern Britannia was a dangerous and liminal place. As David Gilmour remarks, Kipling’s “Roman stories are not so much histories about Britain as parables about empire and civilization” (173). Kipling’s imagined

Britannia parallels the Afghanistan of such works as “Wee Willie Winkie” and Kim as sites of both danger and adventure, where a person could test their strength and .

Equally important, 4th century Britain north of Hadrian’s Wall and 19th century

Afghanistan are sites of cultural exchange, where vastly different peoples and civilizations encounter and interact with each other.

The young Romans who find themselves on the Wall parallel Kipling’s charismatic, bright, and resourceful British males such as Stalky, Kim, Wee Willie

Winkie, and “Coppy” Brandis—men (and boys becoming men) who live and serve at the limits of empire, where they establish themselves as active, capable, and productive adults. Parnesius and Pertinax, the young centurions in this set of stories, live in a decaying Roman world. Interestingly, neither are Romans from Italy. Rather, both (like the Bombay-born Kipling) are provincials—Parnesius is a Romano-Briton, and Pertinax hails from Gaul. They are the products of colonization and intermarriage: native Gauls

166 were among the earliest provincials to Romanize, mixing with Roman soldiers and settlers since the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar in the 50s BC. Romano-Britons, too, were a mixed lot, descending from a blend of native British populations and Roman soldiers, settlers, and administrative officials who came from not only major continental provinces like Gaul, Germania, and Italy, but from across the Mediterranean world.

These people have inherited Roman values, but are not ethnically or culturally “pure”

Romans themselves. They are hybrids, and as such foreshadow Britain’s hybrid future as depicted in the Puck books. Parnesius and Pertinax also embody the strengths of ancient

Rome. Like Cato the Younger (a much-admired figure among Britons in the Victorian and Edwardian periods), who refused to accept what he saw as injustice and usurpation of power by Julius Caesar, Parnesius too refuses to execute an immoral order given by the imperial usurper Maximus, a general who seeks to become Emperor of Rome. As hybrids, Parnesius and Pertinax possess a vitality and deep-seated sense of morality lacking in older, more traditional Roman figures like Maximus or Rutilianus, the aged general at the Wall. Despite their exile to Hadrian’s Wall, the young centurions maintain their in the face of adversity.

At the Wall, their notions of justice and sense of duty are put to the test in encounters with the Other, who can be found on both sides of the border, for the Wall itself is “‘manned by every breed and race in the Empire. No two towers spoke the same tongue or worshipped the same gods’” (101). The Wall, originally strictly a set of military fortifications to keep out the barbarian Other, has itself become a hybridized locale. Along the south side of the Wall, “‘ramparts are partly pulled down and built over from end to end of the wall; making a thin town eighty miles long….The place was a

167 fair—a fair of peoples from every corner of the empire’” (100). This once purely military space has been transformed into a military and civilian hodgepodge, with wine shops, bear-baiting spectacles, and gambling to distract the soldiers. This hybrid space and the differences among the people initially seems to be the cause of disorder among the

Romans, particularly while under the command of their old hedonistic general,

Rutilianus; nevertheless, the disparate soldiers of Rome come together under the new leadership of the vigorous hybrids Parnesius and Pertinax. In a time and place when the new, imported eastern god Mithras holds sway, the gluttonous Rutilianus comes from “a family that believed in ,” a byword for the old Greco-Roman religion (115). A worn-out, temporally dated figure, Rutilianus, with his five Asian chefs, typifies the decadent and degenerate image of late Rome that one finds in Gibbon.

Parnesius and Pertinax contrast sharply with this figure (and, consequently, with

Gibbon’s depiction of the Romans in a supposedly decadent late antiquity), particularly in the way that they are able to interact with other peoples in a way that fosters respect and a sense of equality. They befriend a “tame Pict” named Allo, with whom they go hunting in Pict territory north of the Wall, where other Romans fear to tread even in force

(103). Allo provides us with a sense that the Picts need the Romans, or at least need the presence of a distant, velvet-gloved Roman authority. As Allo advises Maximus, “‘Leave us Picts alone. Comfort us, and cherish us, and feed us from afar off—with the hand behind the back’” (109). It is telling that the Picts are described repeatedly as “little.”102

The Picts are not physically little, but rather it is their ambition, their world vision, and the strength of their civilization itself that is “little” relative to the Romans and the

102 Una, one of the Edwardian siblings to whom Puck reveals himself, tells Puck “‘I like hearing about the little Picts’” (114). Parnesius calls them a “foolish Little People” (125); and in Kipling’s concluding poem, “A Pict Song,” they are referred to repeatedly as “the Little Folk” (128).

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Northmen. The Picts are, as Allo notes, “‘the corn between the upper and lower millstones’” (109). In this view, the Picts need a distant and benevolent, but also hardened, Roman hand to guide them as a people—much as the “wild,” “fluttered folk”

(6) of the East need the West in Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden.” The parallel with 19th and early 20th century Afghanistan is thus taken a step further. However, the

Picts differ from Kipling’s Afghans in that they are presented on a level of greater equality with the Romans. Allo treats the young Romans like he might his kin, referring to Parnesius as “‘good child’” (108), and the Romans treat him with equal regard, seeking out and heeding his advice and assistance. Parnesius furthermore encourages the treatment of all Picts with dignity and respect, ceasing to burn their Heather and offering to take wounded Picts into Roman hospitals behind the Wall. In this way the space around the Wall becomes further hybridized, and interactions between Roman and Pict can now occur at levels of relative equality.

Moving beyond the Wall and into the Heather inhabited by the Picts, the power roles are reversed and the Romans submit to Allo, for “one must obey one’s Pict” in order to survive there (105). Once the Northmen arrive on the scene, power shifts yet again as a frightened Allo warns the Romans “‘My Heather won’t protect you here’”

(105). The liminal landscape of northern Britannia beyond the Wall, bounded by and heather, is slippery and not easily gripped by would-be conquerors. Previously under

Rutilianus, the Romans had marched into the Heather beyond the Wall, scarred the land with and dug ditches filled with broken shards of steel. Yet this marking of territory did little to prevent the Picts from harrying the Romans on the Wall. The slipperiness of the landscape beyond the Wall is further suggested in the description of an attempted raid

169 by the Northmen. The Northmen attack by sea, but the Romans overturn their vessels with stone projectiles. Then abruptly all trace of the raid is effaced by the sea (“the sea makes everything clean again” [117]). Interestingly, this liminal space, where any attempt to make a permanent mark invariably ends in failure, also functions as a meeting ground for different peoples. It is here that the Romans and Picts make a deal to refrain from violence against each other in order to deal with the common threat of the Northmen. As

Allo chides Pertinax “‘your Gods and my Gods are threatened by strange Gods’” (105).

Here beside the hybridized Wall, the liminal Heather, and the effacing sea, enemies must come together for their mutual good.

And yet the Northmen, the great enemies of Rome, are not depicted as bogeymen, like the Malots and Khye-Keens of Afghanistan in Stalky & Co. When Parnesius captures one of the raiding Northmen (who turns out to be their leader Amal), he notes that “‘he wore such a medal as I wear’” (117). It is the symbol of the Mithras, “god of light”

(Coates 43), whose worshippers “‘are many and of all races’” (Kipling, Puck of Pook’s

Hill 117). A religion with Persian roots, had been adopted by Roman legionnaires as a god of soldiers, and came to Europe from the East with the march of the legions (Henig 98). In its transference west it had been adapted, and in effect hybridized, in order to fill the traditional role of Roman celestial sun-god, as well as that of the eastern mystery cult, long popular among Romans (Martin 8). Due to its great popularity with soldiers and administrative officials, “Mithraism had become the religious ‘cement’ that held the empire together,” at least until its displacement by Christianity in the mid-4th century AD (Betz 88). Though the Roman stories technically take place when Mithraism had historically already waned as a religious movement, Kipling allows both Parnesius

170 and Amal, leaders of different peoples (Romans and Northmen respectively), to worship the same hybridized Mithraic god. Due to their common faith, Parnesius permits the captured Amal to leave with his surviving men, and Amal returns the favor by sending the Roman a gold and coral necklace. This object, a fusion of once-living matter from the sea and metal dug from the earth, can be interpreted as reflecting the future hybridization of Northmen from across the sea with the traditionally land-bound Romans. Though perceived by the Romans as rough around the edges, Amal and the “Winged Hats” (as the

Northmen are called) share a set of core beliefs and values with the Romans. Both sides are furthermore capable of appreciating the qualities of their enemies: Amal recognizes the Roman’s nobility and leadership, while Parnesius recognizes the Northman’s strength and determination. As they parley before the onset of war, Amal looks around the room at Roman, Northman, and Pict, and remarks “‘We be a goodly company’” (124). This recognition of their equal worth is a remarkable moment, for though they now must fight, in the end these peoples, like the necklace of coral and gold, will fuse into one entity.

As Coates explains, at the time he wrote the Puck books, Kipling “moved in a world of historical interpretation now defunct” that was based on a “racial framework”

(38). Two conflicting theories regarding the fall of Rome reigned during the Edwardian era. The first was the “Teutonic Theory,” partly based on interpretations of the decline of

Rome in Gibbon’s magnum , which essentially stated that the Romans were a decadent people who had lost their vitality and become degenerate. In this view, the

“pure” Northmen wiped clean the slate and became the true forebears of modern Europe.

On the other hand, the theory of “Classical Heritage” promoted the idea that virtually all of what Europeans call civilization could be traced back to the Romans and Greeks (38-

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40). In the Puck books Kipling takes a compromise, “hybrid” position between the two theories.103 By fusing the inheritance of the classical past with the vigor of barbarian races, a new path to the future opens ahead. As he brings Romans, Picts, and eventually

Northmen into contact, Kipling, like the Weland from an earlier story, is mixing a new alloy for the forging of a new sword. This new, hybrid sword unites the best qualities of each of its components—it is a sword, or rather a people, shaped for the future. In their ability to integrate with the Other, and to draw together the disparate peoples manning the Wall, Parnesius and Pertinax reveal the strength of the hybrid alloy.

These tales were written in the early 20th century, at the height of Western imperial expansion, and when racist eugenicist theories were openly accepted as legitimate justification for imperialism. Given this historical backdrop, Kipling’s emphasis on the admixture of foreign peoples, religions, and ideas can only be read as subversive. I do not believe that it is a coincidence that Puck, Kipling’s hybrid English

Pan, is the ultimate vehicle of these subversive ideas. Kipling uses Puck to frame narratives that queer conceptions of national identity by turning the increasingly popular

Teutonic theory of history on its head. In doing so the Puck books suggest an alternative means of sustaining an empire that refutes the Gibbonian model of a long, slow decline into decadence. I mentioned earlier that the Roman stories act as parables of empire; more specifically, these stories show that the hybrid is the driving force behind the building and maintaining of empire—as McBratney puts it, hybrids are the group from

103 As Coates puts it, Kipling’s works “give a subtle reinterpretation of the forgotten controversy between ‘Teutonic Theory’ and ‘Classical Heritage’” (39). I believe that Kipling’s depiction of Parnesius and Pertinax as tough, able, and adaptable men functions as a critique of both the Teutonic theory and of Gibbon’s portrayal of the Romans as a decadent people. As in the episode with housemaster King in Stalky & Co. discussed earlier in this chapter, the Roman stories in the Puck books cast doubt on the lofty status accorded to Gibbon. In these stories, the traditional Gibbon-esque narrative of decadent decline and ignoble fall is subsumed by one of courageous struggle against terrific odds in which the survivors are those who are best able to adapt to changing conditions, like the hybrids Parnesius and Pertinax.

172 which a nation may “cull their leaders and model citizens, the architects of a new nation and empire” (144).

Puck’s Hybrid Britain

This sense of imperial hybridity takes a subtly different form in the Norman and

Saxon stories of the Puck books. While Parnesius’s late 4th century Roman Britain is a far-flung province of an empire in decline, 11th century Britain is a distinctive place in its own right. It has been home to the Germanic Anglo-Saxons for centuries—they too originally a colonizing people who had replaced the Romans and Celts, and then defended their new home against Viking incursion. Yet it is the vigorous, newly rising hybrid civilization of the Normans that will most radically transform medieval Britain and pave the way to the future. The Normans are descended from Viking raiders who had settled in Normandy and mixed with the local population, adopting their language

(Norman French) and forging a hybrid culture that merged traditions of Germanic and

Latin Europe (Harrison 1). The Norman Conquest transformed Britain from an insular

Germanic society into one with strong connections to the continent. In effect, the

Conquest culturally reconnected Britain to mainland Europe. Equally importantly, it transformed the inhabitants of the British Isles into a hybrid people speaking a hybrid language, with hybridized culture and traditions. It is here—among the first generation of

Britons to experience the Conquest, at the first stages of hybridization—that Kipling focuses attention with the Saxon-Norman story cycle.

Just as the Roman stories revolve around hybridized objects, or hybrid places as objects (Hadrian’s Wall, the liminal Heather, and /gold necklace), the medieval stories revolve around two central hybrid objects: Weland’s sword and the African gold.

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The first story of Puck of Pook’s Hill is in fact entitled “Weland’s Sword;” in this story

Puck fills in the gaps of both pre- and post-Roman British history, concluding with events

“‘a year or two before the [Norman] Conquest’” (16). He begins with a description of how the fairies, or more accurately the “People of the Hills” (originally known as

“Gods,” according to Puck [13]), came to Britain alongside visiting or invading peoples:

“‘The Phoenicians brought some over when they came to buy tin; and the Gauls, and the

Jutes, and the Danes, and the Frisians, and the Angles brought more when they landed.

They were always landing in those days, or being driven back to their ships, and they always brought their Gods with them’” (13-14). We have here a dual image of invading peoples mirrored by invading gods, which results in both peoples and religions mixing together. Puck presents a world where identity is fluid, and cultural mixing, along with religious and ethnic hybridity, is a way of life. As Puck puts it: “‘I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up with people all my days’” (14). Those gods that kept themselves separate from people became fairy vagabonds as they “‘flitted to other places because they couldn’t get on with the English for one reason or another’” (14).

Integration with the local populace is thus essential to the gods’ long-term survival. Puck, as a hybrid entity, has survived through the ages in Britain by adapting, and being adapted by, the morphing population. To people of different eras, Puck takes on different significance. To the Roman Parnesius, for example, Puck is a “‘Faun’” (117), closely connected to “‘the Sylvan Pan’” (103), a Mediterranean god imported to Britain whom

Parnesius has worshipped by building an altar in the woods. On the other hand, Kadmiel, the medieval Jewish character in “The Treasure and the Law,” refers to Puck as a “‘Spirit of Earth’” (165), suggesting a potential connection between Puck and traditional lore or

174 mysticism. In another display of hybridity, Puck speaks to Kadmiel in “foreign words”

(164), presumably the Sephardic Kadmiel’s native language.104 Characters in other stories see in Puck an old friend or contemporary familiar to them. In each case Puck’s hybrid identity has shifted to match conceptions recognizable to the beholder and to blend into the spirit of the times. In this way Puck’s hybrid identity is woven into the ever-changing fabric of British history, mirroring the changes undergone by hybrid British peoples.

Sword and Crucifix: Puck’s Norman Tales

The smith-god Weland, revered by the Saxons, is yet another imported being with a hybrid identity. As Bradley states, “the Weland legend probably originated among

Germanic tribesmen in close contact with the Graeco-Roman world….in the region of the

Danube frontier, in what is now Austria” (42). Bradley goes on to suggest that in Anglo-

Saxon Britain, the pagan Weland “was perceived in a Christian as well as an heroic context” (43). In the Anglo-Saxon church, the image of the smith paralleled that of the teacher of scripture, for “the smiths, according to Bede, stood for those who, like the

Anglo-Saxon monks, studied and spread the Word of God. Such men provided the

Church with weapons” (45). Bradley concludes that

“For Anglo-Saxons the image of Weland was a positive one and a source of reassurance….a Christian symbol of wisdom and hope” (47). Much like Pan (or Puck), a pagan god with origins far from the source of Christianity, Weland is adapted and hybridized to suit the culture and people of Britain.

It is telling that Kipling’s first story in the collection focuses on the hybrid

Weland and the sword that he has forged. The sword itself is a hybrid object, like the

104 The language spoken by Puck and Kadmiel is not explicitly mentioned (though it is described from the perspective of the children as a “strange, solemn-sounding language” [164]). As a Sephardi in the early 13th century, Kadmiel would likely be able to speak Hebrew, Arabic, and/or Spanish.

175 gold-coral necklace in the Roman stories: forged by an ancient pagan god/Christian hero, with pagan “ of ” inscribed on the blade (20), it is not straight and angular but “wavy-lined” (19), suggesting a queered hybrid mixture of Western and non-Western workmanship that would at once be familiar and strange to the Anglo-Saxon or Norman wielders of the blade. The wavy lines further evoke the sword’s unusual history: a queerly sideways development that resists the angularity of normative construction, hinting at the sword’s supernatural or divine origins and foreshadowing the blade’s fate in assisting in the hybridization of the British people. There is also a hybrid religious and militant to the blade, for Weland delivers the sword to the novice, Hugh, in the chapel of a monastery, essentially sanctifying the weapon as a form of crucifix. As the Abbot notes at the end of the story, “‘whatever the Smith of the Gods may have been in the old days, we know that he worked honestly for his living and made gifts to Mother

Church’” (20). In other words, Weland’s past identity does not matter as he has now been absorbed into the common body of a hybrid pagan/Christian Britain. Though Weland then leaves Britain, it is only after he has been accepted by the Saxon monks, to whom he has left his figurative child, “‘the best blade that Weland ever made’” (20). The spirit of

Weland thus never truly leaves Britain, for an essential part of his being remains behind, symbolized by the hybrid sword that would come to serve Saxon and Norman alike, and eventually find its way to Africa on a proto-colonial mission on a Viking longboat with an ethnically diverse crew. The sword’s hybrid, adaptable nature allows it to be wielded continuously by equally hybrid peoples in diverse lands. Moreover, its hybrid backstory serves as a fitting opening to the Puck books, foreshadowing the hybrid objects and peoples that fill their pages. In this light, the Church’s acceptance of Weland’s sword is

176 only the first step in a journey through the winding path of British hybridity.

When Norman Meets Saxon

The acceptance of outsiders and outside things in the Puck books is at work most strikingly in the medieval Norman story cycle. The friendship between the protagonists

Hugh and Richard is the seed that brings unity to Norman and Saxon peoples who initially distrust and dislike each other. “Young Men at the Manor” opens with the Battle of Hastings, where the Saxon Hugh, a one-time novice monk (and now in possession of

Weland’s sword) is defeated and captured by the Norman Sir Richard. Sir Richard spares

Hugh’s life, and shortly afterwards Hugh saves Sir Richard from a group of Saxons who would have killed him. Hugh is already a hybrid, having lived in France “‘for three years at the monastery at Bec by Rouen’” where Richard himself once stayed (29). Together they return to Hugh’s familial Manor, where once again Richard finds himself surrounded by Saxons who see him as a mortal enemy. He is still under Hugh’s protection, however, and in any case De Aquila (Richard’s superior) soon arrives with word that the Normans have defeated the Saxons. Richard is then given a difficult task by

De Aquila: he must ensure that the Manor (described as a “‘Saxon hornets’ nest’” [31]) remains a peaceful, productive place. There being only a handful of Norman men-at-arms to maintain the peace, in order to achieve this both Normans and Saxons must work together. Richard enlists Hugh’s help, returning Weland’s sword to him. The hybrid object in this way returns as a tool used to further the end of building a hybrid future for the British people.

In their first mutual crisis the Normans and Saxons of the Manor join together to chase off a group of Norman swine thieves. As Richard tells the people of the Manor,

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“‘Norman or Saxon…we must beat them back, or they will rob us every day’” (32). After this first success of cooperation, he notes that some of the Saxons “‘even then, began not to hate me’” (33). As a further stage in development on the Roman-Pict relationship, this alliance of Norman and Saxon against thieving Normans illustrates a recurring theme of the Puck books—namely, that one’s ethnic ties are less important than the ties that bind people to the land they call home, wherever that may be. Like the Heather and the Wall in the Roman stories, the one-time Saxon Manor is a hybrid space where different peoples live together and unite in order to solve mutual problems. In the Norman stories the process of cooperation and integration has come further along, but the essential idea is the same.

As time goes by the situation at the Manor gradually improves, and “in an atmosphere of warm rapprochement, Hugh and Richard collaborate to bring order to a newly Norman Britain. In doing so, each moves toward the position of the other”

(McBratney 148). As the Normans and Saxons move closer together, mutual respect leads to friendship, friendship to love, and love to union. The possibility of intermarriage, and the creation of a new, hybrid English folk consequently comes to the fore—a fact not lost on De Aquila, who as McCutchan notes, encourages “Norman-Saxon intermarriage”

(78), an idea implicit in his order to Richard to “keep the plough in the furrow” (Kipling,

Puck of Pook’s Hill 31). In fact Richard is already smitten with Hugh’s sister, Lady

Aelueva, and strives to win her heart. Their eventual union illustrates Kipling’s sympathy

“to the idea of the English as a mixed race” (McBratney 150). In “Old Men at Pevensey” the sage Norman De Aquila remarks (after approving the marriage of a “‘Norman man- at-arms’” to a “‘a Saxon wench of the Manor’” [Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill 67]) “‘in

178 fifty years there will be neither Norman nor Saxon, but all English’” (68). Intermarriage and consequent hybridity is, as they see it, the only road to ultimate equality. As

McBratney notes, “the closely allied Saxon and Norman blend to produce a tough hybrid—the strong gun-barrel Englishman so central to Kipling’s concept of national identity” (151). This hybrid Saxon-Norman race treads a path towards the future of the nation—a future where hybridity is the norm. And though the reconciliation of Norman and Saxon did not historically proceed quite as smoothly as Kipling suggests, “the idea of

England as a consequence of this fusion” [emphasis added] is equally central to the formation of British identity (Gilmour 173).

