The thing about Peter Pan is that it’s weird. This is what surprised me most when I read it on the cusp of age 14–what a sad, strange, adult story it is. In many ways I think this story is better or more interesting than what’s written. Peter Pan the novel undoes much of what I thought was interesting about the ambiguities of the play, unfortunately, but there is an energy here that audiences felt immediately. Barrie clearly spent a lot of time around young boys, and he loved them, and of course he was one at some point. The story is from a young boy’s point of view, even though the boys turn out to be the most boring characters. The pirates are pirates as turn-of-the-century English boys imagined them, and so are the Indians, and so are the girls. Of these, the pirates are certainly the least objectionable.
It is very frustrating that Wendy, the character who changes the most over the course of the play, is always playing house. Always talking the boys into playing house with her. Always yearning after Peter so that I’m confused about her age here. Mrs. Darling wanted desperately to be a mother and enjoys it above all else, so I guess no surprise that’s Wendy’s attitude when she plays pretend. But the fact that Mrs. Darling allows her to return to Never Land to do Peter’s spring cleaning–at which permission she rejoices–is very disappointing. Barry never liked playing house, and he vents his frustration in Wendy’s single-minded persistence, a character with the annoying desires of all the women in Barry’s life. But that essentialism is unfair, most poignantly to girl children.
The genius of Peter Pan is Peter Pan. “I am youth, I am joy,” he says, the boy who won’t grow up, who can’t be beaten. The moments of insight into his psychology, Barrie’s apparition of boyhood, are always the most interesting and hit the hardest. The fact that he might BE Captain Hook after all. The fact that he’s been abandoned and replaced by his mother. The moment when he realizes–what? that maybe he risks getting too fond of Wendy?–when he sees Mrs. Darling cry, and chooses to open the window again, not to make them believe that what happened to him has happened to them as well. There is something crucial in the casual violence of make-believe, never understanding consequences. Except for the moments when maybe he does. Youth and joy cannot be beat, except of course they are, regularly. This is the trick of Peter Pan, who flies back and forth between make-believe and reality.
When I read Peter Pan for the first time, I was leaving childhood behind–really already had–and I was not happy about it. I was clinging to the shreds. I saw no appeal whatsoever in the narratives of adolescence as they were offered to me (Peter Pan certainly did nothing to change that–poor Wendy!). I was nostalgic already, a young 14 and an old one. Mostly I didn’t want things to change and they had anyway. I was on the upside of a rough year. But I do think Peter Pan made me dimly aware of the darker side of pretending not to grow up. That there are sacrifices involved in stasis as well as change. That to live might be the greater adventure.
This was something Barrie understood very well, as it ruined many of his adult relationships. “Boys can’t love,” he claimed of himself and his miserable marriage, and I think most scholars have concluded that he just couldn’t get it up. But Peter Pan is so clear about the real cruelty of children, that they take love as their due but are careless of their parents’ feelings, and I think perhaps Barrie’s self-diagnosed trouble had to do with this inability to take responsibility for other people’s emotional lives. Not the fun part of growing up, Jim, but it does have its rewards. Peter Pan feels to me like an unfinished story, which taps into that great sadness of change but never quite makes it to the other side. Never quite grasps what Wendy, eldest daughter, could tell you about flying back and forth between Neverland and the nursery.