Imperialism and the Politics of Childhood Innocence in Peter Pan and Wendy

Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, or T. S. Eliot reacted to World War I, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism, which isolated and alienated individuals and pushed them into severe loneliness, by turning toward already existing modernist aesthetic as represented by painters, philosophers, and architects such as Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Similarly, children's literature authors adopted literary techniques and thematic issues associated with Modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Kimberley Reynolds, who explores Modernism in children's literature in Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain 1910–49, radical children's literature appeared in Britain between 1910 and 1949, influenced by "leftwing politics, modernist and avant-garde art and design, and progressive education" (10). Radical writers' works for children employed various modernist, experimental literary techniques such as multiple/unusual perspectives, streams of consciousness, two-dimensional and fragmented images/forms, anthropomorphism, carnivalesque reversal, collage effects, the mixing of registers, and open endings, as a way to disturb the dominant ideologies of capital and class (Reynolds 102–29).

In Peter Pan and Wendy¹ (1911), J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), like other British authors of children's literature in the modernist era, acknowledges the value of ambiguity, ambivalence, and disruptions in narrative, and consciously incorporates the complicated concerns and diverse devices of Modernism into his text. That is, Barrie effectively appropriates various sensibilities, perspectives, and experimental techniques of modernist artists on the narrative surface.² Interestingly, however, when it comes to the deep thematic intent behind this simple story of children's adventure into an unknown world, Barrie seems to create the same world from which he tries to escape in Peter Pan and Wendy—one that propagandizes the colonial ideology. Specifically, in Barrie's text, the crude imperialistic, white-supremacist, and capitalistic desire to brutally conquer the world and subjugate colonized peoples is filtered and purified through the immaculate innocence of the child and children's play and games. Far from being innocent fun, when seen through postcolonial and feminist perspectives, the activities of Peter and his comrades represent the experiences of the British Empire.

I. Childhood Innocence

Imperial ideologies take many forms, the most pernicious of which is the use of images of childhood innocence to perpetuate colonial oppression. If imperial conquests always begin with military intervention, they end with cultural intervention. And on the battlefield of ideas, an effective way for the dominant social class to wage war on the colonized is through children's culture, specifically the image of the child, whose innocence and goodness is made to justify the experiences and evils of imperialist thought and action.

Nowhere is this more clearly evidenced than in Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy. Superficially a supreme example of childhood innocence, Peter's play and games enact not just the business of empire, but the contradictions within colonial rule. To perpetuate the empire, the image of the innocent child as a vehicle for driving home the values of the ruling class must be constantly reconstructed, relived, and reexperienced each time as though it were new. But to remain a child, to refuse to grow up like Peter and thus constantly remain in a state of perpetual reconstruction does not immortalize the empire, but rather heralds its certain decay, for the child, like the empire, turns in on itself, feeds on itself, and destroys itself from within. Peter, "imprisoned by his inability to grow up" (Gilead 285), like the British Empire, forgets what he knows. Indeed, ironically, Peter must remember to forget, must reenact in children's games, play, and adventure that which he himself inevitably symbolizes: both the end and beginning of childhood innocence.

In fact, as Marah Gubar points out, the inextricable association of children with innocence has not always been essential, but was only naturalized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (123). It was philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757–1827) and William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who popularized the idea...