Authors: J. M. Barrie,Jack Zipes
Though Barrie wrote a scenario for a silent film of
Peter Pan
and the short story “The Blot on Peter Pan” in 1926, and though he was to continue to doctor and revise the play
Peter Pan
until he published the full text in 1928, there is a sense that he wanted to provide definitive closure to the story with the publication of the prose novel in 1911: Peter goes on living in this work, while Wendy will die. And even though Wendy will die, her daughter and their daughters return to the immortal Peter. He will never be without her and her offspring, just as we are never without some version of
Peter Pan.
The “definitive” novel is the most complicated and sophisticated of all the versions of
Peter Pan
, and though it may have been directed in part at young readers, it is clearly a testament to Sylvia and written primarily for adults. It is
not
fiction for children. There are too many in-jokes, asides, allusions, and intrusions made with the wink of an eye for children to fully grasp what is occurring throughout the novel. This is not to say that adult readers can entirely comprehend the meaning of Peter and Neverland, but it is apparent that the narrator of the novel is sharing his story with adults and, given his intimate knowledge of children and their world—something he tends to lord over his readers—he has made it his mission to explain children to adults:
I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.
After commenting that each child has a Neverland that possesses its own unique qualities, the narrator continues:
[O]n the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever breaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.
Paradoxically, it is the impossibility of capturing the fantastic experiences that Barrie himself sought to capture or recapture through the invention of an omniscient narrator who takes delight in playing with his readers and imparting his vast knowledge about children. This reading experience, which Barrie offers to adults, is in direct contrast to the experience that he had already provided them in his drama. Whereas the play, which can be equally enjoyed by children and adults, is demonstrative and filled with action that needs no detailed explanation, the novel, which is difficult for young readers to enjoy and at times ponderous, is explanatory and serves as a commentary to the play, with which, Barrie had to assume, most readers were—and still are—familiar.
Peter and Wendy
is thus an anti-fairy tale that seeks to explicate mystery, whereas fairy tales simply display magic and mystery. It is a self-help book written by a doctoring author for those adults who have lost touch with their imagination and need to regain it through a re-introduction to children’s imaginative play. It is a prosaic novel intended to rekindle the light of a possible childhood experience that the narrator wants to preserve for eternity, or at least for as long as he lives—otherwise he would not tell it and explain to us so many details about the figment of his conceived notion of children’s imaginations.
In her brilliant analysis of the Peter Pan writings and cultural phenomenon, Jacqueline Rose maintains that “what Barrie’s
Peter and Wendy
demonstrates too clearly for comfort is that language is not innocence (word and thing), but rather a taking
of sides one word against the other. In
Peter and Wendy
, the line between the narrator and his characters is not neat and/or invisible; it is marked out as a division, not to say opposition, or even war” (
The Case of Peter Pan
, 72–3). Rose argues that the narrator is never sure and assumes different roles as servant, author, and child. Moreover, Barrie himself, as author, was trying to bring together two different strands of children’s fiction that collided with one another in his novel: the adventure story for boys and the domestic and fairy story for girls. Barrie was unable to weave these strands together satisfactorily; rather, he revealed more about the impossibility of defining children and childhood than he realized. “
Peter and Wendy
was…the response to a demand for a ‘classic,’ the definitive written text for children. Something definitive is, however, exactly what Barrie’s text failed to provide—either inside the book (the sliding of the narrator) or outside the book (all the other, more simple, versions which were to follow)” (
The Case of Peter Pan
, 85).
While there is a great deal of validity to Rose’s arguments and many other interpretative comments in her book, she makes a major mistake in considering
Peter and Wendy
a novel for children, that is, fiction for children. Though Barrie uses multiple narrative devices and shifts the perspective, the “doctoring” narrator is
always
addressing other adults as implicit readers of this novel, just as he does in
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
And, though there is what Rose calls “slippage,” that is, though the narrator is slippery, Barrie, the author, is not. He is clearly in command of the characters, plot, and setting. He knows what he wants to present and does not hesitate to present an image of imaginative play by children.
