Peter Pan: Childhood as Wonder and Identity Shift

Extract

[...] Her function as a storyteller, when she will share Peter's story with her daughter, then with her granddaughter, embodies what the author seems to believe: growing up is giving meaning to childhood. The wonderful becomes a story, a legend, a trace. Who could tell it, appreciate it better than the one who has fully lived it? Peter remains a prisoner of the present, but Wendy makes the past a source of sweetness and melancholy. She accepts the end of the dream to preserve its brilliance. Childhood, to exist fully, seems to have to be surpassed. This opposition between forgetting and memory gives the story its full symbolic meaning. [...]

[...] She tells stories and cares for the wounds. Her role, although derived from play, already translates a consciousness of the future. Peter, on the other hand, refuses to participate in such a game. Wendy reaches maturity, but Peter, on the other hand, remains a little boy: 'Is it only for pretend, is it not, that I am their father?' he worries about the lost children. Through this opposition, childhood is shown as a place of learning: children 'replay' the lives of adults and explore their contours, as if they sensed the world to which they would one day belong. [...]

[...] Beyond the apparent lightness of the tale, a deeper reflection unfolds on time, memory, and identity. If Barrie celebrates, through Peter and Wendy, the power of the imagination and the wonder proper to childhood, he also shows how this age is traversed by the fear of growing up and the need to separate from the dream to become oneself. In as much as the representations of childhood in Peter Pan do they reveal childhood as a state of wonder, but also as a moment of identity and symbolic turning point? [...]

[...] The return of Wendy to London marks a decisive turning point in the narrative. After having tasted the freedom of Neverland, she understands that this wonderful world is not meant to last. If it has given Peter the desire to stay forever, it has given her the desire and the drive to grow up. Her choice to return to the real world is not a betrayal of childhood, but a form of fulfillment. Barrie makes this decision a symbolic step towards adulthood, the one that transforms the adventures lived into memories that can be told. [...]

[...] Pursued by the crocodile that makes 'Tic-Tac' because it has in the past swallowed a clock, he symbolizes the fear of old age and death to come. Facing him, Peter Pan, eternal child, appears untouchable. Their confrontation is not trivial: both share this obsession with time, that which advances in one and is forever frozen in the other. Thus, Peter symbolically repeats the struggle of childhood against adulthood, fighting against the one who dared to break his golden rule: 'It is forbidden to grow up'. [...]