Sir James Barrie - Peter Pan

"Peter Pan was a children's classic before it was a children's book." (Rose 66)

Barrie always either refused to acknowledge or denied his authorship of Peter Pan (Rose 75). He only wrote it as a book after it had become a "classic" through the dramatic version and after several other versions had been published. In the dedication to the play, Barrie writes: “I have no recollection of having written it”; rather, he claims that it was made by his observations of the Davies’ boys play: “You had played it until you tired of it, and tossed it in the air and gored it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed some of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib.”

Barrie was the youngest son (ninth child) of a weaver in Kirriemuir, Scotland. When he was six, Barrie's 13-year-old brother David died in an ice-skating accident, devastating his mother (whose own mother had died when she was 8). David had been his mother's favorite and the focus for parental ambitions. His mother spent over a year in bed grieving over the death, until an older sister told young James to go in "and say to her that she still had another boy" (Lurie 120); James then devoted the rest of his life to replacing his dead brother. His mother shared with him stories of her own childhood, which captured his imagination; much of this experience underlies PP.

Barrie read avidly as a child and attended Edinburgh University, receiving a master's degree. As he grew to adulthood, however, Barrie became emotionally stunted, preferring to play at boyish games with children over adult pleasures. He was also physically stunted, just over 5 feet tall and very boyish in appearance well into his 40s. He did marry, to an actress (Mary Ansell) whom he met when she appeared in one of his plays; but the marriage ended in divorce after 15 years with his wife telling her friends that it had never been consummated (Frey and Griffith 183). [However, Carpenter (174) says there is no evidence to support claims of Barrie's impotence. Whom to believe?] Carpenter, however, suggests that to some extent Barrie's childishness may be only a role, one of many that he delighted in playing, primarily to manipulate people and to generate material for his writings (174). Even his marriage may have been an elaborate role-playing.

Barrie invented some of PP's adventures in play with the Llewelyn Davies boys in London. He first met the boys while walking his enormous St. Bernard in Kensington Gardens, befriending them and insinuating himself into the family. He developed a crush on their mother, which she evidently tolerated but which irritated the boys' father. PP was first performed at Christmas 1904, seven years after the relationship with the Davies began. Carpenter notes that the play became an annual Christmas event in London immediately after its first production. PP is the only writing Barrie ever did specifically for children; despite a preoccupation with his own childhood, his other plays and works were directed to an adult audience. Most of this other work has ceased to be read.

In 1906, Arthur Davies was diagnosed with cancer and died within the year, leaving his wife and five sons destitute. Barrie took over financial responsibility for the family and became even more closely entwined in their lives. However, as the boys aged, they became increasingly embarrassed by his juvenile behavior and, one by one, they came to resent him even as he provided for their maintenance and education. In 1910 the mother died, leaving Barrie to adopt them de facto. World War I further devastated the family, leaving one boy dead, another disabled, and all of them too old to play with Barrie any more. He returned to writing with one last play, Mary Rose, which Lurie calls "a final and darker version of PP" (133).

Barrie "was able not merely to instruct or entertain but to impregnate the collective mind of his audience. And if he did, indeed, possess this power, which is precisely the power of the great fairy tales, criticism may as well throw its pen away, for then he is immortal by election and there is no more to be said about it." (TLS, 1937, quoted in Rose, 111)

Peter Davies, one of the boys whose friendship contributed to Barrie's writing of PP, called the book "a terrible masterpiece"; since it has come to be regarded as a classic, we have forgotten that which is terrible about it (Frey and Griffith, 181).

It is ironic that this kind of whimsy should be considered especially appropriate to children's literature, when children generally show less appreciation for it than adults. It is the rhetoric of lovers, stage magicians, and jolly uncles. Children don't indulge in it themselves very much, and they don't particularly seek it out in books. (Frey and Griffith 187).

The novel/play brings together three central forms of children's literature in the 19th century: boy's adventure story, domestic story, and fairy tale (Rose 77).

The novel/play unites three central genres of children's literature from the 19th century: the boys' adventure story, the domestic story, and the fairy tale (Rose 77).

First off, note that the book is in some ways closer to Barrie’s play than the Mary Martin version. For Broadway, it was of course necessary to add songs to Barrie’s text; but other points required modification as well. The Mary Martin version (directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins) eliminates the business about the children’s medicine from the first act, which creates a parallel to Hook’s later use of medicine to poison Peter (and Wendy’s insistence on medicine), thus also eliminating one part of Mr. Darling’s antipathy for Nana. The mermaid lagoon scene is transformed into a dry land rescue, probably for ease of staging.

A variety of special effects were planned for the play -- for instance, the fairy Tinker Bell was to have been played by a live actress whose image would be projected through a reducing lens, but this proved too complicated; an eagle was supposed to carry Smee off the ship, etc. Barrie was forced to rewrite the last 22 pages of the script over Christmas holidays to make the opening on December 27, 1904 (already delayed). Rose says “Pantomime was experiment. . . in the form of a lavishness or enterprise, where the meaning of each production was its challenge to the one that went before” (93). Early responses to PP tried to distance it from the pantomime because the latter had developed a bad reputation, but in fact conventions of the pantomime are there, including the lavish production, etc. Part of the subsequent claim that it was not a pantomime rested on claims that it was not a child’s entertainment -- which subsequent marketing calls into question.

