Why Peter Pan still matters

It may seem ridiculous to wonder if the story of Peter Pan is still relevant, given how thoroughly it's woven into pop culture. References to its characters are dropped into TV conversations and movie scenes and newspaper articles, used to describe personalities and psychological tendencies. Over and over, retellings of the story appear, often updated and/or "dark." Tinker Bell is the Walt Disney Studios mascot (though I'm sure she'd prefer the term "spokesfairy").

But the original story is frequently lost in the cultural shorthand. Far more people know it through the 1953 Walt Disney animated film than from the original book or even the original play. And Disney, along with the 1954 Broadway musical, took liberties with the story that did it no favors--note the songs about the Indians which are so blatantly cringe-worthy today. The retellings often take the story so far from its roots than only its outlines are left.

So why is James Matthew Barrie's original Peter Pan still important today?

Gwynedd M. Hudson, 1931

❧ Because Peter Pan has value as a work of literature, as well as a source of enduring fantasy images. It's written with style and whimsy and wit, with characters who contain both good and bad qualities. It doesn't talk down to children, but instead presents them with challenging ideas and an ending that is not altogether happy. And thus it's a book that unfolds with further meaning when read by adults, one which takes us back to a time when the possible was not so circumscribed by experience and failure, yet which doesn't altogether dismiss the realities of the world.

❧ Because we all need to grow up. This idea is watered down--if not absent altogether--in many versions of Peter Pan (Disney being perhaps the worst offender here).  But the 1911 book is rife with examples of how Peter's youth makes him heartless and negligent. And children who refuse to grow up have given us climate change and the garbage gyre and poisoned water supplies. They leave the wreckage of their relationships behind them and have no idea how to look to the future. Even Peter Pan himself has some inkling of the truth of this, when nightmares bring him to tears in his sleep.

Flora White, 1913

❧ Because other eras have something to teach us, in both positive and negative aspects. It's important to understand how people lived and thought in the not-actually-so-distant past, in order to understand what we're doing here and now.

Any work of art from the past will contain ideas and attitudes we find jarring now. I've been catching up on books written ten years ago and I'm surprised how much what is acceptable to say has changed in just that short period of time. Edwardian Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie had little reason to study the history of the American Indian when he wrote a fantasy play for children. We in the modern world have no excuse not to examine these attitudes and realize what is accurate and fair. And perhaps seeing that other eras were not all as consumer-focused and cynical as ours can show us an alternative, or at least be a comfort.

❧ Because there are women--and men--who treasure the idea of being parents, though it may not be fashionable to say so. Wendy does not have to be seen as an anti-feminist icon.

Scott Gustafson, 1991

❧ Because families still lose children, to illness or tragedy. It's not as common as it was in the past and it's rarely talked about outside of support groups and immediate families. But there are parents who ache as much for their lost ones as Mrs. Darling does. Perhaps there is some solace for them in literature like Peter Pan, especially if one knows that Barrie's own childhood was marked by the death of his older brother, and that this loss resonates throughout the book.

The enduring power of an image

❧ Because dismissing literature from the past is like refusing to listen to our grandparents. Our elders have something to teach us. Yes, some of their attitudes may seem unforgivable. But they have knowledge and experience and wisdom we should consider as well.

Searching for the lost boys

No characters in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan have undergone a wider variety of interpretations over the years than the feral children known as the lost boys.

John Hassall, 1907, Duke of York's Theatre lobby posters

Artists who drew the boys immediately after the debut of the play in 1904 showed them as normal Edwardian boys in ordinary clothes. But the longer and more fully-realized version of the story in Barrie's book, published in 1911, takes pains to describe how the boys' garb differs from Peter Pan's suit of skeleton leaves and cobwebs.

They are forbidden by Peter to look in the least like him, and they wear the skins of the bears slain by themselves, in which they are so round and furry that when they fall they roll. They have therefore become very sure-footed.

Even shooting at the Wendy Bird, Flora White's 1914 Tootles looks adorable, even cherubic. This rather describes Tootles, actually, although artists have long seemed fond of thinking of the lost boys in general as sweeter than perhaps Barrie did.

The 1953 Disney animated film took the idea of the bear skins further and dressed the boys in full animal costume. The suits seem to take the place of differentiated personalities for these characters. And I'm sorry, but they're the ugliest lost boys I've seen. Plus there must have been some mighty big rabbits and foxes in Never Neverland.

