Diana's Mirror: The Reflective Surface of Frazer's The Golden Bough

This essay takes issue with the commonplace stereotype of Frazer as a desk-bound, culturally purblind pedant, and stresses instead the buoyant versatility of both his temperament and his work. Taking its cue from the multitude of recorded reactions to The Golden Bough—literary, academic, and popular—it contends that the plethora of these responses is grounded in the sometimes contradictory nature of the text itself. Time and time again, Frazer floats a theory (or sometimes a range of theories) which he then proceeds to undermine with the cutting thrust of his examples. Reconciliation is offered—where it is offered at all—through the nuanced flexibility of his style, at once skeptical and romantic, ironic yet warm. The end result of this suppleness is to set us, his readers, free. Fundamentally, therefore, in reading Frazer, we are in effect reading ourselves.