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Peter Pan (100th Anniversary Edition) :: 0805072454
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A fabulously redesigned edition of a Michael Hague backlist classic
Peter Pan, the book based on J. M. Barrie's famous play, is filled with unforgettable characters: Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up; the fairy, Tinker Bell; the evil pirate, Captain Hook; and the three children-Wendy, John, and Michael-who fly off with Peter Pan to Neverland, where they meet Indians and pirates and a crocodile that ticks.
Renowned children's-book artist Michael Hague has brought the amazing adventures of Peter Pan to life. His beautiful illustrations capture the wild, seductive power of this classic book. This newly designed edition will be enjoyed by fans young and old alike.
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Author: Guest
Yes, there is darkness in Peter Pan - and in Alice, too, and in The Wizard of Oz - and certainly in Felix Salton's Bambi. These books, while written for young people, and which may be described as fantasy, have real plots and real characters who are not perfect. Peter Pan is selfish and stubborn as well as charming because children are not angels - they are little humans. Alice is highly critical of the adults in her dream world - adults who act very arbitrarily and often foolishly, as adults often do. Bambi is about the effects of human cruelty on animals; it deals with death and pain. One of the indications that these are good books, and not merely children's books, is that they can be read at different stages of life with new layers of understanding. You don't have to outgrow them, and they are better than many a book written for adults. The 'real' Pan and Alice and Bambi may not be suitable for the very youngest children, but please don't deprive your children culturally by never giving them anything but Disney's cutesy interpretations. For one thing, Barrie and Salton and Carroll were great writers who used words beautifully and had insightand feeling. Children deserve art as much as adults.
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Author: Guest
J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan appeals to both the young as well as the young at heart. A story about a boy who will never grow up, it addresses the fleeting and "heartless" quality of youth as well as the loss of innocence and imagination that comes with growing up. There is a fair amount of symbolism here, mostly self-explanatory: Peter represents youth and innocence, Wendy is the mother figure, Hook represents growing up and becoming corrupted, and the fairy Tinkerbell represents jealousy. Though occasionally dark and sinister, Peter Pan allows people of all ages to catch a glimpse of the magical world of Neverland, which exists in the minds of all children but may never be revisited by grown-ups. The magical quality of this book is timeless, and it reminds us all of a time in our lives when the Neverland was all that mattered. Peter Pan allows us to go back any time we want, "because the island is out looking for us...it is only thus that anyone may sight those magic shores."
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Author: Guest
This was my first time reading Peter Pan, I have seen the Disney version, but it was many years ago. What I expected was a story mirroring the Disney film exactly. What I got was a story that I believe is not suitable for children (which is what I thought from the Disney version).
To start, the characters have deeply symbolic meanings. Peter, obviously does not want to grow up. His character was first inspired by the author himself. Barrie's experiences with the Davies children (shown in the movie Finding Neverland) was his inspiration and his goal in live, to remain a child. Hook, through my knowledge, was inspired by Mr. Davies, who did not approve of Barrie playing with his children. The character of Tinker Bell is hard to figure out the inspiration or the meaning behind. I thought that her saying "ass" to all of the characters she disapproved of was somewhat inappropriate for what is supposed to be a children's book.
Some situations in the novel struck me emotionally. The scene where Tinker Bell is dying because she saved Peter by drinking Hook's poison shows that no matter how mad someone can be toward another person, you can always count on them. Then Peter calls out to the reader and asks if they believe in fairies is a representation of Peter's friendship toward Tinker Bell. I felt that all of the mean things that Tinker Bell had said about Wendy had never happened because of the emotions that Barrie portrays through the words on the page.
Overall, I loved the storyline and everything else about the novel except for the nasty language of Tinker Bell. That is why I give J.M. Barrie's classic Peter Pan, 4 stars.
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Author: Guest
Tots already ruined by today's sanitization of children's literature will enjoy Peter Pan very little. Like Alice and her Wonderland, this book can be a bit dark and moody and -- gasp! not politically correct. (Political correctness the most moronic bit of fluff and propaganda to have ever wormed into literature.) It can also be fun and witty and just a tad wistful.
But those children and adults who truly understand what it means to be gay and innocent and heartless, will find this to be one of the more fascinating books to have come out of the Victorian/Edwardian tradition. Tinted lightly by the author's deep emotional disturbance, there is a frantic poignancy to Peter's youth and a pseudo-sexual subtext that will fascinate the careful reader, making this a stunning book for all age groups.
This particular version of the story Peter and Wendy (the original and more appropriate title) is lavishly illustrated in a delicate hand. I highly recommend it.