Vikings and Hybrid Gold

At the middle of the Norman cycle of stories is “The Knights of the Joyous

Venture.” This tale is largely set on the Norse captain Witta’s Viking ship, and centers on a voyage of exploration and imperial exploitation that foreshadows Britain’s future role as an imperial power. The Viking ship is the new hybrid space for this journey, populated by Witta and his Vikings, the Saxon Hugh, the Norman Richard, and the

“Yellow Man” Kitai (48), an Asian mariner taken in by the Vikings. Though his nickname smacks of colonial-era racism, Kitai is in fact a valued member of the crew, and the only one who knows how to use a rudimentary magnetic compass known as “the

Wise Iron” (50). In this story the European characters are the superstitious folk who think that the compass is inhabited by an “‘Evil Spirit’” (50), while the Asian character is the repository of rational scientific knowledge. By locating this hybrid figure on the Viking vessel, Kipling seems to be acknowledging the Western debt to the East for its great contributions to science and general knowledge during the Middle Ages. This motley

179 crew sets out in search of riches, finding a hoard of gold “‘in bars and dust…and some great blackened elephants’ teeth’” offered to them by inhabitants of the Gold Coast of

Africa (55). To earn this hybrid animal-mineral hoard, however, they must defeat a band of wild apes that have been harassing the local inhabitants. Norman, Saxon, Viking, and

East Asian crewmembers cooperate and fight side by side, defeating the apes and winning the gold. Hugh is sorely wounded, and that other hybrid object, Weland’s sword, shifts again from Saxon to Norman hands, symbolizing the shift of power that had begun in the previous story.

In this story, Africa is pacified, and its wealth passes into European hands, mirroring later imperial expeditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries to ostensibly “help the natives” while simultaneously expanding dominion over them. The Westerners are thus “freely offered money by the conquered in return for bearing the white man’s burden” (Raskin 108). Echoing the Roman stories, there is a subtext that looks ahead to reflect Kipling’s imperial present. As Lewis notes, “the fact that the gold comes from

Africa would have had special resonance in 1906, since British gold- and - mining interests had been one reason for the recently concluded South African war”

(197). The foreshadowing of future events, both real and fictionalized, is an integral feature of these works, and one that is reflected in the way that hybrid objects can return to serve new functions that are hinted at earlier. The recurring role of the hybrid African-

Viking-British gold in British history is one further manifestation of this idea—the gold, the fruit of proto-imperialism, eventually travels back to England where it is hidden for centuries, and used to transform the nation in the later medieval story “The Treasure and the Law,” which centers on a Kadmiel, a Sephardi who now lives in England.

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Kadmiel, Hybrid Jewish Briton

Having lived through the reign of King John (1199-1216), who “‘used to pull out

Jews [sic] teeth to make them lend him money’” (Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill 165), the

Sephardi Kadmiel understands the destructive power of ethnic and religious prejudice.

Kadmiel, however, is not embittered by this prejudice. Though foreign born he “feels a special stake in the country’s future” and becomes an agent for change and the expansion of law and civil rights (McBratney 153). If Kadmiel is the hybrid agent of change, the hybrid gold brought back to England and hidden by Sir Richard and Hugh, “‘heavier and redder’” than pure English gold (Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill 172), acts as the catalyst for the signing of the Magna Carta. By disposing of the treasure, Kadmiel prevents the

King from raising another army to fight the barons, for “‘so long as he has money he will lie and slay the people’” (168). Through Kadmiel, Kipling empowers the powerless, turning a man who had been mocked and stoned into a figure of Biblical stature who can rightfully claim “‘I have sunk an army with horsemen in the sea’” (172). Kadmiel in this way “uses the power of the gold treasure to ensure that the terms of the Magna Carta will apply equally to all Englishman” regardless of ethnicity or religion (Hinchcliffe 158). As

Puck proudly states, thanks to Kadmiel’s actions, the Magna Carta guarantees “‘but one

Law in Old England for Jew or Christian’” (Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill 164). Kadmiel’s stoic heroism supports the notion that “neither armies nor treasure can ensure freedom”

(Lewis 197). Rather, it is the individual who stands for righteousness that is most important to a society—and once again, the individual who emerges from this story is culturally and ethnically hybrid.

Kipling also steps back to show that acceptance of religious hybridity has come to

181 fruition in the fictional Edwardian world of the Puck books. In the Edwardian bookends to Kadmiel’s tale, Dan and Una’s Jewish neighbor, Meyer, is described as a typical

English gentleman, hunting rabbits and birds across the countryside. Significantly,

Kadmiel is impressed to hear from Puck that Meyer is not only treated equally under the law, but is wealthy enough to employ Christians as servants. This acceptance of the

Jewish Other extends beyond the world of fiction, however. As with the Roman and

Norman stories, “The Treasure and the Law” reflects back on contemporary reality. In

Britain by the late Victorian and Edwardian era, Jewish people could finally live in relative equality to their Christian neighbors. The medieval Kadmiel anticipates notable figures of British-Jewish descent such as Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister Benjamin

Disraeli, himself a hybrid Anglican convert from . There is a strong congruity between Kadmiel and Disraeli in that both show loyalty first and foremost to their ideals regarding the betterment of the British nation. In disposing of the gold, Kadmiel defies the wishes of his uncle Elias of Bury, “‘a great one among our people’” (Kipling, Puck of

Pook’s Hill 167). Much as the Normans of the Manor unite with the Saxons against the

Norman swine thieves, Kadmiel is not restricted by blood ties. This parallels Disraeli’s focus on “promoting British interests, rather than anything that could be identified as a

‘Jewish’ interest” (Julius 2). As Kalmar describes him, Disraeli was “a relentlessly imperialist politician who gained the Suez Canal and for Britain and solidified

British influence throughout the Orient at the expense of the French and the Russians”

(350). Kadmiel and Disraeli represent a minority that has put aside its sense of otherness for the good of the adopted homeland that they now serve. As Coates summarizes,

“Kadmiel’s descendants are accepted members of the community, part of the English

182 scene, rather than a submerged group” (46). They are hybrid beings, defined as much by their Britishness as their otherness.

Anglican and Puritan: A Hybrid British Future

I will conclude this section with an analysis of the role of hybridity in “A Doctor of Medicine” from Rewards and Fairies. I have chosen to end this discussion here, with a story of the English Civil War (1642-1651), one of the most traumatic periods in the nation’s history, because of the key role that hybridity plays in the union and reconciliation necessary to heal the scars of war and civil strife. The coming together of the two main characters—Culpeper the Parliamentarian and Marget the Royalist—in a story about curing disease seems to promise a better future where healing, cooperation, and reconciliation will reunite the great divide in British society.

Though not strictly identified as a Puritan, Culpeper is certainly Cromwellian in his , dressing simply in a “‘buff coat’” (355) and decrying “‘the of the so-called Church, which were rightly forbidden by Cromwell’” (359). Paradoxically,

Culpeper also believes in , calling himself “‘a devout seeker,’” or one that is

“‘nobly curious to search out [God’s] mysteries’” (358). Through his mixture of

Puritanical and arcane beliefs, Culpeper reveals himself to be (like Pharaoh, Parnesius,

Hugh, and Kadmiel) another of Kipling’s hybrid agents. When the story opens, Culpeper relates how he had been grievously wounded and left for dead by Royalist troops for fear of his infection with the plague. However Marget, a Royalist and High Church Anglican priest, dresses his wounds and saves his life. As Culpeper notes, Marget “‘was a Sussex man, like myself’” (355). Once again the ties to one’s homeland trump religious belief and political alignment. Thrust out of the Royalist camp, the two men resolve “‘to leave

183 wars on the left side henceforth’” (355). With the Civil War still raging around them, these men of opposing beliefs make their peace and recognize in the plague a more immediate threat to their homeland and mutual well-being. As Coates puts it, “Culpeper’s faithfulness to his Royalist patients cuts across the ideological division of the Civil War.

His loyalty to them, and surrender, in their interests, of his own political and religious prejudices is far more important than his discovery…of the right way to deal with the plague” (71). Though mistaken in his understanding of the root cause of the plague,

Culpeper’s hybrid mixture of astrology and common sense helps him to come up with an effective means of stopping the spread of the plague in Marget’s hometown: by killing all the rats. He and Marget then work together with the villagers to save the town.

As the story draws to a close, Culpeper is even convinced to attend Marget’s

Anglican church service. And though Culpeper calls Marget’s celebratory sermon “‘a most idolatrous discourse’” (Kipling, Rewards and Fairies 363), he remains in attendance. This is the culmination of a fundamental shift from hatred and war to polite disagreement and acceptance of difference—agreeing to disagree, so to speak. Such civil discourse is essential to a healthy and strong society. It is also significant that it is the

“vulgar” (the poorest commoners), the old women, and especially the children who

“‘dragged [Culpeper] to the House of Rimmon by the hand” where he “‘was kneeling, and praying, and weeping with the rest of ‘em at the altar rails’” (363-364). In the

Norman stories intermarriage led to hybridization and equality. Here it is the humblest of people, the old and the poor, along with children, the products of marriage and the future of the British people, who bring both ideological sides together in a hybridized house of worship, where together they give thanks for their mutual salvation, brought about

184 through cooperation. This is a moment when both sides recognize that they have more in common than they realize, and that they have suffered equally during both war and plague. After the upheaval and bloodshed of civil strife, the plague functions here as the great equalizer: it matters not whether one is Anglican or Puritan, Royalist or

Parlimentarian, for it kills both just as well. It is fitting then that the final instance of hybridization in the story occurs in a place of worship, where both sides can be united in thanks.

Conclusion - Hybrid Past, Hybrid Future

Post-Colonial culture has been described as “a hybridized phenomenon involving a dialectical relationship between the ‘grafted’…[foreign] cultural systems and an indigenous ontology, with its impulse to create or recreate an independent local identity”

(Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin 220). Kipling’s Puck books hold a mirror up to this modern conception and reflect it back on a mytho-historical Britain that can in turn be seen as both proto-colonial and proto-post-colonial. However, in these works the colonial relationship between colonizer and colonized (such as Roman and Pict, or Norman and

Saxon) is leveled and likened to the cultural encounter between two different, but equally

“worthy” groups105 to whom modern Britons could trace ancestral or ideological lineage.

In both the colonial and cultural encounter scenarios, one-time enemies must work together towards achieving a goal that will benefit both parties equally. In the course of this encounter, both sides realize that cooperation is more productive than conflict, and that their differences are less significant than their shared values. As Coates succinctly puts it, “Kipling focuses Puck of Pook’s Hill on inclusion and healing” (45). In Kipling’s

105 To draw once again on “A Doctor of Medicine” in Rewards and Fairies, Anglican and Puritan, for example.

185 fictionalized Britain, colonization and encounter lead to unity, amity, and strength rather than division, hatred, and weakness.

Through this carefully constructed, pseudo-historical vision of Britain, Kipling strives to show the strength and vitality of the persevering and triumphant hybrid.

Hybridity becomes a source of power and a means to advance as a culture to the next stage in history. By embedding this theory of hybridity within a series of historically- inspired fictional narratives told by Puck, a hybrid fairy-god of the British countryside, and more specifically in books aimed at children, Kipling promotes a hope that the next generations of British youth will be worthy inheritors of their culturally and ethnically hybrid patrimony, the Empire. As Raskin writes, Kipling believed that the British “had, by a process of evolution and natural selection, combined diverse strains into a hearty species” (106). For Kipling, the Edwardian children Dan and Una of the Puck books are the next stage in this evolution. They are the people of the future—not only are they descendants of their hybrid British ancestors, but they are in touch with the hybridized history of their country, as mixed as it is with a fact and fiction, magic and science.

Kipling’s view of British history is, along these lines, as hybridized and conflicted as

Kipling the man. On the one hand, Kipling’s stance might be compared to Jean-Paul

Sartre’s description of the Neocolonialist, whose distinguishing feature is his belief that colonialism fails when the colonist is “wicked” and succeeds where he is “good” (Sartre

30). In Kipling’s version of history, virtually all Britons are descended from colonists; and to the good fortune of the modern British nation, most of them were of the “good” sort. And yet juxtaposed with this conservative viewpoint is a liberal and generous notion of the equality of human beings across ethnic, religious, and cultural lines.

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Kipling’s Puck books thus simultaneously promote jingoistic ideals of national identity and imperial patriotism, as well as nobility, compassion, and a sense of brotherhood among peoples. This duality reflects back on Kipling, the hybrid Anglo-

Indian. Perhaps these books were Kipling’s attempt to reassure himself of his own

Englishness in the face of the cultural hybridity that he saw within.106 Or, as I like to think, they are an attempt to reconcile the very nature of hybridity as a typically British feature. In any event, the Puck books construct a fascinating, exciting, inclusive, pseudo- historical Britain that has provided British children not only with a “marvelous sense of a multilayered past that any intelligent child can love and understand” (Gilmour 172), but also a sense of mixed identity that is prescient of today’s multicultural world. In the Puck books, a sense of hybrid otherness is accepted as an essential aspect of an English whole.

Kipling’s Pan figures (including Puck and Pharaoh Lee) are the key to this revelation, proving that this suppressed otherness is in fact an essential part of the individual, and that the individual should not forget that they are also an integrated part of a hybrid

“all”—a nation that is in fact a hybrid entity. Green, vital, hybrid, simultaneously animalistic, human, and divine, Kipling’s Pans breathe life into the era’s graying landscape by reconnecting the nation to a “deeper” England that had been gradually slipping away. This reconnection and renewal is brought about by achieving an understanding of the nation’s complex, unstable, hybrid past of invasion and adaptation.

Such an alternative, queered sense of history diverges from many dominant 19th century racial theories which emphasized monolithic ethnic purity, and instead foregrounds

106 Some previous critics (including Zohreh T. Sullivan) have suggested biographical links between some of Kipling’s works and his own personal sense of hybridity. This topic is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, I will point to the poem “The Two-Sided Man” (originally published in Kim and later expanded) as a particularly compelling example of Kipling dealing with an individual’s sense of hybridity. For more on this, see Sullivan’s footnote on p. 111 of the 2002 Norton edition of Kim.

187 hybridity and hybrid identities as quintessentially English. Such an alternative sense of national identity effectually queers the predominant monolithic conceptions of ethnicity defined by borders. That line of thinking, which shackles ethnicity to the nation state, exploded in popularity with the development of nationalist movements across Europe in the 19th century, and led, in the 20th, from irredentism, to world war, and most tragically, to genocide. In the Puck books, national identity is not strictly tied to ethnic identity.

Instead, Kipling’s hybridity, embodied by Puck and his cast of conjured historical figures, communicates a sense of welcoming openness to assimilation and acceptance of others. Puck, Kipling’s English Pan, and the queered history that he recreates for Dan and

Una, are the entrancing, irresistible vehicles of this alternative, mature understanding of identity and nationality as hybrid. Perhaps most importantly, as children’s literature the

Puck books are, as Kipling remarks, “glorious fun” (Something of Myself and Other

Autobiographical Writings 111). Much of this fun, in my opinion, is due to the compelling, playful earnestness of the magical hybrid Puck, goat-god and earth spirit of

Deep England.

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Chapter 3: The Queer God Pan: Terror and Apocalypse, Reimagined

Introduction

The history of Pan in the 19th and early 20th centuries can be visualized as a web of country paths, with numerous forks and diversions meandering off in different directions. These various byways present strikingly different vistas: one is light and airy, passing through a sunny, tree-rimmed field; another leads to a glen of deep green, silent and mysterious. Yet another takes us into a dark wood, with overhanging branches and leaves that forebodingly envelop and menace the unsuspecting traveler. It is down this last path that I would now like to venture—into the realm of the figure I have termed the queer Gothic Pan: the god’s terrifying death mask. All of the manifestations of Pan examined in this dissertation have magnified and transformed queer aspects of the classical myth through English lenses in the long 19th century. We have seen the queer, eternal child Pan, a mischievous blend of light and shade. We have observed the mature adult Pan: a mystical god of deep England who entices with his hypnotic music, promising personal liberation as he lures us to an alternative vision of the modern world.

Now we shall turn to the dark, vengeful, disruptive Pan: monstrous prophet of apocalypse and queer embodiment of the death drive, and of the unknowable, incomprehensible abyss of deep time. In this chapter, I argue that this darkly reimagined Pan queers both the ancient mythological figure and the conventions of the Gothic monster while feeding off of the anxieties and desires of a disenchanted and secularizing .

Through a critical analysis of the depictions of the god in a selection of literary texts, including three poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning’s “Pan and

Luna,” Algernon Swinburne’s late work “A Nympholept,” and Arthur Machen’s fin-de-

189 siècle “The Great God Pan,” I will highlight the range of queer activities and possibilities represented by this darkly transformed ancient myth, and trace the development of Pan as a queer figure in popular English literature of the 19th century.

As an attempt to catalog fully every instance of the dread-inducing Pan across the long 19th century would perhaps prove tedious, I will instead examine these representative works in order to provide what Halberstam terms “a symptomatic history”

(26) of Pan’s development as an image of terror, disruption, and violence. I will also consider Pan’s significance as a reflection of an increasingly apocalyptic view of modern civilization that had begun to press into popular consciousness during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pan is a cultural marker of what Jasbir Puar terms “queer times,” a period of rapid change in which non-normative potentialities break out of the underground and reveal themselves to be a part of everyday life.107 During queer times, transgressive or disruptive forces emerge from the shadows of repression and become, in some ways, a new norm. Pan, more than any other monster of the period, is an apocalyptic reflection of this sense of “queer times;” an imaginative translation of mysterious, disruptive forces creeping into ordinary life. In such queer times, as humanity hurtles toward a dark, unknown future, the ancient god Pan emerges from the shadows, becoming simultaneously a harbinger of terrifying death and rebirth into new, queer possibilities.

107 Jasbir Puar makes use of the term “queer times” in her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. “Queer times” refer to a period in which, after long and/or intense repression, queer, transgressive ideologies become incorporated into the larger heteronormative society (De Cicco 5). “Queer temporality” refers to the queering of time, a phenomenon in which, for example, “waves of the future [break] into the present” (Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages” 129). My usage of this term is influenced by Puar’s, but nonetheless varies slightly from hers, as will become apparent in this chapter.

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The representative works I have selected provide a range of interpretations of Pan that nonetheless underscore a clear sense of progression, bridging past and future depictions of the god. Though encompassing a variety of styles and themes, all these works depict Pan as an often violent—and always disruptive—reaction against modernity, the industrial revolution, urbanization, declining spirituality, and even heteronormative marriage and sexuality. This Pan is a knot in the wood—a point of resistance that forces a shift against the grain of normative culture. An analysis of these key literary texts will show how Pan transformed from a Romantic pastoral deity into a

Gothicized fin-de-siècle monster haunting the woods and cities of late Victorian and early

20th century Britain. The ancient god’s behaviorally and sexually queer history was reimagined to fit the specific, and equally queer, conditions of this new time and place.

Demonic and angelic, healer and terror, Pan holds a dark mirror up to a Britain in which many increasingly felt spiritually and socially unmoored. By tracing a history of the queer, monstrous Pan, I aim to unravel some of the hopes and anxieties, fears and desires, of this turbulent and transformative era, as they are played out in the pages of popular writings.

While my analysis focuses on the aforementioned works, I will refer to other relevant authors and their writings that feature darker, terrifying Pans. My intention in focusing on the Brownings, Swinburne, and Machen is to illustrate how the queer Gothic

Pan matured and developed during this time by emphasizing the queer irruptions in these texts—the moments of queering reorientation, sparked by the god, that terrifyingly and irrevocably transform perceptions of life, art, spirituality, sexuality, and the world at large. This manifestation of Pan forces other characters to confront the queer possibilities

191 that exist beyond the boundaries of supposedly normative life. In these works Pan burns through the masks of the everyday, revealing a creeping horror that has threatened humankind through the ages.

The Queer Gothic Pan: Terrifying Attraction

This darker manifestation of Pan is both Gothic and queer. Halberstam defines the

Gothic “as the rhetorical style and narrative structure designed to produce fear and desire within the reader” (2). This fear “emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning,” and results in an “experience of horror” intimately linked to the “realization that meaning itself runs riot” (2). The figure that I term the “queer Gothic Pan” embodies an excess of meaning so potent that he is perceived as a serious threat to normative order and categorization. Pan’s queerness is rooted in his ability to defy and dissolve binary categories of subjectivity.108 He does not only resist categorization—like ’s creation or Dracula—rather, Pan demolishes it by undermining the very conception of categories like human/animal, spiritual/physical, passion/dread. Pan queers the Gothic monster of the 19th century, and paves the way for the more amorphous, chaotic monsters of the 20th and 21st centuries. Reborn in the 19th century, Pan gestures to the past, present, and future of the Gothic, Fantastic, and Weird genres.

The queer Gothic Pan tempts before it terrifies. A monstrous being of unlimited possibility, he gives voice to the common human desire to transform one’s self, and by doing so break free from societally restricted boundaries. Though in this sense a transcendent force on the level of the individual, the monstrous Pan is also a force of resistance to change on the societal or civilizational level. As a cultural body, this darker

108 Halberstam lists several such binaries of metaphorized, liminal space that come to be occupied by 19th century monsters, including: “inside/outside, male/female, body/mind, native/foreign, proletarian/aristocrat” (1).

