by J. M. Barrie
It is quite the most successful way of defying wolves, and as one boy they bent and looked through their legs. The next moment is the long one, but victory came quickly, for as the boys advanced upon them in the terrible attitude, the wolves dropped their tails and fled.
Now Nibs rose from the ground, and the others thought that his staring eyes still saw the wolves. But it was not wolves he saw.
“I have seen a wonderfuller thing,” he cried, as they gathered round him eagerly. “A great white bird. It is flying this way.”
“What kind of a bird, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Nibs said, awestruck, “but it looks so weary, and as it flies it moans, ‘Poor Wendy.’ ”
“Poor Wendy?”
“I remember,” said Slightly instantly, “there are birds called Wendies.”
“See, it comes,” cried Curly, pointing to Wendy in the heavens.
Wendy was now almost overhead, and they could hear her plaintive cry. But more distinct came the shrill voice of Tinker Bell. The jealous fairy had now cast off all disguise of friendship, and was darting at her victim from every direction, pinching savagely each time she touched.
“Hullo, Tink,” cried the wondering boys.
Tink’s reply rang out: “Peter wants you to shoot the Wendy.”
It was not in their nature to question when Peter ordered. “Let us do what Peter wishes!” cried the simple boys. “Quick, bows and arrows.”
All but Tootles popped down their trees. He had a bow and arrow with him, and Tink noted it, and rubbed her little hands.
“Quick, Tootles, quick,” she screamed. “Peter will be so pleased.”
Tootles excitedly fitted the arrow to his bow. “Out of the way, Tink,” he shouted; and then he fired, and Wendy fluttered to the ground with an arrow in her breast.39
1. woke into life. The narrator freely admits that he identifies with Peter and the children by using a speech register closer to that of a child than an adult. Although he has a sophisticated awareness of grammar rules (as becomes evident from his reference to the “pluperfect”), he elects to use the simple past tense endorsed by Peter Pan. Here we have encapsulated the narrator’s dilemma: he tries to channel childhood but is condemned to the reflective style and self-conscious condition of adulthood. In a draft for his novel Sentimental Tommy, Barrie wrote about the attempt to recapture childhood: “Cast your mind back into its earliest years, and thro’ them you will see flitting dimly the elusive form of a child. He is yourself, as soon as you can catch him. But move a step nearer, and he is not there. Among the mists of infancy he plays hide and seek with you, until one day he trips and falls into the daylight. Now you seize him; and with that touch you two are one. It is the birth of self-consciousness” (Beinecke Library, MS Vault BARRIE, S45).
2. things are usually quiet on the island. Life on the island is described in the narrative present to underscore the recurrent nature of what happens. Nothing ever changes, even if there are occasional singular adventures, for everything is make-believe. “In the mythical land of immortality, time is definitely circular, archaic,” Maria Nikolajeva notes, in a study that divides up children’s literature according to its deep temporal structures—linear, cyclical, and carnivalesque (90). Peter Pan, like many of the childhood utopias with characters dwelling in a self-contained pastoral setting, invariably faces the challenge of what to do with the child reluctant to grow up.
3. they merely bite their thumbs at each other. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase “bite the thumb at” as a gesture of defiance. The thumb nail is put into the mouth and made to create a noise by its snapping against the front teeth.
4. They were going round and round the island. When Peter absents himself from Neverland, the inhabitants seek a therapeutic alternative to adventure, avoiding conflict through circular movement. Their procession moves along in an eternal present devoid of confrontation and transformative energy.
5. Let us pretend to lie here. Once again, the narrator calls attention to the fact that everything he does is make-believe, even as he allows us to “watch” the boys with him.
6. The first to pass is Tootles. The lost boys, rather than having actual names, are called by epithets: Tootles, Curly, Nibs, Slightly, and the Twins. The lack of a Christian name and surname reduces their identity to a collective stereotype, and, in the play, they speak as a chorus rather than as individuals. Peter is the only one of them with a boy’s name.
