The Shadow of the Object in Peter Pan

J. M. Barrie, particularly in his fantasy novel Peter Pan, which is the focus here, arrives late on the late-Victorian scene of eroticized childhood.¹ Barrie’s work joins a much-discussed line in British literature, which includes such works as Swinburne’s “The Flogging-Bock” and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, that portrays child beating as erotic (Kincaid, Annoying 235–37) and that, more importantly, sutures mainstream culture to what James Kincaid calls the “long pornographic tradition” of erotic child abuse (236; and see Marcus 60–61). That is not to say that there is anything pornographic about Peter Pan (the play or the book), which always hints ironically instead, if at length. Peter Pan, and Barrie’s earlier works on which it is based (notably The Little White Bird), share the more knowing and suggestive fascination with perverse sexuality, including the sexualization of children, found in Charles Dodgson’s photography, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, and John Everett Millais’s painting “The Woodsman’s Daughter,” to name some usual suspects.² Barrie is at once knowing about his interest in the sexualization of children—unable to resist puns and allusions to a painful and complex psychological landscape—and elusive about it or is willing to hide from his self-knowledge through dismissal and humour. Barrie’s defensiveness is built in to the subject matter of perverse sexuality. Steven Marcus concludes that the Victorian literature of flagellation in particular “represents a kind of last-ditch compromise with and defense against homosexuality” (260): it expresses a wish, conscious or not, for identification with a boy who is being beaten, “that is, loved—by another man” (260). This wish is strong in Barrie, but behind it lies an even earlier infantile moment, whose construction (and concealment) is one of the objects of Barrie’s work. For one thing that differentiates Barrie’s episteme from that of earlier British writers preoccupied with child sexuality is the rise in late Victorian-modernism’s culture of understanding early childhood psychology and its relation to linguistics.

This new understanding of the child mind both allows a new reading of Barrie and opens directions for reconsidering perverse sexuality in late Victorian-modern literature. I argue here that Barrie is concerned with infantile sounds that reflect psychological crises and that he uses material features of written language, such as its shapes, sounds, and stresses, to construct a psychological portrait of the infantile mind. Barrie’s interest in symptomatic language differs from the general modernist preoccupation with psychology and with linguistics. While early modernist literature uses Oedipal paradigms explicitly, as Joseph Conrad does in Nigger of the “Narcissus,” for example, or as Virginia Woolf does in the opening scene of To the Lighthouse, Peter Pan is governed by paradigms that define Barrie psychologically and that reflect preverbal conflicts of early infancy. When Wendy gives Peter a thimble instead of a kiss because he does not know the word “kiss” (Peter Pan 25), their exchange suggests a libidinal reading of the arbitrariness of language, so that when the acorn button Peter gives Wendy in return, and which she wears around her neck on a string, saves her from the Lost Boys’ arrow, we see (the arrow of) eros attracted to and fended off by the physical object that represents the arbitrariness of language: for Barrie the physical features that make language arbitrary also make it sexual. Modernist literature is also often interested in material qualities of language (as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Marcel Duchamp’s readymade puns,³ and F. T. Marinetti’s tin books, to name three different kinds), but Barrie’s text develops an idea about the place of sound and shape in infantile consciousness. For many writers of the period, material features of language seem to offer a sanctuary from psychological motivation because they are understood to be mechanical and non-semantic and so are indifferent to psychodynamic logics. But as a line of thought in Freudian and post–Freudian analysis has argued, the indifferent physical properties of language often carry psychological meanings. The visibility of...