Phil Fitzsimmons

Peter Pan as Evil Escritoire: A childrens classic and the heart of darkness Phil Fitzsimmons
Abstract: Considered to be a childrens picture book classic, J.M. Barries Peter Pan script and subsequent versions, including Disneys platinum boxed DVD set, had their origin in Barries earlier text entitled Little White Bird. This latter text is now recognised as an autobiographical treatise on paedophilia in general and Barries obsession with one young boy in particular. Literary myth has also suggested that this text appeared in a mens only magazine, which had paedophiliac leanings, as perhaps the first sealed centrefold. With the exception of Roses1 (1984) brief mention of this foundational essence of evil and a few psychological applications of Barries text as representing some mens inability to mature psychologically2 no research appears to have been undertaken into the transtextual nature of Peter Pan or its existential commentary. Using the principles of visual metaphor (Fitzsimmons 2007) and Lakoffs (2006) folk theory of language3, this paper argues that because Peter Pan arose in a context of time and place when the concept of evil had begun to lose its religious overtones and in a context of situation when Barrie began to wrestle with what he perceived to be the social epitome of evil. Thus Peter Pan represents a grounded theory of liminality. In other words Barries words are heavy words lightly thrown4 and although couched in a childrens text represent an untapped definition of evil. Key Words: evil, language use, childrens literature, Peter Pan 1 Conceptual Foundations This paper had its conceptual birth at the 2007 Evil conference when it was discussed at some length that the only way to effectively describe evil is through the modality of theological discourse. While to a large degree I concurred I could not help but wonder about the other linguistic means through which concepts and ideologies are defined. Off the top of my head I could think of numerous novels that dealt with the double binaries of good and evil. In narrative concepts are not always explicitly defined, as this is this is the paradigm that uses interplay of metaphor, myth through which we touch the unspeakable.5 In narrative the unspeakable elements and emotions in our lives such as hope,

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love, fear and evil are revealed in action as we become engaged as omniscient observers. As I sat and listened I wondered which of all the novels I had read best revealed and defined the concepts of evil. It was then that I decided it was Barries Peter Pan, as in this childrens classic the explicit naming of evil is melded with the subtleties of threaded subtext of inner reality.6 While often viewed as being simplistic by its very nature childrens literature touches the core of what it means to be human7 in a much more focused and succinct way than the compactness of adult novels.8 While the use of illustrations and concise use of text childrens literature often has the appearance of innocence and a sense of first hand reportage. However, it is because of these facets that childrens literature also has the potential to be a fictive means of revealing deeper truth.9 These deeper truths dealing with the various binaries of life such as good and evil are often hidden under the surface in the guise of symbol, mythic facets or the glimpse or pointers of subtext that Barthes has termed the vanishing point, the signifier of the inexpressible.10 More importantly, childrens books are written by adults and therefore carry between their covers all of contexts of culture and situation in which the writers mind is embedded. Using Barrie as a case in point Rose has pointed out, and perhaps the only voice in the childrens literature sphere, these texts can contain a troubling of intention and address, not one which is often entertained in discussion of childrens literature.11 This paper focuses even more intently on Roses critique of Barries troubled intention by using her points of contention but taking them two steps further. Firstly, it will take the point of view that Barrie saw his predilections, fascinations and obsessions as either being considered evil or that he wrote Peter Pan as a means of expunging and eviscerating his pedophiliac compulsions. Peter Pan is therefore and autoethnography of incompatibility, penetrating and participating across boundaries, in rapport with the Otherhalf, the excommunicated half of being.12 Secondly, this paper will unpack the Pan text as a means of viewing how Barrie sought to consciously or unconsciously symbolise how he saw himself in light of how other saw him. While the society he was in viewed his liking for young boy as the disturbance, the difficulty, and above all the impossible questions about origins and sexual difference which circulate between the narrator and child in The Little White Bird, and which lead into, and one might say engendered, the story of Peter Pan 13, Barry appears to believe