7. but we are not really on the island. Once again the narrator shatters the illusion, calling attention to the fictionality of his work, this time constructing a contradiction by suggesting that he is not on the island, even as he witnesses the adventures that take place there.
8. followed by Slightly. In the play Peter Pan, Slightly explains how he received his name: “. . . my mother had wrote my name on the pinafore I was lost in. ‘Slightly Soiled’; that’s my name.”
9. he is a pickle. A British colloquial term for a boy who is always causing trouble or for a mischievous child.
10. “Avast belay, yo ho.” Pirates, redskins, boys, and parents all speak in different registers, in part for the sake of differentiation, in part to create histrionic effects. The Indians often speak in what we see today as offensive stereotypical gibberish: “Scalp um, oho, velly quick.” Hook resorts to archaic language and inversion and is flamboyant in his use of bombast. And even Peter seems to emote in unexpected ways: “Dark and sinister man, have at thee.”
11. on Execution dock. Located on the Thames in Wapping, part of the Docklands to the east of the City of London, Execution Dock was used for over four hundred years to hang criminals sentenced by the Admiralty Court. It consisted of a wooden gallows built on the low-water mark. Pirates, mutineers, and smugglers were paraded across London Bridge past the Tower of London before they were publicly executed at the dock. Their remains were often left on display for days at a time, washed over three times by the tide, as prescribed by Admiralty law, as a warning to offenders. On occasion, the corpses were tarred, bound in chains, and put inside an iron cage, suspended from a gibbet at a site of maximum visibility. During the early years of the eighteenth century, entire crews were sent to the gallows. Captain Kidd, convicted of piracy and murder, was executed there in 1701, and his rotting corpse, its eyes pecked out by seagulls but its bones kept in place by a cage, remained on display for years after his execution, “as a great terror to all persons from committing ye like crimes” (Konstam and Kean, 181).
12. pieces of eight. The term designates the Spanish dollar or eight-real coin, a silver coin worth eight reales that became a world currency in the late eighteenth century. Minted after the Spanish currency reform of 1497, it was widely used in Europe, the Americas, and the Far East, and remained legal tender in the United States until 1857.
13. the handsome Italian Cecco. While preparing the script for Peter Pan, Barrie read pirate literature widely in search of names and colorful details. He reread Treasure Island and studied a number of other works, including Charles Johnson’s History of Pirates (1724). Cecco has no buccaneering model, and he is most likely named after Cecco Hewlett, son of the novelist Maurice Hewlett. Cookson is most likely taken from Captain John Coxon, who plundered a town on the Spanish Main. Black Murphy was a historical pirate, as was Skylights.
14. the prison at Gao. Gao is sometimes emended to read “Goa” in more recent printings. Goa is a former Portuguese colony in southern India, conquered in the early sixteenth century and freed in 1961. The change from “Gao” to “Goa” is made plausible by the reference in Treasure Island to “the boarding of the Viceroy of the Indies out of Goa,” witnessed by Long John Silver’s parrot, and by the mention of “moidores,” or Portuguese gold pieces, that follows.
15. Guadjo-mo. The made-up name refers to a tropical river. Barrie developed his island fantasy from historical fact and imaginative fiction, and he rarely invented geographical place names.
16. six dozen on the Walrus from Flint. Ju
kes received six dozen lashes on the Walrus, Captain Flint’s ship in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
17. the Irish bo’sun Smee. Smee came to be Irish when Barrie, hoping to individualize the parts of Smee and Starkey, asked George Shelton, the original Smee, how to give the pirates stronger profiles. Shelton proposed making “an Irishman of mine,” and Barrie shot back “Shelton, he is an Irishman.” Oddly, he is described as a Nonconformist, one of the Protestant Christians of England and Wales who refused to conform to the practices of the Church of England.
18. Alf Mason. Barrie adds here a tribute to his contemporary the novelist and politician Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (1865–1948), best known for detective novels featuring the French sleuth Inspector Hanaud, and for his novel The Four Feathers.
