[In the following essay, Steig examines what he perceives as a veiled eroticism in The Wind in the Willows, using his own childhood reading of the book as a springboard for his discussion.]

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. As I wrote once: it is a Household Book; a book which everybody in the household loves, and quotes continually; a book which is read aloud to every new guest and is regarded as the touchstone of his worth. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know. But it is you who are on trial.

(A. A. Milne)

Among Late-Victorian and Edwardian novels of fantasy, the one which seems to have retained the greatest power to affect readers emotionally, from childhood into adulthood, is Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). The Alice books may be more challenging intellectually, but Grahame's novel has, according to my personal experience and discussions with other readers, a far more lasting effect upon the feelings and loyalties of those who first take up the book at some point in childhood or adolescence. It is indeed a "household book," and certain connotations of "household" may help to explain A. A. Milne's interdict against "sitting in judgment … on the art of Kenneth Grahame." Such an attitude implies that this work is inviolable, immune to analysis or criticism, because the feelings it arouses are so special and private.

From a slightly different point of view, Victorian and Edwardian novels are by and large "household books"; that is, they comprise a genre of the Heimlich. Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Meredith, George Eliot, George Gissing, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Henry James, each in his or her own way both reveals and conceals the intimacy of emotional life within the family, between lovers, and in the individual psyche. The ciche taunt, "What's he when he's at home?" may be answered or evaded in a variety of ways. While Henry James conducts so painstaking and convoluted an analysis that it often hides more than it reveals, George Eliot merges domestic realism and moral philosophy so that the latter purports to subsume the former. Thackeray manages his evasions through the coy wiles of a characterized narrator who slips in and out of the world of his novels so that their reality remains ambiguous, while Meredith manages his fictional world through a comedy of ideas which allows for the illusion of distance from household secrets. In the Brontes and Dickens there is an overt symbolism which leads away from those secrets at the same time that it embodies them, and in the case of Emily Bronte there is in addition a cunningly elusive narrative form. Hardy's usual form of indirection is a pretension to a cosmology or, as in The Well-Beloved, endless talk around the main subject, while Gissing combines a supposed social realism with barely concealed sexual fantasies. And, seemingly, in Trollope and the Bennett of Clayhanger, there is a transparent openness, so that nothing suggests itself as hidden, and an illusion of complete revelation is created—though not to the satisfaction of some readers, who may feel, "there must be more to life."

Whereas their modernist novels may once have seemed, in contrast to those of the Victorians, to be under a new and fully conscious kind of control, with increasing biographical information we can now understand the personal ambivalences embodied in the works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Yet there is a difference; for Joyce and Woolf, though Victorians by birth, knew something the Victorians did not: they knew the Victorian age with hindsight and could react against it in a way that was only just becoming possible for Hardy. Our own relationship to the Victorians is also a complex one, for we are their heirs, and though we pride ourselves on having transcended their limitations in the domestic sphere, we return eternally to them, to the household in Victorian novels, to try to understand its meaning for ourselves. As Freud found in consulting Daniel Sanders's and Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's dictionaries, heimlich became long ago a virtual synonym for unheimlich (usually translated as "uncanny"). Thus, that which is of the household is familiar and private, even secret, and, paradoxically, strange and forbidden. What is familiar is "of the family," and therefore much of it is not to be discussed, is to be repressed, so that it becomes unfamiliar to consciousness. Superficially, the family is homey (heimisch); but much of what goes on in one's own or someone else's household is mysterious and, in art, likely to be expressed in indirect, evasive, or symbolic form.

The Heimlich has an especially important role in fantasy novels ostensibly for children, from the Alices, the fantasies of George MacDonald, and The Water Babies, to Kenneth Grahame and Edith Nesbit. While the remark that Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies is all about masturbation and its punishment may reflect the reductive pseudo-Freudianism of a recent critic's approach to fantasy [Maureen Dufly, The Erotic World of Faery], the first edition's illustrator, J. Noel Paton, came remarkably close to depicting masturbation as the central theme of the novel, as we see in his frontispiece: the naked water babies cluster around the pretty fairy, thumbs in mouths and a rapt look on their faces, a situation that for a real child of similar age usually finds the other hand on his or her genitals. Such household realities are not likely to be a part of the prior, conceptualized intentions of the author, but they may nonetheless be perceived as a part of meaning.

