Mind matters: Psychosurgical horror in The Great God Peter Pan and Peter and Wendy

Abstract

This article locates a connection between Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy beyond the texts’ focus on the mythic and malevolent Pagan god. Both Machen and Barrie express interest in the brain as a physiological region that can be explored, mapped and manipulated. This interest, I argue, emerges from late-nineteenth-century neurological experiments, especially the psychosurgical procedures performed by Gottfried Burckhardt in the 1880s. Although Burckhardt’s operations were widely criticized, and his results generally discredited, the practice of psychosurgery continued to be debated in medical communities. In The Great God Pan and Peter and Wendy, forms of psychosurgery unleash murderous monstrosities, thus implicating, to varying degrees, Dr Raymond and Mrs Darling, the surgeons of this horror.