J.M. Barrie's Islands of Fantasy

I.M. Barrie's Islands of Fantasy LYNETTE HUNTER James Barrie's plays offer a consistency of approach to ideas about artistic communication that has been seriously neglected. The neglect partly results from a separation between the criticism of his novels and that of his plays, which obscures the development of theme, structure and imagery from the one medium to the other. The criticism of the drama itself has suffered from an avoidance of the published scripts. There has been little if any attention paid to the commentary of the plays which provides a function similar to that of the narrator in the novels, and is invaluable in understanding the author's ironic perspective. The product of the dramatic criticism has been an enonnously diversified assessment of Barrie, leaving an impression of a man of dilettante interests rather than complexity. I But if we examine the plays as generated from the novels, we find in their author not only a more thoughtful and mature literary figure, but also one who is placed finnly among early twentieth century concerns about communication and art. On examination, the similarity between the later novels and early plays of the period 1890 to 1902 is so close2 that it poses the interesting question: why did Barrie change his medium to drama alone after 1902? It could not have been solely for financial reasons, because his novels were selling well;' and while he had written four very mediocre plays by 1902, only the first, Walker, London, a light farce, had more than a respectable run. I would suggest that the change in medium was due to a change in the author's understanding of art and what he saw as the artist's responsibilities. Barrie's early critical work ofthe late 1880'S indicates that he had a strong beliefin the possibility ofabsolute communication through words4 But by the time he was writing Tommy and Grizel in 1900, he had personally discarded this belief, or developed it into a discussion of the fantasist who is a specific kind of artist defined by his belief in absolute personal communication. He is a man who thinks that he can create perfect alternative worlds, and that by initiating them from actual experience he can generate trust in them from his audience. Once created, the worlds are controlled absolutely 66 LYNETTE HUNTER by the fantasist who builds defenses against the intrusion of reality by providing detailed accounts of language, customs, and a way of life that needs no reference to an external standard. Both the creation and control of these worlds demand a passive audience accepting and believing rather than involved and experiencing. In Tommy and Grizel Barrie follows up the implications of these totally self-sufficient worlds. It is interesting that the one chapter explicitly demonstrating the process of Tommy's fantasizing corresponds exactly to Walter Pater's description of image-making in the last chapter of The Renaissance,' and significantly, in Sentimental Tommy Barrie connects the fantasy process with what he saw as the "art for art's sake" movement led by Pater. His point is that if art is totally self-sufficient, its responsibility is to itself, and its morality becomes relative. Barrie points out on many occasions that while this kind of irresponsibility to others is acceptable in a child who is mainly unconscious of the process, it is not so in a man consciously producing a piece of art6 Both novels by Barrie also contain many instances of the ambivalent and dangerous nature of fantasy . The ambivalence stems from the fact that fantasy is something to escape to, and escape can be effective only ifone becomes unconscious of the limits of the story. Yet if one is to control the story, one cannot become entirely unconscious of its existence. Tommy himself is killed when he follows his fantasy into an extreme situation which he cannot control. The danger of fantasy is that its final realization ends in madness or death. The "Tommy" stories provide an obvious study of Barrie's early beliefs about the powers of a writer through the central character. Yet he also examines his own motives for writing about Tommy through the...