Vintage 10/26/09 post from archives:
How could such a bleak and depressing play as Peter Pan ever have been considered children’s fare? Sure, there are pirates, Indians and mermaids, but those are just distractions. It’s really about fear, loneliness, aging and death.
Take growing up. Peter is opposed. Not because he enjoys childhood so much, but because he fears adulthood. Peter is one year old, being pushed in his pram, when he overhears his parents making plans for his future. This doesn’t square with him, so he bolts. The fairies in Kensington Garden tell him how to get to Neverland and off he flies.
That he would make a life-altering decision at such a tender age shows an impulsiveness more common in tragic heroes. What’s more, like those heroes, Peter must face the consequences of his acts. Because of a decision made when he was in his baby carriage, he spends the rest of his life as a virtual orphan. Yes, Neverland has the aforementioned distractions, but he misses his mother. That’s why he visits Wendy. He’s not exactly self-sufficient, either. Peter cries when he loses his shadow and needs Wendy
to sew it back on.
However much Peter wants or needs her, Wendy goes home at the end of the play. She does, however, agree to see him again next year at “Spring Cleaning” time. This hasty solution bears within it the seed of another dilemma. What happens when Wendy grows up? Both the play and the novel versions of Peter Pan acknowledge that Wendy must get older with each succeeding visit. The play hints at it. The later novel is much more explicit. It ends with Wendy, a married woman, sending her young daughter, Jane, off to visit Neverland with Peter. Thus, beginning a tradition that is passed down through the generations.
This serial Wendyism may solve one problem, but, again, it creates another. How can Peter ignore the effects of aging upon the original Wendy? Immune to the passage of time himself, he must watch it consume her in year-long gulps. See her change in front of his eyes. Getting bigger - and then smaller. “Whom the Gods love die young” for this very reason. They are never diminished nor witness the gradual dimming of those they love. Something of which Barrie’s contemporary, A.E. Houseman, was exquisitely aware. Look at his poem, “To An Athlete Dying Young,” wherein he writes, “Smart lad, to slip betimes away/From fields where glory does not stay” and “Eyes the shady night has shut/Cannot see the record cut.” If there is a brief for not growing up, this poem is it. Houseman’s solution, however, is a little drastic. It follows, “The road all runners come/shoulder–high we bring you home.”
Peter Pan can’t die, though, because he’s already dead. Look at the evidence. He enjoys the only permanent, unchanging condition known to man. He lives in a paradise where no one ages. An undiscovered country from whose born a traveler never, never returneth. The play, itself, begins and ends in a bedroom. If you think that sleep is a rather unsubtle metaphor for death, you definitely won’t like the clock. Captain Hook is chased throughout the play by the man-eating crocodile that’s already taken his hand. How does he know this normally furtive reptile is near? The beast has also swallowed a clock. The approach of death is heralded by a ticking clock. The only thing missing is Tinker Bell saying, “Walk toward the light, walk toward the light.”
Now would be a good time to step back from the brink, if only to better appreciate the joy in Peter Pan. Thinking lovely thoughts, for instance. What could be nicer? And flying – what could be more fun? Then there’s Wendy, her mother and Nana, all of whom are unambiguously good. Not that a character has to be bland or sweet to be positive. Tinker Bell, for instance, is appealingly tart. Especially in the Disney version, where she gives off as much heat as light.
Yet, what do people remember about Peter Pan? Those charming moments in the nursery? Playing house in Neverland? Among writers (a brooding group, I’ll grant you) it tends to be the darker aspects. Peter’s literary influence, unlike his entrance, comes with shadows attached. Take F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only a generation later, he writes about a lonely dreamer stuck on this side of paradise. The following passage, the ending of The Great Gatsby, could just as easily be describing Peter as he hovers outside Wendy’s window, casting one last backwards glance before returning to Neverland. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on into the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Again, a mere generation later, Peter returns, practically in the flesh, as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Tom’s futile attempt to save his fragile, younger sister from the brutality of life with a dominating parent parallels the story of Peter, Wendy and her Captain Hook-like father. The directions to Neverland are, “First star to the right and straight on until morning.” The last part is significant because, as Tom Wingfield says, “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further – for the time is the greatest distance between two places.” One reason why Peter is constantly fighting pirates and Indians may be that, like Tom, he is, “Attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.” Neither, of course, succeeds. Their days may be filled with violent activity, but they don’t build upon each other. They have no cumulative value. As Williams’s hero puts it, “They swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches.” Why does Peter return to Wendy every year at “Spring Cleaning” time? Tom Wingfield, again, may have the answer as he confesses, “I tried to leave you behind, but I am more faithful then I intended to be!” Tom feels enormous guilt over not being able to save his sister. As for Peter, who knows? Maybe he never expected Wendy to stay with him in Neverland. It is, after all, a candle-lit world and, as the last line of The Glass Menagerie reminds us, “Nowadays the world is lit by lightning!”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Peter Pan isn’t for children. It’s exciting and fast-paced enough to thrill even the most video-besotted tot. It just shouldn’t be thought of as exclusively for children, something lost on most productions. Worse even than the simple-minded approach of these affairs is that they usually happen around the Holiday Season, when there is already enough saccharine in the culture to sweeten an ocean without adding calories. So, by all means, see Peter Pan with a child. They can hold your hand through the scary parts.
