Peter Pan Man and Friends

Peter Pan Man and Friends HUM 3085: Britain Through the Looking Glass Spring 2010 Professors Perdigao and Ruane February 12-17, 2010

Annie Leibovitz’s “Where You Never Have to Grow Up”

More History! (sigh) 1867—brother David dies at age 13 from fall on ice while skating, early tragedy “Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much” 1902—The Little White Bird, inclusion of Peter Pan story, told by male adult to young children, issues of “children’s literature”: London bachelor befriends young couple’s boy David, takes him for walks in the Kensington Gardens (as Barrie does with Davies boys), tells story of Peter Pan who travels there at night (Maimie in this version, not Wendy) 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (final text in 1928), 1906 Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens as stories from The Little White Bird, 1911 Peter and Wendy (what we know as Peter Pan) and statue as icon, shift in title, shift in significance Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984)

“oh, the cleverness of me!” Power, control, dominance How is power depicted in the novel? What is the place of/for make-believe? Gender issues? First paragraphs: Mr. and Mrs. Darling (5-6), tied to class (with Nana [7]), Wendy and Peter, mother “tidying up her children’s minds” (8), remembers Peter (10) What does “growing up” entail? “You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end” (5) Forgetting to fly Memory, no history, no stories (lost boys [29], forgets unfairness [82]); “Peter had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all” (76)

Frame-tales The place of fairy tales? Creation of fairies (27); Tink not “all bad” (46); killing adults with breath (99) Adventure? Death? Death as adventure? (84) Civility/adventure, “have tea first?” (107) Narrative strategy—power and authority as control over text “If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t)” (5); “Will they reach the nursery in time?” (34); “We ought to use the pluperfect”; “Let us pretend to lie here” (47); “Which of these adventures shall we choose?” (72) Reassurance of “happy ending” (34); question which will win? (50)

The Other in/of Peter Pan Notions of civility “Savages,” race issues—construction of Victorian notions of race, class, gender Slightly “remembers the days before he was lost, with their manners and customs” (48), teaches Peter how to be the father, “Great White Father” (88) Central crisis of story? Being motherless, unsafe (54) With Peter, no formal name, no proper address (24-25) Wendy as mother but “only a girl” with “no real experience” (65) “I am in a story. Hurrah, I am in a story, Nibs” (96), of growing up

From Alice to Peter “Barrie’s own Peter Pan. . . has no problem with ambiguity. It seethes with characters and objects which are neither one thing nor the other, or two things at once: a man pretends to be a dog, a dog pretends to be a woman, a little girl pretends to be a mother, Peter Pan pretends to be Captain Hook, a thimble pretends to be a kiss.” “This is the logic that allows one to be big and small, safe and in danger, all at once, and which, once Barrie had captured it and given it a voice, allowed him to play with age in Peter Pan as Lewis Carroll plays with size in Alice.” Shulman, Nicola. “Eternal Child: J. M. Barrie’s Double Vision.” Times Literary Supplement 5306 (10 Dec. 2004): 14-15. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 124. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

To Freud? Psychoanalytic readings Connections to Alice? Unconscious—dream-world Id, Ego, Superego Oedipus Complex Death drive Eros

To Freud? Text as “a childish dream, a psychodrama of the unconscious” Begins with “the surreal universe of a child’s uncertain psyche” and leads to the island and “the real dream, the fulfillment of a range of childish wishes, including Oedipal sex, lust, flight, murder, and the capacity to transcend both Death and Time.” Trajectory of story from “the recognizably everyday world of a middle-class household in Victorian London to the unconscious universe of the Neverland, and then back again to the waking reality of the closing scenes” Ending—back at the nursery where “all the conflicting psychic tensions presented on the island have been pleasantly resolved--at least for now” And yet Freud persists: “Barrie emphasizes that each new generation of children must undertake the pilgrimage afresh, an essential condition for maturity. He looks ahead four generations and comments: ‘and thus it will go on, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.’9”

