The Tragedy of Peter Pan

The Star-Crossed Story of How Peter Lost Wendy

I recently wrote about the puzzling feeling of panic my first encounter with Fantastic Mr. Fox left me with. Yet recently I have been thinking about another beloved story from my childhood that leaves me with a far deeper and more personal sort of pain.

The people who are closest to me know that I only watch the film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (2003) when I'm incredibly sad. This is because as far back as I can remember, watching the film has left me with a deep feeling of heartache that I could never quite explain.

While the book is in some ways lighter and more whimsical than the film I am referring to, it has a similar sense of sorrow beneath its childish fancy that no child will ever fully pick up on. For one, the fairies and pirates are too distracting, but for another, these gentle sorrows are whispered in a voice only an adult will hear. Children need not trouble themselves with them. Peter Pan has other secrets for them. 

Peter Pan is, after all, a tale that is greatly concerned with children and the act of growing up, and naturally, it contains secrets for both adults and children alike.

Like many books, it begins by stating a universal fact (which it will inevitably try to slip away from).

"All children grow up," the book claims.

Yet contained in this very same line the story simultaneously creates an exception.

"Except one," it whispers. And with that Peter Pan slips away across the page, like across the night sky, revealing himself to be the extraordinary exception to the first universal rule every child eventually comes to know.

Childhood feels like it's forever, while it lasts that is. And at the beginning of Barrie's pondering over this simple idea, he informs us that Wendy was aware of the inevitable-ness of her having to age out of childhood ever since she was two years old. It happened when her mother cried out, quite innocently, "oh, why can't you remain like this forever". And there is that word: forever.

"Two is the beginning of the end," Barrie writes. Another fact.

So, Wendy became aware that forever was only a dream; that forever was available to no one, and nothing.

Not even Peter Pan.

 

Growing up is gradual, and you won't know exactly when you've done it, nor will you know how; much less why. I surely can't tell you how it happens, only that it starts happening when a child first begins to mourn that they will not stay this way forever. (I remember crying over this myself when I was young and wanted everything to be permanent.)

Yet Peter Pan remains the grand exception. For Peter, everything is permanent. And so, from the moment she first meets him in her wakefulness, Wendy, who is by now a great deal more grown up than Peter is, knows that she is "in the presence of a tragedy".

Why? Why this painful word at the beginning of a tale about wonder and childishness?

For Peter Pan, there is another word, equally painful; a word out of which all the great tragedies are made. Love.

The first time the tale mentions it we pay it little heed, for it is a grown up word, unfamiliar to the cares of children.

 

The tale tells the account of how Mr. Darling won their mother's heart by stating a very remarkable and seemingly impossible fact: that once upon a time, when her parents were younger, a great "many gentlemen who had (once) been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her".

Strange, and though perhaps slightly exaggerated, not that strange, after all. For that is how it works. Is it not? One moment you are two and just beginning to wonder if things will ever change, and the next, there is first love; a love that by its first-ness is so unlike the simple love you once knew for your parents. It is not even like the love you have seen your parents display for one another, for there is nothing practical nor sensible about it. This love is a truly unique sort of love, totally untarnished by adulthood. And it is likely that you will never feel anything like it again.

That is part of the enchantment: that you can only love in this way while you are a child, and no child can ever love this way more than once.

It is exactly this type of love that, I believe, Peter Pan feels for Wendy, and she in turn feels for him. It is a love rich in childishness.

We do not know when Peter first sees her. But we do know that she is the first girl he ever brings to Neverland, and I believe that speaks for itself.

As Wendy and her brothers fly away, the narrator asks us if the parents will reach the nursery in time. But time is of little relevance in this story– at least, for now, and if time had played its course then and worked its right, then we would have no story at all.

Yet, when the narrator solemnly promises us that "it will come right in the end" one could also suppose that he not talking about the parent's distress at finding the nursery empty. What he might just as well be saying is that the children will not slip out of time forever. Either way, the answer is the same: the children will return, and time will go right before the story ends.

 

After this, great adventures are had in Neverland, and though it would bring me great thrill to recount them, I think that would be missing the point. I am no longer a child, after all; and adventure, though wonderful, does not apply nor speak to me as it once did. I think of the coming chapters fondly. But nonetheless, they always end so quickly. I cannot hold onto them no matter what I do. The pages pass too quickly. 