Later artists such as Trina Shart Hyman (1980)

and  Scott Gustafson (1991) were more faithful to the book's portrayal, with their lost boys looking roly-poly in their bear-skin coats.

The 2003 Universal/Columbia Pictures Peter Pan movie took more liberties with the boys' attire, but it makes sense that boys in a permanent game of make-believe would take creative advantage of whatever props they came across.

With the modern popularity of "dark" versions of children's stories came grimmer versions of the lost boys, portrayals which do not shy from the more murderous nature of these children. A good example is the group in ABC's Once Upon a Time. However, portrayals of the lost boys as teens, according to Barrie, are impossible. As he tells us, "...when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out." (Dark interpretations of Peter Pan often miss the darkness that has been in the story from the beginning.)

A little bird broken out of the egg

Somewhere between the boy hero of Disney studios and the dangerous, complicated lead of Brom's The Child Thief lies the real Peter Pan.

J. M. Barrie's original Peter is neither the spirit of sweetness nor the incarnation of malice. This Peter is nothing more or less than a small boy who is static, unchanging, embodying both the innocence and heartlessness of a child who doesn't grow up and therefore never learns to be kind.

Peter himself says, "I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg." To an extent, that's true, and it's long been a popular way of considering him. Unfortunately, this charm is tempered with a lack of practicality and ability to exasperate, as the Darling children see over and over on their flight to Neverland.

Barrie tells us how Peter acquires food for himself and the others by stealing it from the beaks of passing birds, which John and Michael find delightful.

But Wendy noticed with gentle concern that Peter did not seem to know that this was rather an odd way of getting your bread and butter, nor even that there are other ways.

One of Peter's more alarming traits manifests when the children fall asleep from exhaustion and tumble through the sky.

Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch Michael just before he could strike the sea,and it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life.

And he's never completely trustworthy.

Indeed, sometimes when he returned he did not remember them, at least not well. Wendy was sure of it. She saw recognition come into his eyes as he was about to pass them the time of day and go on; once even she had to tell him her name.

He was very sorry. "I say, Wendy," he whispered to her, "always if you see me forgetting you, just keep on saying 'I'm Wendy,' and then I'll remember."

Carelessness is integral to Peter's character, as is the way he tries on identities. On one level, Peter wants to be a captain, wishes to play at being a father. But he wants these roles never to be truly real.

I was just thinking," he said, a little scared. "It is only  make-believe, isn't it, that I am their father?"

"Oh yes," Wendy said primly.

"You see," he continued apologetically, "it would make me seem so old to be their real father."

"But they are ours, Peter, yours and mine,"

"But not really, Wendy?" he asked anxiously.

"Not if you don't wish it," she replied; and she distinctly heard his sigh of relief.

He inhabits his roles briefly, and they leave no real impression upon him. It's as if everything is make-believe, including the consequences of his actions.

He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out you found the body; and on the other hand, he might say a great deal about it, and yet you could not find the body.

Peter has the callousness of the child who doesn't understand death, or the fact that people have lives and concerns of their own that have nothing to do with him."I forget them after I kill them," he says of the pirates in Neverland. Because Peter Pan can be heartless--with his indifference towards those he kills, and the way he "thins out" the population of lost boys as they become older--it's easy to see where the dark interpretations come from. But this is a simple interpretation of a much more complex character.

Peter even forgets Tinker Bell after the Darling children leave Neverland and the fairy dies of old age. Most people aren't real to him once they pass off the screen of his immediate life, Wendy being the exception, and that not complete. "Being present" is held up as a high ideal in our culture, but Peter warns of the risks that come if one disregards the richness and depth that present and past bring to existence. His is the peril of the child who refuses to learn and mature.

John and Michael forget about their parents during their time in Neverland, much to Wendy's distress. She is the only one mature enough to realize what is happening, and her attempts to keep those memories alive make up a significant part of Barrie's book. In contrast, the lost boys, who have no such memories to draw upon, do their best to construct pasts for themselves.

Peter's world is one of adventure and novelty and joy. And yet, he cries sometimes in the night, and is at least as unsettled than triumphant when he takes over the captainship of the Jolly Roger. On some level, he knows all is not right with the way he has chosen to live. The scene where the Darling children return home brings into relief what Peter has lost in his refusal to grow up.

There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a strange boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred.

And herein lies the essential sadness of Peter Pan. Courageous in facing the dangers he sets up for himself to defeat, and yet so fearful of the prosaic unknown he does everything he can to avoid it. In the end, he is more lost than the boys who follow him.

