Abstract:The enduring terror of The Great God Pan has been attributed to various factors: degeneration, deep time, the abhuman subject, neurological theories, and sexual mysteries. Connecting and expanding on these analyses, I investigate the terror derived from philosophical and juridical conceptions of consent implicit in contemporaneous debates and legislative changes about vivisection, age of consent, and regulation of venereal disease. While late Victorian periodical and juridical discourse assumes there is safety and justice in the individual’s right and capacity to make decisions about what happens to one’s body, The Great God Pan, I argue, dramatically disquiets these urgent expectations. By compounding an explicitly justified medical invasion with an implied sexual assault, Machen’s tale dramatizes the unsettling indeterminacy of consent at a time when its legal definition has supposedly been fixed. Ultimately, I demonstrate how consent’s hollowness is amplified to terrifying effect in the “suicidal mania” of the main narrative.

中文翻译：

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“她的生命是我的，按我认为合适的方式使用”：亚瑟·梅钦 (Arthur Machen) 的《大神盘》中同意的恐惧

摘要：大神盘的持久恐怖归因于多种因素：堕落、深时、非人类主体、神经学理论和性奥秘。结合并扩展这些分析，我调查了在有关活体解剖、同意年龄和性病监管的同时期辩论和立法变更中隐含的同意的哲学和法律概念所产生的恐怖。虽然维多利亚晚期的期刊和司法话语假设个人在决定自己身体会发生什么的权利和能力中存在安全和正义，但我认为，《大神盘》戏剧性地使这些紧迫的期望感到不安。通过将明确合理的医疗入侵与隐含的性侵犯混合在一起，Machen 的故事戏剧化了在同意的法律定义已经确定的时候令人不安的不确定性。最后，我将展示在主要叙事的“自杀狂热”中，同意的空洞是如何被放大到可怕的效果的。