For the present-day critic, a central interpretive problem engendered by an attraction to the Heimlich in Victorian novels is that of the relation between intention, meaning, and response. Now that we are largely out of the age of anxiety about the intentional fallacy, we can once again see a work of literature as an utterance by a real person, an act of attempted expression and communication. Many now read novels as by Dickens, or Eliot, or James, rather than as autonomous artifacts. But it is the case with Victorian novels that while overt meanings are usually not difficult to discern, the meanings that matter, those which define the work as an aesthetic object, must be constructed by the reader in the course of his or her reading experience and will not be identical for all readers. [In a footnote, the critic explains: "I am using 'aesthetic object' somewhat as Wolfgang Iser does, to refer to the work as constituted by the reader in the reading experience and equivalent to the 'meaning' of the work."] And if one does have the habit of reading a novel as an utterance by a historically real person, the construction of this meaning must, logically, somehow take the historical author into account.

Recent theorists of aesthetic response begin from the premise that literary meaning (as distinguished from purely lexical meaning, though even that distinction is problematic) comes into existence only when the act of reading has taken place; the text may be a potential source of meanings, but it does not contain them. For Norman N. Holland, such construction of meaning will take place inevitably in terms of the reader's individual "identity theme," an unchanging structure of ways of relating to the world and to other people. For Wolfgang Iser, the work as aesthetic object is created by the reader, who follows the instructions of the "strategies" of the text: that is, the ways the author juxtaposes norms, systems, and allusions, to create the potential for a new meaning not contained within those "background" elements themselves. Iser is less interested in the range of divergency among various readers' interpretations than he is in the ways complex narratives involve the reader as a participator in the creation of meaning; but he never completely loses sight of the inevitability of such divergency. For David Bleich, on the other hand, the reporting and self-analysis of individual response is the most important source of knowledge about literature; yet paradoxically Bleich allows for the role of biographical knowledge in the reader's construction of meaning, as such knowledge becomes a part of that reader's total perception of the text.

In my own experience as reader, teacher, and critic I have found that biographical knowledge, including knowledge of an author's other works, becomes a part of my reading-history for a given text, materially clarifying or altering meaning, and thus becoming a constitutive factor in the construction of that meaning. My tentative solution to the problem of relating response to the author's intention is to try to see the work of literature as existing simultaneously in my reading experience and in its own historical context; thus the aesthetic object becomes a constellation of meanings projected along several axes, including the author's attempt to express ideas and feelings, the values of his or her age, and my personal response as they relate to my own associations.

The experiment in interpretation I shall present here follows the actual sequence of my attempts to make sense of my experiences of reading The Wind in the Willows. I describe in detail my reading-history insofar as I have been able to reconstruct it, isolating and describing my responses, specifying my associations with these responses—including the circumstances in which I first read the book—and then summarizing my search in Grahame's life and other writings for explanations of the nature of the book as I perceive it, so as to construct a pathway from my subjectivity to Grahame's (or rather, my construction of it). The potential value of such an experiment goes beyond the illumination of the particular works discussed in offering an approach to the problems of relationships among text, author's milieu, reader, and reader's milieu. The relevance of such an approach to the Victorian novel in general will be suggested briefly in my conclusion.

I

The reviewer for Victorian Studies of Peter Green's centenary biography of Kenneth Grahame remarked only that it was "comprehensive" and "disturbing." I cannot speculate on this particular reviewer's personal reasons for feeling disturbed, but potential sources of disturbance in the biography are clear enough. Green puts forth the thesis, amply supported by the details of Grahame's life, that Tbe Wind in the Willows is a transformation into symbolic form of rebellious and hedonistic impulses mildly evident in his earlier works, a process taking place under the extreme pressures of a late, unhappy, and unfulfilling marriage, being the father of a handicapped (half-blind) child, and tedious work in the Bank of England. Such an analysis might indeed be disturbing to anyone for whom reading The Wind in the Willows has formed a special, private set of experiences, and who does not wish those experiences to be sullied by the misery and frustration of Grahame's life.

