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| This
is the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children logo for the Peter
Pan centenary. Barrie bequeathed the copyright in Peter Pan to the
hospital in 1929 and it has benefited enormously in the intervening
years. The logo is also copyright GOSHC. |
100 Years of Peter Pan
…or, Do You Really Want to Believe in Fairies?
By J D Atkinson (2004)
This article is dedicated to the memory of my mother Wendy Atkinson
(1936-1988)
Dateline: 28th September, 2004
When Peter Pan enticed the Darling children out of their nursery window
and into the night sky over London, en route to the perilous Never Land,
J M Barrie tapped directly into fears that have haunted the minds of
adults and children for thousands of years. Due to the extensive re-writing
Peter Pan has suffered during the past century (thanks to the
mistaken belief that the play should be done in panto style), not to
mention the influence of the bland Disney film, we tend to overlook
the disturbing undercurrents of the story; we find it rather bizarre
that during the First World War soldiers on leave flocked to see a play
we think of as an entertainment for children. Yet Peter Pan touches
on subjects that must have been constantly in the thoughts of those
young men - the possibility of untimely death and being outlived, perhaps
for many years, by parents whose memories of their dead children would
inevitably fade. Contrary to popular opinion there is nothing particularly
childish about Peter Pan.
Once upon a time, long before the cultural juggernauts of Walt Disney,
the toy industry and New Age fantasy crushed the meaning out of them,
fairies were strange and terrifying creatures. Their ancestry can be
traced back to the child-killing demons of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt,
dangerous entities who were often the spirits of women who died in childbirth
or children who died in infancy and bitterly resented being robbed of
life; even the seductive fairies of medieval literature were descended
from ancient Greek nymphs who enticed unwary shepherds away from their
villages. From the dawn of recorded history these mysterious beings,
the inhabitants of a parallel universe that intersects with the real
world at certain places and times, were associated with death and abduction.
In medieval Europe fairies were blamed for stealing human babies and
replacing them with their own deformed and sickly offspring (a handy
excuse for infanticide), impregnating unmarried girls and kidnapping
mortals with useful skills - midwives were much in demand, apparently
because fairy women had difficulty giving birth and as a result the
species was on the verge of extinction. Yet despite these links with
sex and reproduction the fairies were in many ways almost indistinguishable
from ghosts or even vampires, associated with graveyards and burial
mounds.
By the sixteenth century English fairies at least had become more domesticated,
punishing idle servants but performing household chores for the deserving.
These tamed creatures eventually spawned the modern "pink-wings-and-glitter"
fairy, and if asked to name an example of the breed many people will
instantly reply "Tinker Bell". But J M Barrie's Peter Pan
is in many ways the last evocation of Fairyland red in tooth and claw,
a sinister and disturbing place that still fascinates audiences and
readers a century after the play's premiere in December 1904.
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