No. 66 - Peter Pan

Hello! 

I've started a new routine at home, like many of you probably have, and Tuesday is my day for blogging. Hopefully I will be able to get hold of a lot of the books digitally and can continue to write a new post once a week for the time being. Maybe, I can even keep this routine up when things go back to normal! 

This week's book is in fact a play! We haven't had one of those yet! It's J.M. Barrie's fantastical tale, Peter Pan. The play was originally devised by Barrie as a way of amusing some boys he knew, the Llewellyns. If you've ever seen Finding Neverland, you'll know about the relationship Barrie had with these boys and their mother. If you haven't seen this film, I suggest you watch it, it's brilliant! Anyway, although the play came first, Barrie first published the story as a novel for children called Peter and Wendy in 1911, and later in 1928 the play was published, and has been amusing audiences across the world ever since!

Peter, the Lost Boys, Wendy and Captain Hook are a well know set of characters in children's literature. Of course made all the more popular by our friend Walt Disney! I'm not going to moan about Walt this time though as I've never actually seen the Disney Peter Pan (no gasping please!). Instead I'm going to talk to you about the version I know, the play, the original tale of Peter and Wendy. I've never read the novelisation of the play, but I might after this. You can read it for free on the super Project Gutenberg website. Maybe I'll read it and write another post comparing the book and the play. The Project Gutenberg website is great. You can read loads of out of copyright classics online or download them as ebooks for free. 

Now, during my degree Peter Pan was one of the play texts we studied, and my word there is a lot more to it than you expect! At first glance it seems to be a story of childhood vs adulthood, of growing up and loosing your belief in magic. In the famous scene where Tinkerbell is dying Peter Pan asks the audience to save her life by clapping if they believe in fairies. Here the entire audience, adults and children alike, are holding the fate of the character in their hands, literally. A critic once said that more often than not it was the adults who stood up during this scene, clapping furiously. Barrie is inviting them to embrace their childhood again, and the magic of believing in magic. In that moment, and indeed throughout the play, we are asked to suspend our disbelief, and it is interesting to see how far this stretches in adults and children. As we know, it is much easier  for children to believe and we see this is so many children's books. There is always a negative stance on adulthood, and how adults view the world. It is often suggested that adults grow out of believing in the fantastic, and this is a theme found in Peter Pan. However, instead of creating a closed world Barrie encouraged adults to relive their childhood fantasies, rather than shutting them out. Adults are as much allowed to look at Neverland as children are. In fact it has been said that Peter Pan was predominately written for adults, for this exact reason. This claim is backed up by the fact that the characters had already appeared in one of Barrie's novels for adults The White Bird. 

Once you start digging a bit deeper with this play you begin to notice the characters rather than the story. The story itself is muddled, confusing at times, and seemingly a lot happens with no real purpose. Pan is trying to kill Hook, Hook is trying to kill Pan, but it is never truly explained why. There are some fights, and then everyone flies home again, except stubborn Peter. It has been suggested that things never resolve themselves in Neverland because Neverland is not a real place. There are no consequences, they can do what they like. You feel like you've stumbled into a children's game that only makes real sense to those involved. 

Once we ignore the plot, we can start to look more closely at the characters, and this is where it gets interesting! Peter Pan, the boy who refuses to grow up, is a mythical character. Is he human? Is he a fairy? We are never sure. He famously says 'To die will be an awfully big adventure" suggesting that for him death is of no consequence and implies that maybe he is immortal. Peter, like Neverland, is made up and so anything can happen. Captain Hook on the other hand has a very real reminder of his mortality in the shape of the crocodile that has swallowed a clock! The creature ate Hook's hand and Hook is convinced that the crocodile would like to eat the rest of him. The ticking of the clock inside the crocodile's stomach can be heard every time the crocodile approaches Hook, like a ticking time bomb, a reminder that eventually Hook's time will be up because he is a mere mortal! Interestingly, in most productions of Peter Pan, the actor playing Mr Darling (the children's father), also plays Captain Hook (think of Jason Isaacs in the 2003 Peter Pan film). This double role reinforces the idea of Hook as mortal. In fact, is Hook actually Mr Darling? One of my theories is that Neverland is in fact an elaborate make-believe game played within the nursery. Peter Pan is a symbol for the Darling children's childhood, and his conflict with Hook or Mr Darling is about the way the children are growing up. The crocodile is a metaphor for their mortality, whilst Hook's need to defeat Pan, or childhood, is Mr Darling's ambition that his children will grow up to be successful adults. 

There is another theory that has been put forth many times, which will change the way you view this children's story forever. Some critics have suggested that Peter Pan is in fact a retelling of the Oedipus story, where the son tries to kill the father so he can marry the mother. In terms of this story, Peter Pan can be seen as the son, Hook the father and Wendy the mother. There is an extraordinary amount of emphasis placed on the figure of the mother in Peter Pan, and this Freudian reading of the story could explain why. Peter's main purpose seems to be to attack Hook at all eventualities, suggesting that if Hook were the father figure (he is the double of Mr Darling remember) Peter seems pretty intent on bumping him off. As for Wendy, she is portrayed as the mother very early on. In the first scene of the play she is playing at being her own mother with her younger brother John. Then once Peter arrives she becomes his mother, and in Neverland she is the Lost Boys' mother too. Despite being mother to all, Peter is very possessive of Wendy. This could be suggestive of an Oedipus complex. However, when Wendy asks him what his feelings towards her are (and she does this many times!) he always replies 'you are my mother', suggesting he has nothing but familial feelings for Wendy. 

I'm not sure how far I follow the Oedipal theory when it comes to Peter Pan, but it is interesting to explore these critical theories and use them to inform our reading of something that seems, on the surface, just a fantastical play for children. For me, the most interesting aspects of the analysis lie in the doubling of characters, and the theories surrounding the themes of childhood and growing up. I hope this has been of interest to some of you, I've certainly enjoyed writing it. It's not often now that I get to do a critical review of a text. Maybe I'll try and do more! 

Thanks for reading, L x

Next week, I'll be looking at Oliver Jeffer's picture book The Way Back Home.