The Boy Who Shouldn’t Grow Up

Without question, the most complicated character in my personal fictional jerkwads hall-of-fame is Peter Pan. He’s a good guy — the good guy — and yet he’s crueller than villains like Voldemort, he cares less for other human beings than do adult antiheroes like House, and he’s more emotionally damaged than “dark” characters like Dexter. The Disney cartoon and the popular movie Hook scrub Peter’s character squeaky-clean, but the details are there in the book: Peter revels in bloodshed, not caring whose; he forgets about his friends in peril, and when he remembers, he doesn’t care for their sake but because he can go on an adventure to save them; and he never, ever understands (or even cares about) other people’s feelings.

Here I admit to some slight inaccuracy: I wrote “in the book” — rather, it should have been “in the books,” plural, not to mention plays. The original play and subsequent novelisation by Sir J. M. Barrie paint a complex Peter, but the official sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean, and Peter David’s awe-inspiring alternate take Tigerheart both expand on Peter’s almost amoral, just-out-of-reach personality.

In fact, it’s that last that inspired me to work on this post in the first place, and since it’s the least famous of the three texts I mentioned, perhaps it would be best to describe it. Tigerheart is the story of Paul Dear, a boy who takes a quest to the Anyplace, a realm of children’s imagination where the same eternal battle is forever fought between the same players, although the names and places and details always change. Paul yearns to be like The Boy, the ever-young hero who triumphed over the vicious Captain Hack, a pirate with a hatchet for a hand. It’s thematically faithful to the original, right down to the pseudo-Victorian-author tone of the narrator, and it preserves the timelessness and transcendence that other reconstructions, like Dave Barry and Ridley Scott’s Peter and the Starcatchers, exchange for humour and sympathetic characters.

In Tigerheart, Peter’s (or The Boy’s) childish flaws are highlighted by Paul’s stalwart sense of responsibility and loyalty to others. And yet, at the same time, in all three works I mentioned above, the reader can see that it’s precisely his possession of those flaws that allows Peter to exhibit the virtues he so proudly displays. He doesn’t care about anything but adventure — but that’s exactly what makes him so brave. He loves hunting and killing things — but that’s what makes him a match for his pirate nemesis.

This is not the whimsy and high spirits of youth that Robin Williams can come to accept in Hook in order to become a better father to his kids and regain his lost childhood. As a society, we often like to pretend kids are innocent and sweet — that the impulses that move us to do evil and act selfishly are entirely the province of adults. We have a sentimentalized picture of  childhood as a time of moral purity, as though every human being is born 100% good and gradually attains vices through exposure to the corrupt outside world. And we often focus on the cutenesses and kindnesses of children as though they’re a source of unadulterated goodness that we can hold up as our standard.

And yet, at the same time, nobody wants a “childish” boss, romantic partner, or colleague. We implicitly recognize that there’s an inherent selfishness and ignorance in aspects of childhood — that most children develop the ability to see others’ points of view, compromise, and/or uphold complex moral positions only as they get older. This isn’t to say that when children do good things, it’s meaningless — of course not, it’s meaningful when anyone does or thinks something good. And it’s not to say that there aren’t some children who are moral prodigies, just like others are preternaturally great at sports or math or music. It’s not even to say that adults, in general, are more moral than children.

But it is to say that J. M. Barrie’s juxtaposition of the cruelty and carelessness of childhood alongside its better known virtues is intriguing precisely because it dares the reader to make sense of this contradiction. Neverland is a self-culling place: if you are of the mindset that notices moral questions in terms more complicated than “nice to me and people I care about”/”mean to me and people I care about,” you’re probably too grown up to fly away with Peter in the first place.

And that’s OK, because once you’re old enough to start questioning, you have another way to get to Neverland: through the pages of these books, written by people who are in a moral mindframe similar enough to your own that they let you see Peter as he cannot see himself. Barrie and then McCaughrean and David have the perspective to show us the shortcomings of Peter’s position, and they have the courage to show their readers the gritty truths of life. Children die; if you stay away too long, even mothers will forget you; and eternal youth has an eternal price.

If I can’t think of another character as complicated as Peter, I also can’t think of one under the age of eighteen who gets as harsh a no-take-backsies punishment. Even Holmes and Mulder come back to life when they die. Even House and Dexter are awarded permanent friends and people who love them. But Peter is explicitly denied what the books suggest is the most important thing in the world: the caring family he tries so hard to replicate in Neverland by borrowing “mothers” from English nurseries. And in the end, he’s left for eternity to press his nose against the window (literally) while knowing he and all his adventures couldn’t rival this one joy. Even the Lost Boys choose growing up over him if it means getting a family besides.

The inherent contradictions of Peter Pan are part of his timeless appeal. Like his ancient Greek namesake and other mythological figures of chaos, he dares readers and viewers to grapple with tough questions. Are being good and being kind compatible? Are being innocent and being cruel necessarily opposites? And what’s the price we should be willing to pay for lives of meaning and adventure?

I don’t know about you, but I, at least, will always have a special place in my fictional pantheon for the most bloodthirsty, honourable, impulsive character of all — who still has his baby teeth.