J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan in and out of Time: A Children's Classic at 100 (review)

Sustained by commerce and sentiment, Peter Pan has a life of his own. Whether associated with the "magic" of the Disney Corporation's animated feature—and its trademark use of Tinker Bell's wand—or with the Christmas pantomimes upon which it is based, the story of Wendy, John, and Michael Darling's sojourn in Neverland has become a myth informing twentieth- and twenty-first-century understandings of childhood, innocence, and the imagination. Those who actually read J. M. Barrie's plural texts (including inset story, short story, play, and novella), however, find that Peter Pan is edgier, more complex, and more tragic than the shiny commercial versions might suggest. As Jacqueline Rose observed in her seminal study The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), Peter Pan returns obsessively and unsettlingly to "the question of origins, of sexuality, and of death" (24). This new centenary collection provides appropriately rich and protean responses to its subject, the most fruitful of them investigating the textual, narrative, and linguistic challenges presented by the many-faceted and multiple versions of Peter Pan. Donna White and Anita Tarr deserve our thanks for compiling an exemplary collection of essays.

Prefaced with a useful introduction that explains to non-UK readers the history and significance of the Christmas pantomime and its connections with Peter Pan the play, this collection both challenges and builds on the distinguished body of criticism Peter Pan has inspired, such as the provocative and influential books by Rose, Humphrey Carpenter (Secret Gardens), and James Kincaid (Child Loving). The essays are grouped loosely into four sections: "In His Own Time," "In and out of Time—Peter Pan in America," "Timelessness and Timeliness of Peter Pan," and "Women's Time." As the section headings suggest, the first set of essays historicizes Peter Pan, the second considers strands of the myth's transatlantic influence, the third explores contemporary appropriations of the Peter Pan canon as well as its theoretical problematics, and the fourth provides feminist readings.

Karen Coats's brilliant essay, "Child-Hating: Peter Pan in the Context of Victorian Hatred," delightfully challenges Kincaid's work by closely considering the necessary obverse of his thesis. Once one has granted the pleasures of child-loving, it seems natural (though Coats is the first really to consider it) to wonder about the reverse. Her rich and appropriately nuanced discussion is a pleasure to read. Paul Fox's admirable situating of Peter Pan in the Yellow Decade argues that Peter Pan is an embodiment of "art for art's sake" and should be understood alongside Walter Pater's infamous Studies in the History of the Renaissance and Oscar Wilde's even more infamous Picture of Dorian Gray. As does Dorian Gray,Peter Pan confronts the inevitability of atrophy even as it promotes the Beautiful as a way of "justif[ying] the world," in Fox's words (42). Christine Roth's article on J. M. Barrie's too often overlooked contributions to the cult of the Victorian girl likewise historicizes and enriches our understanding of the cultural work Peter Pan accomplished. Jill P. May's essay on pirate lore is a must-read for anyone considering the significance of pirates in Peter Pan and in American culture since. Kayla McKinney Wiggins's essay, enticingly titled "More Darkly Down the Left Arm"—a reference to Barrie's claim that when tendonitis forced him to write with his left rather than right hand, his fictional productions emerged "more darkly"—discusses Barrie's use of Celtic fairy lore not only in Peter Pan but also in two later plays, Dear Brutus and Mary Rose. In the next section, "In and out of Time," both essays focus upon American appropriations of Peter Pan. In the first essay Clay Kinchen Smith argues that...