Of course, there are multiple ways to interpret
Peter and Wendy
, and Rose’s interpretation is one of the most illuminating. However, some critics have astutely pointed out that the novel and the play reflect male anxiety at the end of the nineteenth century, when modernization was bringing about great changes in the family and workplace. Others have examined the nostalgic longing for an idyllic past of carefree boyhood, or the obvious unresolved oedipal relationship represented by the
mother role played by Wendy. None have viewed the novel, however, as a meta-commentary on the proper roles of fathers and mothers and as a handbook for adults on how imaginative play must be safeguarded for children so that they can evolve into responsible adults.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter Pan
, which predated
Peter and Wendy
, were incomplete works because they did not explain to adults what was missing in the stories and what the adults were missing in raising children. Therefore, Barrie wrote the “definitive” text to fix the words and notions of childcare—to define our view of Peter and his friends, and especially of Peter and his special virginal friend. Instead of viewing Peter Pan as merely an escapist figure, the eternal adolescent, the unfulfilled son, I would argue that Peter in the narrator’s version is mainly a rebel who consciously rejects the role of adulthood in conventional society because it has failed him. Adults have failed Peter. The educational system is repugnant. In some respects, Barrie’s work reflects his own struggle to conceive a different type of parent and familial relations that he missed during his youth. Therefore, parents and potential parents must be re-educated so that they will grant their children the freedom to fly off into their own realms and receive the nurturing that they want and need. It is through Peter’s help, for instance, that Wendy learns to become a mother, and it is through Wendy that Peter learns what it means to be a father. In Neverland, Peter does indeed become a surrogate father, while Wendy gains a strong sense of her maternal instincts. The entrance and passage through Neverland is a training ground for all children who have the good fortune to be allowed to release their imaginations. This construct enables Barrie to postulate a theory of mothering and fathering in which he strongly believed, even though he never had his own children. In
Peter and Wendy
he could take complete ownership of the child characters to show how a proper parent should treat his or her offspring. Viewed from this vantage point, Barrie’s sublimated neurosis has broader socio-psychological ramifications in his work, for Peter continually returns to children in the conventional world to guide them through experiences that enable
them to love, understand trust, and be loved in a conflicted but nurturing environment. Neverland thus retains a Utopian value as part of what Herbert Marcuse in
Eros and Civilization
designated the romantic “great refusal” to participate in a society bent on “instrumentalizing the imagination.”
There is a price to be paid for being a rebel. The narrator tells us that Peter “had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.” This is in the next to last chapter, and the play, too, echoes his seemingly lonely position. But the novel does not end this way. In the final chapter Peter is not alone, and the narrator explains the importance of flights into fantasy and mothering. In fact, Wendy is the one who looks out the window in envy as her daughter Jane flies off with Peter to Neverland. The narrator tells us that Margaret, Jane’s daughter, will do the same, “and so it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.”
As we know, children are not gay and innocent and heartless. As we know, we cannot generalize about children and childhood. But Barrie is not afraid to generalize, and he does this by creating a confident and wise narrator. The narrator speaks almost as if he were a professional child and family psychologist and knows all there is to know about children and their imaginative realms and the necessity to keep fantasy alive.
Once he created Peter Pan, Barrie wanted his readers and viewers to keep returning to him and to all the writings about him. He did not mind the various spectacles made out of his symbolic figure, and probably would not have minded all the films and artifacts that have followed because he had fixed the story as history and commentary in
Peter and Wendy.
Ironically, Peter, who declares in the play and in the novel, “I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things…. I don’t want to be a man,” has been brought to schools beginning with an authorized school edition of the novel in 1915 (and countless school productions of the play) and is known more through adulterated versions than through the definitive edition. The imaginative spirit that Barrie created to oppose institutionalization
became institutionalized and commercialized throughout the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Peter Pan, like his creator, is an intrusive and unpredictable figure who keeps returning to doctor our reality and to cart away those people still willing to believe in the power of fairies.
Margaret Ogilvy.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1896.
Sentimental Tommy.
London: Cassell, 1896.
Tommy and Grizel.
London: Cassell, 1900.
Dear Brutus.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923.
Mary Rose.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924.
Barrie, J. M.
The Little White Bird.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902.
—–.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906.
O’Connor, Daniel S., ed.
Peter Pan Keepsake.
The story of
Peter Pan
retold from Mr. Barrie’s fantasy, foreword by W. T. Stead. London: Chatto and Windus, 1907.
—–.
The Peter Pan Picture Book.
Illustrated by Alice B. Woodward. London: Bell, 1907.
Herford, O.
The Peter Pan Alphabet.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907.
Drennan, G. D.
Peter Pan, His Book, His Pictures, His Career, His Friends.
London: Mills and Boon, 1909.
Barrie, J. M.
Peter and Wendy.
Illustrated by F. D. Bedford. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911.
O’Connor, Daniel S.
The Story of Peter Pan
, a reading book for
use in schools, illustrated by Alice B. Woodward. London: Bell, 1912.
Chase, Pauline.
Peter Pan in the Real Never Never Land.
London: Horace Cox, 1913.
Edmonstron, Maysie.
The Duke of Christmas Daisies and Other Fairy Plays.
Adapted from
The Little White Bird
of Sir J. M. Barrie. London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1914.
Barrie, J. M.
Peter Pan and Wendy
, the story of
Peter Pan
extracted from
Peter Pan and Wendy
, illustrated by F. D. Bedford, authorised school edition. London: Henry Frowde, Hodder and Stoughton, 1915.
Hassall, J.
The Peter Pan Painting Book.
London: Lawrence and Jellicoe, 1915.
O’Connor, Daniel S.
The Story of Peter Pan for Little People
, simplified from Daniel O’Connor’s story of Sir J. M. Barrie’s fairy play, illustrated by Alice B. Woodward. London: Bell, 1919.
Byron, May.
The Little Ones’ Peter Pan and Wendy
, retold for the nursery, illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925.
—–.
Peter Pan and Wendy
, retold for boys and girls, illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925.
Barrie, J. M. “The Blot on Peter Pan,” in:
The Plying Carpet.
Ed. Cynthia Asquith. London: Partridge, 1926.
—–.
Peter Pan
,
or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up
in
The Plays of J. M. Barrie.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928.