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there is a greater evil. 2 Text and Context Living in a context when Freuds concepts of sexual deviation as detailed in his psychotherapy sessions with the Wolf Man were widely and circulated, and Jung notions of archetypes were also a facet of intellectual focus, Barrie appears to have discussed the rumour and innuendo concerning his liking for young boys in another semiotic form. While other researchers have clearly identified Freudian and Jungian symbolism in both his ongoing development of the Pan plays and childrens texts, I would argue that the concept of evil in these texts is more clearly introduced and then expanded upon in terms that van Noy has described as the denizens survey.14 Even the most cursory reading of this text reveals that both the surface and the subtextual features of the narrative are characterised by language aligned with literary cartography and topography; a language that equates human qualities with space, time and contours. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.15 The transformation of understanding to concepts of place and space is a fundamental instinctual human activity16, representing the need of humankind to find a sense of place and define personal issues. Thus as well as the alignment of Fruedian and Jungian metaphors in the first mention of evil in this text, Barrie has inserted a set of as deep frame structures representing his views on the evil concepts that had been cast at him. Using the discourse analysis notion of open coding in tandem with the identification of the deep frames it is clear that Barrie wrote Peter Pan around an integrated set of themes based on the shifting roles of evil.17 These themes gives at once a singular but multifaceted definition of evil, not grounded in specific names but the sense of where it came from: the mind of the one named as being evil, the one created as other. A Evil is sexuality not-accepted From the first mention of evil in this text in which Mrs Darling is

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revealed as delving into the childrens minds rearranging their evil passions and overlaying them with pure ones several key points are revealed. Firstly, it seems that Barrie is stating that evil is a natural and embedded part of human nature and that children, and by implication all human beings, are caught up not so much in a dichotomy of good and evil but in a cross current or cross roads of participating in an easy tension between these two extremes. Indeed it is also clear that Barrie believes that evil is also a socio-cultural concept imposed on individuals against their will. Deeply rooted in the forced distance between himself and his mother after the death of his brother, so too Barrie has constructed this formation of evil without a word from the mother in his book. Instead she simple acts, rearranging her childrens minds without the mothers voice of love or acceptance. A mother voice and interaction with her children is a critical element in their development of the concept of self, selfdetermination and the sense of possibility. Mrs Darlings rearrangement of the childrens evil thoughts as if they were clothes to be folded and packed further defines evil as an arbitrary construct robbing her children of individuality and overall denying their free will and natural leaning. The organization and defining of space in text is never simply the stating of place to give a descriptive account that adds to the plot, but rather is a psychological link to the sexual coding of both the author and at times to a central figure in the text. Space and its organization is also never gender neutral, and as Penny suggests is typically orientated towards male sexuality. In the rearrangement of her childrens minds in the solid borders of a metaphoric draw Barrie appears to be suggesting that she forcing her childrens sexuality out their normal development and deforming and disassociating the natural relationship between sex and intimacy. For Barrie this is, and was, the greatest evil. It left him emotionally impotent. It is from this point on in the text, Pan becomes both a figurative and literal mapping and remapping process of imposed understanding and existential definitions. Indeed the whole setting of the text now shifts to the concept of Never Land which Barrie carefully constructs as being highly individualistic and containing the full gamut of human experience and emotion. Elements he never experienced in his relationships with his parents, his mother in particular and later on his wife.