192

Pan is a schwerpunkt—a critical focal point—in the encounter with the seemingly overwhelming trends of modernity. The queer Gothic Pan fights a guerrilla war against the hosts of the modern—striking back at the railways, telegraphs, mushrooming cities and urban landscapes that scar the earth and force boundaries and enclosures upon it.109

The queer Gothic Pan can be interpreted as a more subversive offshoot of the mature nature god examined in previous chapters. However, this Pan has turned away from the benevolent “white magic” in Burnett or the protective Pan of Grahame. This Pan is both shadowy twin and successor to these gentler imaginings of the god. He does not choose to coexist with, or even passively or peacefully resist, the forces of modernity. Rather, the queer Gothic Pan shows that modernity, progress, and civilization are hollow shells that cannot shield humanity from dark, unknown chaotic forces. He is an active, combative force in a death struggle with the modern world. He aims not persuade and win over, but to seduce and destroy. The queer Gothic Pan is a monster that terrorizes the agents of civilizational discipline—the human representatives of industrial and technological change that enforce hegemonic order. At once radical and reactionary, the queer Gothic

Pan exploits irrational fears of nature and the primal, unrestrained life forces that churn beneath the Freudian veneer of civilization. Though potentially horrifying and panic- inducing, Pan’s resistance to normative culture also makes him monstrously attractive.

Those who encounter the queer Gothic Pan are caught in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, hovering between horror and desire, panic fear and exultation. I believe that

109 Dr. Raymond in Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” for instance, aims to reveal the hollow foundations and the shallowness of humanity’s attempt to assert dominance over nature. Dr. Raymond proposes that though “this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables,” what if “an electrician of to-day were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world” (3). According to Raymond, modern science has only scratched the surface of the unknown, of which Pan is a part.

193 this amorphous gray area between clearly definable emotional states is what makes the

Gothic Pan so strikingly queer.

To Queer or Not to Queer

This dissertation has sought to illustrate how queer theory should not limit itself to understanding sexual or gender issues, but should rather explore the many other potentialities and entryways that reading something as queer makes possible. In

Shakesqueer, Madhvi Menon extends queer theory and conceptions of queerness beyond physical sexuality (4). She argues that reading texts as queer is itself a “disorienting experience” that “takes queerness away from its primary affiliation with the body and expands the reach of queerness beyond the body to a host of other possible and disturbing configurations” (4). The expansive nature of Pan’s queerness makes this figure an ideal vehicle for such an approach. As Hughes and Smith note in their seminal anthology

Queering the Gothic, queerness refers to “a sense of difference” or “deviance from perceived norms” that both encompasses and transcends sexual behavior (3). While Pan is certainly a sexually queer figure, his queerness transcends the bodily. His appearance in English literature is almost universally disruptive and disturbing psychologically, temporally, spiritually, and sexually. The queer Gothic Pan is a remarkable manifestation of societal anxiety over the place and function of the non-normative. Pan projects on to the “civilized” Victorian age an image of ancient chaotic forces that continue to shadow modern industrialized society, threatening disorientation should that chaos break through into the rational, physical world.

In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed argues that the encounter with the queer or unexpected is a disorienting experience that upsets our accepted worldview. This is

194 followed by what Ahmed terms a “queer orientation”—a reorientation toward a

“‘slantwise’” view of the world which “put[s] within reach bodies that have been made unreachable,” and objects previously unattainable or invisible under conventional circumstances (107). In the literature and art of Pan, the god functions as a disorienting figure that shatters accepted notions of civilized order, and reorients those he encounters towards new, queer possibilities or orientations. The resulting shock of queer disorientation that occurs upon encountering Pan can be liberating, but is more often terrifying—and it is the sheer terror of a queered disorientation that bears closer examination in this chapter. The experience of Pan is traumatic, and not everyone survives the shock. In these works, Pan becomes an expression of the anxieties and fears of the time—the disorienting, disruptive forces of irrepressible change.

As a vital force in the physical world, Pan’s behavior can be read as queer in multiple ways. As Roberto Malini notes in his study of Pan: “to the liturgy of the cult of

Pan belong actions that normative morals of civilized humanity condemn: intoxication, nudity, , ephebophilia [Pan’s sexual preference for post pubescent teenage adolescents (of either sex)], sacrilege,110 sadomasochism, exhibitionism, bestiality”111 (9).

This panoply of non-normative activities, forms of sexuality, and sexual practices in which Pan engages, mark the god and his disciples as queer in several senses: sexually queer, non-normative or against the grain, and simply odd or unusual. This is not a simple binary of queer/not queer. Rather, I see the presence of Pan in literature and art as an opening—an invitation to a multiplicity of queer pathways. The works by the Brownings,

Swinburne, and Machen examined in this chapter explore the unexpected and unexplored

110 Malini uses the unusual Italian phrase prostituzione sacra, which translated literally means “sacred prostitution.” 111 Translation from the Italian original is my own.

195 windings of these many queer pathways and potentialities.

The queered, monstrous Pan in these works comes to represent the disorienting heart of darkness in the soul of the West. Eating through the decaying walls of civilized modernity, Pan is a Freudian oceanic force of repressed, chaotic, queer drives that besiege civilized humanity, threatening to overwhelm the norm-enforcing superego with the limitless desires of the id. Pan’s queerness is in this way a multifaceted, amorphous entity, like a raging body of water. It sexually and behaviorally queers the individual who ventures near; it swallows and disintegrates logic and order; and finally, it washes away the moral, religious, sexual, and social structures that anchor Victorian society. This is the ultimate threat posed by the queer Gothic Pan: a subversion of Victorian normativity at micro and macro, individual and societal levels. As a fictional figure, Pan allows authors, artists, and audiences of the period to fantasize this overturning of norms.

Simultaneously awe-inspiring, liberating, and terrifying, the queer Gothic Pan speaks to the Freudian discontent within every supposedly “civilized” person, promising to unlock the chaos within, and to reconnect it to the universal chaos without.

The queer Gothic Pan also queers the conventions of the Gothic monster, who is typically confined by some limitations or vulnerabilities. Pan lacks such restraints. He infects the Gothic victim with his monstrously overwhelming queerness, resetting that person’s relationship to physical and spiritual experience. The queered, slantwise view of the world that Pan consequently reveals to his victims is an exhilarating and frightening experience of boundary-free limitlessness akin to hovering over a vast abyss. This overpowering revelation of the infinite compels the victim to confront the disturbing possibility that not everything can be explained or comprehended within the limited

196 scope of positivist science. Moreover, she or he must acknowledge that dark and terrible things have always existed, obscured but present, alongside the mundane and familiar.

This deeply unsettling realization epitomizes the uncanny effect that Pan exerts over those he encounters. Pan’s monstrous ability to reorient and queer the Gothic victim in this manner is a manifestation of what Paulina Palmer terms the “queer uncanny.” Palmer posits that the queer uncanny is the experience of those slantwise, unsettling Gothic moments in literature, art, and film in which queerness and the Freudian uncanny overlap

(6-8). While Palmer primarily uses the queer uncanny as an interpretive lens for modern

Gothic works, I believe that the queer Gothic Pan is a queerly uncanny predecessor of the modern Gothicized figures that she studies. Pan’s queerly uncanny effects on his victims, when combined with the figure’s behaviorally and sexually queer activities, work to construct a new kind of monster that is both original and an amalgamation of older traditions. Terrifyingly reimagined, the goat-footed god was reborn for a new age. A queer reading of Pan will thus help bring into focus the underlying sources of this chaotic terror, which is mirrored in the anxieties that shadow Britain while ostensibly at the height of its geopolitical and economic power as a nation-state. It will also tease out alternative cultural currents that weave in and out of the mainstream during this turbulent time, and show how the great god Pan provides a hidden link between these alternative currents, which include sexually queer practices, the occult, chaotic violence, and a lingering sense of unknowable numinosity present in everyday life.112

As a coda to this dissertation, I will look at how, at the turn of the 20th century, the fictional queer Gothic Pan was itself queered by occultists seeking a new ethical, moral,

112Miéville notes that this numinosity is a feature often associated with (“Weird Fiction” 510). I suggest that numinosity is a feature equally related to the fear of, and desire for, belief in an enchanted, spiritual world.

197 and spiritual framework for understanding humanity’s place in the world. This horrifying

Pan, harbinger of the end, became for a brief period during the fin-de-siècle a focal point for occult beliefs and practices, notably by occult seekers like Aleister Crowley, his disciple, the poet Victor Neuburg, and others in their esoteric circles. Crowley and

Neuburg invoke the wild, dark Pan as a or catalyst for a queered re-envisioning of spirituality and religion. For them, Pan is a gateway to a re-enchantment and reinvigoration of an ossified, morally strictured Christian society. Countering Max

Weber’s claim that an increasingly positivist understanding of the world, and the rationalization of humanity’s place in it, leads to disenchantment, Crowley and other occultists and Hermeticists believe that the world might be re-enchanted through occult study of supposedly lost ancient knowledge. As Roger Luckhurst remarks in a discussion of the Victorian and Edwardian magic revival, “re-enchantment becomes a way of rebinding oneself affectively to a world otherwise emptied of meaning” (233). Out of their fervent desire to find meaning, occult seekers find magic in the everyday, lying beneath the surface of the rational and scientific, and not necessarily mutually exclusive of it. Passed through the occult lens of Crowley and Neuburg, the queer Gothic Pan becomes the vehicle of a re-enchanted, revitalized world. Filled with the seed of arcane meaning, the occult Pan signals a queered rebirth after death. Here, Pan’s piping of the danse macabre does not spell destruction, but rather apocalyptic renewal.

We have journeyed with Pan through birth and childhood, through evergreen maturity, and now to death and ultimate rebirth. This final chapter of my dissertation will take us to the end and back to a new beginning, completing the life cycle of the great god

Pan.

198

“The monster Pan” Revealed

An Ancient Nightmare: Pan and Terror in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Pan has always been potentially terrifying. The earliest recorded stories and traditions passed down from antiquity frequently refer to the god’s ability to inflict panic fear on those he encounters, be they foe or loyal worshipper. In Pan and the Nightmare,

James Hillman remarks that “Christians…at least since [3rd to 4th century AD], saw the Devil in Pan” (46). Pan’s power to frighten and cause panic,113 combined with his frequently horned and goat-footed appearance, and his association with unrestrained sexuality, fertility, and wild music led, during the Middle Ages, to the superimposition of the Christian Devil on to Pan (Russell, The Devil 126). As J.B. Russell summarizes:

Sexual passion, which spans reason and easily leads to excess, was alien

both to the of the Greeks and to the asceticism of the

Christians; a god of sexuality [and/or fertility, like Pan, Bacchus, or

Priapus] could easily be assimilated to the principle of evil. The

association of the chthonic114 with both sex and the , and hence

with death, sealed the union. (126)

In the Christian era, wanton sexuality came to be associated with sin, and so it is unsurprising that an anthropomorphic pagan god associated with Dionysian bacchanalia and panic fear might be conflated with satanic forces. Indeed, early Christian demonologists pointed to Pan’s influence on nightmares as proof of his status as a kind of devil (Malini 28-29). Pan in this way came to embody both evil generally, as well as the source of all evil–not just any demon, but the Christian Devil himself. And though Pan’s

113 Pan-ic—to fall under the influence of Pan (OED). 114 refers to ancient Greek gods or spirits of the earth or the underworld (OED)

199 association with evil solidified in the western imagination during the Christian era, the roots of this darker image reach deep into antiquity. While it is difficult to assess how significantly the horrifying manifestation of Pan colored everyday conceptions of the god in the ancient world, there are several written sources that show that for some, at least,

Pan was popularly perceived as a potentially terrifying being. Among ancient literary and historical works, three stand out for their depictions of darker, threatening Pans. In his

Idylls, the Greek pastoral poet Theocritus (3rd century BC) describes a menacing Pan who, despite his status as a pastoral deity, can potentially cause panic among shepherds, particularly if disturbed at midday, for “it’s then that Pan rests” (1.16). As the goatherd in

Theocritus’ 1st idyll puts it: “We’re afraid of him; he’s tetchy at this hour, and his lip / Is always curled in sour displeasure (17-18). In the 1867 edition of the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology,115 the authors (referring to Theocritus) state that

Pan would become “very indignant” and in an ill humor if awoken at this time of day

(Smith 106). Pan is a noonday demon,116 bringing fear and terror not in the dark of night but at the brightest hour of the day. This depiction of the god as a bringer of noonday terrors would prove to be highly influential to 19th century English writers like Elizabeth

Barrett Browning and Algernon Swinburne, as we shall see later in this chapter.

A second significant ancient source of this darker Pan can be found in the sinister and threatening undertones of Longus’ depiction of the god in Daphnis and Chloe (2nd-3rd century AD). Merivale notes that this depiction influenced the Gothicized, terrifying Pans

115 The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology was considered “the standard Victorian reference work on classical mythology” (Ridenour 6). 116 Andrew Solomon’s memoir, The Noonday Demon (2000), refers to depression and anxiety as the noonday demon who causes “escalating fear” and “who leaves you appalled” (n. pag.). The unexpected arrival of Pan, the original noonday demon, is incidentally still echoed when we speak of “panic attacks” due to anxiety or depression.

200 of Swinburne and Machen (172-173). In Longus, Pan is a potential source of extreme terror, particularly to those who cross favored devotees, like the two protagonists of the title, the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloe. In the story, a group of marauding sailors raid , an island sacred to Pan, and kidnap Chloe. Pan retaliates for this sacrilege, and the sailors become subject to terrifying nightmares, visions, and sounds which eventually force them to return Chloe and their spoils. Longus also depicts Pan as a god of soldiers who often participates in battles, fighting alongside the combatants and inspiring panic terror among his enemies—which, incidentally, is a role he plays again in

Herodotus’ histories (5th century BC), a third ancient source of the terrifying Pan.

Herodotus describes Pan’s intervention in the Greco-Persian wars of the 5th century BC.

The Athenians, who venerate Pan, are threatened by a Persian invasion. Pan appears to the Athenians and promises that he will join them on the battlefield to help defeat the

Persians by wreaking panic fear among their ranks. This darker, violent, and vengeful

Pan threatens those who cross him or his allies with unbearable madness and a breakdown of order. And yet whether friend or foe, Pan must be dealt with carefully, else the “tetchy” god might turn his powers against even those who would otherwise venerate him. The threatening, fickle, ominous renditions of the god in Herodotus, Longus, and

Theocritus serve as prototypes for the sinister envisionings of the god that appear elsewhere in Europe centuries later.

These ancient narratives are retrospectively colored by the diabolization and concurrent magnification and distortion of Pan’s role as a fertility god that occurs with the spread of Christianity from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. Peter Stanford argues that early “Christians, strongly influenced by Augustine in the fifth century,

201 started to condemn anything to do with sex as bad and devilish, and they turned to Pan for iconographic inspiration. His horned, hairy, goat-like figure was the model for many a painting of the lusty bestial Devil” (28). Writing in the late 2nd century AD, the early

Christian theologian Clement of expressly critiques “‘certain statuettes of

Pan, certain naked female figures, drunken satyrs117 and swollen , painted without any and put to shame by their own immoderation’” (qtd. in Eco 40). By the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the image of Pan had become deeply intertwined with that of the Devil in popular imagination, as exemplified in works by

Giotto, Fra Angelico, Hieronymus Bosch, and Albrecht Dürer. In the British Isles, there is furthermore evidence that ancient Celtic deities like Cernunnos, the of fertility and the underworld, who is “somewhat similar in traits and appearance to the

Greco-Roman Pan, was assimilated to the Devil in much the same way as Pan” (Russell,

Lucifer 63). Other influences on this hybridized, diabolical Pan include the Green Man and the Wilder Mann (or “”) figures, variations of which can be found across

Europe, and whose origins may be prehistoric.118 What all of these figures share with the demonic Pan is their association with wild nature, “their hairiness as well as their unbridled sexuality” (78). Pan becomes the vortex of untamed nature, and sexual and animal instinct—which is precisely what early condemn as pagan and unholy.

These echoes of the hybrid, Pan/Wild Man/Devil palimpsest continue to reverberate into the Enlightenment, though with a more nuanced understanding of the

117 Mythological man-goat hybids often associated with Pan. Pan himself is frequently depicted as a kind of satyr. 118 For further examples of Wild Man images that continue to persist into the present day, see Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage, and the article “Europe’s Wild Men” by Rachel Hartigan Shea.

202 god’s theological and philosophical significance to the ancients. For example, the 18th century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico notes that poets of ancient Greece

“assigned Chaos the monstrous form of the sylvan god Pan” (310). Through this embodied chaos and his association with satyrs, “Pan became a symbol of the impious wanderers of the earth’s great forest, who had the appearance of men but the habits of abominable beasts” (310). Such earthy, animalistic images of Pan have been read psychoanalytically by Hillman as symbolic of a primal, instinctual, irrational humanity that is unlocked through union with nature. This Pan is a Freudian id unleashed and unsuppressed. Moreover, as this violent Pan often leads or compels those he encounters to (self-) destruction, I believe he can be read as an embodiment of the death drive, and an expression of what Lee Edelman terms a queer lack of futurity, or the denial of generative potential by a sexually and behaviorally queer being.

All of these threatening, ominous renditions of the god serve as points of reference for the darker envisionings of the god that emerge in the second half of the 19th century. As early examples of Pan’s sinister behavior, they also show that more benevolent depictions of the god have always been shadowed by something darker—a queered reflection of a mythological figure that could already be considered queer. Like a monstrous mask glimpsed in a funhouse full of mirrors, Pan becomes ever more disturbing by a multiplication of the bizarre. Deflecting direct lines of sight, he avoids clear definition and thereby becomes exponentially more terrifying.

This brief overview of influences on the later developments of the darkly reimagined Pan is not meant to be comprehensive;119 rather, it is intended to illustrate the

119 For a more comprehensive overview of depictions of evil Pans in British literature, see Chapter Five, “The Sinister Pan in Prose Fiction,” in Patricia Merivale’s Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times.

203 figure’s deep roots and enduring nature as a literary and artistic image. It is from these dark roots that our queer Gothic Pan springs forth and finds sustenance. Let us now turn the heart of this chapter: the textual examples of the queer Gothic Pan that will help to trace the development of this figure over the course of the long 19th century, and to identify its significance during this transformative period.

The Great God Pan: An Ancient Terror Reimagined in the Long 19th

Century

While the roots of the queer Gothic Pan—terrifying, monstrous, and demonic— stretch deep into antiquity, and reemerge in medieval depictions of the Devil, it is Pan’s reappearance in early Victorian Britain that is the focal point of this chapter. Earlier in the

19th century, Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, and Keats invoke a pastoral, gentle Pan in works like Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan” (1820) and Keats’s “Hymn to Pan” from (1818).

In these two works, for example, Pan is a sublime and mysterious yet benign force. The

Romantic Pan is a mystical embodiment of the spirit of animate nature and poetic inspiration, “occasionally heard, but almost never seen” (Merivale 76). This Pan is not a bodily presence, but rather a spiritual influence or inspirational idea intimately connected to place and nature. Over the course of the 19th century literary depictions of Pan gradually shift away from this conceptualization of a rustic, benevolent nature god and muse. By mid-century, “the Victorians eschewed the abstract concept of Pan as a spirit of the place” (Chapman 273) for what Merivale calls a “concrete and sharply visualized

Pan” (qtd. in Chapman 273). This is Pan the goat-god—a tangible and increasingly terrifying physical presence. Simultaneously, many writers and artists seize on more sinister strands of the ancient myth, like those found in Theocritus and Longus, as well as

204 on the medieval artistic convention of depicting the Devil with Pan-like physical features such as the horns, shaggy legs, and cloven hooves of a goat (Russell, The Devil 126). The darker, classically-inflected aspects of the god also begin to merge with elements of contemporary Gothic literary conventions to create a modern monster that echoes ancient and medieval traditions, while embodying 19th century fears and anxieties over social changes and threats like secularization, sexual liberation, degeneration, and the rapid societal changes undergone since industrialization.

Pan speaks to a sense of unease over an uncertain future in which traditional beliefs and ways of living have (perhaps prematurely) been cast aside. Like the Gothic, monstrous, or Weird Other of the modern Fantastic, the queer Gothic Pan is a monstrous being of unlimited possibility that speaks to the common human fear of transgression and transgressors, as well as the inherent human desire to break free from societally restricted boundaries.120 He is a monster of an increasingly anxious age in which science and materialist conceptions of the universe had gradually begun to break down centuries-old religious structures and understandings of the world. He appears at a time when, as

Hobsbawm puts it, “God was not merely dismissed, but actively under attack” by forces of science, modernity, and secularization (271). Nonetheless, there remained “a nostalgia for religion” (273) that could no longer be quenched by traditional religious beliefs. The

“Pan craze” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and supernaturalist phenomena like the rise of spiritualism, the appearance of occult organizations like the Hermetic Order of

120 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s essay “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” provides a useful toolset for interpreting and understanding the monstrous Pan. A valid argument could be made for Pan to match all seven of Cohen’s theses. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I believe that “Thesis III: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis” (6-7) and “Theses VI: Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire” (16- 20) provide particularly relevant theoretical frameworks for reading the queer Gothic Pan.

205 the Golden Dawn, and the Cottingley fairies incident,121 suggest a popular desire for fantastical re-enchantment in an increasingly disenchanted world.122 The queer Gothic

Pan is a refraction of older traditions, reoriented through Gothic and fantastical, supernatural tropes—a queered, Gothicized monster haunting ancient pagan (rather than medieval Catholic, as in traditional Gothic writings) ruins, artifacts, and places of power that lie beneath the surface of a disenchanted, secularized modern life. This sense of a mystical, superstitious past that continues to echo in the present directly connects the literature of Pan to both the Gothic tradition and to issues that haunted Victorian Britain.

Simultaneously terrifying and sexually and spiritually liberating, Pan offers a queered opening to discourses on power, freedom, and sexuality. But Pan is not merely hybrid human/goat monster, or another Weird creature whose existence stretches beyond the pale of the material world. Pan transcends the monstrous, the Gothic, and even Greco-

Roman mythology.

The darker Pan notably resurfaces in the midcentury poetry of Elizabeth Barrett

Browning. In her work we find the beginnings of a reimagined 19th century monster, terrifying and sexually and behaviorally queer. I agree with Merivale that Barrett

Browning’s depiction of Pan is particularly prescient of the more Gothicized Pans that appear around the fin-de-siècle in works by Swinburne, Arthur Machen, E. F. Benson, and Saki. Yet I also argue that the queerly Gothicized and transformed Pan that we find in Barrett Browning (as well as these later writers) is a queered cultural manifestation of

121 For more on these phenomena, see Alex Owen’s Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, her article “‘Borderland Forms’: Arthur Conan Doyle, ’s Daughters, and the Politics of the Cottingley Fairies,” Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind, and Peter Washington’s Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. 122 For a more detailed discussion of the concepts of disenchantmant and re-enchantment during the long 19th century, see The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914 by Karl Bell.