Yet I found my adult rereading of Grahame's book more perplexing than my subsequent reading of his biography, and it is from this perplexity that the present attempt at interpretation issues. On the one hand, The Wind in the Willows continues to be important to many who have read it, and my own childhood reading of it was an important event for me. On the other hand, there seem to be several reasons why I, and at least some of its other adult devotees, should really dislike it. One may note that this novel's fantasy seems to be a very narrow one as an analogue of the real world. Its principal animal characters are all male, all bachelors, and all independently wealthy, conditions that obtain for few people and fewer wild animals. It is, seemingly, "clean of the clash of sex," as Grahame wrote for the publisher's blurb, as well as being a demonstrably conservative satire of aspects of upper-middle-class life, a satire whose point is now largely lost in North America and increasingly irrelevant in Britain. Furthermore, it contains a good deal of what is, on the face of it, terribly sentimental writing. We can perhaps imagine why an Edwardian reader of a certain social class might find the book delightful because of these very attributes; it is difficult to understand why it should have any appeal for modern readers who have some awareness of the exclusion of females and the class presumption of the four major characters.

The observation that there would seem to be reasons to dislike The Wind in the Willows applies not only to my present adult perspective but to my first reading of the book in 1946, when I was ten-and-a-half. When I first proposed to teach Grahame's book in a course on children's literature which I shared with a colleague, his first reaction was, "I hate that book, with all that awful religious stuff," and I found myself nonplused because I could recall nothing religious about The Wind in the Willows and would have expected that I, as an avowed atheist from early childhood, would have found almost any book with overt religious content offensive by the time I was ten. Similarly, at ten I was on the brink of early adolescence and extremely interested in girls; why a book about bachelors, devoid of female characters (except for two who appear briefly), should have appealed to me at that stage seemed another mystery.

The context of my first reading turns out to be significant in reconstructing that first response. I was in a camp in the Adirondacks, my first full summer away from home, and in the infirmary with a cold. The inevitable feelings of separation and loss were complicated by the fact that my parents were counsellors at the camp, which meant that while I was away from home I was only ambiguously away from them. Upon rereading the book as an adult my general impression was that three of Mole's experiences had been the most important parts of it for me in childhood. The first occurs in the first chapter when Mole comes out of the ground in springtime and sniffs the air:

It all seemed to be too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting.…

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free and were caught and held again.

As I can reconstruct my response it was one of delight, of identification with Mole, and a great feeling of comfort. For the first eight years of my life summers had been spent at my family's place in Connecticut, away from the deadness and heat of a New York summer; this place had been sold in 1945, and we summered that year in Long Island. Only now, in my first summer in camp, did it come home to me forcefully that Connecticut was gone forever; Mole's rediscovery of spring and discovery of the river are associated permanently for me with each summer's return to the green woods, and the wide brook that ran through our property. Thus in the circumstances surrounding my first reading of The Wind in the Willows, several kinds of felt loss and regained delight are layered upon one another.

These layers of feeling are increased and deepened in my recalled response to Mole's return to his home in the ground in the fifth chapter, "Dulce Domum." Having entered the upper world and then the dangerous Wild Wood, where he and friend Rat have been given shelter by the avuncular Badger, Mole is struck with nostalgic longing—which he experiences as smell, a point I will take up below—for his home; but because Rat won't listen to him and keeps on walking, Mole is finally overcome: "The Mole subsided forlornly on a tree-stump and tried to control himself, for he felt it surely coming. The sob he had fought with so long refused to be beaten. Up and up, it forced its way to the air, and then another, and another, and others thick and fast; till poor Mole at last gave up the struggle, and cried freely and helplessly and openly, now that he knew it was all over and he had lost what he could hardly be said to have found." Mole then explains to Rat, amidst further sobs, what his trouble is: "… it was my own little home—and I was fond of it—and I went away and forgot all about it—and then I smelt it suddenly—on the road, when I called and you wouldn't listen, Rat—and everything came back to me with a rush—and I wanted it!—O dear, 0 dear!—and when you wouldn't turn back, Ratty—and I had to leave it, though I was smelling it all the time—I thought my heart would break.—We might have just gone and had one look at it, Ratty—only one look—it was close by—but you wouldn't turn back Ratty, you wouldn't turn back!"

This is followed by the now fatherly Rat's insistence that they go immediately to Mole End and by the rhapsodic passages of Mole's rediscovery of his home, beginning with an "electric thrill … passing down" his body which, though described as "faint," is strong enough to be felt by Rat through physical contact with Mole. Smell leads Mole to his home, but once Mole End is attained smell drops out of the narrative and is replaced by Mole's bourgeois delight in seeing his possessions again, as well as the oral delight in the "provender so magically provided" by working-class field mice children who have come singing Christmas carols.

