Peter Pan

J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, In and Out of Time: A Children's Classic at 100 is a great contribution not only to the field of children's literature, but also to our understanding of how we relate to children. In 1904, when Peter Pan was first performed, children's literature was still in its infancy. Today the availability and popularity of children's literature make us forget that the concepts ofchildhood and literature for children are relatively recent. The creation of a children's bestsellers category by the New York Times and the Harry Potter phenomenon are proofs that children literature and criticism about it have come of age. The collected essays in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, In and Out of Time explore, among other things, the complexity of Barrie's oeuvre, our fascination with it,and its enduring impact on the world of letters. As Donna R. White and Anita Tarr point out, "Neverland is never just one idea, just as Peter Pan is never just one boy or girl, but betwixt and between, and just as Peter Pan is not only one play for children but also for adults" (p. viii). Not surprisingly, the overarching thematic thread that runs through Peter Pan, In and out of Time is that ofliminality. It is noteworthy that Barrie wrote at a time when Victorian/Edwardian society was in great flux--a flux arguably reflected in the hybrid nature and liminality of Peter Pan. The authors of the collection employ and deploy current literary theories and critical tools to stress not only the "timelessness" of Barrie's most popular work, Peter Pan, but also the "timeliness" of this collectionof essays. The book is divided into four parts: "In His Own Time," "In and Out of Time--Peter Pan in America," "Timelessness and Timeliness of Peter Pan," and "Women's Time."
The first part, comprising of five essays, historically contextualizes Peter Pan (play and novel). In "Child-Hating: Peter Pan in the Context of Victorian Hatred," Karen Coats takes James Kincaid to task, and challenges thereader to "unpack and perhaps deconstruct Kincaid's notion of the inevitability of the desirability of the child" (p. 9). She argues, convincingly, that contrary to popular belief, Victorian/Edwardian society was no model of "decorum, civility, and philanthropy," but rather a society in which "misanthropy, imperialism, and outright hatred of otherness" were commonplace (p. 4). Coats's argumentthat humans are predisposed to hating children may seem far-fetched, and one wonders why Barrie would want Peter Pan to remain a child (or why Peter would want to remain a child) if Victorian/Edwardian society was full of hatred of children. Perhaps, as Coats argues, the quintessential Victorian male in the character of Mr. Darling is abhorrent enough for Peter not to aspire to become one. Paul Fox,in "The Time of His Life: Peter Pan and the Decadent Nineties," provides an answer to this query when he argues that the boy who refuses to grow up is the embodiment of art in the sense that he keeps re-creating himself in a bid to defeat time. Hence, our preoccupation with time is dealt with in the very term "Neverland." Drawing on the works of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, Fox opines that, byliving in the moment and "forgetting the past," Peter is the fin-de-siècle artist/e par excellence, as he exemplifies the decadent aesthetics of the 1890s--"the grammar of time" (p. 24). If time itself can be "defeated," he argues, so too can the notion of growing up. While critics have argued that Peter's loss of memory is "the worse curse of Neverland," and that "without memory there is no reallife," Fox points out that Peter is unhappy when he has to recall the past. These observations, in my estimation, should have led to a robust discussion of Peter's identity and his relationship to the past and history.
Christine Roth reminds us in "Babes in Boy-Land: J. M. Barrie and the Edwardian Girl," that the celebration of the boy child in Peter Pan is a spillover from the Victorian cult of...