But glimpsed between these lines, we see the tragic nature of Peter, and this has never left me.  Wendy knew from the beginning that she was in the presence of a tragedy, and she sees it also there, in the wondrous Neverland. She sees it late at night, when Peter Pan is sleeping and unaware of her.

The narrator tells us that sometimes Peter had dreams that are fully unlike the dreams of other boys, for they were more painful and far more troubling.

"For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them... At such times it has been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she has subjected him."

The narrator never tells us what Peter Pan was dreaming about, only that these dreams had to do with the riddle of Peter's existence. Yet their very painfulness reveals to me now a piece of the tragedy. No feeling, no matter how unchildlike, can alter Peter's nature, can push him into adulthood. Children grow up gradually; they grow up every time they feel something that their childish hearts cannot bare, beginning with the very feeling of the impermanence of the things around them, or of themselves. It lies in the painful contradiction of Peter's nature that a boy who dreams of such un-boyish and troublesome things cannot grow up, can neither out grow them or grow up to understand them better.

Peter Pan has another dream the night they fly back to London to bring Wendy and her brothers home. The story tells us that Wendy held him tight that night, while he was sleeping. But the chapter ends there, and in the one that follows, Wendy Darling returns home. And so, Peter Pan is confronted with the first thing since his whimsical life on Neverland began that has not been permanent.

Peter Pan never admits to loving Wendy, as boys that age never do, expect maybe to their mothers. Peter Pan does. And, because everyone knows that Peter Pan does not have a mother, he tells her's (though she's asleep, and so, she does not hear him.) "I'm fond of her too," he whispers.

 

As the children reunite with their parents, the narrator takes us back outside the window to glance at the sight of the "strange boy", a boy who he tells us as "ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know". And yet, here he was "looking at the one joy from which he must be forever barred."

For Peter Pan, the space between growing up is as narrow and thin as the sheet of glass from Wendy Darling's nursery window.

So why all this? Well, it dawned on me when I listened to Taylor Swifts new song "Cardigan", of all places. Therein lies a line that brought be back to this familiar heart ache story, a line about how Peter loses Wendy.

Strange, that Taylor Swift should sing about Peter Pan in a break up song; and yet, not so strange at all. Because Peter Pan does lose Wendy, in the end. But that is not what makes it all so terrible. What really hurts deep within myself, is the part of me that knows that it takes growing up to get over such a heart break.

The story of Peter Pan, with all its marvelousness and magic, still makes me ache. It made me ache as a child, but only because I could sense, even then, how terribly lonely Peter Pan was there at the end of the film when he looks at Wendy through the window.

As I grew, it reminded me of a different kind of heart ache, the kind that breaks your heart when a childish love doesn't end well and it feels like all the world will never be the same.

I cannot even listen to the musical piece from the film entitled "Fairy Dance" without feeling a twinge of loss deep inside myself, in a box that no one else will ever open. Over time though, I have learned that it is a beautiful kind of heart ache. The kind of hurt your heart feels when you love someone so much that it aches inside, like a tight hug in reverse.

At last, a few weeks ago, I walked down the aisle to this song, so forever reversing what was once a tragedy into the fairy tale definition of a happy ending.

The only feeling of sadness I feel now is that I might never need to watch Peter Pan again; that there will never be a night in which my heart hurts so much that it feels like the world is ending. I have grown out of it, I suppose.

Now, when I hurt, I get to hug my husband. And, what's more, I know from experience that time will pass, and I will grow in wisdom, and I one day I will get over it, no matter how deep the hurt. 

 

A Stormy Night with Charles Dickens

It was a dark and stormy night in which I read Charles Dickens.

I read till late, till Book the Second made way to Book the Third, fittingly entitled "The Track of a Storm".

I stopped then and listened to the thunder shake my little house, and wondered at how awful and awe-inspiring it must be to see the sea rise in a storm like this one.

"But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly in the corner all through this (little) space and time. And it was now... that they began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising." ~A Tale of Two Cities

A Day in London Below

I stopped to take this picture while I was reading Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

It was a cool and cloudy day and I could hear the stream outside my window rushing. I lit my Rainy Day Reads candle and read the day away.

I had my second cup of coffee sitting on my nightstand, and by the time I remembered to drink it, it was already cold. My brother always says I have a habit of leaving my coffee unfinished. But I blame the book for that one. I have always been fascinated by Gaiman's imagination. But this book! My, was it ever beguiling!

Why Mr. Fox Had to Lose His Tail

"Did we get him?" said Bean.