Phil Fitzsimmons

As the children in this text finally grow into adulthood and can hear the surf of that distant land of free choice, but shall land there no more18, Barrie appears to be reinforcing the notion grounded in his personal life that the imposition of the will onto a child by another is the ultimate form of judgemental violence, degradation and evil. From this point on in the text the interaction and exchanges between the characters, and in the plot episodes deals mainly with the disconnection, disassociation and disenfranchisement B Evil is sexuality named as other As Barrie clearly highlights in a narrative modality in Pan, and as Berman later pointed out through observation, children realize from a very early age and readily accept that there are dark others in their lives.19 However, as Berman explains what opens up, and deepens unit the age of eight, and is something you are condemned to deal with for the rest of your life, is that an interpretation can be put upon you that is antagonistic to what you feel about yourself. Thus, linked to the prior concept of evil as the exchange and exertion of will over anothers mind, which as in Barries case lead to an inability to form any chance of forming a deep relationship with other human beings except for children, is the concept of naming. Occasionally in her travels through her childrens minds Mrs Darling found things she could not understand, and of these the most perplexing was the word Peter.20 While in the narrative adults lose sight and memory of Never Land, Mrs Darling clearly understands that the name Peter lies at the heart of her childrens evil desires. Now the menace of sexuality and lack of her control raises its ugly head again. In naming that which she cannot understand and is impenetrable, she again fixates her judgmental gaze. The naming process involves a socio-psycho-linguistic process that reveals as much about the namer as it does the named. To name is in itself a judgmental process; Any name is container; poured into are the conscious or unwitting evaluations of the namer.21 For Mrs Darling the name Peter represents all that she is not and will not accept in her children, and his name stood out in bolder letters than any of the other words, while Wendy began to be scrawled all over with him.22

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However, the other side of the naming coin is how the receiver deals with it. In this case Pan soon realises that his name fixes his identity as well as his own self-image. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.23 While commentators generally see Barrie as projecting himself into his text as Pan, the boy who never grew up, it would appear that it is not the boy per se that he wanted to be but the body as a sexual being. Having been denied his place as a self-determining being and losing his identity and sexuality in real life, through Pan he regained the materiality of his body and a reuniting of gender, sexuality and gender. Unlike the fixed and rigid boundaries of the box his mother had created for him as a being, through Pan he regained the fluidity, flowing contours of living soul with the ability to rewrite its environment, to continually augment its power and capacities through the incorporation and into the bodys own spaces and modalities.24 It was through this text that he became what he could never be, not the boy who would never grow up but the boy who could always feel alive. The feeling of being alive and a sexual being is something that escaped him all of his life. The need for his freedom or desire to feel was misconstrued. He was variously rumoured to be an adulterer, impotent and a paedophile. As he saw it, his context of childhood had created in him the image of itself, named him as outcast and so he lived up to it. When this horrid nightmare got hold of me, and how, I cannot say, but it has made me the most unfortunate of men.2.5 C Evil is accepting sexuality as the others other While the story of Peter Pan appears to be grounded in Barries early childhood trauma, the most potent definition of evil in this text is clearly his inability to find self or even to assert his own notion of self. Thus, while this text deals with children who, as long as they believed could fly away to another magical land and escape the entrapment of their context of setting; Barrie could not. He was in effect a prisoner and while the narrative is based on travel, flight and movement, he was both psychological and a linguistic prisoner. Thus this text deals with another form of sexual alienation and source of psychological violence other than previously mentioned. It is in the pivotal fight scenes with Captain Hook that the second

Phil Fitzsimmons

mention of evil occurs. Barrie has made it clear in his notes that Hook is Peter Pans alter ego, and by extension and inference and he is also Barries. Hook is the shadow that Peter lost in the initial sections of the book and had to have sewn back onto his body. As such it the element in Barries life that needed confronting and overcoming in order for a full understanding of self awareness. Pan, alias Barrie, instead kills Hook, and again loses his shadow. The implication being that he has accepted the label place on him by his mother, his estranged wife and society at large. He in effect lives the life of sexual outcast, just as Pan lives the life of boyhood forever. ". to own ones shadow is whole making. No one can be anything but a partial being, ravaged by doubt and loneliness, unless he has close contact with his shadow. The shadow consists of those aspects of your character that belong to you but that have not been given any conscious place in your life. ... Assimilating ones shadow is the art of catching up on those facets of life that have not been lived out adequately.26 The Final Comment on a Life Not Lived Peter Pan is much more than a simple childrens classic. It represents Barries interior landscape, or mind map of local knowledge where symbolic markers have been placed in an effort a journey to find a sense of home and a sense of self. Just as the children flew away from their sense of place so too for Barrie evil was the inability to find a sense of sexuality, home or self. Peter Pan reveals his disconnectedness, flight from hope, discontinuity between the past and the present, lack of future, an inability to know and be known and the destruction of personal history. I wake up with the scream of a lost soul, clammy and shiverin.27.

