The Divided Self: William Hope Hodgson on the Borderland

Published in 1908, The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson is as incoherent a book as we could imagine. It comes apart thematically, formally and generically. Is this a love story, an adventure story, a horror story, a supernatural story, an eschatological story, a science fiction story? Are we to take it seriously or parodically? Does the book deal with psychology or history or both? Does it indeed have a "cogent, coherent scheme of ideas" as the narrator says it does, or is it merely the ravings of a lunatic mind? The nearly non-existent critical history of the book might suggest its intractibility. This book is well-nigh impenetrable; trying to interpret it is like trying to see through mist. It speaks with a "glutinous and sticky" voice, despite its eagerness to sound rational and definite.

To find a hinge for this literary portal, I take my cue from Hodgson and choose the idea of a borderland. We can articulate the border in several ways: literary and historical, geographical and national, spiritual and theological, emotional and psychological. I'll take each of these in turn and hope that an exploration sheds some light on this murky book.

First the literary and historical. Hodgson takes the general shape of his book from a number of narratives that pretend to be found documents presented to the public by a rational and scholarly editor: examples of such texts are Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Poe's A Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1837-38), James DeMille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1874). Such narratives are the legacy, perhaps, of literary hoaxes of the like perpetrated by writers such as James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in the eighteenth century. By 1908 no one could take this literary device (the hoax) as anything more than a convention, but as a convention it sets up a contrast between a rational, even scientifically-minded editor and a story that concerns the irrational and bizarre. Both the editor-narrator of the frame and the narrator of the manuscript are scientificaly-minded men. In the case of the editor, this scientific focus is evident from many of the footnotes in the second half of the book. The rationale for this emphasis on science is twofold: 1) to lend the incredible events of the story credibility, and 2) to provide a comment on the inability of science to explain all phenomena. Some things remain in the realm of the mysterious and inexplicable. Stranger things exist in the universe than philosophy can account for.

This second point deserves some historical context. The House on the Borderland comes at the border of two centuries (or nearly so), published as it is in 1908. The turn of the century saw many books that speculated on time and possibility. For example, fairies were in the air, perhaps not literally but certainly figuratively, as the final chapter of Borderland indicates with its reference to the great house having been "given over to the fairies" (137). The literature at the turn of the century that presented a case for the reality of fairies is extensive, and it culminates in the so-called Cottingley fairy photographs which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle championed as real (see Silver). Science also raised the possibility of dimensions beyond the four that we accept as our reality. Writers such as George MacDonald and H. G. Wells speculated upon the possibility of multiple dimensions opening passages to an infinite array of realities or worlds. Such interest in possible worlds sometimes took an apocalyptic or even eschatological expression. Such is the case with MacDonald's Lilith (1895) which offers a vision of the new heaven and new earth, and with Wells's The Time Machine (1895) which takes its protagonist to the end of earth's history. The War of the Worlds (1898) is another of Wells's texts with an end-to-the-world theme. The House on the Borderland partakes of this end of time sensibility. The anxiety manifested in an end of time narrative just might have an explanation more local and disturbing than the quasi-theological fin de siècle theme we might first find in these books. In other words, what looks like apocalyptic fear might be something more sinister, at least in the case of Borderland.

What this more sinister fear might be leads me to geographical and national borders. Hodgson is the son of an English clergyman. This is about the extent of my knowledge of his biography. But this tidbit of information is enough for me to begin an investigation of the book's setting. The action takes place in Ireland, or more specifically in an isolated location in the west of Ireland. An Englishman writing about Ireland: we might approach such writing carefully. The most obvious function of the setting is for Hodgson to locate the action of the narrative in a place redolent of mystery and fear. He draws upon aspects of the sublime in his evocation both of an isolated, unmapped spot and in his descriptions of the house and the Pit and the cosmic flights. The sublime denotes the vast and unsettling; it is awesome in its scale and implications. It suggests unknown forces and immeasurable spaces. Relative to the sublime, humans are small and ineffectual. To face the sublime is to face that which transcends normal materiality; it is to bring the human into the domain of the supernatural. The face of God or of the Devil shines from the sublime. Hodgson's design is to flag the sublime in order to keep the reader's focus on otherworldly things. We might, however, see this as a feint.

