Tag Archives: The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children

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Peter Pan : An Adult’s Fantasy

The first thing that struck me while reading Jacqueline Rose’s, The Case of Peter Pan, was the fact that it was about Peter Pan. The story of the boy who never wants to become an adult. He wants to stay a little boy forever. He NEVER wants to grow up. I felt this was the perfect entrance piece of writing to read for this course because it gave a good insight to some of the history of Peter Pan but it also challenged ideas and raised questions that probably wouldn’t have come up otherwise. But what I really wanted to focus on is what really stood out to me. I was thinking about it through the entire text was when Rose said,

“Peter Pan offers us the child — forever.”

While reading this, I went back to Beverly Clark’s, “Kiddie Lit” where she mentions that there is some part in us that “values childhood. But we also dismiss it.” People love taking trips down memory lane to the times before responsibility and work and paying bills. I know I do. So there is a little Peter Pan in all of us I guess. Some part of us that wants to stay young. However this is not acceptable “adult behavior”. Eventually we all “grow up” and become a rational, responsible adult. Peter Pan never does. He is an adult’s fantasy.

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The Dark Side of Peter Pan

As many people did, I grew up watching Peter Pan as a kid and wanting to be part of never land myself. As I got older, I realized that there is was always a deeper meaning behind the innocence of these Disney movies filled with adult lessons and sexual humor that I didn’t understand back then. A child is simply drawn to the animations of the story and the desire to be part of it, the last thing any of them would expect is that they are watching real life lessons unfold before them as they go into adulthood and realize it themselves. While I knew Peter Pan was fictional and that never land didn’t exist in reality, it was disturbing to see Peter Pan as well as many other childhood Disney movies I grew up watching in a whole new light, and in a disturbing way strong enough to ruin some childhood memories.

As Jacqueline Rose pointed  out in in the class reading of “ The Case of Peter Pan”  the twist is that the author of Peter Pan is actually just a man who had a desire and interest in little boys himself. This is what I meant by disturbing memories strong enough to ruin a childhood memory, because the whole image of Peter Pan is now seen as something different and not in a good way. Especially in today’s society, where problems like that happen daily, it doesn’t paint a good image for the author or the fans who grew up wanting to be part of Pan’s fictional life. Now I see that this story wasn’t meant for children at all but rather for adults to know, the worst part is knowing that this story probably would of never existed if it wasn’t for possibly the authors interest to possess these little boys. I’m sure everyone who is familiar with the story of Peter Pan has the same question in mind, and I’m not sure exactly myself either.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Imposed Immaturity

During class discussion of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children, there was a lot of talk about children’s literature having to entertain both children and adult audiences, which I didn’t find that shocking. When taking the class I imagined the books we were to read would be geared towards adults, as well as children, and hold a deeper meaning for the adults that would go right over the heads of these “little people”. Otherwise we would be studying picturebooks with 17 max. pages all semester. What I did find interesting was the part about how “the family” evolved. In the article, Little People: When Did We Start Treating Children like Children?, by Joan Accocella, she discusses how the concept of children is relatively new. Which i related to the books that I’m reading now, which are from A Song of Ice and Fire. In these books, there are children from 8-years-old doing ridiculous things and I usually had to suspend my disbelief that a 10-year old girl* is out their stabbing the hearts of knighted men while riding horseback while trying to navigate a map. After reading the article, I can see how the author of the books I’m reading did some extensive research on the era. The idea that children were not regarded as children clears up a lot of my questions in my own reading.

“Children gradually came to be seen as creatures of a different order from adults: innocent, fragile, temptable, and therefore in need of molding….The ‘discovery of childhood,’ Ariès says, deprived the child of all that and ‘inflicted on him the birch, the prison cell—in a word, the punishments usually reserved for convicts.’ At the same time, children became the objects of ‘obsessive love,’ together with incessant demands for conformity to a family ideal.“

These lines hold true in present day. Many parents that oppose marriage equality will say it is because having two gay parents in a family would pass the “gayness” on to their children—if they can manage to adopt some. Meanwhile, a baby boy can’t even look in the direction of a woman without his parents calling him a little lady’s man, or passing down some other archaic gender roles to their pretty little princesses and tough little men. The innocence of children that is so sort after to protect is sullied by the parents themselves. But then again parents aren’t the only ones to participate in such irony, teachers also play their part. Teaching children on the cusps of their sexuality not to have sex instead of giving them information about what sex is and how to do it safe.