"One of them shone a flashlight on the hole, and there on the ground, in the circle of light, half in and half out of the hole, lay the poor tattered bloodstained remains of.... a fox's tail." ~Fantastic Mr. Fox

Ever since I re-watched Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox earlier last week something about the movie has been bothering me. I was a child the first time I saw the film, and the feeling it gave me was one I had only ever experienced when facing things that scared me. I couldn't quite trace what it was about the movie that frightened me, except to know that it was a similar feeling to being trapped inside a closet space with no way out, or being chased by something in a nightmare. It was these types of tight, claustrophobic, and ultimately squeamish fears that the film brought back to me then, as it does now.

And yet it wasn't that Fantastic Mr. Fox was a movie that outright scared me as a child, for I had no nightmares about it, neither did it trouble my waking hours. Indeed, I could easily push the inner feeling of panic away. But then, all I had to do was think about the movie, and the gut twisting feeling would return.

I experienced a similar feeling the first time I read the tale of Peter Rabbit, who likewise narrowly dodges a bloody end at the hands of a farmer. Like Mr. Fox, Peter Rabbit loses something in the chase, and though it is not a body part, it is just as essential to his being as Mr. Fox's tail. Peter Rabbit's blue jacket and shoes are hung up on the skeletal form of a scarecrow, a formidable symbol showing just how nearly the farmer caught him. 

It wasn't until years later when I read Richard Adam's Watership Down and found myself experiencing the same feeling of panic that I began to wonder what it was about these tales that caused me to feel such fear. I found it increasingly strange that the fear I felt as a child troubled me just the same as an adult. And yet these tales are, at their core, children's tales, animal stories, full of wit and charm, and, of course, violence.

Finally, last week on my way to the grocery store, as I was thinking about Mr. Fox's tail, it hit me. The idea in itself has been in these stories all along, and so I can take no credit for them. But, in thinking about Mr. Fox's tail, I was finally able to put my finger on why these tales cause me to relive feelings of claustrophobia and cleithrophobia.

It started with me wishing that Mr. Fox could get his tail back, or better yet, that he hadn't lost it in the first place. A fox's tail is such a nice tail, after all. And the bony, fur-less tail he later gets back is so gory and ugly, the exact opposite of everything a fox's tail should be.

I wasn't sure why it bothered me so much, because it shouldn't have. It was just a tail. Only a child would wish for such a simple thing to be remedied, for such a perfect world where foxes didn't have to lose their tails.

But I soon realized that it wasn't the violent loss of the tail that left such a sour taste in my mouth, but what the tail represents. In short, what I was really wishing for was that Mr. Fox could live in a world in which bullets didn't bite so hard, in which death didn't nip so closely at his heels, and consequences didn't come in such a final form.

But consequences are hardly unique to these beast tales. On the contrary, every well told tale has consequences. Books like Game of Thrones dish out consequences to no end. And yet, even this adult story, which is so well known for its violence and brutal off-killings, didn't make me feel quite so claustrophobic and quite so fearful as Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Fantastic Mr. Fox and tales like it remain the most harsh example of consequences any children's story has ever displayed. What's more, in these tales consequences are given so very quickly. The childish "naughtiness" of Peter Rabbit nearly results in his untimely demise, a harshness which no fortunate child ever experienced. Indeed, a vegetable garden has never seemed so terribly claustrophobic as when Peter Rabbit gets lost in it; a human home has never felt so like a deathtrap as when one of these animal protagonists is trapped in it.

What's more, the animals in these stories are charming, humorous, and even bear peoplelike qualities, such as the wearing of clothes. Nonetheless, the story does not allow them to escape their animal lives, even if they do live in furnished houses and wear jackets. And, being animals, they can be killed for almost nothing. After all, in tales like Peter Rabbit characters are turned into pie, an act which literature normally reserves for the most disturbing acts of revenge, consider Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, for example. Furthermore, the animals in these stories have something the humans in them don't. They have motive, desire, wants, curiosities. Meanwhile, the humans in these stories are little more than creatures of mass productivity, with endless gardens, bird-farm empires with wire fences around them and ravage beasts to guard them. It is only after the critter penetrates them that the human's motives are revealed, and we, the reader, come to realize that their only desire is a repulsive refusal to allow animal trespassers and a revolting need to punish the animals that do.

As Richard Adams wrote in Watership Down,

"Animals don't behave like men... If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality."