19. the only man that the Sea-Cook feared. Sea-Cook, as noted earlier, was the nickname for Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which Stevenson had originally called The Sea Cook.
20. blackavized. Usually written as black-a-vised, the term was used in the nineteenth century to describe a person of dark complexion. Charlotte Brontë wrote, in Jane Eyre: “I would advise her black-aviced suitor to look out.”
21. a raconteur of repute. Hook, unlike Peter, is no stranger to stories. That the French term for storytelling is used to describe him (he is also dubbed a “grand seigneur”) emphasizes his exotic, man-of-the-world character.
22. Charles II. Charles II (Charles Stuart) lived from 1630 to 1685 and ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland during the Restoration period. Crowned king of England and Ireland in 1661, he had been proclaimed king of Scots in 1649. Known as the “Merrie Monarch,” he was a pleasure-loving ruler, welcomed back and seen as providing relief from a decade of rule by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans.
23. these are the Piccaninny tribe. The term Piccaninny derives from the Portuguese pequenino (boy, child), a noun based on the adjective for “very small or tiny.” The word belongs to a Portuguese-based pidgin associated with the seventeenth-century slave trade on the Atlantic coasts. First used in writing to describe the children of women in Barbados, the term today can refer either to a black child of African descent or to an American Indian child. It is considered racially offensive and has led to a certain discomfort about Barrie’s use of racial stereotyping in Peter Pan. Drawing on the adventure stories read in his youth by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Barrie exaggerates and so overdoes the rhetoric used to describe the natives of Neverland that—as some critics argue—he ends by undoing racial stereotyping. Still, it is difficult to defend Barrie, for the term Piccaninny, used well into the twentieth century, collapses categories of racial and national difference and is used in a manner that cannot but appear to be condescending and disparaging, particularly for child readers. Native to Neverland, the Piccaninny are constantly referred to as “savage.” They are described with racial stereotypes that see native populations as naked, violent, and full of stealth and cunning.
24. Tiger Lily. Tiger Lily is a native princess with a name that combines a ferocious animal with a beautiful flower. She has been described as the “other woman,” in both senses of the term—an exotic alternative to the domestic Wendy, who plays the “loyal housewife.” In the screenplay for the silent film version of Peter Pan, Barrie imagined the following courtship scene: “Tiger Lily comes into view. Then we see a redskin evidently proposing to the beautiful creature, who is the Indian princess. She whips out her hatchet and fells him.”
25. dusky Dianas. In Roman mythology, Diana is the goddess of the hunt. She is associated with wild beasts and woodlands, and is often referred to as the moon goddess. A chaste goddess, she is said to have transformed Actaeon into a stag and set his own raging hunting dogs after him. Her ire was provoked when the Theban hero observed her naked while she was bathing in the woods.
26. lions, tigers, bears. L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wizard of Oz contains the famous line “Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!” Baum’s work was published in 1900, predating Peter and Wendy, but there is no evidence that Barrie knew the work.
27. for whom she is looking presently. This is the first point in the text that assigns gender to the crocodile, and some will be surprised to learn that Hook is pursued by a female crocodile. As the “last figure of all” in the procession, the crocodile takes on symbolic importance, representing annihilation and death, “creeping up from behind.” Creatures that can exist on both land and water, crocodiles are also associated with primal powers. In ancient Egypt, the crocodile was venerated as a powerful deity, both solar and chthonic, that is, masculine and feminine.
28. Then quickly they will be on top of each other. Barrie suggests here that conflict and violence will erupt as soon as one of the parties (redskins, lost boys, fairies, beasts, or pirates) decides to move away from its single, fixed pace on Neverland. A similarly precarious network of relationships can be found in the Darling household, with collisions occurring whenever one person puts his foot down.
29. “whether he has heard anything more about Cinderella.” “Cinderella” is the story that Peter Pan hears at the Darling household, and it is also the tale that Wendy tells the boys. The fairy tale, as written down by Charles Perrault in late seventeenth-century France and by the Brothers Grimm over a century later, is set in the domestic sphere and tells of persecution, romance, and marriage. It is about rites and customs ordinarily excluded from Neverland until Wendy’s arrival—hence perhaps its allure for the lost boys.