My associations with this episode are no less specific or vivid. In addition to feelings of loss and return, an incident from age four has the most direct association with my response to "Dulce Domum." Mole's speech ending, "Ratty, you wouldn't turn back!" recalls the time when, on a snowy day my father picked me up at nursery school, assuming that my mother wouldn't be able to make it in time from her job because of the snow. Just as the bus arrived I spotted my mother waving to us from the other side of Central Park West. My father didn't see her and started loading me into the bus despite my protests that I wanted to go to my mother. I don't remember whether I actually wept, but the frustration, the helplessness of the small child to communicate something of great emotional importance comes back to me even today with great force when I read those passages in The Wind in the Willows.

The difficulty of relating childhood memory to adult response and interpretation may be suggested, however, by what I am able to make of the predominance and subsequent elimination of smell in "Dulce Domum." Intuitively, I feel that smell is an important component of the secret, the Heimlich, the forbidden. As Ernest Schachtel points out, smell is the sense in children most subject to conditioning and suppression by adults. It is closest to an animal sense, at least initially lacking in conceptual discrimination, but in a child's development it is most closely allied with feelings of shame, guilt, and disgust. It is perhaps for these reasons that I have no precise memories associated with Mole's smelling of his home, but retain a strong feeling that this is related to some of my most basic childhood experiences. And thus for me the replacement of smell by sight as the dominant feeling in Mole's return to his home is akin to a shift from early childhood to more adult, conceptual ways of thinking and feeling. But how much of my response here is based on traces of childhood memory and how much is a construct based on my reading of Freud and Schachtel is difficult to say. One must recognize that all memories—like all interpretations—are constructs whose ultimate truth can never be established.

Grahame himself stresses that Mole's return is a kind of temporary regression: Mole sees "clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly too how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upperworld was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage." The very image of an underground home suggests a return to some womblike comfort or, more resignedly, to the grave. My own particular association with this aspect of Mole's return, however, is the comfort of being ill in bed, waited on by adults, and in the context of my first reading more specifically the infirmary at camp, which removed me temporarily from the challenges of a group situation and allowed me to be waited on by a young and interesting nurse. Whether The Wind in the Willows is, as Grahame wrote at least twice, free of problems and free of sex, remains to be determined—and thus, whether my association of the book with a budding interest in girls is purely contingent on the circumstances of my first reading.

The seventh chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," contains expressive imagery which in some ways recalls "Dolce Domum." Again, loss is an initial theme: little Portly, the baby otter, is missing, and his father expresses his sense of desolation to Mole and Rat. But the father's sense of loss becomes the occasion for a new set of emotions to be experienced by Mole and Rat as they search for Portly. These feelings begin for Rat with what is apparently the piping of a bird, which is for him "so beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon I almost wish I had never heard it. For it had roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever." Mole hears nothing "but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers," but Rat hears the sound again, and, "rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp."

Finally, as they row closer, Mole hears as well, and is likewise "caught… up, and possessed… utterly." Reaching the island the two are struck with an ever-deeper awe; Rat trembles "violently," and Mole's emotions are described at length:

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in the utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in utter peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter, …

"Rat!" he found breath to whisper, shaking. "Are you afraid?"

"Afraid?" murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. "Afraid! Of Him? 0, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!"

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

When little Portly awakens he searches for the "demigod" like "a child that has fallen happily asleep in its nurse's arms, and wakes to find itself alone and laid in a strange place … till at last the black moment came for giving it up, and sitting down and crying bitterly." But Rat and Mole do not weep because they have been granted the "gift of forgetfulness." They feel "strangely tired," with a lingering sense of contentment, and by the end of the chapter Rat is asleep in the boat, "with a smile of much happiness on his face." My adult response to this chapter is a mixture of revulsion and identification. No doubt this chapter is what my colleague referred to as "that awful religious stuff," with its obvious paralleling of Pan and Christ. The swooning worship is a bit heavy for me now, but I have the sense that my childhood response was positive, if not to Pan himself, then to the gamut of emotions experienced by Rat and Mole. I am fairly sure that as a child I skimmed the overtly religious passages and responded to the complex of emotions: that sense of suddenly seeing things clearly, the awe before nature (once again, for me inextricably tied up with my own lost childhood Arcadia), but also the feeling of being completely taken care of by an adult, expressed in quite different ways in the description of Portly between the hooves of Pan and the other animals' worshipful submission to his power.

