Peter and Wendy

Any good essay needs a good introductory hook. Here, then, is how J.M. Barrie introduces Captain Hook:

He lay at his ease in a rough chariot drawn and propelled by his men, and instead of a right hand he had the iron hook with which ever and anon he encouraged them to increase their pace. As dogs this terrible man treated and addressed them, and as dogs they obeyed him…

His eyes were of the blue of the forget-me-not, and of a profound melancholy, save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red spots appeared in them and lit them up horribly. In manner, something of the grand seigneur still clung to him, so that he even ripped you up with an air…He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding…

Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook’s method. Skylights will do. As they pass, Skylights lurches clumsily against him, ruffling his lace collar; the hook shoots forth, there is a tearing sound and one screech, then the body is kicked aside, and the pirates pass on. He has not even taken the cigars from his mouth.

Such is the terrible man against whom Peter Pan is pitted. Which will win?

This wasn’t quite my introduction to Hook; like so many kids of my generation, I had a VHS tape of the Disney version that I watched to pieces. But we also had a book, with pictures by Michael Hague. I can’t remember sitting down to read it all through, but I remember reading this passage many times. Maybe Hague’s painting of Hook, resplendent in his scarlet finery, surrounded by dangerous men, intrigued me. But I know J.M. Barrie’s description did. Here was the perfect villain: a union of opposites, refinement and brutality. And then that shocking moment of violence, which Barrie, breaking the fourth wall in classic bedtime storyteller style, almost seems to implicate us in. 

The casual randomness of it (“Skylights will do”) chilled me in a way the more famous version of the scene, a tension-deflating gag where Hook shoots one of his crew for singing badly, never could. I thought Hook was one of the greatest villains in literature. I still do. 

I assumed his defanging was yet another example of the proverbial Disneyfication until I saw the very first film version of Peter Pan, and there was Ernest Torrance as Hook, a credible villain but missing Hook’s most essential quality: his dignity. And the terrible death of Skylights is missing from the play. It would seem Barrie felt he could get away with more on the page than he could in the theater or the movies. Rereading as an adult, I can see the irony — Hook’s vaunted courage only shows up sporadically, and any pirate captain who’s regularly bested by children is going to look a little ridiculous to me now. But I stand by my assessment of Hook. And I think we’ll see Barrie would agree. 

Peter Pan, the play, premiered in 1904, which would put it outside the scope of this column. But Peter and Wendy, the novel, didn’t appear until 1911. That time gap’s important. Peter and Wendy, in many ways, feels as much like a commentary on Barrie’s greatest success as a novelization. It and the 1928 script are full of narrative passages picking apart Neverland and its inhabitants, giving these pantomime archetypes depth and life. Hook becomes a “not wholly unheroic figure” and as for Peter Pan — well, he’s not wholly heroic either. 

I’m agnostic on biographical criticism, but it’s hard not to apply it here. After all, Barrie began his career writing autobiographical novels. One, Margaret Ogilvy, was inspired by his mother who, like Wendy, became a “mother” when still a child herself, in this case because she had to raise her brothers after her parents’ death. His next two, Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Liza, were straightforwardly based on his life. And he describes his alter ego as a “boy who could not grow up.”

Does this mean J.M. Barrie is Peter Pan? Maybe, but even then, he could see the darkness inside the dream of eternal childhood. This passage begins, “he was a boy only…and boys could not love.” 

And in a more literal sense, Barrie was Captain Hook — or, as he called himself when he played with a local family as Captain (oof) Swarthy. Barrie and the Davies boys created Neverland in their backyard — the island, the Indians, the pirates, the plank. But a lot changed between turning their adventures into a play and turning that play into a book. The Davies boys’ father died, then their mother, and Barrie became their legal guardian. The older boys, unlike Peter, had grown up. In the end, Barrie assumed all the pivotal roles in his play: Peter, Hook, and the Darling parents.

That may account for the unexpectedly brutal unsentimentality of Peter and Wendy. It’s a celebration of childhood, but a deeply ambivalent one. The ending may as well be Barrie’s summation of the whole story: “Thus it will go on, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” The gaiety and innocence have been explored in millions of books, each more idealized than the last. But those things can’t exist without the heartlessness. The last time I read Peter and Wendy, I was working my first real job wrangling toddlers, and I was shocked by how Barrie cut to the heart of my experience. Reading the novel expecting the safe, sanitized world of other versions is a little like the Darling children’s experience entering Neverland: “Thus sharply did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.”

