“Out of innocence, and out of time, the dark-haired girl stared back at him, caught forever in her brief and desperate girlhood -- fledgling witch and nothing more”.
That is the exact sensation I was left with after finishing “Peter Pan and Other Plays”, the Oxford University Press’ collection of James M. Barrie classics. This edition has five plays: The Admirable Crichton, Peter Pan, When Wendy Grew Up, What Every Woman Knows, and Mary Rose.
I’m a big fan of Peter Pan (no, duh) so I was quite excited to see what off-Neverland adventures Mr. Barrie had to offer. I was not disappointed.
Now, I’ve read the novelized version of Peter Pan about a million times, and I was in a high school performance of the play. However, the text chosen for this specific edition, with the added footnotes*, and in the context of the other works, brings Peter into a whole new light. Yes, it is as magical, and dark, and pathetic, and funny and sad as ever. However, put against “Mary Rose” and her sinister island, and “The Admirable Crichton” and his life-altering island experience (yes, Barrie had a thing for islands: those isolated places, where anything and anyONE can happen), Neverland takes a few hundred more layers. Perhaps Neverland is Mary Rose’s island (as it was originally meant to be), perhaps it is also Critchton’s. After all, Neverland is different according to every child (or adults!) own mind.
What layers does this island of a book possess? Layers that fight each other. Layers that are two sides of the same quarter, much like Peter Pan and Hook: the contradiction of youth against adulthood, innocence against wisdom, man against woman, immortality against mortality, rich against poor. Barrie presents all these struggles and comes to the following (uneasy) conclusion: none of these is superior- each of these states is both desirable and tragic.
Let us look at the happy tragedy that is Peter Pan. As a children’s play, the full darkness of his plight cannot be explored to the extent that it is in "Mary Rose". Both of these characters have been taken (by faeries, of course, for they are amoral) into a timeless island: a place that freezes their innocence and will not allow them to grow up- a place akin to death. "Peter Pan", for all its references to the Llewyin-Davies children, is really about Barrie’s older brother, killed in an accident on the eve of his 14th birthday. Barrie said: “he stayed forever a child of 13, while I, at six, became an adult”. Similarly, Mary Rose came after World War I, when so many parents were left childless. Barrie’s oldest adopted son was also killed in the War. These children are forever caught in that frame—they can’t grow old, but they can’t grow. The tragedy of Peter Pan is not that he is immortal- it is that he is timeless. He has no past, and without a past, he can have no future. He is the epitome of “living in the moment”, and while this is a lesson that perhaps we should all learn (and keep forgetting the older we get!) it is also unsustainable. We don’t hear about Peter’s happy thoughts—for how can he be happy when he has forgotten every friend, every enemy, every victory? Perhaps it is this realization that finally made Hook surrender into the jaws of the Time Crocodile. Similarly, Mary Rose is the only woman in these plays that does not appear as superior in wisdom than the men: she has not had her time to bloom, and thus she is more fragile than her adult counterparts.
Another surprising element in these two plays is the amount of sexuality that rides the pages—there is constant sexual tension in both “Mary Rose” and “Peter Pan”, even though both of these plays are about eternal children. Both Mary Rose’s husband and Wendy (and Tiger Lilly and Tinkerbell, for that matter), demand sexuality out of their loved ones, but these don’t understand it, and so they can’t offer it-- which makes them even more sexual (I can just imagine Humbert Humbert licking his lips somewhere).
As for the battle of the sexes, it is clear whose side Barrie is on: women are those superior goddesses that he never came to understand. Oscar Wilde, take that. Wendy and Mrs. Darling in “Peter Pan” and “When Wendy Grew Up”, Mrs. Moorland in “Mary Rose” and Maggie in “What Every Woman Knows” are the epitome of the woman who knows more than men, but will keep quiet for his proud sake. It may be aggravating to some to see these women stand by and help out the men in silence when they KNOW they know better. However, it is this selflessness that also gives them a moral superiority. A little too idealistic and chivalrous? Yes, perhaps Barrie makes darling mothers of us all- but we must also remember that most of these plays were written BEFORE the War, before the women’s rights movement, and so, in his own visionary way, he was giving women the place that it took decades for them to actually win. Perhaps the sole exception (aside from sexually-asexual Mary Rose) is Lady Mary in “The Admirable Crichton”. Of all the horrible people in “The Admirable Crichton”, the hardest to forgive is Lady Mary because, unlike all others, SHE KNOWS BETTER. It is her innate superior morality that makes her guiltier than all the men. It is also in “The Admirable Crichton” where we find the most equality of sexes: Crichton is the only one of the men in all the plays who is not 100% a child (however bearded others may be) and 100% foolish. Therefore, his faults, his acceptance of social differences, his acceptance of being kept at a lower status by those stupider than him, makes him more reprimandable.
Another thing must be said for Barrie as opposed to Wilde: his use of irony is much subtler and therefore much more effective. While Wilde’s characters (which are usually himself with another name) give off witty remark after witty remark, Barrie’s characters never make a joke: everything they say is in all seriousness, and this makes them even more ridiculous and funny. Barrie was VERY demanding about underplaying. No line, not the corniest, the funniest, the wittiest, could be overdramatized. There is no Wildesque third party looking on and laughing at others. The effectiveness of Barrie’s plays lies in that the characters take themselves seriously: it is the audience who is given leave to laugh at them. Only in this way could he feed to the respectable rich English society such unfashionable topics as the equality of men and women, the equality of rich and poor, the pride of the Scottish, and the sexuality of children. Of course, this demanded infinite skills from Barrie’s actors, and his prose-style stage directions, with impossible to perform character thoughts and descriptions, help readers to perceive what the actual theater experience would have been like. This is much appreciated: without talented actors (or proper stage notes!), the plays would loose their meaning. It is only when you don’t take the words at face value that you really can capture the genius that is James M. Barrie.
*A Footnote about footnotes: Even if you have read all these plays before, I would suggest reading them in this particular edition. The information about the development of the plays through time, of Barrie’s constant editions of them, of the connection of them to his personal life, of his intentions with every line, really help to enrich the reading experience. Of additional interest (at least to me) was the definition of some of the words used: I can’t believe that in only 100 years so much of the English language has gone into oblivion!
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