Cover annotated centennial edition published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2014 (the edition I own)

(8) J.M. BARRIE –

PETER PAN (1902-1911)

Peter Pan, the fictional character created by Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie, needs little introduction but I’ll quote one anyway.

“A free-spirited and mischievous young boy who can fly and never grows up, he spends his never-ending childhood having adventures on the mythical island of Neverland as the leader of the Lost Boys, interacting with fairies, pirates, mermaids, Native Americans, and occasionally ordinary children from the world outside Neverland…Peter Pan has become a cultural icon symbolising youthful innocence and escapism”.

On the topic of fairies, I can’t mention Peter Pan without his fairy companion Tinkerbell.

However, there are some things I might be able to introduce about him.

The first major appearance of Peter Pan was in a play rather than the novel he is better remembered by – the 1904 stage play by Barrie, Peter Pan: or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (although that was preceded by his appearance in another of Barrie’s works, The Little White Bird in 1902), before the play was expanded into the 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy.

“The original play is fairy Child-Friendly: Captain Hook is a blustering comic villain, the violence is usually a pratfall or similar form of slapstick, and death is treated more like a time-out. In contrast, the book version (Peter and Wendy) later written by Barrie is a sly deconstruction of the Victorian notion of the sacred innocence of children, full of parental bonus dark humor and subtle gallows humor; Barrie was a master satirist for his time, though few of his satires are remembered today.”

However, Peter Pan is an archetypal magical trickster hero – “a playful demigod, with aspects of Puck and Pan” (the latter even in his name) and “a cultural symbol of youthful exuberance and innocence”. And I just can’t resist the revival of Pan, that most pagan of classical pagan gods – indeed one that came to embody classical paganism – as a trickster hero of children’s fantasy. Not to mention giving him a thoroughly Dionysian character and – particularly for the proverbial boy who never grew up – a veritable harem of fairies, mermaids and Wendy Darling.

And of course there’s his love of adventure among the Lost Boys fighting pirates, including the ‘adventure’ of his own mortality

“The story of Peter Pan has been a popular one for adaptation into other media” – film, both live-action and animated, stage plays or musicals, television, comics and so on, with perhaps the best known as the 1953 Disney animated film.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)