The mystification of Peter Pan

This paper discusses the darker side of our beloved hero Peter Pan. Is it true that Pan would kill the Lost Boys? Would he really kidnap children left in Kensington Gardens? The impish Peter Pan is much more sinister than we believed him to be. EDIT: it MUST be noted that this is a paper I wrote for my undergraduate degree (Level 5).

This paper explores the classic fairy tale: Peter Pan by James Matthew Barrie and highlights the hidden meaning behind the story as well as discusses the author’s inspiration and personal relationship to the characters in the book. In addition, this paper discusses the evolution of Peter Pan as well as debates the points as to whether or not hidden adult themes in children’s literature should be exposed to children.

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2009

This collection of essays shows how Peter Pan has become fundamental to western popular culture; the subject of graphic novels, literary sequels, cinema and television films as well as popular psychology. The ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ now describes an adult suffering from anxiety, irresponsibility or sex-role conflict.

For the British in the nineteenth century, sometimes a child was not a child. One quality that could disqualify a young person from the exalted state of childhood was self-consciousness. In 1879, the British periodical Golden Hours, an illustrated magazine for family reading, ran a two-part article titled "Tyrants of the Nineteenth Century" bemoaning the prevalence of the self-conscious child, "the little mincing, studied, over-conscious mannikin or womankin, that can sustain with perfect self-possession the attention of some twenty or thirty people" (Ingham 306). With palpable disdain, the Golden Hours writer denounces the reign of the tyrannical child who wields absolute power in the middle-class home, demanding unceasing attention and admiration from parents, servants, and guests alike. The "spoilt, self-conscious, clever darling" that so disgusts the Golden Hours writer-and so many late Victorian and Edwardian adults, as I will show-is positioned here as the despotic star of its very own domestic stage, whose immodesty, self-consciousness, and self-possession are necessary enablers of "its performance of the part it has to play" (311, 307).

inter-disciplinary.net

Abstract: Considered to be a children's picture book classic, JM Barrie's Peter Pan script and subsequent versions, including Disney's platinum boxed DVD set, had their origin in Barrie's earlier text entitled Little White Bird. This latter text is now recognised as an ...

Pages 68-71 and bibliography 8. "My White Bird a book, hers a baby": Conclusion "I think you are speaking more like a bird than a boy now," the little girl Maimie (Wendy's precursor) tells Peter, uneasy. "You are only a Betwixt-and-Between….it must be a delicious thing to be." As we have walked the tightrope, so to speak, that is understanding Peter Pan's complexities, we have understood the challenges inherent in describing, pinning down, the novel's text. Is it a narrative of loss and desire? Does it tell the frustrations of fatherhood, or celebrating the fleeting spirit of boyhood? Peter as half-bird and half-boy, Peter as the child who hovers between earth and sky, caught between infancy and adulthood eternally, answers for us.

Peter Pan is the embodiment of the collective unconscious and also the embodiment of instinctive intuition. Naturally, therefore, this boy has nothing to do with social common sense or worldly knowledge. However, though Peter retains this kind of ignorance, at the same time, he also exhibits mysterious wisdom that seems to be connected to the source of the universe. In this article, we will examine these two points in a faithful reading of the progression of the text.

Peter Pan may be a cultural icon in his cultural settings, but from a different perspective Peter seems to be the creation of an imperialistic mindset as he bears all the paraphernalia of the children’s upbringing at the height of imperialism; in the games, in the symbols, in attacking and defeating the alien forces, in the territories acquired, in associating or despising ‘uncivilized’ and ‘inferior’ peoples, etc., i.e. everything their imagination could conjure up from the raw materials around. Therefore, no surprise Peter is a white man, his regiment of lost boys is a brigade of white men, Wendy is a white woman, and all the rest (“the villains”) are either non-whites or whites lost to the English society for their “bad” character! The question is: whose culture is it, anyway, Peter is an icon of? Isn’t it the right time to look into the images Peter seems to have been created to represent? Peter refuses to grow up. Can’t we take it as a malady of imperialists who refuse to grow up; still want to play childhood games and wish to live on tree-tops with fairies, places secure and away from “contamination?” Keywords: Culture, imperialism, cultural images, imaginary lands and climes

The appeal of eternal life has a deep hold on the human imagination, and it is not surprising to find attention to the immortal and mortal in the domain of children's literature, a locale where both adult and child explore change, transformation, imaginative possibilities and cultural signposts (Wogensen, 2, 2012).

What sets Peter apart from the other children is his steadfast refusal to grow up, but in reality, there is no such child. Peter is the embodiment of logical contradictions. Not only that, but there is certainly a part of Peter himself that hints at non-existence, as well as the world of Neverland. It can be said that the existence of Peter is a symbol of some kind of impossibility, with the contradiction itself as the principle of existence.