At that time he had a full beard and wore woollen hunting shirts with excessively low-cut necks, and it happened also that he not infrequently left the top button undone. When I met him in the autumn of 1859, he was a man of thirty-two – we were about the same age. It’s mostly the first-person account of Lt Glahn’s loves during that summer, but there is a short narrative from another voice at the end that shows us a little about him.

This is a story of the Nordland summer, when instead of the night nearly equal to the day, the sky blushes as the sun approaches the horizon for a kiss and a little touch before shooting back up into the air. Hamsun only explicitly mentions Pan in one short scene, but the protagonist seems modeled on him, the man who lives in nature and is sexually irresistible. Pan seems to be defined by his sexual appetite – I’ve even seen a statue of him fucking a goat, but instead of the goat standing on its legs (the more practical approach), he’s got the animal on its back, which seems to imply consent but also the idea that this is unnatural. The story of Pan is no different: He chases a girl who doesn’t want to sleep with him, she gets transformed into a reed, and he cuts a group of reeds (hoping to get her) and makes them into a musical instrument. It seems like a third of their stories are, “Fleeing from a man about to rape her, a woman is transformed into a feature of the landscape,” and another third are, “Having been raped, a woman flees from the rapist’s jealous wife and is transformed or killed.” Women’s bodies are mutable and disposable, and men are powerless to control their constant erections.

Tags age art austen bible c bronte childhood christianity class conformity dad death depression dickens divorce education ethnicity family fantasy faulkner feminism film france gay gender geo eliot god gothic happiness him history horror identity islam isolation justice ksa life language lawrence lesbian library life love magic marriage mental health misogyny mom murder music mystery mythology nature nature love north carolina politics psychology racism rape religion sex sexuality shakespeare society suicide teaching television the closet the ex united kingdom united states victorian w collins work world war i world war iiĪs I’ve been thinking of things this week, I’ve realized that there is an astonishing amount of rape in Greek mythology.

Pan de knut hamsun