The Queer God Pan and His Children: a Myth Reborn 1860-1917
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The Queer God Pan and His Children: A Myth 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 English Language and Culture, August 2006, University of Amsterdam A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences 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 ii © Copyright 2016 by Mark C. De Cicco All rights reserved iii Dedication The author wishes to dedicate this work, with love, to Sarah, Charlie, Bianca, and Judith. iv Abstract of Dissertation The Queer God Pan and His Children: A Myth Reborn 1860-1917 This dissertation traces a literary and cultural history 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 ancient Greek and Roman literature 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 England;” and the queer Gothic Pan, an apocalyptic god associated with death and the Christian Devil. The coda deals with Pan’s rebirth in the Edwardian magic revival movement. I examine works in a variety of genres, from poetry to children’s literature to Gothic horror. Authors studied include Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Saki, Arthur Machen, Robert Louis Stevenson, 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. v Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... iv Abstract of Dissertation.................................................................................................. v Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Queer Children of Pan: An Edwardian Fantasy ..................................... 30 Chapter 2: Pan’s Queer England: Deep England, National Identity, and Hybridity in Kipling’s Puck Books .............................................................................................. 105 Chapter 3: The Queer God Pan: Terror and Apocalypse, Reimagined ......................... 189 Coda: “‘Come careering out of the night / Of Pan:’ Aleister Crowley and the Quickening of Art and Myth” ...................................................................................... 256 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 274 vi 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 novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward; poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London commons, and literary ladies in Surrey and New England, nymphs of an industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity 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, music, and dance, 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 time? 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 human desire to break free from societally restricted boundaries. And though Pan may at times be monstrous and terrible, he is also monstrously attractive. These attributes connect Pan to boundary–bending beings of fiction like vampires, zombies, and werewolves 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 vampire or werewolf, 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 Greece. As a kind of monster dancing along the borders of human and animal, god and mortal, man and boy, Pan is what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls a cultural body, born at a “metaphoric crossroads” 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 Great God Pan: 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 zombie, 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 goat- god is a kind of monstrous, queer double looking back out of the mirror—a raging Caliban, and a Foucauldian “other Victorian” who, like Peter Pan, 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