Pan is here, one might think, the same fantasized demigod about whom Grahame wrote seventeen years earlier in "The Rural Pan." But whereas in the latter essay Pan has the ephemeral quality of immanence in nature, in the seventh chapter of The Wind in the Willows he is incarnated, with different results. For me, two main things emerge from the passage describing Pan: the lingeringly stressed details, with an emphasis on his power and muscular beauty, and the way in which the otter's child is cradled between his hooves, sleeping with the contentment of a young child in its mother's arms. This strikes me as the embodiment of father and mother in one figure, and the animals' response combines a worship of the nurturing mother (nature, referred to metaphorically as "she" early in the paragraph) with a submission to the all-powerful but benign father. Perhaps in part through an unconscious sense of this I felt (and still feel) that Mole's and Rat's experiences in the seventh chapter are intensely erotic, from the initial intoxications of melody, to the violent trembling at the sight of "things rightly kept hidden," the peak of intense experience in the combination of love, fear, and worship, followed by the gradually falling intensity of emotion (as the animals move into forgetfulness), to the physical exhaustion which leaves Mole "half-dozing in the hot sun," and "the weary Rat … fast asleep."

Roger Sale has recently written that if you "ask any lover of the book to name the most memorable parts … the answer will invariably be scenes from the first half [that is, up to chapter seven]," and though this is unverifiable and probably untrue—since many readers consider Toad the center of the book—it happens to fit with my own reading-history. Toad, delightful though he is, just did not exercise the same magic upon me, nor does he today. Intellectually, one may see the toad as the id, the representative of chaotic and dangerous desires. Of the four animal friends, he is the one who violates codes of good behavior and even becomes an actual criminal in his theft of automobiles. But at age ten, such acting-out was not recognizable as part of myself; it was low comedy, amusing but viewed from a distance.

Insofar as I can analyze my childhood reading of the book, then, the dominant meaning has to do with loss, which begins with the sense of separation from one's mother in infancy, repeated in various ways—literal and symbolic—as one develops; and in the more particular sense, for me, of loss of a place that was home in a more tangible way than a series of apartments over the years—a home that had been periodically regained and temporarily lost with the expectation of recovery each summer. These feelings carry over into the newly threatening loss involved in summer camp, in growing into adolescence, in having to make my own way with an unfamiliar group of my peers, and in the mysteries of adult sexuality as well as the delights and anxieties of a potentially new relationship to girls. In the latter regard, the "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter is important not because it addresses the problem of sexuality directly, but because its rise and fall of emotion, with the revelation of the mystery at the peak, approximate the feelings I was tentatively beginning to connect with becoming an adolescent. In this respect it is an excellent example of what I see as the indirection with which the Heimlich is presented in Victorian novels, though in a book intended for children the indirection is perhaps especially oblique.

It is not difficult to see where a plausible interpretation of the personal meaning of The Wind in the Willows for its author intersects with my own set of meanings, constructed from adult and memory of childhood response. Loss, deprivation of place, and the desire to escape from the city seem to dominate Grahame's life. Having lost his mother when he was not quite five and, effectually, his father as well (since James Cunningham Grahame soon gave up care of his young family to their maternal grandmother), he spent the remainder of his childhood in Cookham Dene, Berkshire, Cranbourne near Windsor, and St. Edward's School, Oxford, coming to love the Berkshire and Surrey downlands and the Thames valley, as well as the still very medieval city of Oxford. There seems little doubt that his uncle's refusal to permit him to enter Oxford University was experienced as another loss, of a place he had come to consider his own, and that London and a clerkship in the Bank of England (of which he eventually became secretary) were antipathetic to his natural feelings.

Peter Green sees the appearance of Pan in the seventh chapter as one manifestation of a rebellious element in Grahame's character, expressed mildly elsewhere in such essays as "The Rural Pan," but Green takes Toad as a much more direct expression of Grahame's ambivalence, since the open rebel is associated with the motorcar—which Grahame abhorred—and is ultimately punished. The Pan of chapter seven Green deprecates as "desexualized, paternalized," and "a projection of Edwardian ruralism, post-Beardsley social opposition, wistful yearning for conformity, an urge towards some replacement for Arnold's God as a comforting Father Figure". Yet, as my summary should have suggested, the feelings expressed in the chapter are more complex than this, in its vision of a motherly father, as well as a distinctly sensual, masculine one, perhaps implying symbolically a boy's erotic feelings for his mother, sublimated into a homoerotic image whose quality Grahame could never acknowledge directly.

