The creepiness of Peter Pan

When I was a child, I frankly and thoroughly detested Peter Pan in every single one of its manifestations; horrible Christmas stage spectacular, horrible Disney cartoon, horrible, horrible novel. It was a passionate and immediate hatred, shot through with something very like terror. In part, I guess, it was the idea that someone might come through your bedroom curtains and abduct you; partly the idea, sinister and frightening, of a child prevented from growing up. Childhood has its own helpless fears, and it would be a strange child who found the prospect of never changing an appealing one.

Really, the unanalysed dislike I had for Peter Pan was a dislike for something which evidently had undeclared designs upon me. I disliked C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books for a similar reason; just at those moments where, as a young reader, you wanted to commune with a mind like your own, you came up hard against some undeclared adult preoccupations. In the Narnia books, it turned out to be Christian doctrine. In Peter Pan it turned out to be sex.

The presence of sexual desire in Peter Pan has been much gone over in recent years — it has become a favourite text for a certain sort of gruesome literary theorist. The unholy combination, in the figure of Wendy, of a wife darning socks, a helpless girl, a mother and, most of all, a kind of Scheherazade-like courtesan (she knows ‘such lots of stories’) is at the centre of it. The more dangerous, indeed murderous passions of Tinkerbell — a figure straight out of Ouida — are as morbidly confusing to a young audience as Hook’s peculiar obsessions. The age was coming to terms with childhood sexuality, but Peter Pan projects adult desires onto children. More subtle analysts, like Henry James in What Maisie Knew, understand very well that, though children do possess their own pre- sexual desires, the sexuality of adults is obscure and often frightening to them.