Loss in Peter Pan and Everyman: A Comparative Study

Introduction: Two Stories Built on Loss

Both Peter Pan and Everyman revolve around themes of loss. The losses depicted in J.M. Barrie's famous children's tale and in the anonymous medieval morality play Everyman are physical and psychological in nature. The Everyman of the medieval allegory loses his physical life and his sense of emotional and social security — his friends, his family, and his worldly goods. He dies to the life he once knew and loved. In Barrie's Peter Pan, the title character first loses his shadow, which is only a temporary loss, and then loses Wendy, the Lost Boys, and the other Darling children. The other children do grow up, unlike Peter, much to Peter's dissatisfaction.

Neither of these tales is depressing, however, because along with loss, both heroes gain something in return. Yet while Everyman is stripped bare of his old life and illusions — which are replaced with a truer understanding of the divine — Peter's refusal to grow up merely results in him recapturing his youth by associating with the next generation of Darling children. Peter refuses to lose his old illusions, refuses to grow up and relinquish his childhood appearance, and thus refuses to validate the conventional adult journey of life, learning, and death, as reflected in Everyman.

What Each Hero Loses and Gains

Of course, some characters in Peter Pan do lose a great deal. The Darling children lose their childhoods, along with the physical freedoms and emotional joys that come with youth's relative freedom from care. Yet while Everyman's loss is a sacred story founded upon the final redemption of the soul into God's all-embracing love — a validation of the losses of youth and life — Peter Pan does not view the losses of the other children with nearly as positive or sanguine an eye.

Peter Pan, though light in tone, carries a darker message: the beauty of childhood is essentially impossible to relive on earth, and this is a terrible thing, rather than simply one of life's passages and transitions. Everyman, more mature in its perspective despite its relatively early place in the history of drama, does not even portray Death as a villainous character. Death acts in God's service — though he is frightening — to ease human beings on their final journey away from the cares, as well as the joys, of earthly life.

The Darkness Behind Peter Pan's Cheerfulness

By contrast, the novel's depiction of age and death in the final paragraph of Chapter 17 of Peter Pan is especially dark and depicts no positive benefits to be gleaned from growing up. In fact, age withers and shrinks rather than gives substance: "as you look at Wendy, you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago." As for the young woman's daughter, "Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret." Aging is described as common, as if it were a matter of poor taste or thoughtlessness rather than a process of learning and growth.

The novel continues: "every spring cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless."

Peter is so thoughtless that he occasionally even forgets his childhood friend's granddaughter. In Peter Pan, this thoughtlessness is treated as charming, whereas in Everyman, thoughtlessness and the loss of fidelity to one's true friends is portrayed as terrible and sorrowful. Peter loses Wendy, yet he easily — even cheerfully — exchanges her for another image of a young girl in the form of her daughter Jane, and continues to do so, as if young, innocent women were entirely interchangeable. The last word of the novel is "heartless," and that conveys the heart of the myth of Peter Pan, whether depicted on stage or in print. The loss of youth and one's youthful character is treated as irreplaceable, while a younger person is always waiting in the wings.

In the play version of Peter Pan, the stage directions indicate that the young Jane is played by the same actress as Wendy, further underlining the similarity of all young women in Peter's eyes (Barrie, 1950). The myth of the boy who will not grow up suggests that no matter what a person's name, the girl remains the same to Peter — so long as he has a surrogate mother of some kind, Peter is content.

Peter, unlike other children, is always young and never loses his youth to decrepitude and death. That is what makes him extraordinary and singular: he can never lose his vitality by sheer force of will. "All children, except one, grow up," reads the first line of Barrie's book. Peter's immunity to loss is unique. In contrast, the prologue to Everyman proclaims, under the title "The Somonynge of Eueryman called it is,

That of our lyues and endynge shewes
How transytory we be all daye. (Scene 1)

Human days are transitory on earth, unlike the days to be spent in eternity — and this is true of all, even as Peter remains forever young.

Conclusion: Two Visions of What Loss Leaves Behind

But in Peter Pan there is a lack of moral apportioning to children along the lines that govern adult life. Wendy, who seems to be the most thoughtful and responsible of all the Peter Pan characters, pays with her youth and takes on adult responsibility — unlike the title protagonist, who also transgresses but never feels remorse and never pays for any hurt he causes the girl.

Thus, both works suggest that loss is an inevitable part of human life, but Barrie is far less positive about what this loss leaves behind. For Barrie, loss means the loss of carefree and amoral youth and the loves of youth — a loss with no spiritual compensation. For the Christian allegory of Everyman, loss means the shedding of the body and the dissolution of the illusions of the material world, in exchange for something far greater. In this sense, the medieval morality play proves the more generous and hopeful of the two visions, even as it confronts death directly and without evasion.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms: Fourth Edition. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1981.

Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. Online Literature Library. Updated 29 Jun. 1999. www.literature.org/authors/barrie-james-matthew/the-adventures-of-peterpan/chapter-01.html

Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. London: Routledge, 1950.

Desmet, D. "The Parable of the Talents in Everyman." Winter 1997. Everyman and the Parable of the Talents. http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~cdesmet/talents.htm

Everyman. Edited by A.C. Crawley. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961.