The play, which is the original version of the story, draws on the tradition of the fairy pantomime, characterized by lavish production and special effects, though later critics, etc., sought to deny this connection (Rose 93). Lurie also notes the pantomime form, which had certain stock characters and situations reproduced in PP; Principal Boy (Peter) and Girl (Wendy), both traditionally played by young actresses; Demon King (Hook); the Dame (Nana), an old woman played in drag by a male actor; the Good Fairy (Tinker Bell - Barrie's innovation was to have her appear only as a light and bell sound, rather than embodied by an actress); the third-act duel (between Peter and Hook); and the transformation scene (the transition to Neverland) (Lurie 126-27). It was also not originally described as a "children's play," although it soon took on that identification. In fact, "children's plays" hardly existed at all before PP, but became seen as a necessity soon afterward (Rose 101-102).

Rose argues that behind PP is the adult man's desire for the little boy(s) - that the little boy in the story doesn't grow up "not because he doesn't want to, but that someone else prefers that he shouldn't" (3). Story wasn't originally intended for children, but appears within adult novel (The Little White Bird). Subsequent versions (play, various novelizations, etc.) cast doubt on "origin" of the story, and on adult/child focus. Perhaps the theater tradition of Peter being played by women, which Rose discusses elsewhere, is related to the questions of sexual desire?

In LWB, story is told by adult to child, about child's own origins (a birds-&-bees or stork kind of tale); further, child is explicitly and insistently male - Rose suggests that children's lit is implicitly for boys only. Originally, Peter is a kind of bogeyman whose job is to bury children who have violated curfew and stayed in Kensington Gardens overnight. Original story highlights problem of dividing adult and child, boy and girl, life and death; play, which eliminates narration, also removes these complexities (Rose, 33).

Note: the storyteller in LWB is male, but the play constructs Wendy and Mother as storytellers - Rose calls this a "socially recognisable context" that dissolves the problem of (homo-)sexual desire embodied in the storytelling. Revisions of story also reduce problem of heterosexuality - e.g., excising seduction attempt by Tiger Lily and mystifying desires of three females (Tiger Lily, Tinker Bell, Wendy) for Peter.

All female characters in Barrie's works resemble his mother, a fact of which he was conscious; Frey and Griffith suggest that his excessive mother-fixation contributed to his inability to achieve a healthy adult sexuality (182-83). This is also the source of tension in PP; Barrie makes it clear that the desire for the mother is a sexual one, in the exchange between Peter and Wendy in which he is puzzled over Tinker Bell's, Tiger Lily's, and Wendy's relationship to him: "There is something she wants to be to me, but she says it is not my mother." Thus we have the incest motif, {discuss sexual tension among the conflicting women} but the taboo is safe because it is all make-believe; Wendy isn't really either wife or mother to Peter.

The Neverland is conceived as a world without mothers, but since such a world is inconceivable, a mother (Wendy) must be imported immediately, compromising the freedom of the world (Frey and Griffith 183). Griffith and Frey note "exaggerated tribute to mother-love" through story, as well as Wendy's "little-mother" character as reminiscent of Barrie's own mother.

A great deal of mother worship here, indeed – suggesting Barrie’s feelings about his own mother. Note too the profound sense of loss that permeates the play.

Peter's relationship with Hook is also part of the incest motif. Barrie's stage directions call for the same actor to play Mr. Darling and Hook, thus emphasizing the identity of the enemy; further, in both worlds, the adult male is the child's rival for the attention of the mother. Both are also very childlike (Frey and Griffith 184-85).

The play has two conflicts: between nursery and Never Land, and between Peter and both (Rose, 35). Peter is opposed to family scene of nursery and family desire of lost boys. Note that Neverland is a consciously psychologized fantasy space, presented as part of "the map of a person's mind" - it is simultaneously a desired space and a denied space (Frey and Griffith 181); for Barrie, it is most disturbing because it is so desirable.

MEMORY: Note, too, the significance of memory as a theme in the book (not in the play, where Peter seems to have a stronger memory until he forgets to return for Wendy.

TIME: "The crocodile that follows Captain Hook, relentlessly ticking (it has swallowed a clock as well as Hook's right hand), is one of the wittiest and most sinister symbols ever created of the way all of us except Peter Pan are stalked by devouring Time." (Lurie 130)

FAITH: Another take on the play: it is about faith. You must believe to be able to fly, and you must believe in Peter Pan to see him (cf. here William James), and there is that seen in which you must express your belief in fairies (Carpenter 181). At the same time that he asserts this position, however, Carpenter suggests the play is also a satire on religion.

Peter Pan is "true to life" in that it insists on the reality of the ordinary world around it and the make-believe quality of its fantasy (Carpenter 180). It seems thus to violate Tolkien's ideas of fantasy, even though Carpenter invokes Tolkien favorably immediately after presenting this idea. Because of the financial need introduced through the figure of Mr. Darling, it is not possible to ignore the "real world" {think here of the fact, stressed by the narrator, of the Darlings' poverty - it becomes a factor in the decision to take in the Lost Boys}. Thus, Peter's insistence on living in the fantasy world exclusively becomes sad, tragic. Further, there is no ending to the story - it simply returns to the beginning and starts all over again (Carpenter 180).

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401