Considering how concrete the details of physical description are in the text, it seems strange that a psychoanalytic writer such as Lili Peller could describe the form of the "Faun" as one which, "barely perceived, dissolves and melts into the foliage"; but Peller is classifying The Wind in the Willows as an "Early Tale," which appeals to young, preoedipal children, and in which sex is reassuringly denied through the mask of sexually unspecific animals. The fact that this particular children's book seems to be read and treasured by many adults, however, and is often first read in preadolescence, makes a difference. What might be comforting denial to a young child may be, for one on the brink of adolescence, an equally comforting, and equally disguised, affirmation of sexual feelings. This latter remark speaks to my own adult and reconstructed childhood responses, but Grahame is at once more elaborately evasive and revelatory than I have yet suggested. The statement that the animals are seeing "things rightly kept hidden" sounds very close to the concept of the Heimlich, just because things at home, things private and secret (and repressed) have a disturbing (unheimlich) effect when revealed in distorted or symbolic form. And the duplicity goes even further, for Grahame takes the trouble to tell us that Mole feels "no panic terror": yet etymologically and conventionally in English "panic terror" is precisely what one is supposed to feel at the sight of Pan. If the intense emotions felt by the animals contain no element of "panic terror," are we to believe that they are entirely serene? This is borne out neither by the "objective" content of the text nor by my own response to it. As we shall see, Grahame's conceptual understanding of what is "in" his text is open to question in a number of ways.

II

After my adult rereading I wanted to see whether Grahame's other works contained any elements comparable to the veiled eroticism I thought I detected in the seventh chapter of The Wind in the Willows. Peter Green suggests that one can find in the earlier works more explicit and thus less powerful expressions of Grahame's impulses and conflicts which are converted into symbolic form in the later book. The rejection of adults as lofty, uncaring, unreasonable "Olympians" in The Golden Age and Dream Days becomes in The Wind in the Willows a symbolic rejection of ever growing up, though with the compromise with conformity expressed in Mole, Rat, and Badger's treatment of the troublesome Toad. As Green speculates about the success of the two books of sketches about children, the fin-de-siécle temperament was ready for a revelation of the gulf between the adult's world and the child's; and to some extent we are still part of that modern temperament which had its roots in late-Victorian days. But there are other patterns and emphases in those sketches which can be related directly to the notion of "things rightly kept hidden," although they are in fact expressed quite overtly.

Half of the eighteen sketches in The Golden Age and of the eight in Dream Days deal with one or more of four related themes: children's curiosity about adult love life, boys' curiosity about girls, children's voyeurism, and heterosexual feelings or fantasies in young boys. In "A Holiday" [The Golden Age] the narrator tells of leaving his brothers and sister to follow the summons of nature, taking the "hearty wind" for his guide:

A whimsical comrade I found him ere he had done with me. Was it in jest or with some serious purpose of his own, that he brought me plump upon a pair of lovers, silent, face to face o'er a discreet unwinking stile? As a rule this sort of thing struck me as the most pitiful tomfoolery. Two calves rubbing noses through a gate were natural and right and within the order of things; but that human beings, with salient interests and active pursuits beckoning them on from every side, could thus—! Well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face, and think on no more.

But the "magical touch in the air" causes him to regard "these fatuous ones with kindliness instead of contempt, as I rambled by, unheeded of them"—a fairly clear statement of the child's somewhat unwilling acknowledgment that sex between humans is natural.

The same narrator, describing himself at an earlier age in "The Finding of the Princess," presents an adventure in which he first fantasizes finding "the necessary Princess," and then suddenly believes he has found her in the person of a young woman "laughingly struggling to disengage her hand from the grasp of a grown-up man". He is naively open with the couple about his belief that she is a princess, and they take him into the house and give him a sumptuous meal. There is a dual perspective, and we understand that the young woman and man regard the boy with a patronizing and careless amusement. When leaving, the child sees the couple walking with arms around each others' waists down the path, and on turning for home he is "possessed" by "a wild unreasoning panic, and … sped out of the garden like a guilty thing … hounded by nameless terrors". That night he dreams of himself as a fish, thrusting "up a nose through water-lily leaves to be kissed by a rose-flushed princess". The connections among the child's feelings are left unstated, but one may feel that the sudden access of guilt and panic has to do with his afternoon's episode of voyeurism, while the concluding dream with its imagery of swimming, thrusting, and the "rose flush" hints at something more than a merely abstract desire for a "princess."