206 the inherent anxieties of an era in which stabilities long taken for granted—such as the

Biblical explanation of human origins, and traditional conceptions of strict boundaries separating human from animal, man from woman—were, thanks to the rapid dissemination of cutting edge scientific advances, gradually unraveling and being redefined. Thus, in my analysis of literary representations of the god, I strive to highlight the deep and essential queerness of the darker manifestations of Pan presented in my selection of texts, and by doing this steer us towards the larger implications for British culture that this figure reflects. The literary works examined in this chapter are united by this darker, more terrifying shift in the depiction of Pan. And yet this is not merely a superficial stylistic or aesthetic twist applied to an ancient myth. Rather, the darkly reimagined Pans of the Brownings, Swinburne, and Machen speak to an increasing sense of societal unease. Specifically, in these writings Pan’s appearance unveils frightening hidden truths: that the modernity central to the civilized nation state cannot hold back the ancient, animalistic, and chaotic forces at work in the world, and that any semblance of order seemingly due to the benefits of civilization is merely an illusion. Pan is the harbinger and queer agent of a deconstructed modernity, demolishing boundaries between animal and human, inside and outside, male and female, homosexual and heterosexual. Pan wields his queerness as a weapon, smashing heteronormative structures in his path.

“The old gods are dethroned”123: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Death

and Life of Pan

In the literature of Pan, anyone that hears the call of Pan’s pipes—even loyal worshippers—experiences the hovering threat of paralyzing panic fear. This sinister

123 A phrase Barrett Browning uses in a letter to Robert Browning (qtd. in Stone and Taylor 48).

207 aspect of Pan was less prominent in early 19th century British imaginings of the god, which typically play down the god’s brutish features. However, this begins to change with Barrett Browning’s Pan poems. “The ” is her first work to feature the god Pan. Written in 1819,124 when the then Elizabeth Barrett was just thirteen years old, this piece of juvenilia is an impressively polished work dealing with mature themes of war, terror, and religious belief. The poem is based upon an incident reported by

Herodotus in his account of the Persian Wars of the fifth century BC. With a Persian army marching on Athens, the desperate Athenians send a messenger, , to

Sparta in order to request assistance in repelling the foreign invaders. Along the road to

Sparta, Pan appears to Pheidippides. According to Herodotus, Pan complains that the

Athenians had not been diligent enough in their veneration of him. He reminds the runner of his friendliness toward the Athenians and promises to help them in battle during their hour of need. Herodotus reports that after the defeat of the , the Athenians “built a shrine to Pan under the ,” and from then on held ceremonies, torch races, and sacrifices in order to express their gratitude to Pan and “to court his protection” (359).

Barrett Browning’s poem retells this episode, embellishing Herodotus’ relatively spare text with dramatic detail. “The Battle of Marathon” shows Barrett Browning first hazarding a depiction of a terrible, awe-inspiring Pan. Though contained in a measured, relatively staid rhymed iambic pentameter, this brief portrait is, to my knowledge, the earliest overtly monstrous description of Pan in 19th century English literature. Rather than alluding to an abstracted nature god like her Romantic predecessors, Barrett

Browning emphasizes Pan’s brute physicality and monstrosity:

124 “The Battle of Marathon” was first published privately in 1820 by Barret Browning’s father (Avery, “Audacious Beginnings” 45).

208

The monster Pan his form gigantic reared,

And dreadful to my awe-struck sight appeared

I hailed the God who reigns supreme below,

Known by the horns that started from his brow;

Up to the hips a goat, but man's his face,

Tho’ grim, and stranger to celestial grace. (2.668-73)

This Dante-esque description of an awe-inspiring Pan as “the god who reigns supreme below” (2.670) is evocative of both the gods of the classical underworld, and of the Christian Devil, and reflects the hybridized lineage of Barrett Browning’s vision of the god.

The runner Pheidippides experiences a panic upon encountering the seemingly demonic Pan: “congealed with dread” (2.677), he fears the worst, expecting Pan “to vent upon the Greeks immortal ire” (2.679). Intriguingly, this expected act of violence does not occur, as Barrett Browning steps back from this initially terrifying portrait of her first

Pan. Though experientially frightening and potentially panic-inducing, Pan speaks “in accents mild” (2.686) and is revealed to be sympathetic to the Athenians and their cause—rather than wrathful, Pan is ultimately merely disappointed and a bit glum that the

Athenians have not been paying their respects to him. Despite this anti-climactic encounter, Barrett Browning’s Pan is still remarkable as a turning point in 19th century depictions of the figure. She shows that the Romantic Pan, potent symbol of harmony with nature, is stalked by a bestial and physically brutish shadow image. Monstrous,

“dreadful” (2.669), “awful” (2.678), and “grim” of visage (2.673), this terrifying, corporeal Pan would continue to stalk the underside of the British imagination well into

209 the 20th century.

Barrett Browning would again spotlight this doubled helpful/monstrous Pan, albeit in a more playful mood, in the 1850 sonnet “Flush or Faunus.” In this poem, the speaker (presumably Barrett Browning, who had a dog named Flush) is lying on a pillow when suddenly she is nudged out of her daydreaming by Flush. His “head as hairy as

Faunus” (5), the dog startles the speaker and makes her feel as though she were “some

Arcadian / Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove” (9-10). Yet all is well in the end, as the moment of panic fear gives way to the “heights of love” (14) that the speaker feels for

Flush. She then gives thanks to “the true PAN” (13) (capitalization is Barrett

Browning’s), guardian of “low creatures” (14). As Chapman summarizes, in this poem

“Pan is first acknowledged as brute and lustful, but then, with humor, domesticated and made safe” (285). Once again, Barrett Browning walks back from depicting a purely terrifying Pan, preferring instead to emphasize the god’s duality. Chapman refers to such doubling as a “bifocal poetics” that can be found throughout Barrett Browning’s works

(275). For example, Barrett Browning’s poems dealing with the Italian Risorgimento simultaneously comment on contemporary gender issues. The divided, downtrodden Italy of the mid-19th century, ruled by foreign powers, is frequently feminized in the popular imagination of English writers of the period (269). Barrett Browning’s resistance to this feminization of Italy in her own work is also a resistance against the very concept of feminization as a point of weakness or inferiority. This doubling is also apparent at the level of characterization, particularly regarding Pan. Demonic and angelic, rapist and healer, Barrett Browning’s Pans are a notable example of this doubling phenomenon in her body of work.

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On a more personal level, her dual depiction of Pan as horror and helper seems to reflect the conflict that she felt as a Christian writing about pagan subjects, which seem like something of a guilty pleasure for the devout Barrett Browning. In the preface to

“The Battle of Marathon” (which she modestly refers to as her “little poem,” despite its

1462 lines of verse in classical form), Barrett Browning apologetically notes that though her of pagan gods and peoples “may unhappily offend those feelings most predominant in the breast of a Christian,” (3) it is nonetheless necessary for a

“young and inexperienced” (4) poet to model herself on a great writer whom she admires—in this case Homer. For a teenage girl of the early 19th century to study the classics is a rare thing; for her to attempt to emulate Homer is outright subversive.

Homer’s model allows the young Barrett Browning to broach subjects and genres traditionally reserved for men, like war and , and gives her creative license to write about pagan subjects, also uncommon for a woman of the time to attempt (though writing on Christian topics would not have been uncommon for a woman).

There is a dynamic tension to Barrett Browning’s Pan writings that reflects the push and pull between a subversive, classical, pagan outlook, and a more normative

Christian one. Barrett Browning’s sensitivity regarding the religious implications of her dalliance with pagan imagery is thus central to our understanding of her depiction of Pan.

In “A Musical Instrument,” for example, Barrett Browning sets Pan up as an

“irredeemably pagan force” capable of resisting any pressure to conform to the will of the

“‘true gods,’” who can only sigh at Pan’s subversive resistance (Mermin 242). Moreover,

Barrett Browning’s Pans act as expressions of the complex intermingling of light and dark, spirit and body, in the classical world—a world that gave birth to both and

211 the blood sport of the arena, to democratic Athens and militarist Sparta, and to Christ and the brutality of crucifixion. Merivale argues that Pan functions as a target against which

Barrett Browning aims ranging shots in “an early counterattack of ‘pietism’ upon

‘paganism’ at a time when the pagans seemed to have the field to themselves” (81-82).

Following this reading, Pan’s significance as a pagan religious figure dovetails with his demonic, brutally physical aspect, while his more benevolent side gestures toward a spiritually harmonious future Christian potentiality. The tension between these two faces of Pan is a theme that Barrett Browning returns to again and again in her poetry, and is intimately tied to her simultaneous artistic admiration for, and religious aversion to, the

West’s classical past. Denied a traditional public schooling or university education in the classics due to her sex, the young Elizabeth Barrett, with her father’s encouragement

(Avery and Stott 30), nonetheless began at the age of ten to learn ancient Greek and then

Latin125 with the tutor who had been hired to teach Barrett’s younger brother, Edward

(Stone and Taylor 11). As a young woman, Barrett Browning began corresponding with two eminent classical scholars, Sir Uvedale Price and H. S. Boyd, who by good fortune lived near her father’s home (12). For a time she even worked as the blind Boyd’s amanuensis, and both scholars openly expressed their admiration for her diligent study of the classics (Avery and Stott 31-32). In her lifetime she would translate works not only by her beloved Homer, but also by , Theocritus, Apuleius, and many others

(Wallace 329). Indeed, Wallace describes Barrett Browning as “the most scholarly woman poet of the 19th century” (329). As a result of her early relationships with Price,

Boyd, and her brother’s tutor, Barrett Browning had “the opportunity to study a wider

125 Barrett Browning would eventually learn to read in “a range of modern and ancient languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Latin and Greek” (Avery, Elizabeth Barrett Browning 2).

212 range of classical writers and thinkers than most men would study at public school or university” (32). As Avery and Stott note, for a woman to study in the traditionally male arena of the classics was “an act of cultural transgression which overtly challenged the established relations between knowledge and gender”—a transgression only compounded by “the perceived moral dubiousness of many of the ancient texts” which at the time

“were considered unsuitable for women” (30). Like her early hero Byron, Barrett

Browning had a particular passion for Greece, both ancient and contemporary (Stone and

Taylor 11). This passion for the glories of the pagan past, however, would repeatedly come into conflict with Barrett Browning’s devout Christianity.

In Barrett Browning’s later poetry and letters, the careful reader will often note implied or explicit criticism of certain aspects of classicist tendencies in the arts, particularly regarding the depiction of ancient pagan gods and heroes as subjects. Later in life she seems to have found such pagan subjects to be impious and unworthy of the innumerable paintings, poems, and writings continually devoted to them. In fact, in “The

Dead Pan” (1844), Barrett Browning notably criticizes Schiller for this very reason.

Addressing the gods of Hellas, the speaker boldly proclaims: “Let no Schiller from the portals / Of that call you back” (220-221). According to Corinne Davies, she is here referring to Schiller’s 1788 poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (“The Gods of

Greece”), which famously (and controversially for the time) lamented the loss of the ancient gods of the Greek pantheon (563). In Barrett Browning’s works, Pan comes to stand for or typify what, in a Christian context, could be termed the morally corrupt pagan gods of old.

“The Dead Pan” in this way serves as the culmination of Barrett Browning’s

213 critique of paganism. In this work the death of Pan, terrifying, behaviorally queer in a

Christian context, is celebrated as representative of the ultimate defeat of paganism. The pagan gods are revealed, through the light of Christianity, to be empty shells—hollow marble skeletons “Dull and senseless as a stone” (100), and mere echoes of a lost time and place. Without even “a grave, to show thereby / Here these gray old gods do lie”

(italics are Barrett Browning’s) (145-146). In the Christian era, the ancient gods have lost all spiritual and moral relevance. With this poem, Barrett Browning sounds the death knell of the pagan gods:

O ye vain false gods of Hellas,

Ye are silent evermore!

And I dash down this old ,

Whence ran of yore.

See, the wine crawls in the dust

Wormlike—as your glories must,

Since Pan is dead. (211-217)

Pan is dead. The heathen foe is slain, his black heart pierced. As previous critics like Merivale and Davies have noted, this poem again breaks with the Romantic tradition of a venerable and benevolent Pan, and instead emphasizes Pan’s “double nature” as good and evil, healer and horror (Merivale 90). In “The Dead Pan,” the god is cast as a corrupting, behaviorally non-normative anti-Christ figure. His death symbolizes the passing of the ancient gods, which makes way for the ultimate triumph of Christianity.

Morality has changed, and Pan’s death signals an end to the behaviorally and sexually queer practices and celebrations of the pagan gods of Greece and Rome, with their lusty

214

“revels” (8) and excessive, inebriating “libations” (214). The ancient gods’ wine that

“crawls in the dust” (215), and their “Wormlike…glories” (216) can be read with reference to the original archaic meaning of the word “wyrm”: according to the OED, “a serpent, , ”—traditional embodiments of evil and/or the

Christian Devil. 126 Like her medieval predecessors, Barrett Browning diabolizes Pan.

Furthermore, she shows how the sinister, sexually and behaviorally queer pagan gods are routed by the normative benevolence, and austere love, of Christ:

Earth outgrows the mythic fancies

Sung beside her in her youth,

And those debonair romances

Sound but dull beside the truth.

Phoebus’ -course is run:

Look up, poets, to the sun!

Pan, Pan is dead.

Christ hath sent us down the ;

And the whole earth and the skies

Are illumed by altar-candles

Lit for blessed mysteries;

And a priest’s hand through creation

126 In “Rhyme, Form, and Sound in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Dead Pan,’” Tim Sadenwasser offers an alternative reading of Barrett Browning’s use of the word “Wormlike.” Sadenwasser states that “the pouring of libations is of course a religious offering to the gods, but for the wine to crawl “Wormlike” is to strike to the roots of their poetry: ‘worm’ and ‘verse’ both come from the same etymological base meaning ‘to turn’….The conspicuous placement of “Wormlike” helps to make evident the transition from the dusty verse of Pan to the universal music of Christ” (523). I believe that Sadenwasser’s alternative interpretation of the word “Wormlike” nonetheless supports my own reading of the stanza, as the speaker “worms” (turns) away from the “worm” (serpent, devil) Pan.

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Waveth calm and consecration:

And Pan is dead. (232-245)

Against this Christianizing backdrop, Pan can no longer be seen as a harmless god of nature, but as a false idol that can potentially lead humanity astray from the straight and narrow. The refrain “Pan, Pan is dead” (or some variation of this) is repeated at the end of every stanza, and by repetition becomes both an elegy to a figure whose time has passed, and a prayerful celebration of Christ and the imposition of a new, hegemonic

Christian order that sheds the queer trappings of the pagan past. And yet Barrett

Browning leaves the reader with some ambiguity regarding the death of Pan. As

Sadenwasser notes, at the end of the poem the speaker “declares ‘Pan was dead’ at the moment of Christ’s triumphant death, but the use of the past tense suggests that the interference associated with him might no longer be dead” (524). Sadenwasser argues that Barrett Browning may be referring to Pan’s return in modern Christianity “under the guise of the ,” whose mediation between God and lay humanity is a paganistic throwback to the role of the ancient oracles that Christ had overthrown. Read in this way,

Barrett Browning’s Pan is not truly dead but rather reborn into new surroundings and circumstances.

Such a reading leaves us with many questions, however. Is Barrett Browning’s

Pan a physical entity, a spiritual being, or simply an idea? Could this force referred to as

Pan represent a queering of Christianity itself, made possible through the clergy’s worldly hierarchies and pagan-influenced rituals? And finally, if Pan stands in for paganism, can Christ truly banish Pan from the world, or will Pan/paganism always return in some new form or other? Barrett Browning does not provide definitive answers

216 to these questions, leaving the nature of Pan’s being, and his death and ultimate fate, open to interpretation. I suggest a partial answer to these questions. I believe that Barrett

Browning’s Pan resists the life/death binary: he is an entity simultaneously alive and dead, looking to the past and future at once. In effect, Pan’s life beyond death queers the nature of death as a final condition.

Though “The Dead Pan” seems to banish a queerly pagan Pan from the world, it did not banish him from Barrett Browning’s imagination. Barrett Browning returns to classical imagery and the Pan myth sixteen years later in “A Musical Instrument” (1860).

This poem retells the ancient tale of popularized by Ovid in Book One of

Metamorphoses. Pan pursues the nymph Syrinx to the bed of a river, presumably to rape her. Just before catching her, sympathetic river deities transform Syrinx into “a bunch of marsh reeds” (March 117). Unlike Ovid’s gentler and more sympathetic portrayal of Pan, in Barrett Browning’s version “Pan has returned as ‘the great god Pan’ vibrant, but violent and destructive: ‘Spreading ruin’…and tearing out a reed from the river” (Davies

565). Here Pan is a force of queerly disorienting sexualized violence that frightens away dragonflies and leaves dead flowers in its wake. He makes his pan-pipes from the reeds into which Syrinx has been transformed, and forcefully blows into the shell of her body, out of which comes “Piercing sweet” music (Barrett Browning, “A Musical Instrument”

32). The language Barrett Browning uses illustrates the violent rending of barriers and the breakdown of order: Pan “hacked and hewed as a great god can, / With his hard bleak steel” (15-16) cutting away leaves and any other signs of generative life from the reed.

The sexual implications of this language are difficult to miss. Mermin describes this episode as a “deliberate articulation of sexual assault” (243). This contrasts sharply with

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Ovid’s original, in which Pan more than Syrinx is the object of pity and suffering. As

Ovid tells it, Syrinx firmly rejects Pan’s advances, and escapes to the banks of the river

Ladon. Once there, she asks her sister nymphs of the river

To change her form, and so, when Pan had caught her

And thought he held a nymph, it was only reeds

That yielded in his arms, and while he sighed,

The soft air stirring in the reeds made also

The echo of a sigh. Touched by this marvel,

Charmed by the sweetness of the tone, he murmured

This much I have! And took the reeds, and bound them

With wax, a tall and shorter one together,

And called them Syrinx, still. (704-12)

Ovid glosses over the possibility that Syrinx might consider Pan’s embrace to be a form of rape, and makes no mention of Syrinx’s suffering aside from describing her flight from Pan. In Ovid’s tale, Pan is front and center—Syrinx is merely a plot device in a bittersweet but amusing story about the love/lust-sick goat-god. Ovid’s version of the myth, and subsequent references to the tale by English writers like Andrew Marvell

(“The Garden”) and Percy Shelley (“Hymn of Pan”) view this episode as merely one of

Pan’s many pitiable failures in love.127 Barrett Browning does something with her version of the story that no previous writer had done: she flips both reader and speaker’s sympathies from Pan to Syrinx. In rewriting a classic from the perspective of a wronged female, Barrett Browning queers the Ovidian myth from a male-oriented adolescent

127 For a more detailed discussion of these and other English poems featuring the story of Pan and Syrinx, see Mermin p. 243.

218 fantasy of “the one that got away,” to a frightening tale of sexual violence perpetrated by a powerful male god against a helpless female.

In “A Musical Instrument,” Pan is a sexualized monster: his forceful hacking of the reed/Syrinx obliquely reflects a rending of the , while his subsequent playing of the torn reed suggests a final expression of mastery over the already violated female.

Syrinx’s plaintive cry emitted through Pan’s piping of the reed is, however, more ambiguously described as both beautiful and painful, reviving the natural life that died or fled upon Pan’s arrival:

Piercing sweet by the river!

Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

Came back to dream on the river. (32-36)

Pan’s sexual violence is orgasmic—a temporary “little death” that both kills and creates. From Syrinx’s agony, Pan makes beautiful, rather than sorrowful, music

(Chapman 283). This music is an example of what Chapman calls the “destruction and inexpressible delight” (279) that are simultaneously expressed through Pan in this work.

Barrett Browning’s retelling of the Pan and Syrinx myth illustrates the disturbing mixture of pain and pleasure that Pan has come to symbolize. Reborn in mid-19th century Britain,

Pan has become a monstrous queering force of violent and terrible jouissance. 128 Like a vampire, Pan “drew the pith, like the heart of a man” (“Musical Instrument” 21) from the reed, leaving it marked not by teeth but by “his hard bleak steel” (16). And like the

128 Definition of jouissance: “a heightened form of pleasure [that] derives from a sense of interruption, a ‘breakdown’ or gap, where, perhaps, something unorthodox or unexpected occurs” (Cuddon 672). Jouissance also “carries connotations of ecstasy and sexual delight” (672).

219 vampiric victim, the reed/Syrinx is left “notched” (23) with “holes” (24), a “poor dry empty thing” (23). Pan has morphed into a vampiric masculine sex monster—a male sex drive unleashed. As Mermin remarks, with “A Musical Instrument” Barrett Browning

“introduces into the idea of Pan as a sexually brutal creature that became commonplace afterwards but had rarely appeared before” (243). After Barrett Browning, the Romantic Pan of benevolent nature vanished (at least for a time), replaced by the animalistic, horned—and horny—goat-god, a being utterly lacking in empathy and driven by an untamed, hyper-sexualized id.

Pan’s violation of Syrinx in “A Musical Instrument” is neither the first nor the only time Barrett Browning deals poetically with sexual assault. Her poem “The

Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848) is a dramatic monologue much in the style of

Robert Browning or Tennyson. In the poem, a female runaway slave refers to her rape at the hands of white men:

So the white men brought the shame ere long

To strangle the sob of my agony.

