J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
Cynical Celebration of a Serial Killer
Or Cautionary Tale?
Burton Weltman
A Kids’ Story?
In this story, there is a charismatic boy, almost mesmerizing in his charm. He lures some children away from their happy home and their loving parents with promises of great adventures. He takes them to an isolated place where he has gathered other children whom he has charmed into being his devoted followers. It is a place from which they cannot escape and he kills anyone who wants to leave. The boy is a cold-blooded serial killer who has no memory of any of those he has killed. He and his kidnapped followers play murderous games in which some of them and other people are routinely killed. The deaths are graphically described.
The newcomers become his adoring followers, and they gradually forget their past lives. He teaches them to kill and they relish their kills, caring nothing about those they have murdered. The children eventually return to their home, but thereafter think nothing but good about the boy and their experiences with him. And all of this is narrated in a lighthearted and jovial tone.
Is this a children’s story? Is this a story you should tell children? It is J.M. Barrie’s story of Peter Pan and we have been regaling children with it for over one hundred years.[1] What does that say about us?
Peter Pan, Serial Killer.
Peter Pan is a book that seems forever fresh and eternally appealing. Despite the book’s age, its freshness seems fitting since the main character in the book, Peter Pan, is in his own view, and in the view of most readers, an exemplar of eternal youth. He is the boy who refuses to grow up, and who appeals to the nostalgia in all of us for what we think we remember as the innocence of childhood. He is the youth we think we would liked to have been. Or would we?
In the closing words of the book, the narrator exclaims over Peter’s everlasting appeal, and predicts that Peter will forever have followers “so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.”[2] And, given the enormous ongoing popularity of the character Peter Pan and of his story, so it has seemed. But, wait a minute, what’s with this “heartless?” What does the narrator mean by “heartless?” Well, when you think about what the narrator might mean, I think you might come to some important conclusions about Peter Pan that are generally missed.
For most people, Peter Pan is read, or is seen in its various cartoon and musical versions, as a sentimental and nostalgic representation of an idyllic childhood. Peter is generally seen as a model of the boy hero, and is widely idealized by readers as the sort of boy who led the fun and games of their own younger days. There is even a peanut butter for kids that is named after Peter Pan, who is pictured on the jar as a fun loving, flying sprite. But that is, I believe, a major misreading of the story.
If you read the book with clear eyes, and read between the lines of the sanitized productions of the story, I think you are forced to a very different conclusion. It is a conclusion that includes the word “heartless” in the description of Peter Pan and what he represents. That most people seemingly do not see this says, I contend, some troubling things about us and our society.
The first thing I think you have to notice about Peter Pan is that Peter is a cold-blooded killer and that Neverland is a bloody place of continual carnage. People in the book are really killed and really die.[3] The slaughter is treated as a game by the inhabitants of the island, and presented as such by the sardonic narrator of the story, but it is a life-and-death game, mostly death.
Lost boys, Indians, and pirates are almost continuously butchered by each other throughout the story. While there is lots of make-believe in the book, the killing is portrayed as real. The Indians, for example, wear around their necks the “scalps of boys as well as pirates.”[4] The lost boys and the pirates are similarly savage. Since, however, the narrator takes an ironic view of Peter and his various antics, it is easy for readers to take all of the killing in stride as cute, humorous, and harmless. But it isn’t. And Peter isn’t.
Perhaps the most telling and chilling passage in the book comes as the narrator is explaining how things work in Neverland. Describing who and what are the lost boys, the narrator says with what seems to be casual irony that “The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on.” Not so idyllic this Neverland where boys being killed is so casually accepted. But for Peter they are disposable and replaceable.
When Peter needs new recruits, he seemingly finds them among abandoned kids and orphans or he lures them from their families, as he did Wendy, Michael and John Darling. Whether or not they were orphans to begin with, the children quickly lose all memory of their past lives, as was happening in the story to Wendy, Michael and John.[5] Then Peter introduces them to the deadly games he plays, and they come to like the killing, as when Michael brags to Wendy about the pirate he has killed and proudly shows her the body. He has been sucked into the joy of killing.[6]
The narrator then goes on to say that when some boys insist on growing up, “which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.” The clear implication is that Peter kills these boys. And then forgets about them.[7] He neither cares for his followers nor cares about them.
