J.M. Berrie\'s Peter Pan --

J.M. Berrie's Peter Pan -- A Review of Methodologies

Peter Pan is ostensibly a legendary children's book but through the years it has been poked, prodded, sniffed at, devoured, stripped naked and examined for those mysterious hidden -- or obvious -- meanings and rumored dark metaphors. The authors, critics, scholars and others who have dissected J.M. Berrie's Peter Pan have used a number of methodologies -- also referred to as philosophical assumptions -- to delve deeply into the meanings and methodologies of the book. That said, an examination into the methodologies that scholars and intellectuals have already conducted is a worthy rationale to embrace on the path to a more thorough understanding of the book.

Literature Review of Methodologies

Does anyone in the scholarly literary critique business really understand why Berrie made the provocative comments -- purportedly to the five sons of his friends Arthur Llewellyn Davies and Davies' wife Sylvia du Maurier -- in his initial dedication of his book? Berrie claims he "made Peter Pan" through a process of "rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks" to "produce a flame"? (Maslin, 2009).

Critic Ann Wilson explains that Berrie's methodology in building the story was through an "anxious and nostalgic" rejection of modern industrial society (Wilson, 2000). Beneath the surface of this story, Wilson -- writing in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism -- suggests that Peter Pan is a "ghost whose first appearance is announced as 'uncanny'" and that is a sign of "anxiety within the play" (Wilson, 2000). Wilson quotes from the stage direction just before Peter arrives at the window of a middle-class family: "…The nursery darkens […]. Something uncanny is going to happen, we expect, for a quiver has passed through the room, just sufficient to touch the night-lights" (97).

Invoking Freud, Wilson asserts that the "uncanny" brings out a sense of "dread and horror" in part because "the familiar evokes the unfamiliar" and that dichotomy renders the otherwise comfortable and "homey" child's bedroom scene into an "uncomfortable and alien" place (Wilson). Hence, when the familiar becomes uncanny and hence unfamiliar, anxiety is generated. That seems a simplistic methodology on the face of it, but Wilson marches on, building a theory that seems plausible enough in some aspects and yet also seems a reach in other aspects. For example, it is Wilson's assumption that Berrie wrote the story based on his "anxious and nostalgic" response to the "new technologies in the workplace and the demise of the [British] Empire" (Wilson).

Deeper than that -- in terms of figuring out the methodology -- is Berrie's apparent sense of anxiety over "the shifts in masculine identity in relation to modern life" that Berrie is witness to in English society during that era (Wilson). After explaining the basics of Berrie's philosophical assumptions that drove his creative juices in the first place (anxiety created by the industrial society's impact on the middle class) Wilson launches into a sociological sermon on the British middle class. She exits those lengthy sentences and provides the reader with evidence that backs up her assertions vis-a-vis Berrie's methodology. The Darling house is located "at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury (87)" -- and that house is so "nondescript" that author Berrie suggest to the reader, "you may dump it down anywhere you like, and if you think it was your house you are very probably right" (Wilson quotes from the book's opening lines).

In that opening scene, Mr. Darling is shown asking his wife to fix his tie. He warns her that "unless this tie is round my neck we don't go out to dinner tonight" and if they don't appear at the appointed venue (to presumably meet with the boss and others from the office) "I never go to the office again, and if I don't go to the office again you and I starve, and our children will be thrown into the streets (91)" (Wilson quotes from the book). Wilson takes that scene to mean that for Mr. Darling there is "instability of masculine identity" between his job and his home; there is also instability, Wilson continues, in the financial situation with the Darling family. When Wendy tells her father that he has caused the Newfoundland dog cry, he asks Wendy to "Coddle her; nobody coddles me. Oh dear no. I am only the breadwinner, why should I be coddled?"

Clearly Wilson is creating a case for anxiety and middle class angst, and the main character in that middle class milieu is Mr. Darling, who is "desperate." Wilson then quotes from the stage directions again; "The desperate man, who has not been in fresh air for days. [and] has now lost all self-control" (Wilson quoting stage directions). Still building her case for a unique answer to the apparent mysteries of Berrie's methodology, Wilson explains that being "cooped up at work" and being "denied a sense of individuality and autonomy" at work, Mr. Darling is thus made into "a piece of furniture in the workplace" (Wilson). "Berrie suggests that under capitalism, human identity becomes a technology" and worse yet, by being "rendered less than fully human in the workplace, Mr. Darling is not even the 'master' within his own home" (Wilson).

And all of these dynamics that plague the family's breadwinner are due to "the shifting demographics of the workforce," Wilson insists. Once Wilson has fully covered her theory as to the Berrie industrial angst-related methodology, she dips into the subjects of sexuality and Captain Hook, and reminds readers that Berrie described Capt. Hook as a "dandy" (gay man). Always more than willing to provide volumes of background to justify her own methods of research, Wilson points out that Oscar Wilde was on trial in 1895 in England and it has been widely reported that out of that trial homosexuality became associated with "effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence and aestheticism" (Wilson quoting from Wilde Century). What has this to do with Captain Hook? The fact that Captain Hook is a dandy and "plays" with the boys, "does suggest a latent anxiety about the homosexual as arrested in his development… [and indeed] there is a homoerotic undercurrent in Peter Pan" (Wilson).