If we return to Ireland and the Irish, we might view the action of the novel in a different--even darker light. England and Ireland have a long history of anatagonism. We don't know who "Messrs Tonnison and Berreggnog" are, but we know something of what they (or at least Tonnison, who has an English name) think of the Irish. Tonnison is adamant that he and his companion not take lodging with the local people because "there was no joke in sleeping in a room with a numerous family of healthy Irish in one corner, and the pig-sty in the other, while overhead a ragged colony of roosting fowls distributed their blessings impartially, and the whole place so full of peat smoke that it made a fellow sneeze his head off just to put it inside the doorway" (14). This is slight evidence, but perhaps enough for us to continue investigating the book's anxieties. What I'm driving at is simple: zenophobia. The Irish are the other, even in Ireland if we take the English perspective. To the English, the Irish are the brutes and barbarians and primitives. If we accept this, then we do not have to make much of a leap into the book's main narrative where a nameless recluse suffers from the relentless attacks of brutish swine-creatures who are discernably human and yet grotesquely cannibalistic and animalistic. They have a language, but a language that is close to gibberish. They communicate as a group, but their group loyalty seems to depend soley on self-interest. They are hideous creatures of pure desire and appetite, Wells's Morlocks without the Morlocks' industrial abilities. What I am saying is this: The House on the Borderland expresses Hodgson's deep zenophobic anxieties. This is a book about the fear of otherness. The Swine creatures reflect Hodgson's own fear of the foreign. What makes this at all palatable is the implication that the fear of the foreign includes a fear of the self. We are strangers to ourselves, just as the narrator is a stranger to himself and to his sister. The fear of the self as different from other selves haunts this book. Or perhaps more accturately I ought to say that the fear of the schizophrenic self haunts this book. But before I take up psychic themes, let me pursue otherness.

If the book is about the fear of otherness, it is also about the threat of otherness. When otherness becomes a threat, we usually perceive the other as evil. Once the word "evil" pops up, we are in the realm of my third category, the spiritual and theological. So if the other is evil and the self is good, we have a pretty clear indication that the narrative fits cliche: it is about the battle between good and evil. The question is: how does the narrative define good and how does it define evil? Obviously, the good guys are the brother and sister and also the ethereal woman/lover who appears to the narrator at least twice in his out of body experiences; they are good because they live quiet and unassuming lives, and because they rather vaguely signal relationship and love. They do not hurt others; they live rather contemplative lives apart from the common herd. They care for each other. True, the narrator is something of a misanthrope, but misanthropy need not be an evil. What is evil is the desire to invade someone else's space and violate someone else's body--both of which the Swine creatures appear eager to do. But we might refine this rather general sense of evil if we connect the Swine creatures with the Arena and its various mythological references.

When the narrator has his out of body experience early in the narrative he floats over a great plain to a place he calls the arena, "a perfect circle of about ten to twelve miles in diameter" (28). In the centre of the circle is the House. The configuration of House and arena suggests a mandala, a circle (often with a square inside) that has deities placed strategically about the periphery. The shape symbolically and in this instance ironically represents the universe. In this mandala, the narrator finds the god-figures Seth (male god of Egyptian origin) and Kali (female god of Hindu origin), plus around the place "Beast-gods, and Horrors, so atrocious and bestial that possibility and decency deny any further attempt to describe them" (29). The Arena represents the universe as a place of death. Could Hodgson here equate evil not only with death, but also with religions that are "other," foreign, not English? He first sees a Swine creature here in this mandala-like place, and later the swine creatures are associated with the "greater, more stupendous Pit that lies far down in the earth, beneath this old house" (78); this Pit surely reminds us of Hell. And that something tempting emanates from this Pit is clear:

Sometimes, I have an inexplicable desire to go down to the great cellar, open the trap, and gaze into the impenetrable, spray-damp darkness. At times, the desire becomes almost overpowering, in its intensity. It is not mere curiosity, that prompts me; but more as some unexplained influence were at work. (80)

At the very least, what we have here is the death drive. As we might expect, the death drive has its counterpart in the instinct for life, what we might call, after Freud, Eros. In the novel, Eros finds its figure in "Her." The narrator's description of the appearance of this female figure invokes the birth of Venus: "Then, as I stared, it seemed that a bubble of white foam floated up out of the depths, and then, even now I know not how it was, I was looking upon, nay, looking into the face of Her--aye! into her face--into her soul" (82). The invocation of Venus raises a pagan mythology, but one that is Western European, and one that has its counterpart in the religion Hodgson would know best. I think of the Sophia of Kabbalistic lore and of course the Virgin-Bride of Revelation. We might think too of Dante's Beatrice, the woman who leads him to his Heavenly vision. Late in the book, after the narrator has told us that he had begun "to take a growing interest in that great and ancient book [the Bible]" (84), this woman appears out of a green globe and brings the narrator to feel he is "in Paradise" (114). After he sees and speaks with her, he asks himself whether he has "come upon the dwelling-place of the Eternal" (117). The harmony suggested by this woman of love and peace may have spiritual implications, but she also most definitely has psychological ones.