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Author: Guest
"All children, except one, grow up."
With these words begins one of the most beloved of all children's fairy tales. James Matthew Barrie's Peter Pan is an evocative tale of mermaids and pirates and fairies, but more than anything else, it is a nostalgic glimpse into a place where we all have been, but a place which many of us have submersed in our subconscious and forgotten: the magical world of the child, called in this tale the Neverland. Barrie once wrote, "To be born is to be wrecked on an island," and so we may still be enchanted, even if we are not surprised, by his description of the Neverland as an island forevermore beyond the reach of those who have grown up:
"On these magic shores children at play are forever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more."
With stirring words such as these, Barrie begins to weave his spell on us, allowing us to look again through the sparkling eyes of a child, at a world filled with wonder and magic. Because it may be appreciated on more than one level, this book is not just for children. On a superficial level, children may adore this story as a wondrous, whimsical, and touching flight of fancy, but there is much more to this beautifully-written tale. Beneath the glimmering surface, in the murky depths of the subconscious realm, lie rarely-probed truths - perhaps monsters of the deep - that offer food for thought for even the most jaded and cynical adults.
The original title of the play upon which this novel is based was "Peter Pan, or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up," and this title cuts right to the heart of the story's message: In growing up, we lose something wondrous. Every child knows that growing up is something to be avoided. Children learn it when they hear their mothers say, "Oh, why can't you stay like this forever!" and this conviction is reinforced daily when they see how petty and joyless - and how without ideals - the lives of the adults around them are. As Peter so passionately put it in the story: "I don't want to ever be a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies." Refusal to grow up - on the surface, this is what this children's classic is all about. But beneath the surface lies the forbidden realm of children's sexuality; few have been foolhardy enough to probe these perilous depths, yet the book's sexual under-currents are there, strong and undeniable. Children's secret sexuality lies near the very core of the story's deeper meaning, and it is in the following passage, that the sexual overtones of the Peter Pan story come fully into view:
"Peter, what is it?"
"I was just thinking," he said, a little scared. "It is only make-believe, isn't it, that I am their father?"
"Oh yes," Wendy said primly.
"You see," he continued apologetically, "it would make me seem so old to be their real father."
"But they are ours, Peter, yours and mine."
"But not really, Wendy?" he asked anxiously.
"Not if you don't wish it," she replied; and she distinctly heard his sigh of relief. "Peter," she asked, trying to speak firmly, "what are your exact feelings to me?"
"Those of a devoted son, Wendy."
"I thought so," she said, and went and sat by herself at the extreme end of the room.
"You are so queer," he said, frankly puzzled, "and Tiger Lily is just the same. There is something she wants to be to me, but she says it is not my mother."
"No, indeed, it is not," Wendy replied with frightful emphasis. Now we know why she was prejudiced against the redskins.
"Then what is it?"
"It isn't for a lady to tell."
"Oh, very well," Peter said, a little nettled. "Perhaps Tinker Bell will tell me."
"Oh yes, Tinker Bell will tell you," Wendy retorted scornfully. "She is an abandoned little creature."
Here Tink, who was in her bedroom, eavesdropping, squeaked out something impudent.
"She says she glories in being abandoned," Peter interpreted.
He had a sudden idea. "Perhaps Tink wants to be my mother?"
"You silly ass!" cried Tinker Bell in a passion.
She had said it so often that Wendy needed no translation.
"I almost agree with her," Wendy snapped.