We all remember Peter Pan embodies gaiety and innocence. “I’m youth, I’m joy…I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.” But is he heartless? Yes, often frighteningly so. Even as a kid, I noticed an ominously vague line explaining what happens to Lost Boys when they grow up: “Peter thins them out.” Whatever murderous intent Barrie might be euphemizing here, Peter is a cold-blooded killer in the way we would never expect a child to be, but that only a child could be. When he returns to visit Wendy a year after killing Hook, he’s already forgotten both him and the late Tinkerbell. 

And eventually, he seems to forget Wendy too. After promising to take her home to clean out their little home every spring, he disappears for decades. When he finally sees the adult Wendy, Peter doesn’t notice “any difference, for he was thinking chiefly of himself” — the reason for almost everything he does. And despite all that, the yearning to be like him again persists: “Something inside [Wendy] was crying, ‘Woman, Woman, let go of me.’”

When I was a kid reading how Mrs. Darling recognized Peter Pan’s name from her own girlhood, I really believed Peter was a mythical character who long predated the play. This was deliberate on Barrie’s part. When he writes, “To describe [all Peter’s adventures] would require a book as large as an English-Latin, Latin-English Dictionary, and the most we can do is to give one as a specimen of an average hour on the island,” I believed that too. 

The name, certainly, is no accident — like the Great God Pan, Peter lives in the wild places of the land and the heart — pure preadolescent id. The iconography of Peter in his green tunic and feathered cap has penetrated the modern world the way the icons of ancient mythology did. Which is odd, because Barrie’s directions for Peter’s costuming suggest something more mythic still. He’s dressed in autumn leaves (“skeleton leaves” in the novel) and cobwebs¹, like something from the old, old fairy tales where the fair folk dispensed blessings and cursings at random and seemed less like residents of the land than emanations of it. Like the old gods, Peter Pan’s intertwined with the world he represents — without Peter’s vitality, Neverland turns dull (even Lost Boys and pirates can only work up the energy to bite their thumbs at each other) and it comes to life when he returns.

If Peter is a mythic character, he’s a “tragic figure” too. Just as in Tommy and Liza, a boy who cannot grow up is a boy who cannot love. He never cries when awake, but he’s tormented by dreams that keep him drying all night. And when the Darlings are finally reunited, “There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred.”

Fatherhood, such as it was, seems to have made an especially strong impression on Barrie when it came time to rewrite the children’s return. Maybe he was just now seeing the hell he’d put Mr. and Mrs. Darling through by separating them from their children for so long. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure his readers understood it. Nearly every description of the Darling children hammers in the pain they unthinkingly put their parents through — “rubbishy,” “scoundrels,” and so on. 

I almost wanted to shout I get it, James. But of course, he wasn’t writing for me. He was writing for children, and something compelled him to make sure they do not miss this, if he had to hammer it into their little heads. What compelled him, I won’t say — a playful way to build suspense for the inevitable happy ending by asking readers if the heroes deserve it? Horror at seeing children gulp this fantasy down uncritically for years? Now that he was a father and not just a playmate, did he understand for the first time the gravity of losing a child?

There’s an odd moment in this passage where the narrator turns his ire from the children to Mrs. Darling, saying he despises her for continuing to love the children who’ve abandoned her. It seems unmotivated, but it’s really setting us up for a swerve: “Now that we look at her closely and remember the gaiety of her in the old days, all gone now because she has lost her babes, we find we can’t say nasty things about her after all…Some like Peter best, and some like Wendy best, but I like her best.”

Mrs. Darling, of course, would be the Davies boys’ late mother. What relationship this implies between her and Barrie is an exercise for the reader.

So much for the mother. Then there’s the father, and you could write an essay much longer than this analyzing the stage tradition of casting the same actor as him and Hook. The obvious reading is of Hook as the archetypal, oedipal Father figure, the cruel authoritarian putting playtime to an end. I’m sure that’s part of it. Barrie certainly makes much of the “unfairness” of relationships between parents and children. Hook captures the Lost Boys by ambushing their Indian guardians while they sleep, breaking the elaborate code of battle Barrie invented to parody the “blood and thunder” novels he’d grown up on. When Peter sportingly gives him a hand up to even the odds, Hook immediately plays dirty and bites him, and Barrie explicitly addresses parents to describe Peter’s reaction:

“Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest.”