And so I come to my last category, which as you can tell, I've been approaching already: emotional and psychological. The House on the Borderland is a book written in the shadow of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams which had its first publication in English in 1905, three years before Hodgson's book. For me, the best way to approach this book is through psychoanalysis. The House on the Borderland is the story of a disintegrating personality, a descent into madness. Despite all the potential Jungian material--mandala, anima, grotesque creatures, astral projection, enabling dog--this is not the account of a successful individuation. Rather, it is the account of a person losing control of reality. The loss of his lover is traumatic, and the trauma results in deeper and deeper melancholia to the point of dislocation from self and reality. This is the story of someone who isolates himself so intensely that he comes apart mentally. We've already seen that he is something of a misanthrope, and we know from the opening poem "Grief" as well as from the central chapter, "The Sea of Sleep," that the narrator suffers from the loss of his lover. His sense of loneliness--"in all space am most alone" (11)--is exaggerated to cosmic proportions. He has come to envisage, as he says, "the end of all things" (84). This guy is what you might call, using an understatement, an over-reactor. He loses his girl and then for him all hell breaks lose until the world itself comes to an end. How melodramatic can you get?

Aside from the general wackiness of the book, we have lots of hints that this guy is over the top, gonzo, loopy, around the twist, out in left field, over the top, out there in the intense inane. He's nuts. From the very beginning of his narrative, we should sense his misanthropy is not your normal anti-social behaviour, but rather an isolationism taken to the nth degree. Then we have his sister. She appears not to experience the same horrors as her brother does. No, the horror she seems to experience is her brother. She grows progressively frightened of him until he decides that she is the crazy one (55). Her fear of him might well serve as the reader's clue to the narrator's madness. Right to the end of the book, she "has seemed unconscious of anything unusual occuring" (132). Her brother's "mad act" of exploring the subterranean pit (69) is a reminder of Feudian spatiality: the cellars and pit are the unconscious and the swine-things represent the return of the repressed, that welter of desire that tries and tries to find entry to our conscious mind. So what we have are two isolated people, a brother and a sister, one of whom is going crazy and the other of whom is either downright stupid or powerless to do anything to help her brother.

All this is well and maybe even convincing, but does it explain the wild flights into the cosmos during the second half of the narrative. What happens here reminds me of the ending to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when Keir Dullea takes his psychedelic trip through the galaxies until he either becomes or comes across a foetus wrapped snuggly in a small orb. In Borderland, this happens when the green globes pass and the narrator enters one (112-113). This precedes his reunification with his loved one. Images in this part of the book are a sort of cosmic pastoral, suggesting a new beginning. We've just had the black sun and end-time imagery, and now we have the hope of a new beginning. In psychological terms, I guess this is false clarity before a fall back into the darkness of paranoia and fear of dissolution. The end of the narrative takes us back to the raving of a lunatic who fears his own absorption in some luminous green fungoid substance. And we are reminded of the image of the house as a plague-spot (110). The fear here is a sort of body-snatcher fear.

Once again, this is all well and good. But as I said at the beginning, the novel falls apart. It has no center or if it does, then the center cannot hold. Things fall apart. What are we to make of the two dogs, Pepper and his successor? Their function in the novel is, in part, to lend credibility to the materiality of what happens. We can assume that Pepper really does receive a wound in the garden, and then later when we find that he is a pile of dust, we might ask whether that bizarre flight into the future actually took place. As for the second dog, this one too has a wound, this time a luminously green wound. We are disposed to accept this wound as a reality rather than a fancy on the part of the narrator. So if we do take the swine things, the flight into the future, and the luminous green wound as realities, then the narrator is most likely not crazy. And if he is not crazy then what in the name of Aunt Grady's neckerchief is going on here? About the only thing I can fall back on is Todorov's notion of the fantastic. What we have here is a narrative that refuses to allow its reader either to explain away in a rational manner what happens or to take resort to the marvellous. Instead, we hesitate between saying this is all bunk, hokum, or unexplainable marvels and saying it is definitely the slide into mental collapse of an extreme paranoiac. This book defies interpretation. Hodgson remains resolutely on the borderland between clarity and obfuscation, beween rationality and irrationality, between the canny and the uncanny.

Santa Claus in Narnia: Presents and Power

1. I have decided to focus on one scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: the scene in which Santa Claus appears, signalling the beginning of the end to the White Witch's power over Narnia. I take this scene at random--it was the scene in front of me when I opened the book tonight. It is also short.

