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  • The Riddle of Peter Pan’s Existence: An Unselfconscious Stage Child
  • Amanda Phillips Chapman (bio)

For the British in the nineteenth century, sometimes a child was not a child. One quality that could disqualify a young person from the exalted state of childhood was self-consciousness. In 1879, the British periodical Golden Hours, an illustrated magazine for family reading, ran a two-part article titled “Tyrants of the Nineteenth Century” bemoaning the prevalence of the self-conscious child, “the little mincing, studied, over-conscious mannikin or womankin, that can sustain with perfect self-possession the attention of some twenty or thirty people” (Ingham 306). With palpable disdain, the Golden Hours writer denounces the reign of the tyrannical child who wields absolute power in the middle-class home, demanding unceasing attention and admiration from parents, servants, and guests alike. The “spoilt, self-conscious, clever darling” that so disgusts the Golden Hours writer—and so many late Victorian and Edwardian adults, as I will show—is positioned here as the despotic star of its very own domestic stage, whose immodesty, self-consciousness, and self-possession are necessary enablers of “its performance of the part it has to play” (311, 307).

The little domestic actor is not only conscious that she possesses a self but also knowing enough to manipulate the effects that self has on adults. Given that the self-consciousness of the child who struts in the figurative spotlight of the home could inspire such revulsion, it comes as no surprise that the self-conscious child who strode the boards of the actual theater could elicit a storm of controversy. On the one hand, the widespread loathing for precocity in stage children hinged on the naysayers’ perception that stage children were supremely self-conscious. Those who expressed antipathy for the self-conscious stage child contrasted him with the properly unconscious child whose “beautiful timidity,” as the Golden Hours writer puts it, amounts to a blessed “kind of ‘stage fright’” (307). On the other hand, [End Page 136] the self-consciousness of the stage child is exactly what produced the artful theatricality that delighted so many theatergoers.1

The cultural tension between a commonly expressed predilection for the unconscious child and a similarly prevalent celebration of the theatrical child can be understood to hinge on whether the child is perceived as having a “self” and how the child can—and whether she should—have knowledge of that self. These ongoing public conversations about the unselfconscious child and the theatrical child converge in the discourse surrounding Peter Pan (1904) on the Edwardian stage. Peter combines the best of both worlds in that he is supremely theatrical while being at the same time entirely unconscious of himself—or, if you will, of his self. As Hook knows, “Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form” (Barrie, Peter and Wendy 130). By situating the phenomenal popularity of Peter Pan in the Edwardian theater alongside the discourses of self-consciousness with regard to the figure of the child, I hope to deepen critical understanding of the enthusiasm of theatergoers for Barrie’s play, while at the same time highlighting what I believe to be a neglected aspect of the ideology of the Romantic child—namely, Romantic ideology’s definition of the true child as unselfconscious.

Scholars of the Romantic child have firmly established that the Romantics invested the child with innocence, a positively valued attribute; yet little critical work has been done on the flip side of that process, whereby the Romantics divested the child of the negatively valued quality of self-consciousness. Focusing on this overlooked feature of the Romantic child will help solve the riddle of Peter Pan’s existence, a riddle that troubles both Hook and Peter. I argue that the answer to this riddle is that Peter has no self of which to be conscious, and that by having no self he combines unselfconsciousness and theatricality—highly valued but seemingly antithetical characteristics often attributed to the child in the nineteenth century. Criticism of Peter Pan has yet to elucidate an important characteristic of the eternal boy: he is pure theatricality...

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