Remediating Tinker Bell: Exploring Childhood and Commodification through a Century-Long Transmedia Narrative

One hundred years ago, rapt children in theatre audiences and nurseries throughout the Western hemisphere clapped to save her life; today, twenty million children per year embody her character online as virtual fairies. The one-hundred-year trajectory of Tinker Bell, from J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up and his 1911 children’s novel Peter and Wendy (now known as Peter Pan) to the present-day Disney Fairies franchise, can be seen as a metanarrative of adaptation and remediation in which media and “childhood” interrelate as mutually constitutive forces. This article examines incarnations—generations—of a transmedia franchise at fifty-year intervals: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan franchise, which began at the turn of the twentieth century; Disney’s Peter Pan franchise, which began in 1953; and the Disney Fairies franchise, which began in 2005. Employing a close textology of each franchise with a focus on the character of Tinker Bell, we consider the dialogic relationship between social constructions of childhood, the evolution of narrative in children’s literature, and the development of media for child audiences since the Edwardian era. Tinker Bell is an exemplar of a broader phenomenon in youth culture: as children’s narratives and media evolve in ways that increase the potential for childhood agency, commercial formulations counter this agency effectively by structuring access and participation (Kafai 122).

At a cultural moment in which we approach the view of literature as an interactive medium and of children as content creators, it is important to recognize the ways in which commercially formulated media, in particular the “virtual-world gravy train” (Barnes), empower and constrain childhood agency. For younger children, online engagement is an increasingly important part of social life, and virtual worlds have become mainstream forms of social interaction (Gee and Levine; Kafai 111; Marsh 101; Meyers, Nathan, and Unsworth; Grimes and Feenberg 106). Virtual worlds provide young people, through avatars or digital representations of themselves, with ways to embody their narratives, to play out their stories in digital environments with other users (Taylor 40). Gretchen Papazian advocates for the consideration of the narrative structure offered in video games and virtual worlds as signalling “a fundamental social shift” or a “cultural process” that gives primacy to people’s thoughts and feelings in the moment (451). In contrast, Sumana Kasturi argues that, in both content and form, new media also convey specific pedagogical messages to children about representation and consumption: “Personal identity, place in society, and even self-worth are commodities standing as symbols of this identity” (49).

The Disney Fairies website, along with its constellation of products and texts marketed to children aged three to twelve, teaches children at a very young age to fall into a pattern of consumption. At the same time, in the midst of great concern over children’s safety online, the Walt Disney Company, with a long reputation for family entertainment, is a brand that parents trust to provide a secure, moderated online environment for their children. Parents have always been the primary stakeholders in media systems aimed at youth, and “childhood” has for the last century been a category defined and refined by commercial stakeholders (McGavock 39). In this context, the character of Tinker Bell is particularly instructive because she was developed by Barrie during the Edwardian period, a pivotal moment of social concern and fascination with “childhood” as a special time and place separate from adults, something to be protected through an integration into social policy and commodified through integration into the economy (Gavin and Humphries, “Worlds” 2; McGavock 37). The changes and the gradual intensification of the understanding of the child as consumer over the century since that period can be traced by following the trajectory of the representation of Tinker Bell and, more generally, the evolution of one of the earliest children’s transmedia franchises. Our procedure controverts the idea that current children’s media constellations are novel developments; rather, these developments fit into a long tradition of...