2. What to say about this scene? First, I make no secret that I dislike this book. This particular scene is not the most egregious of the book's scenes by any means, and therefore it might prove a useful place for me to direct my attention to. I might add that I dislike the presence of Santa Claus in Narnia because he seems to me out of place in this world of violence and hierarchy. I know the story of St. Nicholas and the children in which St. Nicholas comes to the rescue of the children when they are about to be eaten by a giant, and I see it hinted at in Lewis's book in the horn which Santa Claus gives Susan, the horn which, when blown, will summon help. But the Narnian world is such a hodge-podge of mythological creatures that I find the book ragged. I guess Lewis's point is that all mythology, whether pagan or Christian, has something in common, expresses a common truth about human desire for the divine. And I suppose there is no real reason not to mix mythologies in a fantasy, but I find it jarring. I guess what I dislike is Lewis's assumption of authority. He includes whatever he happens to want to include.

3. And he assumes the authority of setting us to rights regarding what we should think of these mythological creatures. For example, Santa is not conventionally funny and jolly; rather, he is "so big, and so glad, and so real" that he makes everyone solemn. What does "so real" really mean? And why should his being so glad make the others solemn? Solemnity is something Alsan invokes too, and it smacks of Lewis's authoritarianism. Lewis is nothing if not an authoritarian. He cannot envisage a world of frivolity, of the carnivalesque, of freedom from authority outside the self. His world is filled with authority figures, either positive ones such as Santa Claus or negative ones such as Jadis. Santa brings presents, but he also brings instructions telling the girls he doesn't mean them to fight and telling Peter that his presents are not toys but tools. In order to sanction his acceptable authority figures Lewis invokes a language of abstraction: "that deep shiver of gladness which you only get when you are being solemn and still" (99). What does this tell the child reader? It tells her that characters such as Santa are to be revered, looked up to, believed, followed, not questioned. And it is here, I guess, that I balk. Lewis sets himself up, as narrator, as one of these authority figures, someone who knows the truth, someone the reader should instinctively and unquestioningly accept and believe.

4. Santa, by the way, is a minor Alsan. In other words, he is a type of Christ--a kind of Old Testament prefiguration of the Messiah yet to come. I say this not only because of the solemn and still mood he brings or creates, but also because of the tea, sugar and cream he brings from out his pack. Here is a version of loaves and fishes or of water into wine. The narrator, in a parenthetic aside, says he supposes the tea came from Santa's pack, but that no one actually saw him take it from there. This aside serves the purpose of emphasising the mystery of Santa and his powers, but it also draws attention to the narrator himself and to his powers of understanding. Why even mention this unless he wants to remind his readers of his grasp of the situation?

5. But none of this bothers me as much as the presents Lewis has Santa dole out to the characters. First the Beavers: Mrs. Beaver gets a sewing machine, a good gender specific present that reminds me of Lewis's reactionary attitude to women (remind me to tell you of Lewis's war year classes at Oxford). She gets something to keep her working. But what of Mr. Beaver. He gets his work finished for him, the dam built and the sluice gates finished and the leaks mended. Now I ask you, is this fair? Mrs B. must continue to work; Mr. B. has his work done for him.

6. The children's presents focus on weapons, sword and shield for Peter, a bow and arrows for Susan, and a dagger for Lucy. As others have pointed out, Lewis likes a bit of righteous violence and he here prepares the children to engage in brutal activity--all in the name of Alsan, of course. I note the simile Lewis uses to describe the ramping Lion on Peter's shield: "as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it." The Lion is a reminder of Aslan, but in its ramping position it represents the lion red in tooth and claw, the lion ferocious, attacking, fierce. To compare it to a strawberry is to underline the natural quality of this lion; it is natural to ramp and rend. Violence itself is natural. After all, when you pick a strawberry, you are effectively ending its life. The simile is supposed to be familiar, unthreatening, natural. For me, however, it is a ruse to disguise the real meaning here: death, violent death. The ploy is typical of Lewis's method. He defers and disguises. He does not say what he really thinks and feels because he could not do so and remain sane. In short, Lewis does not fully grasp his own anger and desire for violence. Battles are ugly when women fight them, but the implication is that they are not ugly when men do so. Also, ugly as these battles may be, women must be prepared to engage in battle bravely and with a will.

7. The horn Susan receives and the vial of cordial Lucy receives are supposed to be women's gifts. The horn summons help--women are usually in need of help and protection, the help and protection of men. Women are also nurturers, the Florence Nightingales of this world. Lucy has the power to restore the wounded in this bottle. And perhaps I will end here. The power is the thing. Everything in Narnia rests on power, authority, positions of influence. In Lewis's world, Santa Claus is not simply a kindly old man who spreads relationship and love, who connects times past and present and future, who reminds us of the importance of giving; no, in Lewis's world Santa Claus reminds us of our duty to fight and our duty to work. The Beavers of this world must work and the future kings and queens must fight.

