Peter Pan

I have just finished reading J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and I must say that it is a considerably darker story than I had imagined. It seems to me that it was not originally intended for a distinctly juvenile audience as it currently receives, but such is the case of excellent children’s stories like Peter Pan or The Little Prince. People are generally accustomed to the Disney version, to Spielberg’s Hook or to the stage production itself. Rather, I have just read the novel, which gives Peter much more depth than other mediums. For instance, Hook briefly examines the fact that Peter tried going back to his window, but found it shut to him, a symbol that his mother had forgotten him and did not have the unconditional, everlasting love which is generally attributed to mothers. In the novel however, this fact fills Peter with great bitterness each time that mothers are mentioned with the exception of Wendy being his make-believe mother, and actually more like his make-believe wife. In tern, his bitterness fills him with wrath and malign cunning. Granted, he is not without his nicer qualities which adequately counterbalance the bad ones, but Peter is much more the Pan in the novel than in the movies or the play.
Furthermore, no other telling of the story seems to include the fact that Peter regularly forgets Wendy, as he forgets many things owing to his own selfishness. What is more, and I hope that I haven’t spoiled too much for some people, at the end of the story Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell, who was described in her feminine qualities with the grace that Victorian literature gives, who loved Peter and was jealous of Wendy, is quite dead and no amount of clapping could bring her back. Furthermore, in keeping with his character, Peter had completely forgotten about her. To some this sounds horrible and shocking as she loved him so dearly. People expect some degree of reciprocity of feeling between two such characters when they go to the theater, but Peter is a boy, as naive and selfish as they come. Perhaps it is only in naïveté that happiness is found at the extremes. To stay young and happy forever, one must remain perpetually without thoughts that wrinkle the brow, and yet to become partially cynical, one automatically feels, by nature of cynicism itself, that it is loathsome to be naïve at all.