Forever a Foreigner

“All children, except one, grow up.”

This is the iconic first line of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. I don’t really remember when the book first reached my hands, but my beloved, battered copy remains on my shelf to this day.

I have been surprised by how many people have not had the pleasure of reading Peter Pan. Many people I’ve spoken to only know the story through the classic Disney cartoon or other various film adaptations, or they may have seen a stage production. As a lover of the story, I have also dived into the many various adaptations and plays (I was even in a school production of the Broadway musical), but the book remains my favorite version of the story, and I return to it again and again, even as an adult.

Why? Wherein lies the charm?

Let’s disregard for a moment the delightful, iconic characters and vivid settings of Neverland, though there is plenty to praise about them.

The draw for me is J.M. Barrie himself. He is present in Peter Pan as the wry narrator, speaking directly to the readers with a twinkle in his eye. “Wendy knew that she must grow up,” he says solemnly on page 1. “You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”

He puzzles over which adventures to tell us at the end of chapter 7: “The best way will be to toss for it,” he muses. “I have tossed, and the lagoon has won. This almost makes one wish that the gulch or the cake or Tink’s leaf had won. Of course I could do it again, and make it best out of three; however, perhaps fairest to stick to the lagoon.”

He is very convincing about certain things, like how mothers tidy up their children’s minds after bed, or about how to see a certain part of Neverland. “If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one,” he says, “you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire. But just before they go on fire you see the lagoon.”

(I more than half believed that one for a while.)

His narration makes Peter Pan so fun to read aloud. I first read it to my younger siblings, and I continue to read it to any children I can. (You do have to make some decisions about some dated language and British terms such as “ass,” the prevalence of the term “redskins,” the use of “gay,” and so on as you read, and I’m sure people have different methods of dealing with these quirks.)

But Barrie’s real genius for me is that he perfectly captures the magic of children’s play with the wisdom and insight of an adult.

He understands the imagination of children like no other author I have ever read. He has a perfect grasp of the child-logic used in make-believe, and he uses it to glorious effect. One of the important things to realize about the story Peter Pan is that the children in the story are very young, probably around the ages of five to seven years old. If you’ve ever spent a lot of time with kids in this age range, you know precisely how energetically imaginative they can be. Motherhood has an almost mythical aura in Peter Pan, just as small children see it. Romance is playing house, and even the violence in the story matches the way children will often play with the ideas of war and death.

Film adaptations of the story often fail to capture this aspect of Peter Pan because they never can get actors young enough. Too many adult ideas slip into the story, and the story drifts from its intended tone. Peter himself is the archetype of that particular kind of six-year-old boy, the kind that is filled with energy and imagination from head to toe, “gay, innocent, and heartless,” as the author says. (If you’ve met a kid like that, you know.) Peter can’t tell the difference between real and make-believe, and he will never grow up, which is both what makes his character fascinating and tragic.

Barrie riffs off of all the popular genres of his day that children’s imaginations were on fire with–pirate stories, Westerns, fairy tales, and island survival adventures. His pirates are menacing, his Indians nobly savage, and his island wild and whimsical. He pokes fun at the tropes and cliches of his day, while also creating his own iconic characters and settings. There is always a hint of absurdity in his descriptions. His pirates are a motley crew, full of references to pirate stories, and “a more villainous-looking lot never hung in a row on Execution dock.” The iconic Captain Hook has a backstory of attending a famous English school, and remains obsessed with “good form.” The Piccanniny tribe, completely made up by Barrie, and bearing no real relation to any real-life Native American tribes, is hilariously trope-y. At one point, they lose in battle to the treacherous pirates because the pirates failed to keep to the “unwritten laws of savage warfare,” where the white man must hole up in a fort on a hill, while the Indians attack just before dawn. In one skirmish with the lost boys, the two sides decided to switch identities mid-fight, as Peter and the boys declare themselves to be redskins, and the redskins, “fascinated by Peter’s methods,” agree to be lost boys, and they go at it again, “more fiercely than ever.” Nothing is quite so charming as the lost boys’ underground home, where they sometimes have to make-believe their suppers. The Darling family dynamics are hilarious, as Barrie pokes fun at everything from financial concerns to arguments over taking medicine.

Barrie tells it all in such a delightful way, tongue-in-cheek. He invites us to join him in his exercise of make-believe. As we go, we are always half-conscious that he is only making it up, but as we choose to follow him into the fun, the play nearly becomes Real.

But there is a wisdom to Peter Pan as well. Though the play is fun, in the end we all have to lay aside the adventures, take up our family roles, grow up, and find other joys. But children’s imaginations will continue to fly, from one generation to the next, “and thus it will go on, so long as a children are gay and innocent and heartless.”

THE END