Hauntings: Anxiety, Technology, and Gender in Peter Pan

Hauntings: Anxiety, Technology, and Gender in Peter Panl ANN WILSON J.M . Barrie's Peter Pan (1904) circulates in the popular imagination as a happy tale for children that, through the adventures of Peter and the other children in Never Land, celebrates playfulness. As Mark Twain commented, "It is my belief that Peter Pan is a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age; and the next best play is a long way behind" (qtd. in Jack 158). Tellingly, Twain's comment that Peter Pan is uplifting seems to depend on ignoring the fact that each of the "lost" boys is a baby who has fallen out of his pram "when the nurse is looking the other way" and who, if not claimed within seven days, is "sent far away to the Never Land" (Barrie I0 I). The boys of Never Land are dead, and so Peter Pan, arriving at the window of the Darling family, is a ghost. As the stage direction before Peter's arrival indicates, "the nursery darkens [, ..1. Something uncanny is going to happen, we expect,for a quiver has passed through the room, just sufficient to touch the night-lights" (97). As Freud suggests in his 1919 essay, the "uncanny" arouses an experience of "dread and horror," partially because the familiar (heimtich) evokes the unfamiliar (unheimlich), rendering the comfortable and "homey" uncomfortable and alien (224). The familiar, now both familiar and unfamiliar, generates anxiety. Peter Pan, as a ghost whose first appearance is announced as "uncanny," is the sign of anxiety within the play. Beneath the familiarity of middle-class life, in the opening and closing scenes, and the culture of children's play evident in the adventures in Never Land is the anxiety aroused by the shifts in masculine identity in relation to modem life, including the new technologies of the workplace and the demise of Empire. Barrie's response is anxious and nostalgic, the desire to return to an imagined past of stability that, if it ever existed, is impossible to recuperate, a point marked by the setting of the play in "Never Land." The "modern," as the experience of recent times, involves the memory of Modern Drama, 43 (Winter 2000) 595 ANN WILSON the ,past and anticipates a future. Thus, the experience of the "modern" is change. In the flux, the familiar may be lost or altered. If change is a characteristic of the modern, then heimlich and ullheimlich - the familiar and the unfamiliar - with the resulting dread and anxiety produced by change are important features. One of the implications of this understanding of"modem" is that as capitalism emerges as the economic ethos of Western countries, the changing technologies of industry that buttress capitalism become key to understanding the "modem." Industrial technologies are not simply tools within the workplace; because they change the terms of work, they inevitably have an impact on the relation of workers to their labour and, hence, on the identities of workers, particularly in terms of redefining class and gender. As industrial technologies evolve, they effect radical change, which generates anxiety, particularly for the middle class, which, located between the upper and working classes, is in a site of negotiation and inherent instability. Industry and its technologies opened a set of social relations that gave rise to the middle class. It is relatively easy to define the upper class as those who enjoy social privilege by virtue of aristocratic birth and those with established fortunes - either made or inherited - that allow access to social institutions of power. In contrast, as Ed Cohen notes in Talk 011 the Wilde Side, "agricultural labourers and the industrial working classes [".J were largely determined by the material constraints circumscribing their lives" (19), which is to say that the work in which they engaged was mainly physical, intellectually disengaged , and under-waged, so that there was little possibility of accruing excess capital. Members of the working class did not have the luxury of imagining that their financial circumstances would improve significantly. The middle class seems more difficult to define. Cohen, synthesizing a wide range of commentary on class formation, suggests that understanding the middle class depends partially...