They would not leave me for my dull

Wet eyes! (101-104)

Rather than live with a child that is a physical reminder of the brutal violence of her white oppressors, the speaker chooses to kill her own baby. And though Marian in

Aurora Leigh (1856) is saved from ever having to make such a gruesome choice due to

Aurora’s intervention, Marian too has been sexually exploited—first by Lady Waldemar, who sells her to a brothel, and later by the male client who rapes and impregnates her. Simon Avery has called this episode “one of the most acute representations of the

220 exploitation of one class by another, and one woman by another, in ”

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning 88). While “A Musical Instrument” on the one hand distances the articulation of violence against women by way of its mythical setting, there is yet something intangibly horrifying about the assault on Syrinx that is lacking from the other instances of sexual assault in Barrett Browning’s works. I believe this difference is due to two distinct features of Pan that Barrett Browning emphasizes: his inhuman, animalistic nature (“Yet half a beast is the great god Pan” [Barrett Browning, “Musical

Instrument” 37]), and his pagan origins. The rapists of both the runaway slave and of

Marian are mortal men—as violent and cruel as they may have been, they are nonetheless human beings, over whom “That great smooth Hand of God, stretched out / On all His children fatherly, / To bless them from the fear and doubt” (Barrett Browning, “Runaway

Slave” 44-46). Pan, on the other hand, is depicted as a pagan beast-god, a wilder mann of nightmare and prehistoric mythic memory.129 The figure is exponentially more terrifying than before, for his motivations and very existence lie in the realm of the irrational and inexplicable, buried in the depths of a pre-Christian past.

The horror of Pan’s irrationality seems inextricably linked to these pagan origins.

I see a parallel between Pan’s irrational, bacchanalic features as depicted by Barrett

Browning and Nietzsche’s exploration of Western society’s Dionysian elements, which he argues stand opposed to the Apollonian features of Christianity. As Russell explains,

Nietzsche identified the Devil with Dionysius, who was for him the rich,

ambivalent, but generally positive symbol of , chaos, fertility,

destruction, sexual license, and courage. Under the influence of Nietzsche

129 Tellingly, the petrifying approach of the sexualized beast-god Pan also provides the moments of deepest terror in later works by Swinburne and Machen, discussed below.

221

and , Dionysius and Pan became popular symbols in the art

and literature of the end of the [19th] century. (Mephistopheles 226)

Pan, traditionally depicted as a friend and follower of Dionysius, and Christ, who in the early Christian era took on aspects of the ancient Apollo,130 stand juxtaposed in

“The Dead Pan” and “A Musical Instrument.” This counterpoising of Pan/Dionysius and

Christ/Apollo is implied, for example, in “A Musical Instrument” when “the true gods sigh” (40) for lost Syrinx while Pan laughs. More dramatically, in “The Dead Pan,” Pan dies at the moment of Christ’s sacrifice:

‘T was the hour when One in Sion

Hung for love’s sake on a cross…

When his priestly blood dropped downward

And his kingly eyes looked throneward—

Then, Pan was dead. (183-189)

While Pan dies, the heroic risen Christ replaces Phoebus (a Latin name for Apollo

“in his capacity of god of the sun” [Smith 343]) in the , for “Phoebus’ chariot- course is run” (Barrett Browning, “The Dead Pan” 236). The speaker encourages poets to look toward Phoebus’ former domain (“Look up, poets, to the sun!” [237]), which has been filled by Christ: “And the whole earth and the skies / Are illumed by altar-candles /

Lit for blessèd mysteries” (240-242). Having taken on the mantle of Pheobus/Apollo,

Christ lights up the world as the new God of light. This example of dynamic tension between Christianity and paganism reflects Barrett Browning’s personal struggle as a

Christian in accepting the classical heritage of authors whom she admires. Homer and

130 Sadenwasser argues that by tying the abandonment of their oracles to the arrival of Christ, the poetic speaker in “The Dead Pan” explicitly identifies Christ as the successor to “ as the supreme deity and Apollo as the chief poet” (524).

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Ovid, whose works feature an understanding of morality often markedly different from

Christian beliefs, haunt the margins of Barrett Browning’s poems, attracting and repelling simultaneously. Indeed, several of Barrett Browning’s works are accompanied by some sort of denial, refutation, or for the pagan subject matter. And yet again and again she returns to Pan. I believe this can be partially explained by the appeal of Pan’s dual monstrous and benevolent nature, which itself parallels Barrett Browning’s feelings of attraction and repulsion for the classical heritage.

Barrett Browning struggled throughout her life with the dueling allure of classicism and Christianity, and the creative and moral dilemmas that this caused her were never resolved. Her family, while deeply religious, were “freethinking

Congregationalist[s]” suspicious of the clergy and hierarchical church structures (Worn

236). Her father’s independent religious thought set an example for Barrett Browning, while Mr. Barrett’s high regard for the early Greek Church Fathers like Pelagius, and for the benefits of a classical education, gifted Barrett Browning with a lifelong love of the classical (and particularly the Greek) world (236). At the same time, “the danger of excess in this religious freedom experienced by the young Elizabeth can be seen in her own recognition that she was ‘in great danger of becoming the founder of a religion of

[her] own’ where Christianity was merged with Greek pantheism” (236). Barrett

Browning’s Pan poems arise from this internal turmoil between Christian and pagan influences that, in mature works like “The Dead Pan” and “A Musical Instrument,” contrast spiritually luminous Apollonian Christ-figures against dark, earthy Dionysian

Pans. And though the Christ-Pan conflict remains unresolved in Barrett Browning’s works, as Merivale remarks, “it is enough to say that Mrs. Browning and Pan made each

223 other famous” (85). It is Barrett Browning who brings renewed attention to Pan’s sinister features in 19th century Britain, as she “attempts to grasp bravely the nettle of Pan’s crudely and frighteningly animal nature” at a time when “hardly anyone else had thought of doing so” (82). Likewise, “The Dead Pan” and “A Musical Instrument” are two of her most popular and frequently anthologized pieces, and arguably did more to color public perception of Pan in Victorian Britain than the works of any other contemporary author.

Thus, whatever uncertainties she may have felt regarding classicism, it is often through these poems, which engage with Pan and the classical past, that new students of literature first encounter both the author and Pan.

The Snares and Schemes of “rough red Pan”: Robert Browning’s “Pan and

Luna”

Robert Browning’s “Pan and Luna,” though published in 1880, nearly twenty years after his wife’s death, thematically meshes with Barrett Browning’s “A Musical

Instrument.” Browning’s poem is in many ways a spiritual sequel to the earlier poem, and serves as an illustration of what Pollock terms the “intertextual relationship” between

Robert and Elizabeth (216). Indeed, Mermin argues that “Pan and Luna” is a direct response to Barrett Browning’s earlier poem, and that contextually they should be read alongside each other as two sides of the same coin; taken together, Mermin maintains,

“the two poets’ Pan poems have a dark and subtle reciprocity” (244).

Like “A Musical Instrument,” Browning’s “Pan and Luna” retells a classical myth featuring Pan that was originally recorded by a well-known Roman author. Both works also foreground the violent ravishing of a beautiful female by an animalistic Pan. Yet while Barrett Browning finds her inspiration in Ovid, Browning instead turns to Book

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Three of Virgil’s . Written in the first century BC during the Roman Civil Wars that followed the death of Julius Caesar, the Georgics are a collection of four books of poetry that, according to Elaine Fantham, have traditionally been notoriously “difficult to describe or analyze” (xv). Taken as a whole, the Georgics are “part agricultural manual” and “part political poem and ” (xv). Virgil revels in the beauty of the natural world in the context of the rural farmland and countryside of ancient Italy. The poem is interspersed with brief interludes on other topics like politics, current events, and mythological stories and anecdotes. In writing “Pan and Luna,” Browning picks up on one such mythological anecdote about Pan, and expands it into a full length poem. Book

Three of the Georgics very briefly refers to the myth of Pan’s of the moon goddess Luna: “And so it was, if truth were told, that Pan of Arcadia wooed you, / the

Moon. By such immaculate designs he drew you to / the secret places of the wood, and you did not resist his call” (3.391-393). Though Virgil’s source for this legend has not been identified, it is clear that Browning’s story uses Virgil’s original as a jumping off point (Karlin 108). In fact, Browning opens his own poem by directly addressing his poetic predecessor:

Oh worthy of belief I hold it was,

Virgil, your legend in those strange three lines!

No question, that adventure came to pass

The one black night in Arcadia… (“Pan and Luna” 1-4).

Though Virgil serves as a source of inspiration for Browning, it is rather Barrett

Browning’s “A Musical Instrument” that more immediately resonates in “Pan and Luna.”

Browning’s creative interpolation of “those strange three lines” (2) climaxes with an

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“ of a primal scene of sexual transgression” (Karlin 108) that mirrors the sexual assault in Barrett Browning’s earlier poem. Browning fills in the unspoken details of

Virgil’s story, elaborating on how Pan traps and rapes the goddess Luna, using language that echoes Barrett Browning’s depiction of the beast-like Pan’s assault of Syrinx: “So lay this Maid-Moon clasped around and caught / By rough red Pan” (65-66). Browning’s description of the assault becomes even more graphic, as Luna lies

…trapped

Bruised to the breast of Pan, half-god half-brute

Raked by his bristly boar-sward while he lapped…

To tell how she recoiled—as who finds thorns

Where she sought flowers—when, feeling, she touched—horns! (83-88)

This is a violent and disturbing scene of rape, “sexual, visceral, discomfiting to both male and female readers” (Karlin 111). It is also darkly sexually queer—the “half- brute” Pan, horned and “bristly,” laps at Luna like an animal, his prickly hair raking her skin as he assaults her. As the speaker notes, this is not the straight love of two mutually amorous partners: “Never say, kissed her! that were to pollute / Love’s language” (85-

86). This is as close to a description of bestiality as could likely be printed in the 19th century—and it is indeed almost surprising that “Pan and Luna” was published at all given its sexually graphic nature. Browning’s compressed narrative, and the things that he does not say, but rather implies or suggests with ambiguous language or phrases left open to multiple interpretations—such as the speaker’s use of the word “raked” (84) in the context of sexual assault, or when Luna touches Pan’s “horns” (line 88)—are a source of “bewilderment and even terror” (Karlin 111). It is “violence…of a different order”

226 than that seen in the poetry of contemporaries like Tennyson (111), or even in

Browning’s earlier works. The source of this violence is Pan; more specifically, Barrett

Browning’s Pan. Moreover, Barrett Browning’s reading of Pan has been assimilated into, and comes to dominate, Robert Browning’s reading of Virgil. Her Pan has, in a sense, queerly disrupted both the later poem, as well as subsequent readers’ interpretation of

Virgil’s original. Pan’s presence in these works is thus not only sexually disruptive, but also temporally disruptive in the context of literary criticism.

All this, of course, would not be possible had Robert Browning not been writing back to his wife’s earlier work. Ever a passionate advocate of Elizabeth’s writing,

Browning “knew [Barrett Browning’s] work intimately and often echoed it in his own”

(Stone and Taylor 47). Another example of this echoing can be found in Robert

Browning’s “Pheidippides” (1879) which recounts the same episode from Herodotus featuring Pan and the famed Athenian runner that Barrett Browning had written about in her juvenile epic, “The Battle of Marathon.”131 That the power of Pan as a poetic image could, in this other pairing of Pan poems, echo across sixty years, from wife to husband

(remarkably attracting both a precocious teenage girl and an elderly man) underscores the compelling power of this queer and queering figure, whose very presence makes possible some of the Brownings’ most transgressive poetry.

As Pollock has noted, “Browning habitually tried to make sense of his own efforts by placing them in dialogue with other works and himself in dialogue with other artists”

(39). “Pan and Luna” is no exception. Read together, the Brownings’ Pan poems illustrate the authors’ mutual interest in what can be considered queer: in “marginal or grotesque

131 For more on the connections between Robert Browning’s “Pheidippides” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Battle of Marathon,” see Merivale pp. 87-88.

227 characters and situations” (9), and in the playing out of non-normative sexual behaviors and desires. They also show the enduring influence that a darkening image of Pan had on both authors over the course of many years. And while the Brownings popularized a darker, hyper-sexualized Pan, it would be Swinburne and Machen who would bring the figure to a fever pitch of demonic intensity.

Swinburne and Sexual Obsession

Taken alongside the pseudo-classicism of works like “The Battle of Marathon” and “A Musical Instrument,” Barrett Browning’s critique of Schiller’s more earnest classicism in “The Dead Pan” seems symptomatic of a larger uneasiness regarding the classical world during the 19th century in Britain. On the one hand, many historical

Greeks and Romans, like and Cato, were admired for their .132 And yet the very different understanding of morality in the ancient world was a source of disquiet for pious Victorians like Barrett Browning. As Ronald Hutton notes in The Triumph of the

Moon, unless the classical, pagan past was “kept subordinate to Christianity in the realm of religion and ethics,” the classical world could become “a profoundly subversive force”

(17). With “The Dead Pan,” Barrett Browning sought “to strike a blow against the continuing influence” of Schiller’s unabashed paganism (25). And yet for some the subversive attractions of the pagan past prove too powerful to contain under the strictures of Christian morality. An author who seems well aware of the moral dichotomy of admiring the ancients during a Christian era, and yet who wholeheartedly embraces the

132 Richard Jenkyns has written extensively on the Victorians and their admiration for and Rome. For more information on Victorian fascination with classical—and especially Greek—figures, as well as information on classical morality and virtues as interpreted in Victorian Britain, see Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece; see also his Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance, as well as his edited collection of essays The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal. Additionally, see Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain; and chapter 2 “Victorian Hellas” in Green, Classical Bearings: Interpreting and Culture.

228 queering aspects of the pagan past, is Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose depictions of

Pan expand upon and further develop the queer dualities of light and dark found in

Barrett Browning’s Pans. Swinburne’s depiction of the god is more overtly, irresistibly seductive and irrationally terrifying than earlier incarnations. Unlike Barrett Browning, whose Pans function as queered shadows of Christ, for the atheist Swinburne there is no

Christ-figure to temper the pantheistic paganism represented by Pan. Rather, in

Swinburne paganism becomes a virtue opposed to a restrictive sense of Christian morality. Where Christianity concerns itself with the soul and the spiritual, for Swinburne the pagan is by contrast linked to the body, locus of physical sensation. The physicality of

Swinburne’s poetry, with its wild pagan beauty, was both shocking and electrifying to readers of the time. In contrast with the devout (if unorthodox) Christianity of Barrett

Browning, Swinburne was defiantly and unabashedly open in his admiration for the thrilling power of ancient myth and culture, and many of his works (and the poet himself) have been described by both contemporaries and modern critics as neopagan. Hutton argues that it was Swinburne who (re-)stoked pagan fires in Victorian Britain, first

“rais[ing] the standard of paganism in the field of revolt” in the 1860s with in

Calydon, which was styled after ancient Greek drama (25). The gods of Greece and

Rome frequently figure in Swinburne’s works, and Pan is no exception. Late in his career, he wrote several Pan poems, including “Pan and Thalassius,” “The Palace of

Pan,” and “A Nympholept,” (all written between 1887 and 1893) (Merivale 96).

Swinburne’s poems celebrate “the animal quality within humans, and especially within women” (Hutton 26). Likewise, his depictions of Pan become vehicles for interjecting the animalistic and primal into human life. Yet in Swinburne, Pan’s animal nature is also

229 complicated by an overwhelming sublimity that intensifies the panic terror that Pan is capable of inflicting. The darker, Theocritan vision of Pan in his poems is especially striking, as it emphasizes unmoderated emotional responses to the god that “are of the two extremes of ecstasy and terror” (Merivale 96).

Thematically and stylistically, Swinburne’s Pan poems align with much of his earlier, more well-known poetry. The pagan, classical subject matter, sublime natural imagery, and the sensuality of the ornate, rhythmic language in these later poems echo earlier works like “Hymn to ” and “Anactoria” from Poems and Ballads

(1866), or the play Atalanta in (1865). There is, however, a small but not insignificant shift in emphasis in later poems like “A Nympholept” and “The Palace of

Pan.” While earlier works like “Anactoria” and “Laus Veneris” mix light and dark in their foregrounding of the sensual pleasures and pains of love and loss, the later Pan poems inherit the twilit key of darker works like “Faustine,” “The Garden of Proserpine,” and the paired “A Ballad of Life” and “A Ballad of Death.” The Pan poems, however, extend and center a sense of sublime awe at the workings of nature (something that occurs only to a lesser degree in early poems like “,” “The Garden of

Proserpine,” or “Felise”). This awe becomes intimately tied to the pagan gods, and particularly to Pan, who intensifies these already overwhelming sensations into a deep, terrifying, and powerful experience of divinity in and through nature. As Levin puts it,

“like Wordsworth and Shelley, Swinburne too perceives nature as a shrine for an invisible god;” however, Swinburne believes that this god cannot be “found in a physical place, but in a mental space—between ‘thought’ and ‘rapture,’ where spirit and sense converge” (4). For Swinburne, this pantheistic deity is Pan himself, who surrounds and

230 encompasses a humanity made miniscule and insignificant in his sublimely terrifying presence. Swinburne’s Pan is an overwhelming force that, while located externally, is experienced internally, affecting the subject simultaneously from inside-out, and outside- in. The awe, panic fear, and terror inspired by a wild, animalistic natural world is expressed through Pan, and experienced physically and psychologically through enraptured figures like the nympohelpt. In his late Pan poems, the power and consequent psychological and emotional affect of a violent, animalistic Pan on human beings is magnified to terrifying levels. In “A Nympholept” in particular, on which this discussion will now focus, the experience of Pan is always extreme, threatening to overwhelm the individual with the weight of the infinite pan-all, queer in its sheer immeasurability.

Swinburne’s “A Nympholept” (first published 1891) features both foreboding tones of doom and feelings of awe at the workings of life, death, love, and divinity. Panic fear and terror are at the heart of the experience of Pan in this work, which Fisher describes as “a noonday nightmare” (792). Rosenberg reports that in a note Swinburne explicitly describes reading the poem as a way of experiencing “the terror and ‘splendid oppression of nature at noon which found utterance of old in words of such singular and everlasting significance as panic and ’” (qtd. in Rosenberg 151). The poem depicts the approach of Pan and his nymphs from the perspective of a nympholept:133 a

133 A nympholept is a person, typically a man, who has been aroused to a state of intense, passionate ecstasy of desire inspired by nymphs, to the point that he is trapped or caught by them (OED). The nympholept is helpless in the hands of the nymphs. Interestingly, both Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning use variations of the word “nympholept” in their published work. Barrett Browning uses the word “nympholept” (1.190) in Casa Guidi Windows (1851). In a letter to John Ruskin (“who had complained about her use of [the word] ‘nympholept’” [Chapman 272]), Barrett Browning cites Byron’s use of the word “nympholepsy” (4.115) in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Stone and Taylor 244). Chapman suggests that Byron may be her source for this word (275-276). Robert Browning’s poem “Numpholeptos” (1876) “has been interpreted autobiographically as Browning’s expression of rebellion against the fifteen year bondage to the memory of his dead wife”

231 person paralyzed in sexual thrall to a nymph or nymphs. In the poem Swinburne confronts “the underside” of his own pantheistic beliefs (Wilson 66) by bearing witness to the cruelty, amorality, and horror of the god Pan (64). Swinburne’s Pan is “a demonic overlord”—sadistic, amoral, and horrible—associated with the day rather than the night, and whose power peaks at noon134 (64). In this daymare, the rays of the fierce

Mediterranean sun bring “awareness of the god’s cruelty” (64). Swinburne’s language describing the sunlight is evocative of this demonic Pan: “fierce,” “fearful,”

“unmerciful,” “loveless,” and “naked,” while the light “pervades, invades, appals” (85-

88). As in Barrett Browning’s Pan poems, a monstrous Pan threatens to overwhelm any sense of order or equilibrium. This time, however, no reformative rays of Christianity appear to banish Pan’s queering, chaotic influence. In fact, the speaker outright rejects the self-enforced repression and submissive norms required by Christianity (and formally generally):

I seek not with submission of lips and knees,

With worship and for a sign till it leap to light:

I gaze on the gods about me, and call on these.

I call on the gods hard by, the divine dim powers

Whose likeness is here at hand… (40-44)

Instead of looking to the heavens, the nympholept “call[s] on the gods hard by”

(43)—the physically grounded gods present in nature, like Pan, who are “at hand” (44)

(Loucks and Stauffer 459). Intriguingly, this interpretation reads Elizabeth Barrett as the nymph, and Robert as the “numpholept.” Though beyond the scope of this chapter, a thorough analysis of the connections between these terms as used by these various poets would be a fruitful topic for a future paper. 134 Rather than at midnight, when demonic figures are traditionally believed to reach the peak of their powers.

232 and can be felt rather than merely worshipped. This desire for a tactile deity—a god that can be physically experienced—is for the nympholept personified by a Pan that inspires powerful emotions, like terrific fear and intense sexual desire, which are manifested bodily.

As Pan approaches, the nympholept experiences primal panic terror tinged with desire.135 The queerness of this sexualized desire is revealed by the conflicting emotions of extreme fear and lust that course uncontrollably through the nympholept’s being. He is unsure if he suffers from “panic dread” or “panic passion,” to use Swinburne’s language

(qtd. in Fisher 795). 136 The nympholept’s uncertainty regarding his own feelings, as well the resistance he encounters in trying to define them linguistically, are signs of the inherently queer nature of Swinburne’s Pan, who functions as a catalyst of queer desires—in this case, sexual obsession and masochistic thralldom. The distinctly non- normative sensations experienced when touched by Pan result in Ahmedian “queer disorientation”: the nympholept’s perspective has shifted, and a set of hybridized alternative pathways that were once obscured have opened before him. As Pan and the nymphs get closer, the nympholept’s desire and anxiety intensify,137 further compounding this sense of queer disorientation. As Fisher remarks, “terror and delight merge

135 See also McSweeney pp. 205-206 for an alternative interpretation of these lines. McSweeney argues that the speaker “refuses to assume any religious posture, or adopt any kind of Christian framework in his desire to possess nature’s ‘secret’” (205). McSweeney reads this as a rejection of all religion, replaced by nature itself as the focus of all desire. I partly disagree—I see Pan as the focal point of the nympholept’s desires. Pan in this poem is not merely “the spirit which impregnates nature and quickens the speaker’s response to it” (206), as McSweeney asserts; he is more centrally the terrifying great god Pan, the Greco-Roman deity. Pan, though intimately connected with nature, should not be conflated with it. This conflation is an error of oversimplification that, for example, obscures the significance of Pan’s sexual power as a source and stimulus of queer desires. In McSweeney’s reading, desire is subsumed in the experience of nature. I believe that the wildly sexual desires unleashed in the nympholept should be central to a reading of the poem. 136 From Swinburne’s manuscript notes, as quoted by Fisher. 137 Pan’s ability to freeze those he encounters in a state of anxious paralysis harkens back to the god’s association with nightmare like the incubus (Malini 28).