Later in her long, involved essay, Wilson points to another place in the story where sexuality comes under her microscope. Wendy offers to give Peter a kiss, but because Peter doesn't know what a kiss really is, Wendy hands him a thimble. In his naivete, Peter asks if he can kiss Wendy, and offers her an acorn, thinking of course that a kiss is the exchange of some item. Wilson believes that this scene is Berrie's way of providing a cue "about middle-class perceptions of female sexuality." Wendy has the chance to "take the lead and give Peter a kiss," and instead gives him a thimble; and in reciprocating, he gives her the acorn which "creates an economy in which the exchange of tokens of affection substitutes for the expression of affection itself" (Wilson).

Is this Berrie's way of saying sexuality is repressed in early 20th Century British society? Wilson explains that at the very least Neverland (England?) is "homosocial" in that instead of naturally warm relations between men and women the reality is that "women, if they figure at all, do so as currency in the exchange" (Wilson). But there is also a "spectre of the homoerotic" which "haunts the scene" given that, as mentioned, in that social era the cultural imagination regarding homosexuals was as "pathological and criminal" (due to the press coverage of Wilde's trial).

Even Tinker Bell takes a middle class hit in Wilson's view of the Berrie methodology: "She is quite a common girl, you know…she mends the fairy pots and kettles (100)" (Wilson quotes the book). So "even the fairy world is market by class" and it is obvious that "Tinker Bell, who is working-class, is impure and suspect in ways that are consistent with the middle class's imagining of the working class" (Wilson).

Meanwhile, New York Times writer Janet Maslin interprets the 2009 book by Piers Dudgeon (J.M. Berrie, the Du Mauriers and the Dark Side of 'Peter Pan') by reporting that Daphne du Maurier, the niece of Sylvia (Sylvia had become Berrie's close friend) has "hot and cold running secrets" along with "tentacles that extend out to touch Henry James, DH Lawrence" and Arthur Conan Doyle. The methodology put forward by author Dudgeon is hinted at in his chapter titles -- "Secret," "Corruption," "Predator," "Victim," and "Suicide" -- and the author delivers on that dark strategy, according to Maslin. Boiled down, the methodology that drives Dudgeon's book is un-provable but entertaining as it submerges readers into magic and psychic exploration.

What Maslin discovers in Dudgeon's book sets a bonfire to the image of the very charming J.M. Barrie played by Johnny Depp in the popular film "Finding Neverland." The twisted, churning plot that Dudgeon weaves -- and that Haslin attempts to explain to readers of the Times -- incorporates a du Maurier gift of psychic power, and those in the family that wield this power include Kicky du Maurier. It is Dudgeon's hypothesis through this bizarre methodology that the author Barrie and Kicky actually met and somehow Kicky demonstrated his power of psychic perception to Berrie, which of course fascinates Berrie. After becoming very interested in Kicky's powers Berrie than attempts to emulate those powers and in doing so gives Dudgeon's book its own mysterious glow (Haslin).

Once Berrie has become acquainted with the boys he becomes, according to Dudgeon's book, "Uncle Jim" to them. Soon Berrie (AKA Uncle Jim) succeeds in alienating the lovely Sylvia from her husband, and takes "borderline-pornographic photographs of her sons," and proceeds with his own apparently diabolic methodology to "immortalize" the boys as "delightful fictitious characters" (Haslin). Worse yet, and this goes well beyond the assumptions in the movie starring Johnny Depp, Berrie "forges a draft of Sylvia's will" in order to take possession of the boys and raise them the way he wants to raise them.

The book was not available for this paper, but Haslin explains that author Dudgeon "Blends scholarship, name-dropping and scandal-seeking heavy breathing"; moreover, Haslin continues, Dudgeon is "eager to point out that this is something spookier than celebrity pedophilia."

The implications and insinuations that author Dudgeon brings to the table include the notion that Berrie "dooms at least two of the five to suicidal melancholy" (Haslin). Why did Berrie do what he did? Why would a successful author turn to warped, wrong-headed practices with young boys? By bringing Freud and Jung into the picture Dudgeon suggests that Barrie's "perverse nature" is due to the bad treatment he received from his mother. Dudgeon offers that "maternal rejection is a terrible thing" that can "destroy a child's self-esteem" (Haslin).

Notwithstanding those psychological problems and the root of those issues for Berrie, Dudgeon claims that Berrie realized he could be "a controlling force, at least in his own world of illusion" (Haslin). Dudgeon is not satisfied to lay the blame for Berrie's unorthodox behavior towards young boys on Berrie's mother; Dudgeon also hints that Berrie may have been disturbed by the death of his own brother David, going on to suggest that Berrie may have become guilty over his brother's passing simply because perhaps Berrie had a hand in it.

Regarding the issue of Berrie's less than perfect relationship with his mother it is possible (without going to deeply into Freudian psychotherapy) to place Peter's "estrangement from the mother imago" square in Berrie's mother's lap. The methodology that is employed by Berrie, according to Richard Rotert, is psychologically based. The "barred window excludes Peter as a participant" in the mother-child nursery scene, according to critic Rotert (Rotert, 1990). And in denying his own manhood, Peter also denies "the possibility of a mature, loving relationship with any of the female characters" in the story (Rotert). The idea of Peter denying his manhood was a result of his "prior displacement from the nursery," Rotert explains. Peter's "instinctual desire for the feminine, which would normally shift from the mother to a lover, was arrested at an infantile stage" (Rotert).

Moreover, Rotert goes on, Peter develops a neurotic compulsion against adults: grown-ups were "spoiling everything" and so when Peter went into his tree he breathed "intentionally quick short breaths of about five to a second" (Rotert). Peter breathed in this manner because in Neverland, "every time you breathe a grown-up dies"; hence he wanted to kill them off as quickly as possible (Rotert).