8. I do not cease to wonder why these books have attracted children as they have. The scene I have taken at random is, after all, pretty harmless, maybe even curious for the young reader. Perhaps the 10 year old newly disabused of his or her belief in Santa Claus can smugly enjoy Lewis's manipulation of the Santa Claus fantasy. Yes, Santa does exist--as fantasy--the way hobbits exist. But do they really like this silly stuff with the Beavers? Do they really like this pseudo-spiritual stuff with the gladness, the solemnity, the stillness and all that guff? It seems some children do, and I can only shrug and say there's no accounting for taste. In the long run, I doubt that this book with all its sexism, war-mongering, status-seeking, colonialism, and let's-hear-it-for-the-class-systemism will do irreparable damage to young minds. Despite some evidence to the contrary, young readers do not always believe everything they read.

Storytelling vs Experience: The Wind in the Willows

1. The Wind in the Willows attracts me for the tension in the book between the urge to conformity to group standards and expectations and the need for a radical making of the self. This tension appears in many books for children: Anne of Green Gables, The Chocolate War, Julie, Huckleberry Finn, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Witch Week, Julie of the Wolves are a few examples. Only several years after I began reading and thinking about this book did I connect this tension between acceptance of outside control and inner need for independence to early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Once I did this, the book's uneasy expression of imaginative release became clear to me. Grahame then appeared to me to express the Romantic paradox: solipsism or behaviourism. That is, he tries to find a way out of the impasse set up by a fear of outside control and an equally strong fear of subjectivity and relativism. Either we are creatures fashioned by our environment (that is, we have no freedom to create ourselves), or we have that terrible freedom akin to nightmare in which we create everything there is (that is, our deepest desires and anxieties are the only reality we can know). Obviously, on the final page of the book Grahame opts for a vision of benign social control, and earlier in the book he had tried to envisage a sort of pagan deity--Pan, the goat-god--as that which grounds us and gives our lives stability and order. I persisted in reading this Pan figure as an imaginative projection rather than as a reality separable from the human imagination. In other words, I focused on what I perceived to be the book's championing of imagination as the source of human meaning and hope, and I tended to lop off that last page in which the small creatures doff their caps and pull their forlocks in hommage to the animals higher in the social hierarchy. The passages I looked at most closely in the classroom were the "Wayfarers All" chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter, and the final section with the "altered Toad." I even wrote an essay on the book in which I argued that the best way to read it was the "visionary way."

2. Now, however, I look for something new in the book, and I may have found this in what suddenly leaps out at me: the book contains many instances of storytelling. This is something I was aware of previously, but only in a vague sort of way. I connected the storytelling and Ratty's writing of poetry with the book's interest in imaginative and visionary experiences. Now, perhaps because I am more acutely atuned to the significance of the act of storytelling or perhaps because literary criticism has focused on the art of narrative so acutely these past fifteen or so years I see a different significance to the book's allusions to storytelling than I did before.

3. I begin simply. Storytelling is comforting. It provides the characters with a way to experience dangers and excitement without putting themselves in harm's way (see the storytelling at the end of chapter 1). It is also thrilling, filling as it does a lack in their lives. I use the word "lack" deliberately because I want to raise the spectre of Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis generally. In raising this spectre, I also raise the bugaboo subject in children's books: sexuality. I have in recent years noticed and told my classes of what I perceived to be the one passage of explicit sexuality in the book; it occurs in chapter 3, "The Wild Wood." Students have reacted negatively to my observation--oh, and I ought to say that my observation was that Grahame's only inclusion of sex in his book--a book he claimed was free of the "clash of sex"--was safe and sublimated. Nature itself expresses the act of love-making in all its ritual splendour. In case you are puzzled, I am referring to the passage in which the shepherd boy, the knight, and the prince are waited for by the lovely ladies of summer (near the beginning of chapter 3, "The Wild Wood"). The prince is to "kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love." The entire passage is redolent with the charms of romance, and as such it is distanced, kept innocent and safe. (Much the way Grahame's letters to his fiance distanced the reality of sex in their childish discourse and cutsy flirtatiousness.) In Grahame's world, nature is filled with acts of love and life, and it is to nature that this book bends in reverence.

