Patard on the redemptive message of Peter Pan

R. Petard dissects the "children's classic" Peter Pan, which first debuted on the London stage 105 years ago this week, and finds much material which requires a decidedly more "grown up" understanding.

It was in 1904, at Christmastime, that American impresario Charles Frohman first staged James M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan: or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre. Perhaps the astute Jewish producer had noticed, as David Goldman put it in his December 2006 essay “Sympathy for Scrooge,” that “the Christmas season [is] a moment when the entire Gentile world is given over to a child’s view of things.”

Mr. Goldman insightfully observed that Dickens’ Scrooge caricatures Dissenters whose disdain for Christmas dated back to the Puritan attempt to abolish it. That attempt failed, in part because the Nativity story and its celebration serve a purpose: namely, to confute Adoptionism—to remind Christians that their faith is about God becoming man, not man becoming God. New England’s Christmas-spurning Puritans devolved, by way of Adoptionism, into Unitarians. Yet the persistent popularity of the Christened solstice relative to theologically weightier Good Friday and Easter might remind us that a reluctance to grow up, to “put away childish things,” to leave the manger and shoulder one’s cross, long antedates Barrie’s fiction. Perhaps neo-Scroogian cultural critics might deprecate our aversion to confronting mortality as “Christmas syndrome,” had not Barrie provided a scapegoat—a figure to whose account, under the rubric of “Peter Pan syndrome,” that folly may be charged with less manifest humbuggery.

Barrie’s cricket club-mate G.K. Chesterton regarded Peter Pan more fondly. In The Everlasting Man (1925), in the chapter “The Strangest Story in the World,” Chesterton wrote: “Peter Pan belongs not to the world of Pan but to the world of Peter.” But Chesterton’s time and culture are not ours, and the fault lies less in Peter Pan than in ourselves that we construe him so paganly.

Peter Pan is about the death of children, long a daunting challenge to both simple faith and learned soteriology. It is, however, equally about deadly parental neglect—about not wanting or loving children. It is all too timely for our era of selfishly infertile and casually feticidal adults. Perhaps we miss Peter Pan’s central themes in part because child death post partum has become far rarer than it was a century ago. We also may miss them, at least in part, because we dismiss as mere caricature the story’s main adult character, Captain Hook: We fail to recall and give due weight to the tradition, which goes back to the play’s first staging, under Barrie’s direction, that Hook be played by the same actor who plays Mr. Darling, a flawed father. Mr. Darling and Hook are, in fact, the same character, operating respectively in this world and in Barrie’s limbus puerorum, Neverland. Although, as G.B. Shaw noted, Peter Pan “is ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people,” appreciation of its burden for grown-ups requires attention to its main adult character. Appreciation of Peter Pan requires sympathy for Hook.