233 repeatedly in ‘A Nympholept’” (795), as the terrible, queerly disorienting jouissance of

Pan is taken to new heights. Pan’s queerly painful and ecstatic pleasures can also be read as a product of what Dollimore terms “sexual dissidence.” Sexual dissidence is a way of queering the subject “by claiming non-normative desires as essential to one’s nature”

(Denisoff 432). Pan causes his subjects to feel that their own queer, uncontrollable desires—e.g. panic dread/passion—are inherent and inescapable. Pan queers the subject by exposing the sexual dissidence that lies dormant within the individual.

This potent but dissident mixture of queer sexual pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, are common themes in Swinburne’s poetry. Indeed, Dorothea Barrett argues that

Swinburne’s work reflects…[a] tortured relation between language and

desire. Poetic experience, like sexual experience, is for him a compound of

pleasure and pain…for him pleasure and pain are intrinsic to sexual and

poetic experience, are indeed essential to them, since pleasure is perceived

only in contrast to pain. Swinburne’s is a relative world in which all

opposites are embraced because perception is impossible without

difference. (113)

Pan’s ability to encompass difference, or what we might term a pan-chotomous

“all”—pleasure and pain, queer and heteronormative desires of all kinds—is an essential aspect of the god’s attractions. Ridenour suggests that the appeal of Pan in “A

Nympholept” is the promise of union with the divine: with the god, with the nymph, and with nature itself (7). Those who seek Pan desire a sense of wholeness and at-oneness that only he can provide. Pan, like the that so attracted Swinburne,

234 offers “a spiritual dissipation of the self within a natural collective” (Denisoff 435). This would seem to connect Swinburne’s Pan to the healing nature god of deep England discussed in the previous chapter. However, this potential union is also destructive to the individual, as it threatens to erase the boundaries of individual identity. As Ridenour argues, by the end of “A Nympholept” the potentiality of union “dissolves almost instantly…[for] in Pan the quality of terror is too great to be assimilated” by any individual (7).

And though the possibility of union vanishes, the potential destruction of the individual affected by Pan remains a threat that, as the nympholept knows all too well, cannot be escaped.

This phenomenon of inescapability—the inability to break one’s thrall to the monstrous Pan—is the figure’s strongest link to contemporary Gothic monsters like

Dracula, Mr. Hyde, or Dorian Gray. Many late Victorian Gothic works feature moments in which the victim completely submits to the monstrous Other, be it as a willing vampiric victim of Dracula, in Dr. Jekyll’s surrender to the temptations of the progressively uncontrollable Mr. Hyde, or in Dorian Gray’s submission to the horrific portrait that mirrors the fate of his soul. The Gothic victim loses control over his destiny, enthralled as he is to the monster that threatens to engulf him. What makes Pan effectually different from other monsters is the god’s inexplicability. Dracula is physically described and observed by many people, and scientifically studied by Van

Helsing. ’s “Beetle” is also described in detail and confronted with science, and we are even given some physical descriptions of Mr. Hyde. Such descriptions, and characters’ attempts to understand or counter the monster, provide at

235 least some sense of control over it. However, if one wishes to remain sane, one must never catch even a fleeting glimpse of Pan, which is often enough to drive one to babbling madness (as occurs repeatedly in Machen’s “The Great God Pan”). Even mere contemplation of Pan, as in “The Nympholept,” leads to terrified paralysis. Unlike

Dracula or other late Victorian Gothic monsters, Pan can never be comprehended or effectively combated with rational means, for science breaks down when confronted with

Pan’s queer monstrosity. Pan’s utter incomprehensibility, and the way that his irrationality overwhelms the individual, makes him unique among contemporary Gothic monsters. Pan is more than just a being with a monstrous physical body. He is a chaotic force that comes crashing through the veneer of civilized modernity. Pan tempts, invites, and enraptures the curious souls who seek him out in the hope of eternal union with the divine and infinite, only to reveal his irrational, queerly disruptive and destructive nature to the helpless subject. In doing this, Pan opens to them a slantwise view of the universe that is too much for mortals to bear. Pan then destroys the individual by overwhelming her or him with the chaotic force of life unrestrained.

The mingling of fear and desire, and inevitable, inescapable destruction that occurs through contact with Pan is intimately connected to the potential loss of self that

Pan both promises and threatens. This notion is crucial to our understanding of how Pan functions as a queer challenge to normative structures of subject and object, and conceptions of individually separate identity; moreover, it foreshadows the ultimate queer monstrosity of Arthur Machen’s Gothic, proto-Weird Pan in his elaborately constructed novella “The Great God Pan.” This shift from poets to a prose writer in my discussion of the queer Gothic Pan requires some explanation. Interestingly, Swinburne’s depiction of

236 a dark, terrifying Pan had little influence on later English poets; rather, prose writers, and specifically writers of horror or of the horrifying, like Machen, Saki, E. F. Benson, and even D. H. Lawrence in his duskiest mode, “use Swinburne’s clues to indicate Pan’s awe- inspiring presence or approach, but the important similarity is in the extreme and ineffable emotions to which the experience [of Pan] gives rise” (Merivale 99). Uncanny and queerly monstrous in his resistance to norms, and in his sexual and behavioral impact on the individuals who experience him, this fiendish image of Pan bursts into the horror literature of the period as one of its most memorable monsters.

Machen’s Queer, Decadent Pan

Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” was written almost contemporaneously

(1890-94) with Swinburne’s “A Nympholept” (1891), and was published in its completed form only a few years (1894) after Swinburne’s poem appeared in print. This novella is the culmination of the queered Gothicization of Pan that begins with Barrett Browning and continues with Swinburne. Machen’s demonic envisioning of Pan also links to early

Christian and medieval traditions of the superimposition of the Devil onto Pan, as well as to ancient mythology of the god as a source of panic terrors. This Pan reborn into the fin- de-siècle is nastier, more horrifying, and more overtly sexualized than his predecessors.

“The Great God Pan” was composed in the middle of what Joshi calls “Machen’s

‘great decade’ of fiction writing—the period between 1887 and 1901 when, thanks to a timely inheritance, he was able to devote his energies entirely to his art without thought of monetary recompense” (The White People Introduction vii). This fruitful period saw

Machen complete the lion’s share of his most famous works, including his novels The

Three Impostors (1895) and The Hill of Dreams (1904), and numerous short stories

237 including “The Inmost Light” (1894), “The Red Hand” (1895), “The Shining Pyramid”

(1895), and “The White People” (1904) (Joshi, Weird Tale 39-40). Machen’s works from this period are, moreover, stylistically and thematically related to each other and to popular literature of the day. Many critics have noted the parallels and connections between Machen’s early style and that of the contemporary ;138 his sonorous, highly descriptive and evocative language, and the obsessive concern with

“illicit sex” (Joshi, Weird Tale 22), death, corruption, degeneration, and other gloomy or forbidden subjects link Machen to Baudelaire, Huysmans, Swinburne, Symonds, and

Wilde in his darker works. Though Machen did not consider himself to be part of the

Decadent set of the 1890s, he associated with many in their circles, including Oscar

Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas (Owens 117). Two of his early books, the paired The

Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, and the episodic novel , featured Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, and were published in John Lane’s Keynote series. Publisher John Lane’s Bodley Head Press was the home of the notorious Yellow

Book (if anything could be called the Decadent’s bible, it was this journal), while his

Keynote series included a number of sensational and risqué works of the 1890s like

George Egerton’s Keynotes (which gave the series its title) and Grant Allen’s The Woman

Who Did (Harris 1407). Machen’s early works were thus well-positioned to be received as part of this movement, even if Machen himself did not feel fully a part of the

Decadence.139 And indeed, early works like “The Great God Pan” were reviled as

138 See also Arthur Machen’s Supernaturalism: The Decadent Variety” by Jill Tedford Owens, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: ‘Degeneration,’” by Adrian Eckersley, and “Modern Narratives and Decadent Things in Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors” by Stefania Forlini. 139 Machen biographer Mark Valentine writes that “Machen recalled in later years that his book came out ‘when Yellow Bookery was at its yellowest’ and [that it] ‘profited by the noise’ that the Decadent movement was making, though he denied that his work itself derived from this ‘ferment of the nineties’” (30).

238 perverse and obscene by some of the very same newspapers and journals that attacked the

Yellow Book school of writers (Valentine 30-31).

Decadent or not, “The Great God Pan” epitomizes Machen’s early works, and in its reworking of the image of Pan as a figure of terror, it prefigures the cosmic horrors of

20th-century writers like H.P. Lovecraft and (33). Machen’s novella “was influential in attaching to Pan a new mode, an association with the daring and dangerous….what had previously been a rustic, rather bucolic image, was now laced with images of illicit sex and cosmopolitan decadence” (33). Machen amplifies the darker aspects present in earlier writers’ depictions of Pan, such as the god’s violent tendencies and his ability to inflict panic fear, while intensifying his queer sexuality. In this work,

Pan and his kin become sexualized terrors who force human beings to confront unveiled horrors beyond their comprehension.

To briefly summarize the plot, Dr. Raymond seeks to lift the veil between the material and the spiritual worlds by way of an experimental neurosurgical procedure—“a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred” (Machen 2)—performed on his orphaned ward, Mary. As Raymond boasts to his friend Clarke, who is observing the procedure, “‘for the first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit-world.

Clarke, Mary will see the god Pan!’” (4). After the operation, Pan presumably appears to

Mary, impregnating her in the process. Mary consequently enters a catatonic state, never regaining her senses. Though she dies in childbirth, Mary is survived by a daughter named Helen, who grows up among mortal folk. Once Helen reaches young adulthood,

Pan apparently reveals himself to her, his presumed daughter. Thereafter Helen becomes

239 a living terror—a manifestation of Pan in human form—and uses the potent sexuality of her queer, hybrid body to seduce modern British men, women, and children. Helen compels her victims to face the horror and chaos of the deep past, and forces them to choose between infernal union with the infinite (which consequently threatens loss of the self in the vastness of time and the ubiquity of evil) or death by their own hands.

Madness, moral degeneracy, and suicide follow. The rest of the novella is essentially a detective story structured “like a nest of Chinese boxes” (17) as the straight male bachelor protagonists attempt to solve the intertwined mysteries of a series of suicides committed by aristocratic men in the prime of their lives, and to peer through the nebulous uncertainties surrounding Helen/Pan’s queer origins.

Machen’s Pan, like Swinburne’s in “A Nympholept” and Barrett Browning’s in

“The Dead Pan,” hovers over the text like a half-forgotten nightmare, glimpsed and referred to, but never described in great detail. His threatening presence, however, is always at hand. While in all of these works Pan paradoxically inhabits both the center and the periphery of human experience, in “The Great God Pan,” Machen develops the potentiality of Pan’s expansive presence. Though he may at first he seems an intruder in the physical world, it is gradually revealed that Pan has always been there, underlying the limited human perception of life. As Dr. Raymond remarks in his justification for the surgical operation performed on Mary:

You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you

that all these things—yes, from that that has just shone out in the

to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams

and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is

240

a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision…beyond them

all as beyond a veil….it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients

knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan. (2)

It is gradually revealed to the bachelor-detectives Clarke, Villiers, and Austin, that

Pan is a symbol of something greater and more horrifying than merely an ancient mythological figure. He is a demonic force of pure evil that has always existed just beyond human perception—pan-evil, existing across pan-time. Significantly, Machen brings this threat home to England. His transformed Pan no longer inhabits a

Mediterranean landscape (as in Barrett Browning or Swinburne’s poems)—rather, he has been transplanted to turn-of-the-century London, in female form. Pan’s spatial, physical, and temporal shifts underscore the transformation of the god of antiquity into the great god Pan: a queer Gothic monster and modern embodiment of evil.

The queer Gothic Pan exists within and without human perception. He is both dream and waking nightmare, male and female, and inhabits the modern world and the ancient past simultaneously. This temporal instability is a source of Pan’s queerness.

Worth argues that the horror of Pan is owing to his embodiment of the abyss of “deep time,” a “kind of terrifyingly expansive past that had forced itself into the Victorian consciousness during the previous decades” (216) due to new conceptions of geological and evolutionary time. By the century’s close these new areas of study had already actively “undermined or actually disproved” many of the “verifiable statements in the

Judeo-Christian holy scriptures” (Hobsbawm 271). Pan, whose name has (albeit through etymological error [Boardman 26-27]) traditionally been understood to mean “all,”140

140 Merivale suggests that one of the “overriding themes” in prose horror featuring Pan “is that of terror caused by merging with or seeing the All which is Pan” (99). The infinite pan/all is terrifying precisely

241 personifies the monstrous horror integral to this sense of immeasurably deep time that threatened established understandings of temporality. Pan’s unclassifiable vastness, spreading across deep time, accentuates his monstrosity. As Cohen posits, “the monster is a category that is not bound by classificatory structurations, least of all one as messy and inadequate as time” (“Time of Monsters” ix). Machen’s Pan monstrously transcends time, crushing humankind with the vastness and inconceivability of the infinite. By continuously existing in the deep past, present, and future, Machen’s Pan queers understandings of “straight” time—linear, teleological, and diachronic—and introduces a queered sense of time. I define this queered sense of time as synchronic, immeasurable, and lacking a clear beginning or end. Thus Pan, existing in a queered sense of time, can simultaneously appear as a modern human woman (Helen) and as a creature of the deep past (Helen’s atavistic transformations). This queered, synchronic temporality, shifting forward, backward, and sideways in time, is illustrated by Helen’s unstable body:

Here too was all the work by which man had been made repeated before

my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself,

and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence

it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even

to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism,

always remained, while the outward form changed. (46)

Pan’s influence has fundamentally queered Helen’s body. Helen’s wavering, morphing form, moving through a reverse or parallel evolutionary process, signals the collapse of traditional modes of interpreting and regulating conceptions of time, species, gender, sexuality, the body, and human nature itself. Regulation and categorization because it cannot be comprehended by the limited perceptions of finite beings.

242 disintegrate, leaving chaos in their wake.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 18th century philosopher Vico remarks that in antiquity Pan was associated with embodied Chaos (310). In Machen’s work, Helen— terrifying and terrifyingly attractive, daughter of Pan and a mortal woman—awakens dormant memories of this primordial chaos which “inheres in every human” (Fox 66).

Pan-via-Helen is the catalyst of this awakened ancient chaos. She rips away the veil concealing “the horror which underlies the quiet surface of life” (Punter, The Literature of Terror 22), and reveals that humanity exists tenuously in a state of siege from ancient

“dark forces” (Punter and Byron 146). Chaotic life itself, unmediated by constructed civilized perceptions, becomes the ultimate horror (Fox 66-67). Helen is the queer agent of chaos who provides the lit fuse to this primordial bombshell that lies underneath the fortification of civilization. Helen’s inherent queerness lies in this ability to wreak disorienting chaos as she undermines normative structures of marriage, sex, power relations, and generative potential.141 This Pan in drag sabotages heterosexual relationships and destroys the possibility of futurity by leading heterosexual British men and women to suicide or madness. Like the ghost or revenant of the Gothic tale, Helen is

“a kind of transvestite, destabilizing gender as [she] terrorizes the straight subject”

(Fincher 10), particularly the aristocratic bachelor-detectives who attempt to reassert heteronormative authority over her queer, resistant body. Helen’s body itself is the locus of this sexual panic surrounding the queer (and especially the queer female) in this work.

All who interact with her experience distress, confusion, intense fear, and disorientation, as men, women, and children are drawn to her in spite of themselves. Helen’s

141 Helen’s interactions with other characters are notable points of disruption from previously normative lives, functionally queering their experience of life. Her influence is so disruptive that characters could essentially divide their lives pre- and post-Helen.

243 unrestrained sexuality—queer for her time and place—causes a particularly riling panic in the heterosexual men, and a consequent reaction that is both fearful and vengeful. This pandemic of highly sexualized panic is the most powerful manifestation of Helen’s monstrosity, imaginatively combining two real-life contemporary sources of heterosexual male anxiety in Europe and North America: fear of the “New Woman,” and the anxious state of homosexual panic.

Homosexual panic is a phenomenon that Eve Sedgwick argues was “the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement” since the 18th century in the English- speaking world (Epistemology of the Closet 185). Sedgwick explains that it is the intense expression of fear and hostility on the part of (supposedly) straight men toward homosexuals, who are perceived as a threat to established social order (185). The sexual panic around Helen is similar, only now instead of being directed against homosexuals, it is directed against an overtly sexual woman. As Aaron argues in Welsh Gothic, “in nineteenth-century upper-class London society [female sexual desire] cannot be tolerated; it constitutes such a destabilizing threat to a gentleman’s view of the feminine, of himself and of his civilization that it is unendurable. ‘[H]ealthy English boys’ cannot bear such decaden[ce]’” (76). Helen’s unrestrained sexuality wreaks havoc on heterosexual men— particularly male British aristocrats, her primary targets—and fosters a reaction against a powerful woman that is both fearful and vengeful. As a powerful woman, Helen echoes contemporary discourse regarding what was known as the “New Woman.” This was a term used in the latter half of the 19th century to refer to sexually and behaviorally liberated women who felt emancipated from male domination. Popular press and literature responded (often hysterically) to the perceived threat that the New Woman

244 posed to traditional society, leading to what Showalter terms a “masculinity crisis” in the

West (10). In art and literature of the fin-de-siècle, this crisis is often dealt with imaginatively through depictions of powerful femme fatales whose “castrating potential” produces “an exaggerated horror” in the viewer (10). Machen’s Helen is an über-New

Woman of nightmare: a queer being that fulfills paranoid male anxieties over the castrating female who has come to strip aristocratic men of the keys to the kingdom.

This pandemic of panic is the most powerful manifestation of Helen’s monstrosity. Such disorienting “impact(s),” as Mittman argues, are “rooted in the vertigo of redefining one’s understanding of the world,” and caused by the encounter with the monstrous (7-8). Helen defies traditional Victorian gender and sexual roles, her queer body casting a monstrous shadow, invisible but subliminally perceptible to the straight men who pursue her.142 They in turn experience a panic of category crisis upon encountering Helen, for they are unable to classify, and thereby exert control, over her body:

Every one who saw her at the police court said she was at once the most

beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on. I have

spoken to a man who saw her, and I assure you he positively shuddered as

he tried to describe the woman, but he couldn’t tell why. She seems to

have been a sort of enigma; and I expect if that one dead man [one of the

suicides] could have told tales, he would have told some uncommonly

142 Helen’s monstrous shadow can be read as a dark double, a trope common to late Victorian Gothic works like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). For more on the double as a literary trope, see Karl Miller’s classic Doubles: Studies in Literary History. For more in-depth intertextual readings of The Great God Pan alongside other late Victorian Gothic works, see The Literature of Terror, Vol. 2: The Modern Gothic by David Punter, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle by Kelly Hurley, and my article “‘More than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of the Fin-de-Siècle.”

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queer ones. (Machen 20)

These “uncommonly queer” tales would likely be colored by the queerly uncanny feelings of unease that Helen triggers in others. Helen forces a new, queered orientation onto those she encounters—a slantwise view of the world which reveals ancient horrors coexisting in the same space as a mortal human woman. Pigeonhole conceptions like beauty or ugliness lose significance in her presence. The straight men who see Helen, like those at the police court, become disoriented and unsettled by her queer body’s resistance to categorical interpretation. Her body triggers uncanny feelings of dis-ease in the men around her, who are both attracted and repulsed by her.143 Fincher argues that Gothic writings are marked by “the multiplicity of potentially conflicting interpretations” which is mirrored in “the fear of those queer bodies whose gender or sexuality cannot be easily read and who remain suspicious” (67). At once physically female, but imbibed with the dark powers of a male Pan, Helen’s body queers any attempt to categorize or exert control over it—and this, according to Fincher’s criteria, “signifies a queerness in [its] resistance” to external control and heteronormative power structures (67). This resistance to control, according to Mittman, is a hallmark of the monstrous: the monster “is outside of…definitions; it defies the human desire to subjugate through categorization. This is the source, in many ways, of their power” (7).

Helen’s subversion of Victorian conceptions of patriarchal sexual hierarchy is horrifyingly demonstrated in the novella’s final scenes, when her body undergoes transformations before the group of straight men who have come to oversee her execution/suicide as punishment for her crimes. Rational comprehension and

143 Interestingly, the threat of Helen seems to drive the male protagonists deeper into the safety of their homosocial world, empty as it is of other females.

246 conventional means of communication, like speech and writing, break down in the face of the transmutations, as the narrative begins to shatter into fragments (indeed, Chapter

VIII is entitled “The Fragments”). Dr. Matheson’s manuscript describing Helen’s monstrous transformation is scribbled in Latin, and “was only deciphered with great difficulty, and some words have up to the present time evaded all the efforts of the expert employed” (Machen 45). Clarke’s letter to Raymond, and Raymond’s to Clarke, are likewise fragmentary. Helen’s queer monstrosity defies not only reason, but also the men of science who impose reason upon Victorian society. This demolition of rationality clears a path for the incomprehensible and inexplicable queerness of the shadow-world embodied by Pan.