4. What I did not notice, or at least raise to consciousness, until I glanced through Maureen Thum's article on The Wind in the Willows, is the connection between this passage and storytelling. Grahame makes it abundantly clear that what he describes in this passage derives from the stories Ratty and his house guests tell during the winter days. The previous summer was, he notes, a "rich chapter." Connected here are memory of a past season, stories, community sharing, and recreation of experience, a transmutation (or transfiguration) of experience into the language and conventions of romance. This activity fills in for the lost season. What the characters lack--i.e. summer with its warmth, comfort and womb-like security--they recreate through language. What they lack is not only warmth, but more fundamentally sensual pleasure of a particular kind. I say "of a particular kind" because, clearly, they have warmth and pleasure in their cosy home with their comfy friends and surroundings. What, then, is this "particular kind"? You guessed it: the pleasure of what we have no other word for than sexual pleasure. In psychoanalytic terms, this lost pleasure is experienced as a lack, a lack specifically of the mother and her all-encompassing protectiveness and pleasant nourishing. Before I move beyond this paragraph, I ought to make the following conclusion: storytelling is an attempt to fill the lack I have just called "sexual." The pleasure we derive from the text is, then, a sexual pleasure; this is the case for both the writer and the reader. (Check Roland Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text.)

5. Now this chapter, "The Wild Wood," turns on Mole's desire to fill another lack: the lack or absence of Badger. Mole wants to meet Badger, a figure he has heard so much about, a figure who clearly wields great influence in the River Bank world and its environs. He strikes off on his own while Ratty sits by the fire musing over some rhymes. What now catches my attention, and I state emphatically that I had not noticed this until today, is what for me is the fact that the language of sexuality does not end with the completion of Grahame's long paen to summer and romance. Thum, who does not notice the sexually charged language throughout this chapter, makes what seems to me a perceptive point. She points out that early in the chapter the animals perceive nature through the medium of story. In other words, the experience of nature is not unmediated; rather the characters perceive the world through the conventions of literature. In other words, they do not perceive the world for itself, but rather for how it has been perceived by others in an unending tracing of language in the past, back at least as far as medieval romance. She then speculates that Mole's trip into the Wild Wood in the winter time allows him to perceive nature as it really is, and she offers passages from the book to support her contention. She concludes that Mole's trip changes his consciousness, makes him a wiser Mole on his return home with Ratty. He has seem something for himself rather than through the rose coloured lens of romance. If I were to turn to Margaret Homans's reworking of Lacan, I would note that Mole has here turned from the symbolic language of the father to the literal language of the mother. In other words, Mole turns his back on male discourse and experience to reexperience that literal and unmediated condition he could only have experienced before in the womb. This is the experience of at-oneness. To experience literally is, if I understand Homans, to bear the word, to give birth to meaning within the self and not be imposed upon by another. The myth takes me back to the Romantic notion of self-engendered reality.

6. I have no quarrel with this, but what excited me is what Thum's insights have opened up for me. I repeat: Grahame's language does not lose its sexual charge. It does, however, change the import of this sexual charge. It does not return us to the literal; it does not provide Mole with an umediated vision. This is not an example of what Homans thinks of as women's writing, as the return to the mother. How could it be? Grahame is a man. But my excitement remains. I could not have the insight I do into this chapter without the prompting from both Thum and Homans. But what is this insight? Remember, Mole goes in search of Badger. In other words, he goes in search of this book's strongest father figure. I like to think of Badger as something of a Marlon Brando, the godfather of the forest family. He turns away from the storytelling by the fire with its opening of magic casements to the romance of summer, to the harshness of the forest and its winter covering. Could it be that what he turns away from is the world of romance, so often associated with women, to the cold contingencies of masculine experience? Mole's entry into the wood is bold and forthright. He "penetrated to where the light was less," to where "holes made ugly mouths at him." He begins, despite himself, to imagine things, things obsessively associated with holes. Faces, hard and hostile, stare at him from holes. What is it he is afraid of? He knows somewhere deep in this wood is the Father, Badger, but to reach him he must pass the gauntlet of all these holes with all these malicious faces. Before long the whole wood seems running, hunting, chasing. Perhaps the rabbit which brushes by Mole tips us off to the kind of running, hunting and chasing that is going on here. Mole's is a rite of passage, a rite that will lead him into the presence of the father. But not before Ratty turns up to rescue Mole. And before Ratty turns up, Mole takes "refuge in in the deep dark hollow of an old beech tree." Anyone who has read George MacDonald's Phantastes will recall the female associations of the beech tree. As Mole snuggles into the hollow he becomes aware of that dread thing--"the Terror of the Wild Wood!" What is this terror, really? As far as I can tell this terror is a terror of the "clash of sex," that direct penetration into the mystery that Grahame wished so to keep out of his book. The Wind in the Willows is a book that never does come to terms with its own lack because Grahame instinctively desires an easy return to romance. The only difference between the romance of summer's chivalrous knights, princes, and shepherds and the romance the Badger represents is the difference between the feminine graces of summer and the masculine toughness of winter. In terms of the book, Badger's form of romance involves storming Toad Hall to oust the interloper stoats and weasels. In the "Wild Wood" chapter, this masculine form of romance appears in the person of Ratty with his brace of pistols and cudgel. To underline the point, Shepherd draws Ratty in a Sherlock Holmes outfit. Holmes represents masculine aggression in act and thought. Holmes the rationalist differs from the nymphs of summer.

