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| J.M.
Barrie |
100 Years of Peter Pan
…or, Do You Really Want to Believe in Fairies?
Part II
By J D Atkinson (2004)
This article is dedicated to the memory of my mother Wendy Atkinson
(1936-1988)
Dateline: 28th September, 2004
It is no coincidence that some of the darkest fairy tales come from
Scotland, Barrie's homeland, or that the playwright was deeply affected
by the death of his brother David at the age of thirteen. Peter Pan
is the Boy Who Wouldn't (or Couldn't) Grow Up; the most obvious reason
why a child doesn't grow up is because he or she is dead, and death
is never far away in both the 1904 play and 1911 novel version of Peter
Pan.
Peter himself is not a fairy in the sense most modern readers understand
the word - he has a low opinion of Tinker Bell and her ilk - and his
surname identifies him as part of the literary and artistic cult of
Pan that flourished in Edwardian England (think of the god's brief but
unforgettable appearance in The Wind in the Willows). Yet Peter
is clearly not human in the sense that Wendy and her brothers are human,
and despite his most famous line in the play - "To die will be
an awfully big adventure" - is he really alive at all?
The question of existence and non-existence is touched upon several
times in the play (PP1) and novel (PP2). In PP1 we see the three Darling
children acting out the their own births - "I am happy to inform
you, Mrs Darling, that you are now a mother." Michael, the youngest,
is worried that his advent will be ignored. "Am I not to be born
at all?" he asks plaintively, to which John rather brutally replies,
"Two is enough". Even after a child is born its continued
existence as part of the family is not to be taken for granted. In PP2
we are told: "For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful
whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to
feed." (Wendy's name is a tribute to a little girl who used to
call Barrie "my fwendy" and died at the age of eight.) There
was similar anxiety about Michael and John, but mercifully Mr Darling
earned enough to keep all three of his offspring. One wonders what happened
to less fortunate children - is this the origin of the Lost Boys, who
fell out of their prams when their nursemaids weren't looking and ended
up in the Never Land?
After Mr and Mrs Darling have chained up their own canine nursemaid
Nana in the yard and gone to a party, leaving the young maid-of-all-work
Liza in charge, Peter and Tinker Bell enter the nursery in search of
Peter's lost shadow.
The first chapter of PP2 is intriguingly entitled "Peter Breaks
Through" - "breaking through" was a phrase often used
in contemporary spiritualism to describe a spirit's possession of a
trance medium or automatic writer. Peter is clad in "skeleton leaves
and the juices that ooze out of trees," (PP2) an outfit that suggests
the graveyard as well as the sylvan habitat of his namesake (there was
also a tradition that Pan was the only Greek deity who eventually died).
PP2 hovers on the brink of admitting what is only implied in the stage
directions of PP1, namely that Peter is in fact a dead child.
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Even before her children fly away Mrs Darling, puzzled by Wendy's references
to a mysterious "Peter Pan", dredges up a vague childhood
memory of Peter as a psychopomp (a conductor of souls to the afterworld):
she remembers "that when children died he went part of the way
with them, so that they should not be frightened." Barrie goes
on to point out, in a sentence that many 21st century parents might
prefer not to read aloud, that children take the most extraordinary
events for granted: "For instance, they may remember to mention,
a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they
met their dead father and had a game with him…"
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Meanwhile, back in the stage nursery, Wendy tries to comfort the motherless
Peter by putting her arms round him. He shrinks from her, saying "You
mustn't touch me… No-one must ever touch me." A stage direction
confirms that "He is never touched by anyone in the play,"
a clear indication that at least in his relations with ordinary mortals
(the taboo does not prevent him from fighting with Captain Hook) Peter
is as intangible as a ghost. When he and Wendy are marooned on the rock
Peter diplomatically ignores her question "Do you mean we shall
both be drowned?" Another stage direction informs us "…she
has been told by the Boys as a deadly secret that one of the queer things
about him is that he is no weight at all. But it is a forbidden subject."
Peter seems to be one of those pathetic little ghosts who died so young
they don't understand that they are dead, or refuse to accept the fact.
He, the Lost Boys and the Darling children make their abode in "the
house under the ground", a phrase irresistibly reminiscent of the
burial mounds once believed to be inhabited by fairies, and although
he takes part in Wendy's imitation of family life he subsists on "pretend
meals" ("She was rather startled to find, on arriving, that
Peter knew of no other kind, and she is not absolutely certain even
now that he does eat the other kind…" PP1)
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