Helen/Pan forces her subjects to experience the amorphous reality of this anti- logical, queer shadow-world. The monster Helen/Pan in this way “calls into question our…epistemological worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and thereby asks us…to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categorization” (Mittman

8). As “a summation of the Dionysian144 condition of existence” (Fox 67), Pan rips away the illusion of civilization and modernity, inducing “events that force us out of civilized habits” (Hillman 9). In a darkened refraction of Puar’s optimistic interpretation of “queer times,” Pan at the turn of the 20th century reveals that the world is fundamentally queer, albeit in a way that is horrifying rather than liberating. Murder, suicide, madness, rampant sexuality—Pan breaks down the walls that separate rational, modern humanity from these socially unacceptable behaviors. Worth suggests that a source of Machen’s

144 Rather than the Apollonian condition idealized by the Enlightenment. For more on the tension between the in art, see Nietzsche’s .

247 existential horror is in the breakdown of such categories and boundaries145—between human and nonhuman, the cultural and the biological, the distant past and the present

(217). He goes on to argue that Pan is the ultimate vehicle for this form of horror in that he embodies the “disconcerting continuities” that figure so prominently in Machen’s

Gothic fiction (217). Pan mingles divine, human, and animal; youth, maturity, and old age; the masculine, feminine, and androgynous, into a queer blended All that is terrifying precisely because of its overwhelming ability to violate boundaries and to encompass and unify disparate parts.

The queering process of Helen’s transmutation (a word for which Machen had a fondness) into an abject protoplasmic horror (Navarette 190) is the culmination of Pan’s monstrous development in the long 19th century. Machen’s Pan is made even more terrifying because of his proximity to humankind, and his capability to affect them psychologically, spiritually, and physically. Through scientific procedure, he can be touched, and is biologically capable of impregnating a human woman. Yet Pan remains a mystical being, and a cultural entity associated with Western antiquity. The boundaries between these many personae are not clearly defined, and the end effect of an encounter with the boundary-less Pan is uncanny and extraordinarily discomfiting. Like more traditional monsters, Pan is a that exists along the gray, amorphous borders between the physical and spiritual worlds, in “a sphere unknown” (Machen 3) to a humanity limited to the tangible. Pan’s liminality defies the rationality of the mind, which seeks to make sense of the world by categorizing and defining experience. However, Pan is not precisely irrational (or anti-rational), but a-rational. In other words, he is not

145 The breakdown of boundaries is particularly evident in the concluding chapter of “The Great God Pan,” when Helen’s body undergoes transmutations from human to beast to slime.

248 diametrically opposed to rationality, but is rather not limited to it. Pan encompasses both rationality and irrationality, order and disorder. To return again to Vico, Pan is a force of primeval Chaos—a chaotic integration of infinite parts. The terror of Pan is thus of the chaotic, incomprehensible infinite which threatens to expand out of the liminal borders and swallow the finite being in its horrible vastness—an impression experienced by

Machen’s Clarke, who “‘has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror’” (qtd. in

Worth 217).

Machen’s Dark Visions

This sense of looming darkness waiting to be revealed is of a piece with many of

Machen’s other works of the 1890s and early 1900s—and indeed, “The Great God Pan” expresses several themes common to Machen’s early fictions. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on those themes directly relevant to his portrayal of Pan. The aforementioned sense of apocalyptic revelation, connected to the discovery of occult knowledge, is commonly found in Machen’s works. In “The Shining Pyramid,” “The Red

Hand,” and “The Novel of the Black Seal,” revelation occurs through the gradual deciphering of some ancient artifact, while in “The Great God Pan” and “The Inmost

Light,” this life-changing revelation occurs through experimentation with queered science: arcane, unorthodox, and ethically questionable experimentation that mix straight

(orthodox, materialist) science with the occult, performed by male scientists upon

(surprisingly) willing female subjects who submit to the experimentation out of love or some debt of gratitude to the scientist. This occult revelation, coupled with the queering of science and scientific methods, “places science within a greater, sacred and mystical universe of force and energy, matter and spirit” (Botting 143). Science becomes queerly

249 occult, and the occult is queerly scientized.146 These mismatched parents birth horrific revelations. Such revelations are apocalyptic in the sense that they cause a paradigm shift in one’s perception of the world, and most particularly in one’s perception of evil. This is experienced as an awakening to previously unimagined horrors—think of Clarke or Dr.

Matheson in the conclusion of “The Great God Pan,” or Dyson in “The Inmost Light” when he discovers that Dr. Black’s wife’s soul is trapped in the fantastical opal gemstone.

There is, moreover, something about this evil that characters find attractive; at the very least, the attempt to comprehend the ultimately incomprehensible evil is something that they obsess over. Dyson, the amateur detective who appears in several of Machen’s stories and novels,147 and his counterparts Clarke and Villiers in “The Great God Pan,” cannot rest until they uncover the evil secrets at the heart of the mysteries that involve them. They become obsessed with their subjects, and are relentless in their pursuit of gratification. There is something sexualized about this hunting of evil, and particularly so in the pursuit of Helen, that simultaneously alluring and revolting female Pan. In

Machen’s fictions, evil is often sexualized. Pan himself is highly sexualized, seducing or raping several women in the novella, and Helen seduces (and it could be argued, rapes or sexually assaults) a series of men. In “The Shining Pyramid,” the atavistic “Little People” kidnap a local girl from a nearby village, and dance nude around her in an orgiastic ceremony that exudes unrestrained sexuality and violence. And in The Three Impostors, it is the female conspirator (incidentally, also named Helen) who appears to take the most enjoyment in the torture, mutilation, and killing of the mysterious “young man with the

146 In fact, Machen’s Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light” refers to his experimentation as “occult science” (75). 147 The Holmesian Dyson appears in the short stories “The Shining Pyramid,” “The Red Hand,” and “The Inmost Light,” and in the novel The Three Impostors.

250 spectacles.” While Machen’s powerful, hyper-sexed evil female would seem to be an excellent topic for future study, my chief concern here is with the sexualization of an evil

Pan specifically. Machen intensifies the tendency to focus on the sexuality and violence of Pan seen earlier in Barrett Browning and Swinburne, and exponentially expands the sheer wickedness of his deeds and the nastiness of the circumstances surrounding the god. Finally and crucially, Machen’s fictions relocate Pan from the poetic grounds of antiquity in Arcadian Greece, to his very real present in late 19th century London.

This brings us to two final intertwined themes common to these early works: first, the underlying sense of incomprehensible evil and horror coexisting with, but predating, civilized humanity; and second, Machen’s geographically locating ancient evil (here, embodied by Pan) in the modern world—namely, in London and the Welsh borders. As

Punter has noted, Machen’s works often deal with the existence of evil just below the surface of everyday life (The Literature of Terror 22). The superficiality of what human beings perceive as reality is an illusion, and occult seekers like Dr. Raymond or Dr. Black from “The Inmost Light” can lift the veil between the material and spiritual worlds. And though what lies beneath that veil is too horrifying to put into words, the locus of this evil can frequently be pinpointed on a map. In “The Great God Pan,” The Three Impostors, and “The Shining Pyramid,” civilized London is contrasted with “wild Wales,” which is seen as the home or source of Gothic horrors out of the deep past (Aaron 75). For the

Welsh-born Machen, the liminal nature of the Welsh borders—inhabited since prehistory, frequently invaded, and littered with the remains of many eras and peoples—comes naturally as a source for the fantastical.148 And yet in these works London, too, is an

148 For a more detailed exploration of Machen’s literary and personal relationship with Wales, see chapter 2 of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic.

251 enchanted place, for its size, diversity, and labyrinthine nature make it the perfect locale for chance encounters with the occult, the unknown, and the heart of darkness within modern humanity. Thus if Wales is the source of horrors and throwbacks of the deep past, London becomes their stage.

The Queer Gothic Pan

The literature of Pan, like the Gothic itself, is a genre deeply concerned with borders and the liminal. In Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, Ardel Haefele-Thomas describes the Gothic as “a liminal genre” that allowed writers “to look at social and cultural worries consistently haunting Victorian Britain” (3).149 Like the Gothic or monstrous Other, Pan is an opening to discourses on power, freedom, and sexuality— namely, freedom from societally-imposed restraint (and particularly sexual restraint). In the literature of Pan, the Gothic, the queer, and the monstrous come together in the form of the goat-footed god. Pan is a reminder of what Punter and Byron refer to as “past, half- hidden memories that remain lodged in the individual psyche” which are “inseparable from humankind’s bloody history” (146). Pan revives these ancient memories, heretofore buried in deep time. His ability to reach into the mind of the individual, overriding their will and accompanying mechanisms of psychological repression, exposes humanity’s inability to resist the goat-god’s grasp.

Destabilizing nature, history, power structures, and sexual and gender norms,

Machen’s Pan inflicts chaotic mayhem on a world hurtling towards an apocalyptic 20th century. He is the culmination of the terrifying Gothicization of Pan that began with

149 The liminal nature of Pan reflects the new paganism of the fin-de-siècle, a mystical way of understanding the world that “problematized the false divisions between humans, other animals, and nature in general” (Denisoff 443). See also Forlini’s essay “Modern Narratives and Decadent Things in Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors,” especially p. 485.

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Barrett Browning, and would later be explored by writers as diverse as Algernon

Blackwood, Saki, E. F. Benson, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence. Through Machen,

Pan truly becomes a queer being, exploding any attempts to classify or understand him in normative terms. Machen’s demonic, terrifying, and queerly disruptive Gothic Pan foreshadows the coming of a new age, when humanity’s sins against the natural world and against the instinctual, innate desires and needs of the individual, will be reckoned.

Pan’s queerness is closely connected to apocalypse in the original sense of unveiling or revealing what is hidden beneath the surface. Pan reveals to his subjects their own hidden desires (e.g. the nympholept’s uncontrollable desire for the nymphs, or the hidden truths revealed to Helen’s victims), and by doing so shakes the foundations of gender, sexuality, sanity, religion, and modernity, and questions the hegemony of western capitalist-imperialist society itself. This queerly Gothicized Pan mocks rational humanity at the same time as he threatens to overwhelm it with the ancient retribution of panic and chaos. In this literature, Pan’s touch can be deadly, and the whisper of his name can send the most rational, scientific individual into paroxysms of panic fear. At the same time he is a seductive figure, enticing and queering individuals seeking alternatives to heteronormative society. The queer Gothic Pan, particularly in its fully developed form in

Machen, functions as a locus of queer disruption, cultivating the sense of dread and apprehension that was gradually creeping into the public mindset in the years before the cataclysm of the Great War. In retrospect, this monstrous Pan seems almost a prophetic figure foreshadowing the horrors to come.

Conclusion - Queerly Weird

In the essay “Weird Fiction,” China Miéville argues that Machen’s “The Great

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God Pan” is marked by a horror of the failures of “democracy and the perceived vulgarities of modernity’s ‘disenchantment’” (513). I argue that Pan is the figurehead of this disenchantment, and a harbinger of coming crisis in the Western world. His reappearance in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries speaks to a sense of cultural and societal dis-ease that would soon culminate in world war. As Miéville argues, “the growing proximity of this total crisis—kata-culmination of modernity, ultimate rebuke to nostrums of bourgeois progress” is expressed in the monsters of nascent Weird fiction

(“M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire” 111). Though Pan is a traditional mythological figure, he shares many similarities with the creatures of Weird fiction as defined by Miéville. I see the queer Gothic Pan as a precursor to the monsters of the

Weird. Like H. P. Lovecraft’s hybrid monstrosities, Pan is god, demon, and mortal, humanoid and animal, with origins that extend into prehistory. 150 Like Cthulhu, Pan inspires inexplicable panic terror in those he encounters. 151152 Pan literature, like Weird fiction, is marked by the shattering of natural law, and the divide between inside and outside (“Weird Fiction” 510-511). Both share an “obsession with numinosity under the everyday,” and at the same time “focus…on awe and its undermining of the quotidian”

(510).153 Finally, Pan literature, like the Weird, expresses a literary moment marked by

“upheaval and crisis” (513). Miéville argues that the creatures of the Weird emerge as

150 As with the monsters of the Weird, Pan’s immeasurable age is a source of horror. Pan is a symbol or representation of “deep time,” as Aaron Worth terms it. The characteristics and imagery of the classical Pan are only superficial trappings that mask the nameless horror of this bottomless abyss of time. 151 Miéville suggests that the terror of the Weird is closely linked to the Burkean sublime: “a radicalized sublime backwash” (“Weird Fiction” 511). 152 There are, of course, some key differences between Pan and the horrors of the Weird. Pan is a figure firmly grounded in Western mythology, unlike the tentacled creatures of Weird fiction. In most depictions, he bears at least some physical resemblance to a human being or (at least) a mammal. As Miéville notes, the teratology of the Weird tends toward the alien, or least the non-mammalian (“M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire” 1). 153 In Pan literature, these numinous, awe-full qualities, are revealed through the death and life of Pan.

254 either a foreshadowing of, or a reflection back upon, the horrors of the First World War

(513-14).154 I suggest that Pan literature, too, prophetically looks ahead to the coming cataclysm. Like a dark, pagan reflection of John the Evangelist, Pan foretells a reckoning of sinners and sins: the inexplicable, a-rational terror that Pan inspires in this manner prefigures the agonies experienced on and off the battlefields of the Great War.

However, unlike John’s Book of Revelations, Pan’s message is not one of ultimate salvation, but rather of apocalypse. This Pan is a harbinger of the gathering storm of world war and the end of a Western hegemony and way of life that have become unsustainable. The queer Gothic Pan reflects a dark vision of the future and of a chaotic past that has returned to wreak havoc upon the material world. Queer, Gothic, and proto-

Weird, Pan embodies the fears and desires of transformational times. He is a transitional figure that speaks to the past and the future, and as a cultural phenomenon paved the way for the next breed of Weird and transformational fictional monsters that still stalk our bookshelves and video screens today.

154 As Miéville puts it, “the war of 1914-18 is the black box, the heart of the Weird” (513).

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Coda: “Come careering out of the night / Of Pan”: Aleister Crowley and the

Quickening of Art and Myth

Reifying Pan

In the previous chapter I dealt with literary depictions of the terrifying Pan in the latter half of the Victorian era, and attempted to show how the darker strands of the ancient stories and myths of the god came to be reinterpreted in the long 19th century.

However, this period’s engagement with the terrifying incarnations of the god Pan is not limited to literary and visual artistic production. Nor do all who invoke the dark Pan strictly gesture toward an epochal sense of telos, or the end of an age. As a coda to my study of the queer god Pan, I will consider a fascinating example of the reification of artistic and cultural production, which will show how the dark Pan was reborn in the early 20th century, thus completing and renewing the god’s life cycle. Through the vehicle of the late Victorian and Edwardian magic revival, the queer Gothic Pan made the transition from art to life. A newly animated, occult Pan was to be born into the realm of body and spirit, slouching its way towards Bethlehem, from a man popularly known as

“The Great Beast”: Aleister Crowley.

Today, the name of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) conjures vague images of and Devil worship, with a whiff of sexual perversion thrown in for good measure.

This is in no small part due to the stream of sensational articles and books155 about him that appeared both during Crowley’s lifetime and particularly in the years after his death, and indeed continue to appear to this day. This public image, like those of many other famous figures, is both exaggerated and oversimplified (though in some regards not by

155 John Symonds’s sensational biography The Great Beast (1952) was particularly influential in shaping Crowley’s legacy as a hedonistic, diabolical figure (Newman vii).

256 very much, as we shall see). Crowley was born in 1875 in Leamington ,

Warwickshire, “to parents who were Plymouth Brothers, a fundamentalist Christian who accepted the literal truth of the Bible” (Newman 3). Thanks to profits from the sale of a successful brewing company and investment in railroads (Kaczynski, Perdurabo n. pag.) the Crowleys were fairly well off, and after his father’s death in 1887, “Aleister”

(born Edward Alexander) inherited the family fortune (Newman 3). As a young man in the 1890s, Crowley attended Trinity College, Cambridge, but left before completing his degree in order to pursue spiritual and magical interests. By the turn of the century,

Crowley had become deeply involved with some of the era’s most notable occult groups, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley spent the next decades living a bohemian lifestyle, spending time in Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, the United States, and other more exotic locales (Breeze x). He travelled, wrote stories, novels, poems, literary criticism, and occult tracts, climbed mountains, played chess at “competition- level,” experimented with magic and mysticism, and explored occult, spiritual, and sexual possibilities (ix-x). His notoriety (or more accurately, notoriousness) as “The

Great Beast” would come later in life, when Crowley had become established and well- known enough to be a lightning rod for sensational and/or moralistic journalism. The focus of this section will be on a period before the peak of Crowley’s notoriety, when he was still a young man exploring the occult, and when such things were rather popular among bourgeois circles in Western Europe and the United States. During this period of exploration, Crowley would for a time look to Pan as a possible liberator and savior, and as a magical catalyst for transformative change.

In this coda to my dissertation, I will examine Pan’s significance to Crowley as an

257 animate spiritual force. To do this we must look to Crowley’s ritualized and magical engagement with a queerly sexualized Pan, which culminates in two significant occurrences at the end of the first decade of the 20th century: first, Crowley and the poet

Victor Neuburg’s sexual sacrifices to Pan during their mysterious adventures in the

Algerian desert in 1909; and second, the performance and subsequent publication of

Crowley’s -drama The Rites of in London in 1910, which prominently features Pan in the last of the seven rites, the “Rite of Luna.” These two events highlight the dark Pan’s transition from fictionalized Gothic horror and harbinger of apocalypse, to living entity, and herald of a new , while simultaneously underscoring the influence of literary depictions of the ancient god (like that of Swinburne or Machen) on this reanimated figure.

Before I do this, it is worth taking a moment to specify what this concluding essay is not. It is not my intention to provide an in-depth overview of Aleister Crowley’s esoteric philosophy, or of his use and understanding of .156 Nor do I aim to review all of his writings featuring Pan (and there are quite a few). Henrik Bogdan and Martin P.

Starr’s Aleister Crowley and features a fine collection of essays extensively dealing with Crowley’s esoteric thinking and his influence on later occult movements. Other books like ’s excellent biography Perdurabo and

Paul Newman’s Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan provide discussions of Crowley’s body of work and the thematic threads that bind them. Rather, my intention with this coda is to focus specifically on the significance of Pan to Crowley during this relatively early and formative stage of his esoteric and philosophical thinking. What queer and

156 Crowley adopted the term “magick” to differentiate his work from the tricks and illusions of stage “magic” (Kaczynski 561).

258 queering spiritual and sexual possibilities does Pan offer to Crowley, and how is his understanding of Pan connected to the literary depictions of the queer Gothic Pan discussed in the previous chapter? These are the key questions that I will seek to answer in this conclusion.

Aleister Crowley, variously remembered as occult sage, , and writer; decadent, hedonistic fraud, and “The Wickedest Man in the World” (Newman 3), during the early 1900s sought to breach the walls between the realms of art, the physical, and the spiritual, through invocation of the god Pan. For a time, Pan became a central figure in

Crowley’s mystical philosophy. Revering Pan as “the diabolic god of lust and magic,”

(Owen, Place of Enchantment 198) and ally of humanity, in his literary and spiritual works Crowley depicts the god as the one who “tears aside the veil” in order to reveal the anti-Christ “Child of ” to humankind (Newman 16). A dark, mystical prophet and herald, Crowley’s Pan paves the way for personal revelation and magical empowerment.

Crowley takes the reinterpreted and darkly reimagined Pan of the literature of fin-de- siècle and makes him integral to an occult philosophy and way of life that encompasses mind, body, soul, and aesthetic experience. This movement reifies the artistic experience of Pan: the god becomes real, and takes tangible shape in a way that disrupts and disorients adherents of traditional Judeo-Christian religions, occult seekers, and neopagans alike. This quickened Pan parallels the purely literary adaptations experienced by readers familiar with popular Pan literature by Swinburne, Machen, Benson, et al.

Unlike the clearly fictional imaginings of these authors, for Crowley and other like- minded esoteric seekers, Pan is a queer, living force, more powerful, disorienting, terrifying, and liberating than the Pan of fiction. Through Crowley’s mystical, religio-

259 philosophical writings, rituals, and organizations (and those of similar groups that appeared later, like ’s Fraternity of the Inner Light), the queer Gothic Pan makes the leap from art to life, fulfilling aesthetic challenges confronted by previous writers and thinkers of the 19th century (like Pater, Wilde, and Ruskin) who explored, conversely, the experience of life as art. Crowley, Fortune, and others reverse this process, and reinterpret the aesthetic experience of a queered, Gothic Pan into a way of life, thought, and belief that many in the mainstream of English society found threatening and unsettling.

Machen’s intensely disorienting fictional expression of the queer Gothic Pan is a useful point of reference for understanding the occult groups and ceremonies that give a prominent place to the goat-footed god. In Machen’s work, Pan is not only “a metaphor for the spiritual reality that exists beyond our senses,” but is also “a real, concrete entity as well” (Pasi 71). Crowley, his disciple Victor Neuburg, and others bring this conception of the god out of the pages of fiction and into reality. Their esoteric understanding of Pan essentially projects a Machen-esque figure, that can be invoked and interacted with, onto the material world. To them, Pan is not just a metaphor or symbol of nature or liberation from sexual or societal norms, as he is to many writers and artists of the period; rather,

Pan is a real entity who can be called upon by initiates into his secrets (69). Crowley,

Neuburg, and Fortune accept both the horror and potentially liberating powers of Pan as real, and believe that, armed with the necessary esoteric knowledge, one can potentially experience the god firsthand, much as Dr. Raymond attempts to do in Machen’s fictional work. This is a fascinating instance of Oscar Wilde’s famous adage that “Life imitates

Art” (Wilde 350). The living vitality of Pan is realized via the mirroring of artistic

260 creation. The fictional Pan becomes reality; like a scene from a Gothic novel, the painted image steps out of the picture frame and into the world.