How doth the little crocodile

I have been remiss in addressing the crocodile in Peter Pan, which is, after all, a significant character--and frequent metaphor. But ignoring her has certainly never made her go away.

J.M. Barrie devotes little of his book to physical description of Captain Hook's scaled nemesis, although in stage directions for his 1904 play, he provides the memorable stage direction: "A huge crocodile, of one thought compact, passes across, ticking, and oozes after them." He tells us in the book that the creature is female, although Hook refers to the beast as "it" (an omission for which Vivian takes him to task in The Stowaway). In the 1953 animated Disney film, the croc is male and named Tick Tock. In Peter and the Starcatchers, and the play derived from the book, the crocodile is again male and known by the moniker Mr. Grin.

In Barrie's wake, many writers and filmmakers have given the crocodile additional metaphoric weight. It is easy enough to see her as the personification (reptile-ification?) of death. As the character of Mrs. Snow says in the film Finding Neverland, in a quote often misattributed to the author rather than the character played by Johnny Depp, "I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it? Time is chasing after all of us, isn't that right?"

And yet Disney studios gave us a, well, goofy croc. Not only am I not threatened by Tick Tock, I actively feel sorry for him. I accept the reasoning behind making the movie less frightening for young children, but I'm embarrassed on behalf of the cartoon Hook, as being afraid of this animal just makes him look more ridiculous. Surely the poor crocodile deserves better as well.

The 2003 live action movie went the entirely different direction with its menacing, dinosaur-esque crocodile.

And we've lost all pretense to realism in the stage productions of Peter and the Starcatcher, but I admit to being particularly impressed with the use of minimal props to portray an alarming Mr. Grin.

In The Stowaway, we learn that the story Peter Pan told Mr. Barrie--that he cut off Hook's hand and threw it to the crocodile, leading the beast to stalk the pirate incessantly in hopes of getting the rest of him--may not be entirely correct in all its particulars. But that does not mean the crocodile isn't a deadly creature and frightening enough in its own right. As I write this, I see that only a day ago, the remains of a man were found in the belly of a saltwater crocodile in Australia, in the same region where another crocodile killed a 12-year-old boy in January. The croc in The Stowaway has metaphorical significance, as may be unavoidable after so many years and retellings, but I hope not to be heavy-handed about it. The real physical threat posed by a crocodile is already substantial enough.

Why they flew away

Adaptations of Peter Pan frequently invent reasons why Wendy feels she must fly away to Neverland with Peter and not grow up. In the 1953 Disney film, she is about to be moved out of the nursery because she has become too old to share the nursery with her brothers. The 2003 film created the odious character of Aunt Millicent (though played by a lovely actress, Lynn Redgrave), who disapproves of the children's tales of adventures and wants Wendy to be a proper society lady. Wendy also begins drawing pictures of a mysterious boy paying visits to her in her bed, to the consternation of all the adults in her life.

Flora White, 1914

But when I was young, I wouldn't have needed much convincing to fly away to a beautiful place of freedom and adventure, and I don't believe most children would. These filmmakers (and many writers) must find that reality distasteful, given the lengths they go to showing that the Darling children need more impetus to fly away with Peter than simple desire.This change undercuts the point of J.M. Barrie's book. To Barrie, that desire was not only sufficient, but part of the inherent nature of children.

For instance, Barrie describes how Peter Pan convinces Wendy and Michael and John to join him by telling them exciting tales of mermaids and pirates, and how he appeals to Wendy's desire to take care of boys who have never had anyone to nurture them. Peter's childishness is not sugarcoated either, and in fact is integral to the story. For example, on their way through the skies to Neverland:

He could go so much faster than they that he would suddenly shoot out of sight, to have some adventure in which they had no share. He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was, or he would come up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to say for certain what had been happening. It was really rather irritating to children who had never seen a mermaid.

"And if he forgets them so quickly," Wendy argued, "how can we expect that he will go on remembering us?"

Mabel Lucie Attwell, 1921

But even Wendy's memory of her loved ones is not consistent, despite the fact that "in the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls"--in contrast to the depiction of Wendy as a girl who didn't want to grow up.

As time wore on did she think much about the beloved parents she had left behind her? This is a difficult question, because it is quite impossible to say how time does wear on in the Neverland, where it is calculated by moons and suns, and there are ever so many more of them than on the mainland. But I am afraid that Wendy did not really worry about her father and mother; she was absolutely confident that they would always keep the window open for her to fly back by, and this gave her complete ease of mind. What did disturb her at times was that John remembered his parents vaguely only, as people he had once known, while Michael was quite willing to believe that she was really his mother. 

