Peter Pan: Indefinition Defined

Now that the fairy dust has settled on the centenary of Peter Pan, it is an appropriate time to review what is known of him. After all, he has been prolifically studied throughout his hundred plus years, particularly since the publication of Jacqueline Rose’s seminal The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, and it thus seems logical that we should now know him well and be readily able to describe him. In this respect, Rose’s book is telling. Its use of Peter Pan as a model of the contention that children’s fiction hangs on “the impossible relation between adult and child” (1) has rightly gained currency and become an important principle for those who wish to examine Peter and what he is about, including me. Having said this, though, The Case of Peter Pan also highlights the propensity for analyses of Peter to go problematically off-piste. Allison Kavey pinpoints this exactly when she asks, of Rose’s steady tendency to discover child sex abuse in the Peter Pan texts, “did I miss a crucial scene in Barrie’s story?” (4), before commenting that more recent attempts to critique Barrie’s narrative theoretically have made it all-too-often “serve many masters, not all of them particularly kind” (5). When such extratextual distractions come into play, Peter’s priority is typically set below that of the apparatuses that purport to help understand him (and the stories he inhabits), leaving him subordinated rather than clarified as a result.

Against such approaches, this essay will argue that, when Barrie’s narrative is allowed to stand as its own master, it functions first and foremost to reveal in Peter a protagonist who is imagined, written, and thus defined above all else by his resistance to definition. As Solomon Caw puts it in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Peter is “a Betwixt-and-Between” (17): an indefinite being who, in accordance with Solomon’s comment, can best be described apophatically; by asserting what he is not. While this confessedly ironic observation is not wholly new (indeed, it is an integral part of the thesis that Rose develops in The Case of Peter Pan), it nevertheless needs to be revisited for two reasons: first, because it is the quintessence of what it is to be Peter Pan; and second, because it is frequently obscured by the several methodologies of the commentaries written about him. In this revisiting, I shall examine indefinition in the origin and elaboration of Peter’s character before homing in particularly on Peter’s disjointed relationship with fatherhood. I will argue that Peter’s resistance to paternity is contextually significant because it is a well-developed exemplum of his wider resistance to definition: it illuminates not only his own disrupted definition but also his concomitant propensity to disrupt the definitions of those about him. I shall show that Peter’s presence instigates a process of reciprocal destabilization with Wendy, which draws him toward being classified as a father but eventually and essentially reconstitutes him as a betwixt-and-between. Ultimately, I will use these points to restate my main contention: that, when analytical priority is given to Barrie’s narrative, Peter can only be defined as his indefinite self; and that, just over a century after his inception, this is definitively how he should now be known.

I shall begin with Peter’s origins, or rather his lack of them, for Peter is a character with no distinct beginning. In the dedication to Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (1928), Barrie confesses that he is unable to remember writing the play and that Peter himself just materialised from the ether of Barrie’s relationship with the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies:

As for myself, I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from you. . . . [It is] my uncomfortable admission that I have no recollection of writing the play of Peter Pan, now being published for the...