Peter is a creature of the moment and of his impulses. He has chronic amnesia, an inability to remember anything for very long. It is one of his key characteristics and a key to his character, particularly his callousness. If you cannot remember what you’ve done, you cannot have a conscience or apply moral rules to your actions. Conscience builds on recollection. In turn, if you cannot remember people, you cannot care about them. Peter is always in the moment, and the moment is generally filled with enmity.
The narrator tells us that Peter would go out and kill someone, and then forget about it by the time he got back. He could not remember to tell you about it, the narrator explains, but “then when you went out you found the body.”[8] At the end of the book, when Peter comes to get Wendy for her annual spring-cleaning visit to Neverland, Peter has no memory of Captain Hook or his thrilling fight to the death with Hook that was the centerpiece of the book. “’I forget them after I kill them,’ he replied carelessly” to Wendy in explaining his inability to remember Hook.[9] Peter Pan is a serial killer without caring or conscience.
Peter is almost completely self-centered. If you cannot remember anybody or anything, you have only your immediate self to be concerned with, and he is. Peter is both arrogant and overly sensitive to insult. He needs to dominate any situation. Having no memory of his past deeds, he has no track record of achievement to fall back upon, no foundation for self-confidence. Motivated by a pre-adolescent striving for recognition, he has an overwhelming need to keep proving himself to himself and to others. Over and over again, endlessly into eternity.
Peter is also extraordinarily vain, and his followers are expected to continually go on about how great he is. His vanity and arrogance are what Hook, himself an extraordinarily arrogant and vain man, hates most in Peter.[10] Peter and Hook have much in common and are competitors in many of the same attributes, another facet of Peter Pan that is generally overlooked. Peter loves adulation, craves it, needs it, and insists on it from his followers. It can be dangerous to disagree with him or fail to praise him sufficiently. Peter needs an audience and needs the applause of that audience. And he is constantly seeking applause in everything he does.
Finally, Peter is almost completely ignorant, and proudly so. The narrator says that he was the only boy in Neverland who could not read or write. “He was above all that sort of thing.” At the same time, the boys in “his band were not allowed to know anything he did not know,” so they often pretended their own ignorance when he was ignorant of something. Unlike the other boys, Peter could not distinguish between make-believe and reality. “Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head,” the narrator explains and concludes that “I don’t believe he ever thought.” Nonetheless, Peter expected his followers to believe anything he said even if they knew it was nonsense, and his hold on them was such that they did.[11]
The story of Peter Pan is a horror story grimmer than Grimm. Grimm’s fairly tales are full of gruesome things happening to children, but they are portrayed in the interests of some moral lesson that is being taught to kids. Grimm’s carnage is depicted in a negative light, usually as a punishment of someone for their disobedience of authority or their departure from middle class ways and mores. In Peter Pan, the carnage serves no moral purpose, and it is described as fun and even funny. Rather than morality, the story promotes amorality and immorality. The narrator notes, for example, that Peter is not opposed to Hook because Hook is evil, but because Peter sees Hook as a competitor. Killing for Peter is fun and games.
All of this is described by the narrator in amused supercilious terms, as though “children will be children, and what can you do?” But the benign sarcasm of the narrator is a thin gloss over a very ugly situation. The book is almost a prequel to the adolescent savagery in Lord of the Flies. But the evil in Lord of the Flies is obvious and easily rejected. Not so in Peter Pan. The ironic narration is a cover-up that mostly works since most people seemingly don’t see through the narrator’s sarcastic patter to the cruelty of Peter and the horror of life in Neverland. Like the denizens of Neverland, most readers, and most producers of the lighthearted plays and musicals based on Peter Pan, get lulled by Peter’s charisma into overlooking the carnage he wreaks.
The Moral of the Story: Epater la Bourgeoisie?