Here the deeper meaning of the Peter Pan story unfolds. Peter Pan starts out in the story by seducing Wendy away from her sheltered life as a child, and teaching her to fly - not in an aircraft, mind you, but, in a state of ecstatic transport, to fly her body (an allegory for orgasm). She becomes a woman and an ersatz mother in the imaginary Neverland as a result of this eloping nuptial flight - a flight which was a sort of make-believe sexual communion in which her two younger bothers became her babies, and Peter's. Peter and Wendy live (and sleep) together on this imaginary island as husband and wife with the orphaned lost boys as their pretend children. Tinker Bell, whose fairy dust gives Peter the power of flight, is in love with Peter and shows unmistakable signs of sexual jealousy when he uses the power she gives him to teach Wendy to fly. Wendy, too, seems jealous when Peter is pursued by other girls, like the Indian maiden, Tiger Lily, so it is clear that all the girls in the story want him as their exclusive intimate partner. But Peter is only a boy and all boys are impotent (that is, unable to experience orgasm, and consequently unable to inseminate girls, and to sire children) and so, having never had the epiphany of the first orgasm, Peter is simply unable to comprehend what girls want from him. Unlike boys, though, girls - no matter how young - are fully-functional sexual beings. To be sure, pre-pubescent girls are sterile (that is, they are unable to become pregnant) but they are as capable of fully partaking of sexual intercourse and are as capable of achieving orgasm as are fully grown women. This, then, is the genesis of the sexual tension underlying the story: Every girl in Peter's life is in love with him and wants to "fly" with him (i.e., wants to consummate her love with him sexually - orgasmically) but he is clueless and unattainable by virtue of his boyish impotence. His unattainability makes him all the more desirable to the girls, for it is human nature for people to want most what they can't have. On the other hand, what Peter really looks for in girls is an unconditionally-nurturing mother figure to replace the one who abandoned him as a baby. He said "I ran away the day I was born," but more likely he was - like all the lost boys - lost in Kensington Gardens by an inattentive nursemaid, which makes it clear that his mother wasn't there for him even as a baby. If Peter were to, one day, achieve sexual potency he would no longer be unattainable, which would likely make him less desirable to girls. Perhaps they would even then say of him, as many women say of all men: "Men are like dogs - they all think with their Peters." Moreover, once his natural addiction to communal ecstasy had made him a father, he would then, ever after, be not only a slave to his sexual hunger, but to the selfless support of his wife and children as well, thus drawing to a close his halcyon days of carefree youth.
Beyond the sexual aspects of the story (the aspects of fleeting delight), there is a somber pathos that pervades Peter Pan's existence. Without having had loving, wise, and unconditionally-supportive parents as role models, Peter has never seen anything to be admired in adults so he never wants to become like them. This is why he never wants to grow up. Peter's hatred for adults stems from the fact that he had been deserted by his mother at a very early age. Like every child, he came into this world trusting in a mother's unconditionally-nurturing love for her child, but she abandoned him when he needed her most. This made him withdraw from the world of the adults who betrayed this sacred faith of a child, and when he tried to return, the windows to his room were barred to him, and there was another little boy sleeping in his bed. It was the cold heartlessness and perfidy of adults - particularly that of his mother - that created the eternal child, Peter Pan. His development was forever frozen - fixated in the pristine state of childhood - for he wanted no part of becoming like the heartless adults who hurt him, abandoned him, indeed discarded him, as if the child he was were nothing more than human refuse. Perhaps every time an adult is unfair or cruel to a child, every time a mother betrays the faith of the child in the sacredness of the maternal bond, every time a child is abandoned to the care of uncaring strangers, another child's development is frozen, and another Peter Pan is made. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that such an eternal child would have contempt for adults, would see children as the only nobility and beauty in the world, and would hope to form affectionate bonds with those at a similar stage of development (though they might be much younger in actual years) when those children are most susceptible to such seduction by virtue of their own betrayal, disillusionment, or abandonment at the hands of cruel or uncaring adults.
Perhaps the saddest part of the story of Peter Pan is that in the end, even the children that he has seduced to fly away with him ultimately forsake him. They return from their flight with him, and enter the grown-up world to become boring and hateful adults (to Peter's way of thinking), and forget him on all but a repressed, subconscious level. Because they have a good mother's love to return to, and good parental role models to emulate, the returning children are able to move on, while he is left behind, alone on the shores of Neverland, with only fairies and other lost boys to keep him company. In his sleep, Peter cries often over the puzzle of his existence, but while he is awake his mind protects itself by a carefree forgetfulness that gives him respite from his anguish, but which often verges upon a heartlessness equal to that of the mother who abandoned him (as, for instance, when he can't recall what happened to Tinker Bell, but he "expect[s] she is no more.") In addition to this, Peter's character has yet another flaw, and that is a flaw that almost all children (and, sadly, most of today's adults) have: selfishness. It is only natural for one like Peter to have this flaw, though, for unselfishness and self-sacrifice are usually only learned when one becomes a parent, and even then it is only learned by those few who become good parents. Despite his tragic flaws, Peter Pan is worthy of our tears, for he is the eternal child, ever abandoned by all, and had the story ended here this tale would have been a heart-rending tragedy. But in order to avoid the supremely tragic fate of an eternal child condemned to eternal suffering, Peter comforts himself with forgetfulness, and returns again and again, ever to delight in seducing new generations of children away from the drab and often cruel world of adults, on enchanted fairy flights to Neverland. This book touches the heart, and speaks to the child within all of us.
- Review by Khan Amore, author of HYPATIA
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