These occult seekers believe that it is possible (as Machen puts it) to break “open the door of the house of life” (“The Great God Pan” 50) and concretely interact with forces beyond the material world. However, unlike in Machen’s fiction, where there is no way to initiate successful (and safe) contact with such immensely powerful, chaotic forces outside the walls of our immediate reality (Pasi 76),157 Crowley and his occult brethren believe that successful of the god could be achieved. The aim of these occult explorations is the ultimate goal of esoteric study: “spiritual emancipation from a previous condition of inferiority” (79). Such mysticism seeks to re-enchant a world that is increasingly seen as growing disenchanted by the slow but steady decline in religious belief.

As Wilson argues in God’s Funeral, by the latter half of the 19th century social cohesion was breaking up due to the rise in unbelief (“doubt” was “the Victorian disease,” as he pithily puts it [8]). Science and philosophy did not cause these changes, but rather “ratified” them (12). The occult offered a path to re-enchantment “in the face of an all-powerful capitalistic materialism and the decline of organized religion”

(Newman 5). Unlike many religious authorities, Crowley and other occult practitioners do not see themselves in a struggle against science. Rather, they embrace science as a way of explaining how this —the material world—functions (6). For Crowley, the problem with what we might call “straight” or orthodox science, as well as with traditional religious practices, is that both “had failed to answer their own questions

157 Pasi terms Machen’s pessimistic point of view regarding such interactions as a kind of “negative epistemology” unusual to esoteric studies of the time (76).

261 because of their inherent methodological limitations” (Bogdan and Starr 4). Straight science on its own could only go so far, straitjacketed as it was to the physical world; likewise, traditional Judeo-Christian religions had become ossified around religious practices that Crowley and others deemed outdated, inflexible, and overly concerned with a stifling sense of morality. Crowley’s understanding of a unifying magic could, and did, incorporate science and scientific structures, alongside religious and even anthropological approaches,158 into its hybridized understanding of the world. However this is a queered, magical, occult science fascinated with the paranormal and with making contact with other planes of existence. Therefore, a hybridized, queered science that embraces not only scientific fact, but also mystical knowledge, was seen by occultists like Crowley as the pathway to solving mysteries that positivist science and traditional religion could not address on their own. Magic builds upon this queered science of the occult, and seeks to understand how the laws of the universe “interact with human ” (Newman

24). By applying “the rigors of the scientific method to a decidedly non-scientific approach,” Crowley aims to bring structure and method to occult practices159 (Kaczynski,

Perdurabo 560). As Fuller explains, “the occultist or mage is not a man who believes natural law can be upset; he says there are natural laws not suspected by our present science and that they can be brought into operation” (130). Magic (or more accurately in

Crowleyian terms, Magick) becomes the key to harnessing the mystical, but scientifically or pseudo-scientifically understandable, forces that surround us, unseen and unfelt.

158 Crowley’s biographer, Richard Kaczynski, discusses a number of 18th and 19th century anthropological works that heavily influenced Crowley’s understanding of religion and magic, including the ’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786), the many orientalist works of Sir Richard Francis Burton, (“Continuing Knowledge” 152-153) and James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), which directly inspired Crowley’s short story collection Golden Twigs (Perdurabo 447). 159 Bogdan and Starr note that “Crowley chose as the motto of his occult journal, , ‘The Method of Science; the Aim of Religion.’ Magic was the third way.” (4).

262

Crowley and his occult contemporaries look to magic as a road to greater understanding of the world and the self, and see Pan as a guide to achieving this end.

For occult practitioners like Crowley, neopagans like Swinburne, and even for those expressing a more general disenchantmant with the modern world (like E. M.

Forster, for example) Pan functions as a vital, orgiastic, and subversive counterweight to the slow death of traditional Christianity as it is outlined by Wilson in his seminal work.

Neopaganism and the occult promise to reassert the mystery and mysticism of life and belief; Crowley and his acolytes, for their part, look to Pan as a key to this spiritual illumination and rebirth. Despite the horrifying dangers that Pan is believed to pose, direct engagement with the occult vision of the god promises enlightenment and revelation to the committed and knowing devotee. And, in fact, this is precisely what

Crowley attempts to do during his adventures in . Like Machen’s Dr.

Raymond, Crowley intends to lift the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds—to physically touch Pan, and lose himself and his own physical limitations in the process.

Queer Sacrifice and the Death of Binaries: Crowley and Neuburg in the

Desert

Crowley’s most dramatic invocation of Pan occurs while traveling through

Algeria in 1909 with his friend and disciple, the poet Victor Neuburg. Something monumentally queer—in all senses of the word—transpired in the heat of the North

African desert, though the facts of what precisely happened are rather difficult to pick out from the exaggerations and legends that often swirl around anything to do with Crowley.

Alex Owen has admirably managed to pull together a narrative of the episode in Chapter

Six of The Place of Enchantment. According to Owen, Crowley, with Neuburg as his

263 chela, or novitiate, in the magical Order of the Silver Star, traveled “into the North

African Desert to the southwest of Algiers” in order “to perform there a series of magical ceremonies that prefigured his elaboration of the techniques of ….the ceremonies combined the performance of advanced ritual magic with homosexual acts”

(186). As chela to the man he referred to as his “holy guru,” Neuburg was most certainly subordinate to Crowley and his many whims; indeed, reports of Neuburg describe him as

“dreamy and mystical by nature, and in awe of a man [Crowley] whom he both loved and admired” (186). Their relationship, which was at times sexual, had begun several years earlier at Cambridge.

Neuburg was a young poet studying at Cambridge when he met Crowley in 1906 through the introduction of a mutual friend (Kaczynski, Perdurabo 165). Kaczynski describes Neuburg as particularly receptive to a man like Crowley: he was a “young mystic who believed in reincarnation, vegetarianism, and the existence of a greater reality. Thinking Judeo-Christian religions a sham and finding spiritualism unsatisfying, he was searching for a genuine master” (165). Mutually impressed with each other,

Neuburg invited Crowley to speak at Cambridge before his poetry club, which Neuburg had dubbed, intriguingly, The Pan Society160 (166). Despite the disapproval of some of the more religious elements at Cambridge, over the next couple of years Crowley returned many times to the Pan Society “to present poems and papers” (Newman 36) and to “discuss magic, and recruit students into his fold” (Kaczynski, Perdurabo 166).

Neuburg, too, began to study magic, and “jumped at the offer of being accepted as

[Crowley’s] pupil” (Fuller 145). Not long after, Neuburg was apprenticed in Crowley’s

160 Owen comments that Pan also held “particular significance” for Neuburg: “Neuburg literally had what acquaintances described as an elfin and ‘faun-like’ appearance” (Owen, Place of Enchantment 198).

264 new magical order, and went so far as to take a vow of obedience to Crowley (Owen,

Place of Enchantment 186). By 1909, Neuburg and Crowley had become very close,161 and thus it was that Crowley chose to take Neuburg along on his magical explorations in

North Africa.

Initially, it seems that Crowley had hoped to travel to North Africa to escape the headaches of approaching divorce proceedings from his estranged alcoholic wife, Rose:

Crowley “loved that region and simply wanted to roam at will” (195). And yet as with anything that Crowley did, there was a touch of the carnivalesque to the proceedings.

Crowley, Koran in hand, was turbaned and dressed in a robe, while “Neuburg’s head was shaved except for two tufts of hair that he twisted into horns. Thus Crowley led his familiar djinn about on a chain, to the amazement of the locals” (Kaczynski, Perdurabo

196). At some point during their journey, though it is unclear when precisely, Crowley determined to undergo what might be termed “a vision quest” (Brown 6) in the desert, performing magical ceremonies influenced by Crowley’s study of the Cabbalistic magic practiced by Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer, the English Renaissance mathematician and mystic John Dee (Owen, Place of Enchantment 196). Dee and his “scryer,” or clairvoyant, Edward Kelley, believed that they could communicate directly with angels via a series of magical instructions known as “Calls” (196). Dee would perform the complex magical-mathematical instructions and the angels would clairvoyantly speak through Kelley. The purpose of these experiments was to try to prise from the angels “the secrets of the universe” (196). It was with similar intentions that Crowley and Neuburg attempted to “Call” out to the angels and demons of the spirit world. As Neuburg later

161 According to both Owen and Fuller, Crowley and Neuburg’s relationship had likely become sexual prior to their trip together to North Africa (“Sorcerer and his Apprentice” 22) and (Fuller 150-151).

265 admitted, “‘We went out into the desert and called them. We didn’t know what would happen….We made up our own rituals and thought out everything we would do.’” (qtd. in Fuller 87-88). The pair were embarking on “a psychic adventure of unknown consequence” (Fuller 173), the results of which would prove interesting to say the least.

After reaching Algiers, Crowley and Neuburg traveled to Bou Saada, a remote town in the hinterland, and then deeper into the desert to a mountain known as Da’leh

Addin (198). While in the desert, Crowley and Neuburg engaged in a number of bizarre,

John Dee-inspired occult rituals and experiments, including the summing of an Aethyr, or demon. Crowley, eager to continue his experiments with Dee’s Calls, instructed Neuburg to act as a scribe and assistant in these rituals (Fuller 173). Seated in a protective magical circle, Neuburg watched Crowley summon a powerful Aethyr known as , who allegedly temporarily possessed Crowley’s body. Neuburg was reputedly left to fight off

Choronzon/Crowley with a magic dagger at the height of the ritual. For the purposes of this discussion, one of their ceremonies, or experiments, in particular is central to our understanding of Crowley’s fascination with Pan as a magical enabler. According to various sources, including Fuller, who interviewed Neuburg some years after these events, while descending Mount Dal’leh Addin on December 3, 1909, “Crowley was seized by a compulsion, or as [Crowley] puts it, [he] ‘heard a command,’” (Fuller 174) presumably from the god Pan himself. Crowley and Neuburg stopped and constructed “a rough stone altar dedicated to Pan,” and consecrated it as a temple by inscribing “words of power in the sand” before it (Kaczynski, Perdurabo 197). Worship could not be complete without a living sacrifice, however; and yet rather than sacrifice live animals, as they had in done in some previous ceremonies, Crowley and Neuburg sacrifice their own

266 to Pan (197) by way of “a magical homosexual act” (Owen, Place of Enchantment

198). Placing themselves on the altar, Neuburg and Crowley engage in anal sex, with

Neuburg “taking the active role. They dedicated it to Pan” (Fuller 174). Neuburg, who with his hair tufted into horns already resembled a demonic Pan, became “‘inflamed’ by the power of the god….momentarily identify[ing] with all that the man-goat god represented” (Owen, Place of Enchantment 198). They believed that this sacrificial (and terrifying162) act of queer magical sex would allow Neuburg, in essence, to become Pan, and for Crowley to “cross the Abyss”—a term “denoting the last terrible journey that a magician must make before he could justifiably lay claim to the highest levels of

Adeptship” (198-99). This queer sexual act performed for and with Pan, via the medium of Neuburg, left Crowley “in a drunken state of spiritual ecstasy” (Kaczynski, Perdurabo

197), and revealed to him a world of new possibilities. Not only did he more simply come to accept his own queer sexuality, Crowley also “realized for the first time what power could be wielded by using sex in ritual” (197). For Crowley, queer sex—enabled by a wild and terrifying Pan—could disorient the subject from her or his previous state, and reorient them toward a state of higher spiritual and magical capability.

As in the literature of Pan, the god is a mask of some deeper, primeval power that only the adept can unlock—be it Crowley, Machen’s Dr. Raymond, or even Swinburne’s susceptible nympholept. In order to touch this aspect of the god, who stands in for the infinite, the finite self must in some way be annihilated. The participant must lose him or herself in Pan—as Crowley convinces Neuburg to do, as Dr. Raymond coerces his ward,

Mary, or as the nymphs compel the nympholept. With this ritualized act of taboo queer

162 Indeed, Neuburg was haunted by the experience for the rest of his life (Owen, Place of Enchantment 199).

267 sex set in a magical context, Crowley and Neuburg transcend the limitations of their egos163 by obliterating them. They thereby cross into unknown magical frontiers, and pave the way for further magical experiments and summoning of other Aethyrs. By eliminating the “I,” and embracing the limitless “all” of Pan, Crowley seeks to liberate the individual from the limitations of binaries like male/female, living/dead, hetero-

/homosexual, and especially conscious/unconscious (Owen, Place of Enchantment 211-

212). The individual would become part of a larger collective existence—a pan-all, you might say. In fact, in the 1920s Crowley and his followers at the in

Sicily tried unsuccessfully to follow up on this revelation by attempting “the systematic destruction of the ego, which [Crowley] regarded as a barrier to magical progress”

(Owen, “Sorcerer and his Apprentice” 36).

While one might endlessly debate the tangible achievements of Crowley’s fantastical projects, his core ideas and goals are nonetheless fascinating: “Crowley was attempting to find a shortcut to one of the highest goals of occultism,” which Owen describes as “a return to a lost Eden of wholeness and completion” (Owen, Place of

Enchantment 212). For brief time, it seemed for Crowley that Pan could lead the way to this wholeness. The occult seeker who could locate Pan might then achieve the demolition of binaries that queer theory has, in our own times, sought to explore. The parallel between modern queer theory and Crowley’s magical experiment is not one I draw a lightly—Crowley and his occult brethren were in many senses queer individuals

163 Crowley, like many thinkers of the time, read and was influenced by Freud, and adopted some psychoanalytic terminology (such as “ego”) in his writings. However, according to Owen, Crowley’s usage of the term “ego,” for example, has more in common with Freud’s “I” (das ich) (Place of Enchantment 209). For a more detailed discussion of the overlap between Freudian and Crowley’s magick, see Owen, The Place of Enchantment pp. 208-209. For simplicity’s sake, my use of psychoanalytic terminology like “ego” will remain Freudian.

268 existing, at best, on the fringes of respectable society, keeping a tenuous toehold within its boundaries as they stretched out into the unknown. Crowley, like today’s queer theorists, aspires to demolish the very existence of these boundaries. For Crowley their destruction would set the stage for a queer new androgynous164 age, which they believed would be ushered in by none other than the great god Pan.

Tearing Aside the Veil: Crowley’s

Crowley’s fascination with Pan culminates with the prominent role given to the god in his occult ceremonial drama The Rites of Eleusis, which he staged in London during the autumn of 1910. The Rites is an example of Crowley’s attempt to merge drama with religious (albeit occult) ritual, which would serve both as a means of artistic expression, as well as a way of publicly transmitting his occult philosophy and beliefs

(Van Kleeck 194). The staged drama is Crowley’s first attempt “to transfer the private rituals of secret societies to the semi-public sphere of subscription performances in halls and rented rooms” (Brown 25).

The title of Crowley’s Rites is clearly a reference to the of ancient Greece. Though Crowley’s rituals themselves have little to do with the ancient

Greek Rites, which deal with the myths surrounding Dionysos, , and Demeter, there are some general connections between the ancient and modern rites (Van Kleeck

200). Crowley occasionally makes reference to Persephone or related Orphean mythology in his Rites (Brown 10), but more centrally, both ancient and modern rites are rituals of and spiritual instruction, answering a “riddle” of life via revelation

(Van Kleeck 200).

164 For a fuller discussion of Crowley’s interest in gender and , see Owen, The Place of Enchantment pp. 213-217.

269

The performance of the modern Rites in London in October and November of

1910 featured bizarre occult rituals performed in Orientalized robed costumes, ethereal violin solos by Crowley’s Anglo-Maori lover, , Neuburg’s anarchic dancing (which supposedly occurred while under the possession of various spiritual entities), the recitation of poetry (Crowley’s and also, notably, several of Swinburne’s works165), chanting, and heavy with magical symbolism.166 The point of these “occult entertainments” was “to induce in an audience altered mind states through an esthetic assault on the senses” (Brown 25-26), and ultimately to produce a “liberated ecstasy” (Van Kleeck 194) of religious feeling in the audience in order to make them converts to Crowley’s brand of the occult (Brown 12). As Brown comments, Crowley

“saw himself as the prophet of a new religion—Crowleyanity—and the Rites were to be his first great evangelization” (5). The prominent role given to extended recitation of poetry in this religious ceremony, particularly that of Crowley and Swinburne, reflects back on Crowley’s use of art and myth as an inspiration for life; here, poetry becomes a vehicle for .

Pan’s role in Crowley’s first mass entertainment/conversion experience is central, despite the fact that Pan does not physically appear onstage until the seventh and final rite, “The Rite of Luna.” Newman provides a succinct plot summary of the whole

165 The performance of the Rites featured excerpts from several of Swinburne’s works, including “Ilicet,” “The Garden of Proserpine,” “Hertha,” and “Atalanta in Calydon.” Also intermixed with the drama were Paul Verlaine’s “Colloque Sentimental” and Psalm 91 from the Bible (Kaczynski, “Continuing Knowledge” 147). 166 Crowley’s “Rite of ,” performed earlier in London during August 1910 by the same group of people (including Waddell and Neuburg), is considered the precursor to the seven Rites of Eleusis, which were written to follow-up on the successful performance of “Artemis” (Kaczynski 220). This earlier Rite also included general use of opiates by both performers and audience members (a shared a “Cup of ” was passed around by Neuburg. The drink was spiked with alcohol, mescal, morphine, and heroin [Brown 8]). It is unclear from sources whether or not such drugs were in use during the later performance of the full Rites.

270 dramatic ritual:

[The Rites of Eleusis] featured Man, trying to solve the riddle of the

universe, asking questions of the old gods, , Jupiter, , ,

Mercury and Luna, all of whom are found wanting. Finally the Virgin

Moon takes the floor, but she is barren of hope, till the Great God Pan

springs into action and tears aside the veil revealing the hope of humanity

in the Crowned and Conquering Child of Horus. (16)

Each of the seven rites work in slightly different ways “to dramatize the single idea that the gods are dead, and therefore every person should do whatever pleases” him or her (Brown 10). This is a manifestation of Crowley’s famed adage, “do what thou wilt is the whole of the law”—a philosophical stance that Crowley’s detractors narrowly define as hedonism, but more accurately is an assertion of self-liberation from restraint, be it societal, sexual, religious, or otherwise. This self-liberation is balanced by a “respect of others as equally independent and free beings” (Van Kleeck 196). Essentially, Crowley aimed to forge religion from out the mines of individuality (Kaczynski, Perdurabo 562).

From a broader cultural standpoint, his rejection of the normative and his assertion of individual freedom aligns Crowley with both the liberatory Pan of contemporary

Victorian and Edwardian fiction, and incidentally with modern queer theory, which seeks to break down traditional categorization while simultaneously asserting expression of one’s true self, liberated from repressive social restraint.

It is interesting to note that, paradoxically, in the Rites Pan is excluded from the death of the old gods, whose era has ended and powers have waned. Clearly Crowley sees a further role for Pan to play in the spiritual history of humankind, despite the

271 echoing calls announcing the god’s death that had been repeated over the centuries since

Plutarch’s famous account of the 1st century AD. In Crowley’s drama, each of the old gods from Saturn to Luna in turn confesses “their inability to provide the solution” to the riddle of the universe, and all ultimately look to Pan for the answer (Fuller 187). It is Pan who, like a pagan John the Baptist, reveals this answer by unveiling the child-savior

Horus (who himself represents the godless, Nietzschean167 human of the future [Brown

10]). For Crowley, Pan is therefore the agent and prophet of a brave new world in which the “Law”—a term Crowley uses to refer to his religious doctrines, which encompasses one’s morals, beliefs, life philosophy, etc.—is completely subjectivized within the individual. And yet Pan’s role in the Rites is not merely cerebral, but also intensely bodily. The physical, sexualized nature of the Rites—the wild dancing and music, the sensuality of the performed actions,168 the Orientalized dress of the performers—all serve to direct the focus of the ritual toward “the exaltation of anarchic lust, personified in the god Pan” (10). It is Pan who necessarily must tear down the veil hiding Horus, symbolically removing the restrictions “of the old law to show forth the naked, available youthful energy of the new law” (Van Kleeck 200). Pan empowers and fertilizes a previously barren humankind, “bridging the gap” between the gods and “the earthly participants in the Rite,” and unifying the mortal and divine in the human (200-201). Pan thus becomes the locus of a physical and spiritual reorientation and transformation of humankind, by way of a queer, convention-defying performance. The god comes to embody the living, lusting, driving force behind Crowley’s aim to publicize the occult

167 Crowley read and admired Nietzsche (Owen, Place of Enchantment 199). Echoes of Nietzschean ideas can be found throughout Crowley’s writings. 168 Some reviews of the performances “suggested that sexual activities were taking place in the darkness” of the theater among performers and possibly even audience members (Brown 22).

272 and esoteric learning (196), which Crowley saw as the first step in the ultimate renewal of a spiritually decayed and decadent world.

Conclusion - The Queer God Pan Lives

Crowley’s magical experiments and theatrics involving Pan show that the influence of the mystical god was not limited to the world of art. It shows that literary and artistic depictions of the mythical figure could, and did, reverberate and come to life in different fields and circles, further illustrating that the intangible, queerly attractive mystique surrounding the god held particular resonance for England during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However briefly, for Crowley and other occult seekers, Pan lived on as a potential creative and liberating force within and without the individual. The potential terror one might experience under the reified Pan’s possession (as Neuburg could likely attest to) was, as Crowley believed, simply the cost one must pay to be reborn into a more powerful, liberated state of being. As a figure with queer and queering resonance, Pan explosively and dramatically shows how one might break down the restrictive barriers that the modern world has erected to wall us in to ever smaller spaces.

Whether fictional representation or reified deity of a new magical order, Pan proved to be an enduring and seductive figure who captured the imagination of generations of authors, artists, thinkers, audiences, and non-conformists of all stripes.

We have thus journeyed through the life cycle of Pan, from birth and childhood, maturity, death, and finally rebirth. If we take one thing away from this journey, it should be that Pan, mystical god of Arcadia, will live on among those open to his sometimes frightening, sometimes benevolent, and always reorienting, life-changing influences.

273

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