But there are more specific and intriguing connections between Captain Hook and Mr. Darling. Mr. Darling is precariously upwardly mobile and deeply self-conscious about it. (There’s a rich, often overlooked vein of satire in this book.) His fragile pride makes the incongruous appearance of Nana the almost human dog-nurse, a fantasy element in the “real world,” almost plausible. If he can’t afford a nurse for his children, at least a dog will keep up appearances². 

At home, this means he is myopically focused on making his children “admire” him, which leads indirectly to their departure to Neverland when he leaves them outside Nana’s care in a sequence of events kicked off by both his unfairness — he tries to trick Michael into taking his medicine by pretending to take his own — and his vanity — he tries to win back the children’s admiration by pouring his medicine in Nana’s bowl as a joke. This only provokes a fight with her that ends with her outside the nursery and the children unguarded.³

Captain Hook doesn’t put on airs. He really does come from a lineage so important that “to reveal who he really was would even at this date send the country in a blaze.” But he’s just obsessed with “form” as Mr. Darling is with “admiration.” The way we learn this is shocking. After building an archetypal villain for the last hundred pages, Barrie begins to take him apart and show the human being underneath. As anyone who’s sat through any number of Star Wars prequels or horror movies subtitled “Origins” knows, this is a Very Bad Idea. Hook as we met him in that passage at the top has no humanity, no vulnerability, nothing we can sympathize with. That’s why he works. 

And yet, what Barrie adds to Hook in these last chapters not only works, it works beautifully, even tragically — or tragicomically, which is even more devastating. Barrie returns to his satirical mode, with a portrayal of the English boarding school so biting it makes historical context redundant.⁴ As far as he knows, Hook has won everything he wanted — Wendy and the Lost Boys captured, Peter and Tinkerbell presumed dead. 

But “Ah, envy not Hook.” Deep down, he’s still a scared little boy looking up at his examiners, still trying to live up to their capricious standard of “good form.” He tortures himself with their impossible standards  — “Most disquieting of all, was it not bad form to think about good form?” Peter and Wendy changes from the story of the boy who wouldn’t grow up to the story of the man who was forced to grow up — by the teachers and other assorted grown-ups the illiterate Peter so carefully avoids. And growing up means growing old, and eventually dying. The only two things Barrie says Hook fears are the sight of his own blood and the crocodile, tick-tick-ticking the hours away to his inevitable death.

Knowing this, the reason for his all-consuming hatred of Peter begins to take shape. None of Hook’s adult concerns worry Peter’s thoughtless head. Peter seems to have a brilliant strategy to intimidate the pirates: imitating the ticking of the crocodile. Except he only did it out of habit because it scared off the other wild beasts of the island: “Had he known he would have stopped, for to board the brig by help of the tick, though an ingenious idea, had not occurred to him.”

By the time Peter begins picking off pirates one by one in the darkness of the hold and one of his Lost Boys solemnly counts the bodies, I was no longer scared of Hook. I was scared for him. In the end, Barrie seems to have talked himself into sympathizing with his villain: “He did not know the crocodile was waiting for him; for we purposely stopped the clock that this knowledge might be spared him: a little mark of respect from us, at the end.” And another mark of respect: Hook goes “content to the crocodile” as Peter finally slips up, leaving these last words: “Bad form.” 

In the end, Wendy and the Lost Boys must join Hook in adulthood. The melancholy of having to grow up is hardly fresh territory, but most versions ignore it in favor of the fantasy of eternal youth — including the original play, which ended with the Darlings’ reunion. In the novel, we watch these extraordinary children grow up to be ordinary adults, for better and for worse. Neverland hangs on them for a while: they need to be tied to their beds to keep from floating away, and they enjoy pranking adults by pretending to fall and then flying to safety.

But by and by they ceased to tug at their bonds in bed, and found that they hurt themselves when they let go of the bus. In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.

1. Could this change be the result of theaters recycling Robin Hood costumes? Discuss. ↩︎
2. He has only one other maid, who he insists on calling “the servants” ↩︎
3. There’s another odd little mini-play just before the children return where Mr. Darling finally gets the status he craves by walking around everywhere inside Nana’s doghouse as penance. ↩︎
4. Here’s some context that is relevant: the oldest of the Davies boys were sent to Eton between the compositions of the play and the novel. ↩︎