Pan in the Alps
This chapter focuses on The Hedgehog, an autobiographical novella by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) that straddles the division between children’s and adult literature and exposes an adult’s stake in a child’s connection to antiquity. The plot concerns a young girl living in the Swiss Alps who has been taught by her mother to see the world through the lens of mythology. Thoughts shaped by this teaching allow her to fulfill her mother’s hopes for an end to class division (as when she identifies a woodcutter’s son with the god Pan) and, in the wake of World War I, to international conflict. At the same time, H.D. evokes the mythic paradigm of Demeter and Persephone to allow for a daughter’s independence of her mother, as well as the child reader’s independence of the adult author.