In contrast, "The Burglars" is a straightforward, amusing account of the children's taking the spooning curate and their Aunt Maria as burglars and causing them much embarrassment. The sketch opens with some speculation by the children as to what "spooning" is, and Edward (the eldest) can only conclude lamely that "it's just a thing they [adults] do, you know". Sexual curiosity is the dramatic motive of this sketch, though the denouement is mild farce, revealing the "spooners" as ridiculous. The Heimlich, the private, secret aspects of the family, is here as a part of the story's propositional content, but as in most of the other sketches it is not presented with much force and is overlaid with a tone of knowing adult irony. The strongest instances of presented emotion are "The Magic Ring," one of a group of sketches in Dream Days dealing with boys' budding interest in girls, and "Its Walls Were as of Jasper," the emotional power of which comes from its total lack of explanation.

The first of these sketches is probably the most overtly erotic. It tells of the boys' visit to a circus, during which the narrator falls in love, first with Coralie, the "Woman of the Ring,—flawless, complete, untrammelled in each subtly curving limb", and then more profoundly with Zephyrine, the Bride of the Desert, a "magnificent, fullfigured Cleopatra." As in "The Finding of the Princess," this sketch ends with the narrator dreaming, this time of Zephyrine, with the eyes of the white-limbed Coralie glimmering at them in reproach. Here we are clearly on the verge of masturbation fantasies. But "Its Walls Were as of Jasper" is much more ambiguous. The narrator is taken by his aunt (there are no parents in these books, likely a reflection of Grahame's own childhood) to a large country house where he is promptly ignored by the adults. Wandering from room to room he takes down a picture book and, after an initial disappointment that it is in a foreign language, discovers in it pictures that image some of his own fantasies. There is nothing specifically sexual, though one page on which he focuses depicts a wedding. But when discovered by his hostess, he is spanked soundly and made to suffer with the Sabbath Improver. It is never made clear what his particular crime has been, beyond the fact that he is being denied indulgence in fantasy and made to feel guilty about it. (The spanking itself is sexually ambiguous: in the text the boy's fantasies are interrupted with his own "Ow! Ow! Ow!" and the book is "ravished" from the boy's grasp by his "dressy" hostess.)

I find it most significant that Grahame took such pains to deny that The Wind in the Willows contains either problems or sex, considering that his two previous books are full of both. And there is one surprising passage in the novel which may illustrate the degree of self-deception of which he was capable. At the beginning of the second chapter, following Mole's ecstatic discovery of the river at the end of the first chapter, we are told that Rat has been swimming in the river with his friends the ducks and annoying them by diving down to tickle their chins. He has composed a five-stanza song which he calls "Ducks' Ditty." I shall quote stanzas one, four, and five:

All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!

Everyone for what he likes!
We like to be
Heads down, tails up,
Dabbling free!

High in the blue above
Swifts whirl and call—
We are down a-dabbling
Up tails all!

Assuming that Grahame had no conscious intention of slipping in an allusion which would appeal to adults' salaciousness while bypassing innocent children, this poem strikes me as a remarkable example of Victorian double-think, the ability to know something and deny it to one's consciousness simultaneously. For "uptails all" has a long history as a slang expression referring to sexual intercourse. The OED gives as its first meaning, "the name of an old song and its tune," and one has to seek pretty assiduously in that chaste dictionary to piece together the meaning that is historically primary. Even if Grahame did not know the old vulgar song, it is unlikely that he did not know Robert Herrick's poem, "Up tailes all," included in Hesperides, and in which the meaning is perfectly clear. Herrick was one of Grahame's favorite poets, and one of the four, after Shakespeare, who led the list for numbers of poems included in Grahame's idiosyncratic anthology of poems for children.

