Peter Pan: Betwixt and Between

How do we explain Peter Pan’s enduring hold on our imagination? Why do we get hooked (and I use the term with all due deliberation) when we are children and continue to remain under the spell as adults? J. M. Barrie once observed that Huck Finn was “the greatest boy in fiction,” and Huck, who would rather go to hell than become civilized, may have inspired the rebellious streak found in Peter Pan. Like Dorothy, who does not want to return to Kansas in The Emerald City of Oz, Huck and Peter have won us over with their love of adventure, their streaks of poetry, their wide-eyed and wise innocence, and their deep appreciation of what it means to be alive. They all refuse to grow up and tarnish their sense of wonder and openness to new experiences…

Peter Pan creates a true contact zone for young and old. In fact it is his story, as staged in the play Peter Pan and as told in Peter and Wendy, that helped break down the long-standing barrier — in literary terms — between adult and child. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with its enigmatic characters, allusive density, playful language, and sparkling wit, had already gone far in that direction, uniting children and adults in the pleasures of the reading experience. Earlier children’s books, seeking to teach and preach, had not been designed to draw adults in…

Fairy tales and adventure stories, which flourished in the nineteenth century, reoriented children’s literature in the direction of delight rather than instruction, and both literary forms inspired the narrative sorcery of Peter Pan. Drawing readers into exotic regions and magical elsewheres, they promised excitement and revelation where there had once been instruction and edification. The expansive energy of Peter and Wendy is not easy to define, but it has something to do with the book’s power to inspire faith in the aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional gains of imaginative play. As sensation seekers, children delight in the novel’s playful possibilities and its exploration of what it means to be on your own. In Neverland, they move past a sense of giddy disorientation to explore how children cope when they are transplanted from the nursery into a world of conflict, desire, pathos, and horror. Adults may not be able to land on that island, but they have the chance to go back vicariously and to repair their own damaged sense of wonder.

Barrie’s refusal to serve as adult authority reveals just how determined he was to break with tradition and to write a story that appeared to be by someone whose allegiances were to childhood. In a book on Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose famously proclaimed the “impossibility” of children’s literature, claiming that fiction “for” children constructs a world in which “the adult always comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver).” Basing her observations chiefly on J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, she concludes that authors of children’s fiction use the child in the book to take in, dupe, and seduce the child outside the book. She is particularly incensed by the narrator of Peter and Wendy, who refuses to identify himself clearly as child or adult: “The narrator veers in and out of the story as servant, author and child.” Undermining the very idea of authority and authorship, Barrie dared to disturb the notion of a strict divide between adult and child.

To be sure, much of what Rose has to say rings true, and, when we read about J. M. Barrie entertaining children in Kensington Gardens with his St. Bernard named Porthos, we cannot help but have the sneaking suspicion that children’s fiction may indeed be “something of a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction.” But it is equally true that Barrie’s addiction to youth — his infatuation with its games and pleasures — enabled him to write something that, for the first time, truly was for children even as it appealed to adult sensibilities. And beyond that, Barrie turned a category that was once “impossible” (for Rose there is nothing but adult agency in children’s literature) into a genre that opened up possibilities, suggesting that adults and children could together inhabit a zone where all experience the pleasures of a story, even if in different ways. Old-fashioned yet also postmodern before his time, Barrie overturned hierarchies boldly and playfully, enabling adults and children to share the reading experience in ways that few writers before him had made possible…

Like Lewis Carroll, who developed and refined his storytelling skills by co-narrating (telling stories with children rather than to them), Barrie did not just sit at his desk and compose adventures. He spent time with young boys — above all, the five he adopted — playing cricket, fishing, staging pirate games, and, most important, improvising tales…