Peter Pan Critical Essay

There is a sense of wonder which comes naturally to children. The child’s world is full of secrets, in the corners of the attic, behind the locked doors and high fences, in the late night after they are in bed; there is mystery and adventure in the unknown. The world is constantly expanding, the geographies further unfolding before their infinite and voracious wonder lust, the child is a Christopher Columbus, or rather Christopher Columbus as he should have been, joyfully discovering and bounding across new continents, new worlds, dripping with experience. This sense of wonder usually becomes lost or forgotten in adulthood. James Barrie regretted this loss deeply. Peter Pan was his effort to remember and record this lost sense, giving new life to a spirit. He pulls these characters from his mind and the minds of others, embodying them in his writing, an attempt to reawaken wonder.

On attending elementary school, children are introduced to the idea that there is a known way the world works, one way, it has been tested and proven by multiple generations before them, and the people before those generations were simply ignorant. Your first grade teacher knows a great deal about it and you know very little, so you would do best to be quiet and listen. Children are given the “answers”. When nearly everything is known, and there is very little unknown, there can be no mystery, no wonder. If you cannot see it, it is not real, there is nothing real in the world that cannot be seen and documented in a rational manner. By creating these “answers”, the world is given a ceiling and a roof, which we may not climb on. We lose or forget the wonder lust which revealed the geographies of the world to us as children.

Barrie had the ability to move thoughts and ideas from his mind into the real world. Neverland and the Kensington gardens are the geographies of his mind. William Phelps writes of Barrie “he is one of those extremely rare artists who can actually embody their con­ceptions. His dreams come true. At his desk, he is visited by visions so fantastic that he must often laugh aloud in solitude; but the amazing thing is that he can make the whole world see them as he sees them.” He describes how after “lockout time” in the Kensington Gardens the park becomes the realm of the birds and the fairies, which hold banquets and dances in the fields of the park. “Long ago children were forbidden the Gardens, and at that time there was not a fairy in the place; then the children were admitted, and the fairies came trooping in that very evening. They can’t resist following the children, but you seldom see them, partly because they live in the daytime behind the railings, where you are not allowed to go, and also partly because they are so cunning”. His characters are drawn from childhood archetypes, his descriptions pull on the psyche to for the awe of a child who sees the world towering over him. The world expands again; there are secrets in intricacy and detail.

So Barrie has pulled these things from his mind, and shown them to the world. However these are “just” Barrie’s thought, however perhaps they are not only Barrie’s. Perhaps the reason his stories, along with all great stories, have such a strong pull on people is that we already know them, we have only forgotten. Even then, they are still things which are only present in the mind, in most cases the subconscious. The question of whether or not Peter Pan is of any literary significance boils down to the question of which is more important; the consciousness, or the physically present. If the physical (as in what is currently real) is what mainly matters, then Barrie was just a bit of a pedophile who wrote trite and ridiculous children’s stories, which became a permanent but equally ridiculous fad, and was probably mad. Though maybe he was mad anyway, if to be insane is to see the world “differently”. If what is in the consciousness is mainly what matters, then Barrie was probably a genius, and has had some hand in shaping the world for the better. Does the real form the consciousness or the consciousness form the real? In a letter to Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that “the actual is not the true”. Most of Barrie’s writing is not directly social satire and or philosophy, but when I read his pages, the realities of modern society seem to stammer and dim. A man may count his gold, but he is not wealthy, he may put the crown tottering on his head, but he is not king.