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  • The Kiss in a Box
  • Richard Rotert (bio)

"Long ago I thought like you that my mother would always keep the window open for me; so I stayed away for moons and moons and moons, and then flew back; but the window was barred, for mother had forgotten all about me, and there was another little boy sleeping in my bed."

—Peter Pan (106)

In spite of Peter Pan's history of recurrent amnesia—he says of pirates, "I forget them after I kill them," (161)—the distressing memory of being barred from returning to his mother persists. Considering the preponderance of material purged or repressed in the adolescent mind, it is crucial for an analysis of subsequent behavior to identify which details of a child's life escape general oblivion. What remains in conscious memory is likely the most significant element in that whole period of life, regardless of whether it possessed such importance at the time or gained importance from the influence of later events (Freud, Character 193). In the traumatic memory cited above, Peter acknowledges his estrangement from the mother imago, an estrangement that persists without hope of redress. The barred window excludes Peter as participant in the previously abandoned familial context of mother and child in a nursery. Peter's personal story, mirroring that of the text, begins and ends with a flight from and return to the nursery window, the locus of his unresolved dilemma. Peter Pan was—and is—on the outside looking in.

By returning to this locus Peter acknowledges his deprivation and reveals the purpose of his original flight. "'Wendy, I ran away the day I was born. . . . It was because I heard father and mother,' he explained in a low voice, 'talking about what I was to be when I became a man.' He was extraordinarily agitated now. 'I don't ever want to be a man,' he said with passion" (26). Peter's repudiation [End Page 114] of "manhood" may also be affirmed in the conspicuous absence of the father from the iterative nursery scene, an absence indicative of the fulfilled wish by a son who sees the father as denying access to the mother. The normal wish to eliminate the father imago is revealed in a wistful encounter with a dead father in a wood, later to be identified as the Island of Neverland. "Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them. For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they met their dead father and had a game with him" (8). Here the apparent merriment of the children suggests the ultimate resurrection or replacement of the father, or adult, in their own eventual maturity. But Peter Pan permanently rejects fatherliness, including his own, by refusing to enter the prerequisite order of manhood. By denying his manhood, Peter also denies the possibility of a mature, loving relationship with any of the female characters, considering them only surrogates for the desired but inaccessible mother.

Peter's necessary conflict with a specular image of the father is displaced onto Neverland battles with pirates whose captain, James Hook, is associated by parallel episodes to the one identifiable father in the text, Mr. Darling. In a nursery scene with Michael, Mr. Darling invokes parental authority by demanding the consumption of medicine by his son. "Strong man though [Mr. Darling] was, there is no doubt that he had behaved rather foolishly over the medicine. . . . When Michael dodged the spoon in Nana's mouth, he had said reprovingly, 'Be a man, Michael . . . when I was your age I took medicine without a murmur' (16). Later, in Neverland, Captain Hook adds a poisonous concoction to Peter's medicine in an effort to murder the boy: "But what was that? The red in his eye had caught sight of Peter's medicine standing on a ledge within easy reach. Lest he should be taken alive, Hook always carried about his person a dreadful drug . . . which was probably the most virulent poison in existence. Five drops of this he now added to Peter's cup" (122-23). The father-pirate analogy exposes the tyranny...

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