Sympathy for Hook: Toward a Christening of Peter Pan

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:46:00 -0500

It was in 1904, at Christmastime, that American impresario Charles Frohman first staged James M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan: or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre. Perhaps the astute Jewish producer had noticed, as David Goldman put it in his December 2006 essay “ Sympathy for Scrooge ,” that “the Christmas season [is] a moment when the entire Gentile world is given over to a child’s view of things.”

Mr. Goldman insightfully observed that Dickens’ Scrooge caricatures Dissenters whose disdain for Christmas dated back to the Puritan attempt to abolish it. That attempt failed, in part because the Nativity story and its celebration serve a purpose: namely, to confute Adoptionism—to remind Christians that their faith is about God becoming man, not man becoming God. New England’s Christmas-spurning Puritans devolved, by way of Adoptionism, into Unitarians. Yet the persistent popularity of the Christened solstice relative to theologically weightier Good Friday and Easter might remind us that a reluctance to grow up, to “put away childish things,” to leave the manger and shoulder one’s cross, long antedates Barrie’s fiction. Perhaps neo-Scroogian cultural critics might deprecate our aversion to confronting mortality as “Christmas syndrome,” had not Barrie provided a scapegoat—a figure to whose account, under the rubric of “Peter Pan syndrome,” that folly may be charged with less manifest humbuggery.

Barrie’s cricket club-mate G.K. Chesterton regarded Peter Pan more fondly. In The Everlasting Man (1925), in the chapter “The Strangest Story in the World,” Chesterton wrote: “Peter Pan belongs not to the world of Pan but to the world of Peter.” But Chesterton’s time and culture are not ours, and the fault lies less in Peter Pan than in ourselves that we construe him so paganly.

Peter Pan is about the death of children, long a daunting challenge to both simple faith and learned soteriology. It is, however, equally about deadly parental neglect—about not wanting or loving children. It is all too timely for our era of selfishly infertile and casually feticidal adults. Perhaps we miss Peter Pan ’s central themes in part because child death post partum has become far rarer than it was a century ago. We also may miss them, at least in part, because we dismiss as mere caricature the story’s main adult character, Captain Hook: We fail to recall and give due weight to the tradition, which goes back to the play’s first staging, under Barrie’s direction, that Hook be played by the same actor who plays Mr. Darling, a flawed father. Mr. Darling and Hook are, in fact, the same character, operating respectively in this world and in Barrie’s limbus puerorum , Neverland. Although, as G.B. Shaw noted, Peter Pan “is ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people,” appreciation of its burden for grown-ups requires attention to its main adult character. Appreciation of Peter Pan requires sympathy for Hook.

Never Growing Up as Child Death: The Autobiographical Origins of Peter Pan

Barrie worked on Peter Pan for a quarter century. It is not one work but two, one of which changed over decades without fixed form, and both of which Barrie anticipated or elaborated in other works published in his lifetime or posthumously. Although the play was first staged at Christmastime in 1904, its script was not published until 1928, and Barrie restaged it and revised its script repeatedly in the interim; even the only extant script for the play’s staging, unpublished and housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library, antedates and differs from the play described by reviewers on opening night. The title Peter Pan also refers to Peter and Wendy , later republished under the title Peter Pan and Wendy or simply as Peter Pan . This is a novel-form rendition of substantially the same story with dialogue sometimes different from that of the playscript as published, and with more profuse narrative commentary. The novelized version was first published in 1911, seven years after the play was first staged but seventeen years before its script was published.

The character Peter Pan first appeared in chapters 13-18 of The Little White Bird; or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens , a novel published in 1902; the Peter Pan chapters were republished in 1906 as a children’s book, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens . The 1902 Peter Pan is an infant runaway who dwells on the bird sanctuary island in Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake and consorts by night with fairies in neighboring Kensington Gardens. Boys abandoned in the gardens at night he either rescues and takes to his island or buries, if they have died of exposure. He fights no pirates and has no Neverland, save that real people never go to the bird sanctuary island in the Serpentine.

In July 1927 Barrie further elaborated the character of Captain James Hook in a droll address, “Captain Hook at Eton,” that he delivered at Hook’s putative alma mater . London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, to which the childless Barrie bequeathed his Peter Pan copyrights and royalties, has published, on its J.M. Barrie website, selections from Barrie’s notebooks, including 500 entries called “Fairy Notes” that date from 1903-1904 and illuminate the play’s writing, and a not entirely complete playscript, titled “Anon,” that dates from late 1903 and early 1904.

Some of Barrie’s letters and his biography of his mother ( Margaret Ogilvie , published in 1896) also seem very helpful for understanding Peter Pan . The death of Barrie’s brother David at age thirteen, when James Barrie was six years old, left Barrie lastingly scarred psychologically. For the remaining 29 years of her life, Barrie’s mother abandoned James emotionally to mourn his dead brother. This gave rise in Barrie, per his biography of his mother, to an “intense desire to become so like [David] that even my mother should not see the difference.” Barrie’s effort to resemble his brother took its specific form from his mother’s habit of consoling herself with the thought that her dead son would remain a child forever—that she would meet him in eternity just as he had been when they parted. Young James Barrie resolved that he, too, would remain a child forever—that he would never grow up, in the hope of regaining his mother’s affection. “The horror of my boyhood,” he wrote in Margaret Ogilvie , “was that I knew a time would come when I must give up the games and how it was to be done I saw not. This agony still returns to me in dreams, when I catch myself playing marbles, and look on with cold displeasure; I felt that I must continue playing in secret.” This, Barrie reportedly observed in a letter to his sister, was how the dramatic theme of “a lost childhood” occurred to him. His Fairy Note 259 states: “The horror of growing up [is the] root idea of P[eter Pan] .” In sum, Peter Pan is autobiographical in origin, and its theme of “never growing up” refers to dying as a child.

That Peter Pan is about child death, Barrie bluntly suggested in the program notes for the 1908 Paris production of the play: “Of Peter himself you must make what you will. Perhaps he was a little boy who died young, and this is how the author conceived of his subsequent adventures” (A. Birkin, J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys , page 116). In Chapter 1 of Peter and Wendy , Mrs. Darling, on hearing of Peter from her children, dimly remembers from her own childhood “odd stories” about “a Peter Pan who . . . when children died . . . went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened.” It seems, then, that the term lost boys is a euphemism for “dead boys” (notwithstanding their miraculous return to London at play’s end), who go to Neverland not by flying but by dying. Peter Pan is not only a dead child but also a psychopomp for other dead children. In this context, Peter’s role of taking children to Neverland seems starkly menacing to parents, represented by Mr. and Mrs. Darling.

Indeed, the Fairy Notes extracted from Barrie’s notebooks in 1903-1904 suggest that Peter Pan, not Hook, was originally the villain of the piece. Consider the following:

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Sympathy for Hook: Toward a Christening of Peter Pan