So, what are we to make of this story? Barrie was writing in early twentieth-century England. There was a widespread movement among European and North American writers and artists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that rejected what they saw as the prevailing stiff and stuffy bourgeois values and materialistic middle-class mores. This movement was epitomized by the slogan of Baudelaire and other French poets that they should “epater la bourgeoisie,” that is, audaciously astonish the middle classes and stick it to them.
Peter Pan can be considered an example of that idea. For most of the book, the narrator treats Mr. and Mrs. Darling, the middle-class parents of Wendy, Michael and John, with scorn. Mr. Darling is a businessman who is obsessed with calculating the costs of anything and everything.[12] Mr. Darling is also a social climber. He is “very sensitive to the opinion of neighbors, and continually fretted about what the neighbors might think of him and his family.”[13] Mrs. Darling truly cares for her children, but her vanity overcomes her concerns for them on the fateful night they go off with Peter. The family is stiff, boring, and thoroughly bourgeois. Peter Pan, flying through the window into the Darling nursery, represents a literal breath of fresh air in this stiff and stuffy bourgeois household.
Peter Pan is the antithesis of bourgeois values and an antidote to middle-class mores. He is both magnetic and pathetic, heroic and vulnerable, noble and needy, all things that make him attractive and make people flock to him as their leader. He mesmerizes adults as well as children. The problem is that, most of all, he is a cold-blooded killer and a vain and heartless monster. We admire him at peril to our moral selves. That the reaction of most people to Peter Pan is admiration, and even longing, represents a dangerous tendency in our society.
This tendency can be summarized as a tendency to choose leaders on the basis of their charismatic personalities and their appeal to the worst in us instead of the strength of their characters and their appeal to our better angels. Peter Pan is an exemplar of a life based around grievance and taking revenge on those whom he sees as the source of his grievance.
As a creature of the moment, and lacking a foundation of self-confidence, Peter reacts defensively to all comers, and adopts a posture that mixes arrogance and vanity. Continually seeing and responding to what he perceives as slights from others, he has an endless supply of enemies he must vanquish. Peter exemplifies, in turn, a leadership based on cultivating the grievances and potential violence in others. You can read Donald Trump into this description of Peter Pan. And that is, I think, the moral of the story of Peter Pan and the point of this essay.
Bluntly put, Peter Pan is a moral monster. But is that what the author Barrie wants us to think? If so, why has he couched the story in a narration that underplays and obscures the awfulness of Peter’s actions and of life in Neverland? Bluntly put again, is Barrie a moral monster who wants us to be pulled by the charisma of Peter and the charming tone of the narrator into approving Peter’s monstrous character and awful deeds? Is Barrie trying to astonish and make fools of his middle-class readers with a cynical celebration of a serial killer?
Or is Barrie setting up a test for us to see if we can see through Peter’s charisma and the narrator’s charm so that we reject what Peter stands for? That is, is Barrie trying to astonish us middle-class readers to reject the kind of leadership represented by Peter? Is this a cautionary tale? I like to think that the latter is the case.
But if so, we seem to be failing the test both in continuing to teach the story of Peter Pan to our children as an innocent idyll and in electing a Pan-like moral monster as our President. Maybe it is time to eschew both Peter Pan and Donald Trump. I am writing this in early July, 2020. A national election in the United States is forthcoming. This is our chance to get rid of Trump. I hope we take advantage of it.
B.W. July 8, 2020
Footnotes.
[1] J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan. New York: Scholastic Inc. 1993. Barrie’s story about Peter Pan was published by him in several slightly varying versions during the early twentieth century. The version that I am using for this essay is one that has become standard. It is simply titled Peter Pan and is published by Scholastic Inc., a premier publisher of children’s books.
[2]Ibid. P.200
[3] Ibid. P.135 for example, describing “a massacre” of Indians and pirates.
[4] Ibid. P.62.
[5] Ibid. Pp.88-89.
[6] Ibid. P.174
[7] Ibid. P.58.
[8] Ibid. P.90.
[9] Ibid. P.92.
[10] Ibid. Pp.136, 143.
[11] Ibid. Pp.27, 44, 59, 78, 89.
[12] Ibid. P.27
[13] Ibid. P.189
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