The Liminal Poetics of The Wind in the Willows

Abstract

[...]liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.In their association with symbolic richness, intensity, and impermanence, as well as the momentary undoing of conventional social structure (to use Turner’s term), the liminal and the liminoid are both inherently literary.[...]while we evoke Turner’s important work on liminality vis-à-vis ritual and the liminoid, we take a heuristic, rather than slavish, approach to employing his insights.The only extended scene of comity that crosses class- and generational lines occurs in “Dulce Domum,” when Rat, Mole, and the juvenile, carol-singing hedgehogs engage in spontaneous fellowship (though even here Rat remains an observer, rather than a true participator in communitas).[...]while we employ a Turnerian model of liminality, we note the limits of this model for reading a text such as The Wind in the Willows.According to Moore, “the final purpose of Pan in Grahame’s garden is apparently to offer a principle of forgetfulness, primarily the forgetting of intense, sublime experience” (58).