Anne Graham Johnstone, 1988

Perhaps Barrie's easy acceptance of that quality of children is part of what makes Peter Pan not solely a children's book. As he himself ends his tale, 

...and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

Heartless. Barrie was able to like and appreciate children despite this capacity. It's unfortunate so many others who revisit the story of Peter Pan don't feel the same, or trust that their audiences might.

Taking on Tiger Lily

With the casting of Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in the upcoming Pan movie (as if I didn't have enough issues with that already, starting with the fact that it's inexplicably set in WWII), I can't not address the problematic portrayal of the character and how I hope to address it.

Anna Mae Wong as Tiger Lily with Betty Bronson'
 Peter Pan in the 1924 silent film.

Complaints about Mara's casting center around the white-washing of Tiger Lily, which has been a problem with the casting since the story was first filmed. (That said, Q'orianka Kilcher, having already played Pocahontas and Aaya in SyFy's Neverland, might want to play someone besides an iconic Indian princess for a change.)

Rooney  Mara

J. M. Barrie himself,I'm sorry to say, made no real stab at accuracy when he wrote his Indian characters to appeal to young boys in Edwardian England. 

On the trail of the pirates, stealing noiselessly down the war-path, which is not visible to inexperienced eyes, come the redskins, every one of them with his eyes peeled. They carry tomahawks and knives, and their naked bodies gleam with paint and oil. Strung around them are scalps, of boys as well as pirates, for these are the Piccaninny tribe, and not to be confused with the softer-hearted Delawares or the Hurons...

Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. 

The single worst section in the book, to my mind:

They called Peter the Great White Father, prostrating themselves before him; and he liked this tremendously, so that it was not really good for him. 

"The great white father," he would say to them in a very lordly manner, as they grovelled at his feet, "is glad to see the Piccaninny warriors protecting his wigwam from the pirates."

"Me Tiger Lily," that lovely creature would reply. "Peter Pan save me, me his velly nice friend. Me no let pirates hurt him."

She was far too pretty to cringe in this way, but Peter thought it his due, and he would answer condescendingly, "It is good. Peter Pan has spoken."

I didn't even want to include this, but it's the elephant
in the living room of Neverland.

Barrie at least made Tiger Lily a warrior and foil to Wendy's domestic aspirations. The 1953 Disney film was pretty much entirely offensive in its depiction of the Indiands--it's as if the writers were not even writing about human beings. "What Makes the Red Man Red?" indeed.

(And yet my personal favorite rendition of Tiger Lily comes from a Disney "My Side of the Story" book, in which she's a real estate agent who gets in over her head when trying to find a property for Hook to buy.)

Given that I'm generally so concerned with being true to J.M. Barrie's original story, it's valid to ask how I'm addressing the portrayal of the Indians. It's a problem without a good solution. As I see it, these characters have never been done right (I think SyFy's Neverland miniseries came the closest, but I realize there are issues there as well, no doubt many I haven't even caught). The premise of The Stowaway is that Peter Pan told his story to Mr. Barrie with a plethora of wish fulfillment fantasies and misunderstandings--if not outright lies. And that includes his descriptions of the other people who live on the island.

After reading many bloggers' opinion, I went with the approach that since this tale is fantasy already, why not use a lost civilization as the "tribe" in Neverland? Research turned up the City of Caesars: a civilization founded in Patagonia by shipwrecked Spaniards who built a city of gold and diamonds. Spanish doubloons and sailors. Aha! 

As Hook says to his companion Vivian in The Stowaway,
"[The Trapalanda] are neither of Asia nor the Americas. Peter calls them Indians because he has nothing else in his vernacular that fits...Have you heard of the City of Caesars or the Wandering Town? It's a lost civilization, like Atlantis, except that here it is very much found."

I realize this approach can be seen as erasing the Indians altogether, as the movie Hook did. Tiger Lily is one of the few well-known Indian characters in literature, after all. But I would rather be guilty of that than adding to inaccurate and offensive stereotypes that I am not informed enough to avoid. I am not qualified to write an Indian tribe with the accuracy and respect it demands, nor do I believe research would be adequate to resolve my ignorance. As I said, it's a problem with no good solution. I am making this decision because it seems likely to cause the least harm.