7. Ratty informs Mole that there are "a hundred things one has to know" before one enters the Wild Wood: passwords, signs, sayings, verses, plants, dodges and tricks. In other words, to partcipate in this cold world, this "real," but hardly literal, world, one must know the symbolic language of wooings and subterfuge. Life is much simpler lived on the river bank, and love is much safer when lived vicariously through story. Isn't much of the book about the neatness and safety of vicarious living? Mole steers Ratty away from leaving home to follow the Sea-Faring Rat by giving him a pencil with which to write verses; Badger and friends refuse to allow Toad to go his own way until he must retreat to his own room where he triumphs in song by himself. Perhaps this book really is an escape. But, of course, escape is impossible; sublimation is what is possible. And in this book sexual energy, imaginative energy, anarchic energy--all are sublimated in story. This might explain why, when Ratty and Mole succeed in finding Badger's house deep in the Wild Wood, they arrive at a place rich in story. Badger is the character in the book most resistant to the urges of desire; he appears to have no desire, being content to lead a sedentary and solitary life. Yet he too must have periods when desire rears its disturbing head. But his house contains the stories of a long past history, a history of human settlement dating back probably to the Romans.

8. So what does all this add up to? What do I want my audience to learn from this paper? Believe me, I have no desire that you accept the incipient psychological reading here; I do not expect you to go out and read Lacan, or Homans, or Thum. But I do want you to know that for me The Wind in the Willows becomes more exciting when I find others who prompt me to keep thinking about the book. Stagnation is fatal to mental growth, and without others to keep us moving mentally we would stagnate. Left on my own, I would fall into a pattern of recycling well polished ideas about this book, and in time the polish would itself become dim. All of us need to converse. To understand what we read as fully as we might, we need conversation. Thum and Homans and Lacan provided me with some conversation. In short, the lesson here is that the reading of literature needs to be a communal activity, not a private one.

9. Second, although I have no wish that you assimilate what I think about the book, I do hope that the conversation I spoke of is ongoing and that you find something in what I write to react to or against.

10. Third, I think it is clear that I think this book is complex and compelling. It goes without saying that I have only scratched the surface of it. Yet this is a children's book. Grahame wrote it for his young son; it has been published on the children's lists for a century now; and I presume children have accepted it. This should tell us that books for the young need not be pap. Children deserve the challenge of satire, allusion, complexity, parody. Whether this book will cpature the imaginations of young people today or not remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: if adults won't read a book like The Wind in the Willows, then it is unlikely children will. The same is probably true of any book for the very young.

Curiosity Killed the Cat: Colin the Curious: Burnett's The Secret Garden

1. This is a book I had never heard of, much less read, until I began to teach children's literature. I discovered then that this is one of the "canonized" texts in children's literature, a book that has touched generations of readers as the back cover of my Dell edition notes. This blurb speaks of "readers," not "female readers," but I suspect that one reason I did not hear about this book when I was young was that I was a boy. The Secret Garden is thought of as that obsolescent phenomenon, the "girl's book." As I sit here tonight, however, in my blue funk I choose to think of this book as a very bad "boy's book."

2. Why a boy's book when the book is so clearly about the change in a little girl, a change that is so powerful that she--the little girl who changes--can effect a change in others around her? That's just it. Mary changes, but in doing so she changes for the worse. She becomes a docile and meek young thing ready and willing to recede into the background and allow that priggish young fellow Colin to take over, to take all the credit for life in the garden, to take authority unto himself. As the book moves along, the character who was front and center at the beginning, Mary, moves into the background as boys emerge as the dominant characters. First we have Dickon, a goody-goody cross between George MacDonald's Curdie (and perhaps Thomas Day's Harry Sandford from Sandford and Merton) and Kenneth Grahame's Great God Pan. Here is the boy of the moors, friendly with animals and wise in the ways of nature--a kind of northern Tarzan who takes Mary as his special project for protection and teaching.

