Buried Feelings, Standing Stones: Secularity, Animism, and Late-Victorian Pagan Revivalism
Abstract
In this project, I argue that during the late-Victorian period a revived form of paganism developed in response to an emerging kind of secularity. My first chapter engages post-secularism as a framework for understanding how paganism responds to this new sense of secularity, which I demonstrate formed alongside developments in geology, archaeology, and anthropology. In chapter two, I show how ideas of “primitivity” and “animism” put forth by John Lubbock and E. B. Tylor influence what Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater debate as “the pagan sentiment.” The rest of the project concerns forms of what I call “pagan affectations,” authorial personae which cultivate counter-secular, pagan modes of subjectivity that make room for kinds of feelings such as ecstasy, “primitivity,” and a sense of immersion in an ecology of animistic agencies. Chapter three situates the popularity of the goat-god Pan within this developing paganism. I argue that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen, and George Egerton offer Pan as an icon of competing pagan masculinities within the context of the contrast between Victorian secular ways of being worldly and pagan revivalist ways of being earthly I set out in the previous chapter. My fourth chapter examines how Richard Jefferies adopts and adapts a unique form of pagan affectation. I argue that Jefferies affects a paganism grounded in intimate connections to the Wiltshire landscape that is in conflict with Victorian secularist ideas of archaeological and ecological relationality. Chapters five, six, and seven turn to questions of “Celticity” and the Victorian racialization of Celtic peoples. In these chapters I focus on Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Celticity and the ways in which he challenges Anglo-Saxonist claims of aesthetic and epistemic superiority. I argue that Stevenson queries Celticity as a means of access to a deeper, transancestral Paterian “universal pagan sentiment.” Throughout these chapters, I will also demonstrate the importance of affectations of pagan Celticity to his genre fiction, style, and theories of Romance. Overall, my research contributes to Victorian scholarship by showing how creative writers from the 1860s to the 1890s participated in the revival of paganism in ways that respond to and challenge Victorian secularity.