Notes
1 J Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Childrens Fiction, University of Philadelphia Press, Philadelphia, 1993.

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2 3 4 5 D Kiley, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, Corgi, London, 1983. G Lakoff, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2006. L Niemi and E Ellis, Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking about difficult stories, August House Pub, Little Rock, Ark, 2001, p. 11 B Abernathy and W Bole, The Life of Meaning: Reflections on faith, doubt and repairing the world, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2007, p. 11, E Mendelson, The Thinks That Matter: What seven classic novels have to say about the stages of life, Pantheon, New York, 2006, p.xv L Niemi and E Ellis, p. 8. E Mendelson, p. xv11. T McCarthy, TinTin and the Secret of Literature, Granata, London., 2006, p. 5. R Barthes, Mythologies, Hill and Wang, New York, 1988, p. 21. J Rose, p.21. D Deardorff, The Other Within: The genius of deformity in myth, culture, and psyche. White Cloud Press, Ashland, 2004, p.79. J Rose, p.24 R Van Noy, Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place. University of Nevada Press, Nevada, 2003. J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan, Butler and Tanner, London, 1911. Van Noy, p. 7. A Billone, The Boy Who Lived: From Carrolls Alice and Barries Peter Pan in Children's Literature, 32, 2004, p. 179. Barrie, p. 12. M Berman, M., Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the hidden history of the west, Schuster, New York, 1989, p. 36. Barrie, p. 13.

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27

A Strauss, Language and Identity in Open University Team (ed), Language in Education, Open University Press, London, 1972, p. 71. Barrie, p. 13. Barrie, p. 31. E Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1994, p. 187 H Coulter, Exploring the Shores of Neverland, in Psychoanalysis Down Under, 4, 2003, p. 3. R Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow, Harper Collins, New York, 1991, p. 43. A Birkin, J.M Barrie and the Lost Boys, Futura, London,1980, p. 36.

Bibliography Abernathy, B. and Bole, W., The Life of Meaning: Reflections on faith, doubt and repairing the world, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2007. Barrie, J., Peter Pan, Viking Kestrel, London, 1911. Barthes, R., Mythologies, Hill and Wang, New York, 1988. Berman, M., Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the hidden history of the west, Schuster, New York, 1989. Billone, A., The Boy Who Lived: From Carrolls Alice and Barries Peter Pan Birkin, A., J.M Barrie and the Lost Boys, Futura, London,1980. Coulter, H., Exploring the Shores of Neverland, in Psychoanalysis Down Under, 4, 2003. Deardorff, D., The Other Within: The genius of deformity in myth, culture, and psyche. White Cloud Press, Ashland, 2004. Grosz, E., Volatile Bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1994. Johnson, R., Owning Your Own Shadow, Harper Collins, New York, 1991. Kiley, D., The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, Corgi, London, 1983. Lakoff, G., Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2006. McCarthy, T., TinTin and the Secret of Literature, Granata, London, 2006. Mendelson, E., The Thinks That Matter: What seven classic novels have to say

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about the stages of life, Pantheon, New York, 2006. Niemi, L. and Ellis, E., Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking about difficult stories, August House Pub, Little Rock, Ark, 2001. Rose, J., The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Childrens Fiction, University of Philadelphia Press, Philadelphia, 1993. Strauss, A., Language and Identity in Open University Team (ed), Language in Education, Open University Press, London, 1972 Van Noy, R., Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place. University of Nevada Press, Nevada, 2003.