To Freud? “Barrie’s Neverland then is an unpredictably predictable universe to which each dreaming child can fly. It is a place where the inhabitants--Wendy and Tinker Bell, specifically--can die and yet survive death; where aging and growth can be transcended; where children may marry, and kill bloodthirsty pirates; where there are wild beasts of prey, and savages dangerous and worshipful by turns, and where half-perceived hints of adult sexuality and licentiousness abound. It is, in other words, an authentic vision of the Freudian id.11” Child’s superego still in formation, persistence of id, free from adult intervention, “heartless” as free from conscience Egan, Michael. “The Neverland of Id: Barrie, Peter Pan, and Freud.” Children’s Literature 10 (1982): 37-55. Rpt. in Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 124. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

Back to Victorianisms “Peter Pan, as a ghost whose first appearance is announced as ‘uncanny,’ is the sign of anxiety within the play. Beneath the familiarity of middle-class life, in the opening and closing scenes, and the culture of children’s play evident in the adventures in Never Land is the anxiety aroused by the shifts in masculine identity in relation to modern life, including the new technologies of the workplace and the demise of Empire. Barrie’s response is anxious and nostalgic, the desire to return to an imagined past of stability that, if it ever existed, is impossible to recuperate, a point marked by the setting of the play in ‘Never Land.’” Middle class world in Bloomsbury, playing at class and gender roles—children playing at being parents Nostalgia for middle class life at the end of act one and in Never Land Lost boys as dead—ghosts “In Never Land, the parental figures -- Mr and Mrs Darling -- are left behind, and so Barrie abandons the critique of the middle class that he seemed to offer in the first act. Never Land, as its name implies, doesn't exist, save in its imaginative rendering within the constraints of the proscenium arch. It is a place of play within a play. The terms of Never Land are nostalgic and gendered.”

Masculinity in Crisis? Hook as Oscar Wilde, dandy, trials in 1895, sexuality in question “he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanour, showed him one of a different caste from his crew” (50). “Dandy effeminacy signalled class, far more than sexuality. The newly dominant middle class justified itself by claiming manly purity, purpose, and responsibility, and identified the leisure class, correspondingly, with effeminate idleness and immorality. In the face of this manoeuvre, there were two alternatives for the wealthy and those who sought to seem wealthy. One was to attempt to appear useful and good; the other was to repudiate middle-class authority by displaying conspicuous idleness, immortality, and effeminacy; in other words, by being a dandy. (38)” (qtd. in Wilson) Theatrical convention—actor playing Hook plays Mr. Darling

Hook in Crisis? Dying like “English gentlemen” (121) Eton’s traditions “still clung to him like garments” (117) Questions who Pan is— “who and what art thou?” (130); reply is “nonsense” thinks it is not good form Pan defines self as youth and joy Not “wholly unheroic” (132)

Femininity in Crisis? “The fantasy circulating around the ethos of Never Land rehearses that of the public schools, which were, as Jonathan Rutherford has suggested, implicated in establishing codes of manliness associated with a virtuous Englishness that justified imperialism. He suggests that ‘public schools sought to inculcate four qualities in their boys’: ‘sport,’ ‘readiness,’ ‘character,’ and ‘religion’ (15). . . In Never Land, the culture of the public school is rehearsed in the separation of the boys from family and, particularly, the influence of mother.” “Although Wendy desires Peter, she is reticent about acting; not Tinker Bell, who tries to cut Wendy from Peter’s affections so she can have him to herself. Tinker Bell is brazen and, as Peter remarks, ‘not very polite. [...] She is quite a common girl, you know. She is called Tinker Bell because she mends the fairy pots and kettles’ (100). It would seem that even the fairy world is marked by class and that Tinker Bell, who is working-class, is impure and suspect in ways that are consistent with the middle class’s imagining of the working class.”