In context, the double entendre seems at first to make little sense, but referring again to my own responses and associations, and to the end of the first chapter, in which Mole is described as "emancipated" because he has "learnt to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water," I find a generalized sensuality in swimming, which amounts to being touched all over one's body, and in boating, in the alternation of struggling against the water's resistance and submitting to its force in drifting. Note also that Rat's tickling the ducks' necks is a kind of aggressive teasing of their bodies, done while he is swimming, which Rat (unlike a real water rat) does for sheer enjoyment. Not that this is much to build a full-scale interpretation on, for the sexual implications are not carried through in this chapter, as Toad soon turns up and attention is focused on him. But the very presence of the salacious allusion amounts to a kind of denial of its meaning, in the context of a book whose author guaranteed it to be "clean of the clash of sex." Putting this together with the erotic aura of chapter seven, I have to conclude that Grahame's insistence on the absence of sex is a clue to his conscious awareness of it in many of the earlier sketches about children, and at least a repressed awareness of its presence in The Wind in the Willows.

That presence is discernible through reader-response and its analysis, taken in combination with the evidence of Grahame's other works and the details of his life. One may wonder what Grahame thought of Aubrey Beardsley's title page design for Pagan Papers, showing two strange faun creatures, one, seemingly male and in human dress, looking wistfully at the other, who is naked and perfectly ambiguous sexually. Certainly there is little in Pagan Papers, apart from three of the six pieces later moved to The Golden Age, that even hints at the erotic. Beardsley may have been indulging his own preoccupations rather than actively interpreting the content of a somewhat misleadingly titled book. But sexual ambiguity is one of the feelings I find evoked by the "panic" scene of the seventh chapter of The Wind in the Willows. One way of explaining Grahame's making all of the principal characters male, animal, and without the usual animal characteristics of predatoriness or sexual need, is that he was engaging in a kind of denial which subsequently manifested itself in those two strong statements about the absence of problems and sex. It seems less useful to label the animals "phallic," as Maureen Duffy does, than to try to capture, subjectively, the dramatic and narrative feeling and tone, and to place these in relation to Grahame's life and other writings.

III

In the context of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature, Kenneth Grahame may look like something of an anomaly: a man who in the 1890s published one mild book of essays and two bestselling volumes of sketches about childhood, and who then wrote only one more book, which in the year of its appearance evoked a good deal of confusion in his former admirers because it was so different from his previous work, but which has remained the book by which he is remembered—a book not clearly either for children or adults, and which overtly resembles no other volume that we normally think of as a Victorian or Edwardian novel. Yet that book is, as Peter Green has shown, in its own way as much a transformed autobiography as David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, or The Mill on the Floss. Each of these novels and many others of the period resemble Grahame's fantasy-novel in that each has an overt content of propositional meaning which overlies a strong, though disguised, emotional content of the forbidden. If the programmatic meaning of The Wind in the Willows is the misbehavior and reform of Mr. Toad, that of David Copperfield is that David's heart must mature from its infatuation with Dora to the true love of Anges; but Murdstone and Heep have already been shown, quite overtly, to be his doubles, and there is no evidence but narrative assertion that David has really escaped the shadows of his childhood by the conclusion of the novel.

Emily Bronte is more elusive in her elaborate narrative layering, and yet the heimlich concerns of brother-sister love are to be found at the base of the overt tale of Romantic love fulfilled only in death. In a quite different way Eliot in The Mill on the Floss places the most private, familial matters at the emotional center, and yet structures the novel in terms of a moral and philosophical program which is then subverted or at least distorted by the wish fulfillment fantasy of the book's ending. With Henry James the typically Victorian programmatic content seems to disappear, and yet fantasies of the private and forbidden are admitted through other kinds of indirection: the "uncanny" mystery of The Turn of the Screw, the innocent viewpoint of the child in What Maisie Knew, or the endless talk around the subject by an elderly man "innocently" in love with the heroine in The Awkward Age.

It is not my intent to suggest that The Wind in the Willows is a universally serviceable paradigm for Victorian and Edwardian novels. For one thing, these simplified generalizations must stem in part from my own preoccupations as a critic and a person: primarily, the search for hidden meanings. But I contend that the exploration of meaning along subjective and biographical axes provides a dialectical basis for intersubjective syntheses, initially between critic and author, and potentially, if the critic's experiences bear any resemblance to others', between critic and other readers. In the area of Victorian literary domesticity, where the Heimlich so often masquerades as a synonym of the Heimisch instead of the Unheimlich (rather as Mrs. Rochester's sex-mad screams are for such a long time attributed to the placid Grace Poole), the approach may prove to be one of the most fruitful methods for recovering meanings that really matter to us.