Jacob’s Wrestling with the Angel from Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories

This article aims to trace a set of intertextual relations that originate from the Jacob and Esau episode of the Bible, notably from the climactic wrestling of Jacob with the angel. Despite the cultural distance, some defining features of this wrestling resurface – in a transmogrified form and in relation to the sphere of childhood – in Walter Pater’s The Child in the House and in Katherine Mansfield’s The Aloe and ‘Prelude’, which are themselves closely connected. This network of mythical and symbolic elements reveals its full relevance once we approach the Jacob and Esau story through the lens of C.G. Jung’s theories, notably through the book Erich Neumann (a student of Jung) devoted to it in the 1930s.