30. “ ‘a cheque-book of my own!’ ” The humor of Nibs’s desire for a checkbook will escape children but will be understood by adults. One critic makes the brilliant point that “Barrie uses adult voices speaking childishly to create social comedy for children, and children’s voices speaking in naively adult terms to create social comedy for adults” (Hollindale 2008, 314).
31. wild things of the woods. Was Maurice Sendak inspired by this phrase when writing Where the Wild Things Are? It is unlikely but nonetheless a wonderful coincidence that Barrie used the term “wild things” in Peter Pan.
32. “Davy Jones.” Davy Jones is the nickname for the spirit of the sea or the sailor’s devil, in some ways the male counterpart to mermaids, who lure sailors down to the depths of the sea but also warn them of their impending fate. Davy Jones’s locker refers to the resting place for drowned sailors. The origins of the term, first used in Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), are not known: “This same Davy Jones, according to sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, shipwrecks, and other disasters to which a sea-faring life is exposed, warning the devoted wretch of death and woe” (Smollett IV, 221–22).
33. seven large trees. In 1873 Barrie went off to study at Dumfries Academy, in southwestern Scotland (his older brother had a post there as school inspector). At the academy, Barrie not only composed his first play, Bandelero the Bandit, but also played pirate games with the son of the sheriff clerk of Dumfries. The Home Underground, with its many tree-trunk entrances, may have been inspired by some of the sites in the gardens of the sheriff’s home, Moat Brae. Barrie later wrote that the games played there had created “a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan. For our escapades in a certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land to me, were certainly the genesis of that nefarious work” (Speeches 86).
34. “and then he’ll get you.” Observe that the crocodile changes gender. The pirates describe it as a male of the species.
35. “Odds bobs, hammer and tongs.” The expression is taken from a sea ballad in Frederick Marryat’s novel Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Friend (1837): “Odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I’ve been to sea, / I’ve fought ’gainst every odds—and I’ve gained the victory.” Barrie was familiar with Marryat’s many adventure books for boys.
36. “Unrip your plan, captain.” Unrip is a now obsolete verb, meaning to disc
lose or make known.
37. “That shows they have no mother.” Hook twice emphasizes that the absence of a mother puts the children at risk. His plan seems designed by a villain who, once again, thinks more like a child than like an adult. The plot he cooks up about a cake covered with green sugar may well have been invented by Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys during some of the pirate games at Black Lake Island.
38. “Have shaken claws with Cook.” Cook is changed to Hook in most reissued editions of Peter and Wendy.
39. Wendy fluttered to the ground with an arrow in her breast. In his preface to the play Peter Pan, Barrie described how “we first brought Peter down” with an arrow in Kensington Gardens. He added: “I seem to remember that we believed we had killed him . . . and that after a spasm of exultation in our prowess the more soft-hearted among us wept and all of us thought of the police” (Hollindale 2008, 75). Barrie was no doubt aware of how arrows that strike but fail to kill are associated with Cupid, the god who inspires romantic love with his weapons.
CHAPTER 6
The Little House
Foolish Tootles was standing like a conqueror over Wendy’s body when the other boys sprang, armed, from their trees.
“You are too late,” he cried proudly, “I have shot the Wendy. Peter will be so pleased with me.”
Overhead Tinker Bell shouted “Silly ass!” and darted into hiding. The others did not hear her. They had crowded round Wendy, and as they looked a terrible silence fell upon the wood. If Wendy’s heart had been beating they would all have heard it.
Slightly was the first to speak. “This is no bird,” he said in a scared voice. “I think this must be a lady.”
“A lady?” said Tootles, and fell a-trembling.
“And we have killed her,” Nibs said hoarsely.
They all whipped off their caps.
“Now I see,” Curly said: “Peter was bringing her to us.” He threw himself sorrowfully on the ground.