Defending Mr. Smee

I didn't realize when I began writing The Stowaway that I would become protective of characters I had formerly not been overly concerned about. Such as poor Mr. Smee, being seen by the world today as an ineffective bumbler when he was originally nothing of the sort.

The first Smee, as acted by
George Shelton in the 1904 theater
production of Peter Pan.

J.M. Barrie describes Smee as Irish and a Nonconformist--e.g., not a member of a state religion like the Church of England. He does not mention his first name, allowing that detail to be guessed at by numerous tellers of the Peter Pan story, not always in ways of which I approve. For example, "He was called Smee because he looked like a Smee."--Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry. Really? Must we be that disrespectful to the original? (I confess to having a little fun with Mr. Smee's first name in The Stowaway, but I do my best to be respectful otherwise. In fact, it's hard for me to refer to him without the honorific of "Mr." after so long writing about the crew with the formality with which their captain addresses him.) 

In Barrie's Peter Pan, we first see Mr. Smee as "an oddly genial man who stabbed, so to speak, without offence." Make no mistake, he has no compunctions about killing, taking lost boys hostage, and other acts of piracy.

Smee had pleasant names for everything, and his cutlass was Johnny Corkscrew, because he wriggled it in the wound. One could mention many lovable traits in Smee. For instance, after killing, it was his spectacles he wiped instead of his weapon.

Bob Hoskins, who plays Mr. Smee in the movie Hook in 1991 and reprises the role in Syfy's 2011 Neverland, touches upon the quality the original Mr. Smee possesses of being a genial sociopath, in that the women of Neverland fear him. But even Hoskins does not portray him with characteristics that he would be required to have in his role of bo'sun of the Jolly Roger (not first mate, another common mistake).

Barrie does describe Smee as "rather stupid," and indeed he is less educated than the erudite Jas. Hook, with little understanding of his captain. But as bo'sun, Mr. Smee must have some degree of intelligence and a great deal of common sense. The bo'sun (or boatswain) is responsible for the maintenance of all the equipment on a ship, from rigging to anchors, and supervises the crew who work on the deck. Mr. Smee has a working knowledge of every aspect of sailing the Jolly Roger. And while it is popular to depict the crew of the Roger as a pack of dunderheads, if that were so, there wouldn't have been a ship around long enough to present worthy foes to Peter Pan.

No. 

 

Also, a bo'sun's whistle looks like this.

ABC's Once Upon a Time takes regular liberties with its characters, and amusingly has created a William Smee closer to Barrie's character than Disney's, a competent and decent man--perhaps more decent than Mr. Barrie would have liked. Christopher Gauthier's interpretation could expand to include a trait which Barrie does describe as native to Mr. Smee--a curious quality of unknowingly inciting pity from others. Perhaps other portrayals confuse this quality with idiocy?

Christopher Gauthier in Once Upon a Time

There was little sound, and none agreeable save the whir of the ship's sewing machine at which Smee sat, ever industrious and obliging, the essence of the commonplace, pathetic Smee. I know not why he was so infinitely pathetic, unless it were because he was so pathetically unaware of it; but even strong men had to turn hastily from looking at him, and more than once on summer evenings he had touched the fount of Hook's tears and made it flow. Of this, as of almost everything else, Smee was quite unconscious.

[Pg 202] 

Most striking of all, Mr. Smee possesses traits which Hook himself hopes to embody:

For long he muttered to himself, staring at Smee, who was hemming placidly, under the conviction that all children feared him...Feared him! Feared Smee! There was not a child on board the brig that night who did not already love him. He had said horrid things to them and hit them with the palm of his hand, because he could not hit with his fist; but they had only clung to him the more. Michael had tried on his spectacles.

To tell poor Smee that they thought him lovable! Hook itched to do it, but it seemed too brutal. Instead, he revolved this mystery in his mind: why do they find Smee lovable?

Richard Briers--also known for playing Tom Good
 in  BBC's"Good Neighbors"--as Mr. Smee
in the 2003 Peter Pan film.

[Pg 206]

He pursued the problem like the sleuth-hound that he was. If Smee was lovable, what was it that made him so? A terrible answer suddenly presented itself: 'Good form?'

Had the bo'sun good form without knowing it, which is the best form of all?

This Mr. Smee is far from the man seen in so many books and films who regularly trips over his own feet, who doesn't seem like anyone a ship captain would rely on for anything. Yes, the common depiction of Mr. Smee provides ample comic relief, but at the expense of a character who originally possessed depth and even a bit of mystery.