Crisis of Modernity Wendy as purity, in white, in contrast to Tinker Bell as coloured light, Tiger Lily; “common fairy” (29) “To state what at this juncture must be patently obvious, Peter Pan is a fable of modernity, anxiously negotiating industrial technologies that produced a middle class predicated on instability and which encoded impossible roles for men and women. Given the circulating ideologies of manliness that involved notions of their agency, of being patriarchal masters in their immediate households and in that enterprise of nation predicated on a lexis of ‘family,’ middle-class men at the turn of the twentieth century seem to have been denied any actual way of becoming ‘real’ men. The evolution of industrial capital inscribed their failure. But no less did it regulate middle-class women by locating them as asexual, pure figures whose ‘natural’ inclinations to maternity became the sign of the inherent virtue of whiteness. Mr Darling may be ‘really a good man as breadwinners go,’ but the implication is that ‘goodness’ is accessible only to a middle-class woman like Mrs Darling.” Wilson, Ann. “Hauntings: anxiety, technology, and gender in Peter Pan (1).” Modern Drama 43.4 (2000): 595+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

Happy Endings? Father changes roles—from Pan as Great White Father to father as Nana (137), as “quixotic” From recognition of being inside of a story (hurrah) to retelling the story once they leave Neverland critique of behavior with children (135); at end, moral condemnation of children Power in telling, retelling, Wendy as storyteller (95), revision of story with fairies, kill off grown ups (99), then tells Jane Control death— “if you believe” (114), clap Power leaves them, no longer believe (145); Wendy cannot fly As circle—Jane replaces Wendy, always returns, death but here avoidance in generations

Preserving Innocence? “Peter is a prehistoric creature. Since he is exempt from history and time, death is meaningless to him. He must lose everyone and everything he knows, but he need never remember the loss. To Peter death seems only ‘an awfully big adventure’; therefore, he remembers nothing, not even Wendy.” “To remember is, in this novel, to be an adult. The memories of the other children are somewhat fluid: Peter’s alone is totally unreliable, and, though this saves him much pain, this is also the source of his heartlessness. When Wendy is astonished that Peter does not remember Captain Hook, Peter can say grandly, ‘I forget them after I kill them.’ He also asks, ‘Who is Tinker Bell?’ and such insouciance, likewise, grates when we meet it in other contexts, as in the Spartan epitaph ‘Mrs. Darling was now dead and forgotten.’ Exempt from time, and its burden of an irrevocable past, Peter is likewise exempt from remorse; as his final meeting with Wendy demonstrates, to be without memory is to be without a heart.”

Preserving Innocence? “Peter’s heartlessness is a consequence of his rejection of the adult world, a world devoured by time. We sympathize with the adults in Barrie's novel because time takes everything from them, as it does from us, and so makes them like ourselves. Hook is, for this reason, something of a tragic antagonist in the novel. If Peter is the archetypal child, Hook is certainly the archetypal adult, for he is obsessed with time, as grotesquely symbolized by the alarm clock in the crocodile which pursues him to his death. ‘Terribly alone,’ cursed with acute self-consciousness and the knowledge of his failure to live up to his ideals, Hook is also obsessed with good form, the lost grace and innocence of childhood which Peter cannot help possessing.” “One can find a heart only by leaving Neverland, and this is the consolation Barrie offers us for the loss of Paradise. . . Hook and Mr. Darling, because they cannot leave childhood behind, cannot find hearts. Barrie contends that it is only in the acceptance of time, and of loss, and of the risks of love, that a heart is to be found.”

Back to the Garden “So Barrie’s novel is perfectly frank about the fact that childhood is a lost paradise, but he also tells us that it may be a paradise well lost. In this he resembles Milton and the great romantic poets ... It is this sense of the felix culpa, this awareness that one must lose Paradise in order to find love, that balances the nostalgia for childhood in Peter Pan and make the novel so much richer than its partisans and detractors alike are apt to realize.” Blackburn, William. “‘Peter Pan’ and the Contemporary Adolescent Novel.” Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Children’s Literature Association (1982): 47-53. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Gerard J. Senick. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

Peter Pan Man and Friends