3. Mary tries throughout the novel to find space for herself. She has from her early days in India been drawn to attempt garden-making. This is clearly an indication of her need for a place of her own--what Virginia Woolf later will articulate in A Room of One's Own. Mary feels the need of a place of her own, a place she can claim as herself, not a place in which she is diminished by the presence of another or the presence of a mother. Never having been mothered, at least reassuringly, Mary's desire is to be a mother, to nurture something even if this something is a few plants in a pitifully small garden. A girl's fate, however, is to occupy someone else's place. A mother's role is to be displaced. In England, Mary finds a garden and begins to claim it as her own. This garden once belonged to another mother who found her place of beauty and fulfillment to be a place of death. As I indicated above, however, Mary cannot claim this place without the assistance of Dickon (remember Lilias Craven required the assistance of Ben Weatherstaff) who quickly fills the garden with his charges: fox, crow, squirrel, etc. Still Mary perseveres; she accepts her place beside the male.

4. Meanwhile, Mary tries to emerge from the shadow of this boy wonder by snooping about the house--a place she tries to claim as her own since Dickon has no presence here. Houses and females have always gone together, although often the house closes so closely around the woman (cf. Alice in the White Rabbit's house) that hysteria results. The woman becomes confined to some region of the house where she can rail to her heart's discontent (vide Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic). Here, in The Secret Garden, the madwoman in the distant part of the great house turns out to be a sickly male. On one of her snoops, Mary discovers Colin and he will eventually and effectively complete the displacement of Mary from her place in the book, in the garden, and in the world.

5. As the book progresses, Colin becomes more and more assertive. I know, I know--he has always been assertive, but I mean to say that he becomes less petulantly assertive and more acceptably assertive. Of course, I mean "acceptably" in terms of the novel's sense of value. He remains to the last, for me, a prig of the highest order. But I think the book sanctions his sanctimonious and self-righteous self projection. Look at his lecture to the assembled in chapter 23, "Magic." Something began "making things out of nothing," he begins. This made him "curious," he says. "Scientific people are always curious." Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have it. First note the confusion of categories: in a chapter entitled "magic" we have reference to the curiosity of scientific people. What arouses this curiosity is a totally unscientific assumption: that something began making things out of nothing. Only god makes something out of nothing, and we know that Burnett's story has a spiritual significance. But what is going on here is a sanctioning of masculine reason, rational inquiry, scientific thought in the guise of irrational, feminine mystery. Burnett wants to promote a "feminine" message, but she does so by adopting a masculine discourse. Colin will improve his physical health through small "experiments." Colin also becomes High Priest leading his little congregation in incantation. Scientific or Spiritual leader--Colin emerges as the dominant figure in the book. He is given to lecturing in the garden, and the best thing about lecturing, as Ben Weatherstaff says, is that "a chap can get up an' say aught he pleases an' no other chap can answer him back." The final words of the book are "Master Colin."

6. What I can't figure is why Burnett allows Mary to drift to the background. Mary has brought the transformation in the garden and in Colin about. Now she retreats to silence. Perhaps an analogue here is Mrs. Sowerby whose name always reminds me of a sow as well as a sower. She is fertility personified. She is a nurterer, a role Mary willingly takes on: note that Mary is ready to allow Colin to eat her share of food so the adults in the house won't know he is getting healthy. Susan Sowerby is also much in the background. She enters the garden as something of a Virgin Mary figure, and Colin's eyes "quite devoured her face" (275). She is, he says, "just what I wanted." He wishes she were his mother too. Boys need mothers, but for their own desires to be fulfilled. In other words, males need females to fill their desires, to give them a sense of their importance; girls accept this role of nurturer. A girl's desire is deemed to differ from a boy's. Whereas Colin desires the gratification of being master, Mary can only be mistress in the sense of helpmate. To be mistress in the sense of proprietor is to be contrary. Mistress Mary is quite contrary as long as she desires her own garden; once she relinquishes this desire and accepts a place in a dominant male's garden she is no longer contrary.

7. So what to conclude. I don't really like what goes on in this book, although I have always taught it and written about it with appreciation. My sense of the book's structure of images has always carried me through a typical "male" reading of the book, one in which I as reader dominate the interpretive activity. It has been my practice to read the book as typical of nineteenth-century fantasies for children which sees the child as a Romantic type, pure and unsullied, representative of imaginative and humane values, wiser than adults, closer to nature than adults, a reminder of pastoral's critique of urban and only apparently civilized life. The Romantic myth, however, is one perpetuated by the likes of Colin to maintain an unquestioning positioning of traditional hierarchies, especially hierarchies of gender. Yes, I still think of the book as a fine introduction to literary symbol (tree, garden, bird, key, nature, animals, child, wise old woman, sea, house, wind, laughter) and romance for the young reader, but I am now more willing to question the implicit positioning of both the subjects within the book and the subject who reads the book.

8. To conclude on this latter point, I wonder who is the ideal reader of this book: the young girl or the young boy? Will girls learn to accept their status as nurturer and helpmate through reading this book? Will boys have confirmed for them their own status as Masters of gardens and houses?