Ultimately, the thing that makes animal tales of this nature feel so claustrophobic is that there is not a lot of wiggle room in them. Their world is harsher and much quicker to strike than any human one we know, for in their world there is no buffer between one mistake and another; there is no intermediary between one mistake and death. Thus, a single misstep could very easily be one too many. Indeed, death is never more than a step away, and though Mr. Fox and Peter Rabbit ultimately give it the slip, it does not miss them by much.

But like I said, the squeamish feeling leaves me as soon as I stop thinking about these stories, in other words, as soon as I return to my human life, in which death does not live so close, in the farmhouse down the hill, or worse, laying watch outside my front door.

As Roald Dahl concluded his animal tale masterpiece,

"They sat there by the hole, waiting for the fox to come out. And so far I know, they are still waiting," (Fantastic Mr. Fox).

Love for Well-Worn Paperbacks

I detest the mistreating of books, as I hate the mistreating of trees. I find it despicable when people misuse something that may very well outlive them. For indeed, the average lifespan of a book, much like a tree, is very likely to outlast the lifespan of a person. And although these things appear on the surface to be inanimate, there is so much beauty and possibility for wonder and growth in these things that their unnecessary destruction angers me.

There is, however, a difference between a mistreated book and well worn book.

The most worn out book I own is a paperback addition of Charles Dickens' Bleak House.

The spine is cracked, pierced by white like so many paper-veins showing through its otherwise black spine. The cover is bent in a few places, like an old photograph, or a letter that has been unfolded too many times. What's more, my handwriting is woven in with Dickens' own words, my messy script playing around with the printed paragraphs; drawing lines and arrows, underlining the words I want to read again, the sections I spent the most time in marked by pencil. Sometimes there are scribbles too, words jotted down; thoughts and references tugged out of my mind by the on-goings of the page.

I love this worn out book, not just because Bleak House is one of my favorites, but because I love how lived in this particular addition feels.

My copy of Bleak House is worn because I read it well. The cover is bent in places from all the time I spent carrying it around with me on the inside of my bag.

I have a love for worn out books, paperbacks specifically.

There are some readers who morn the wearing out of a book. I, on the other hand, have come to be greatly fond of this process. I believe it to be my right as a reader.

There is something comforting about a well worn paperback. You can tell when it has been opened, and even to what extent it has been read. If a reader quit part way through, the cracks will stop and the further pages will not open as naturally.

But a book that has been well-read and well-opened will open easily. It will want to be opened, for it has gotten used to be handled by readers, being visited by fingers and skimmed by eyes.

Breaking in the spine of a paperback book is like wearing in a pair of walking shoes; it is the wearing through, the cracking, that shows that there has even been a journey. These shoes have been walked in. They have gone places, a well worn pair of shoes seems to say. Or, in the case of the well worn paperback: this book has been read.

“Books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when you and I are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive.” ~The Hiding Place

Watership Down

Watership Down has been at the bottom of my to-read list for quite some time. I finally picked it up at my local library a few weeks ago but still, I was unsure whether I would have time to read it.

I am so glad that I did. 

Watership Down is a well-beloved story about Rabbits, so going into it that is exactly what I expected: a loveable and entertaining adventure. But this book was so much more. 

Let me rant about Watership Down for a while. 

The fact that this is considered a children's book, and the fact that it is a story about rabbits, gives this book a certain image that is entirely misleading.

But let me tell you, this is no ordinary rabbit adventure, and these are no ordinary rabbits. While this adventure through the countryside is at times charming and perhaps even a little delightful, it is so in the least childish way imaginable. Rarely have I read a book that was so heartfelt and yet so heartwrenchingly twisted! This book is heartening simply because it is so brutal, it is gruesome, and it is so powerful!
These rabbits are not your ordinary cute and timid bunnies. These rabbits are fierce and they are ferocious! These rabbits are fighters, and it is their fight against the cruelties of a world gone savage that makes this book so empowering! 
  To say that this book was life-changing or eyeopening might be overselling it a bit. But before I began reading it I read somewhere online that after reading this book you will never look at a countryside or a meadow the same way again. And it is in this sense that I can honestly say that, yes, this book was life-changing and it was eye-opening. This book has made countrysides and prairies, not into peaceful meadows, but battlefields where life must fight with all its vigor to survive.

"Your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you."

~Frith to El-ahrairah 

Watership Down, by Richard Adams  

Thanks again Dad for taking these pictures for me. It really means a lot that you make the time to support me. 
Check out more of his pictures here.