Queering the Reader in Peter and Wendy

The night of his birth, Peter Pan runs away to Kensington Gardens to live among the fairies: as he later informs Wendy in J. M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy, he wants “always to be a little boy and to have fun” (92). A shock to the “stay-at-home” Wendy, who tries but fails to make sense of him, Peter lacks a mother, cannot say how old he is, and gives as his address “second to the right, and then straight on till morning” (89). Obstinately averse to growing up, Peter epitomizes what queer theorists have recently dubbed the queer child: as Kathryn Bond Stockton writes in The Queer Child, or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, “The child who by reigning cultural definitions can’t ‘grow up,’ grows to the side of cultural ideas” (13). In queering the child, queer theorists open a discourse for complicating the idea of childhood and for examining it outside the bounds of heteronormativity.¹ Curiously, however, these theorists have shown little interest in Barrie’s novel;² Stockton, despite her compelling argument on sideways growth, does not mention it. Critically and culturally, Peter Pan has become a trope—the boy who wouldn’t grow up— and perhaps it is the fact of its status as a phenomenon that has curtailed study and analysis of Barrie’s character.³ Yet the tale seems fit for queer analysis, not only because Peter resists normative growth, but also because normative ideas of childhood are themselves called into question in what Rob K. Baum has called the “queerest of dramas” (71).⁴

Baum’s reading assumes a sexual queerness: Peter Pan is a “gay funny play” that “started with a love of boys” (71, 72). Indeed, although “there was almost nothing he could not do” (144), Peter cannot comprehend or even acknowledge female sexuality. “You are so queer,” he says to Wendy in the novel, wondering what she could want to be to him, if not his mother (162). Tiger Lily puzzles him for the same reason, while Tinker Bell, “a highly sexualized stereotype of femininity” (Stirling 520), does not affect Peter sexually either, despite her devotion and possessiveness. While it would be worthwhile to pursue a sexual view of queerness in this novel, my own interest lies less in the child’s potential gayness and more in what Stockton would call its “strangeness”: “for no matter how you slice it,” she writes, “the child from the standpoint of ‘normal’ adults is always queer” (7).⁵

This essay suggests that the queering of the child in Peter and Wendy inheres less importantly in the child’s sexuality than in a strangeness brought about by the unstable narrative form of the novel. The text operates through a self-reflexive, self-conscious, and intrusive narrator who frequently demands his narratee’s participation; as such, the form of narrative address in the book queries the normative subjectivity of the child and more specifically that of the child reader. Barrie’s narrator repeatedly fractures the narrative by drawing attention to its construction, deliberately extracting the narratee from the fantasy: “that is all we are,” he reminds his listener, “lookers-on. Nobody really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt” (208). Invited to view events from the narrator’s perspective, to join him in saying “jaggy things,” the narratee often takes up a position outside the narrative, participating in the challenge this novel poses to normative ideas of childhood. Narrative form, then, functions as the principal queering force in Peter and Wendy and, as I argue below, the child queered most significantly and insistently in this book is its reader.

To discuss the possibility of a queerly rendered child reader is to assume that queer readings of canonical children’s texts are a worthwhile addition to the new critical conversation on the queer child, a conversation that tends to lack, rather surprisingly, analyses of books for children.⁶ I suspect that queer theorists’ reluctance to engage with children’s literature has to do with their...