Participación Ciudadana

When Peter is removed from Kensington Gardens to Neverland, he is removed from the real world, to a world of play, a world designated “never”—both outside of time and, simply “not.”xci If he exists in his own temporal plane, Peter’s refusal to age can be seen as a product of

where he lives, not of what he is. Describing Peter in his first incarnation, the narrator of The Little

White Bird tells David that “His age is a week, and though he was born so long ago he has never

had a birthday, nor is there the slightest chance of his having one. The reason is that he escaped being a human when he was seven days old.” It seems impossible to avoid the euphemistic sound of this statement—Peter, he goes on to explain, “escaped by the window, and flew back to the Kensington Gardens” (55)—but this is not the usual method of escape, and, if that knowledge is lost on David, it is not lost on the narrator or the reader. “All children,” Barrie continues, “having been birds before they were human,” have this natural desire to escape—and, by the time of Peter

Pan, Peter is there to help them escape. The unique temporality of Neverland allows a convenient

“escape” in an unconventional way.

Neverland exists in its own temporality, an island upon which reproductive time is out of joint, or ceases to exist at all. Not only do the child citizens of this world never reach sexual maturity, the implication of sexuality is erased from their origins. While some of the Lost Boys claim to have vague memories of their mothers, they mostly seem to have simply sprung into

being, like the babies on Peter’s island in The Little White Bird. The adults who inhabit Neverland are as out of step with reproductive time as the islands’ ghostly children. The pirates live in the same adventurous, all-male society as Peter and his Lost Boys. Even among the “Indians,” the only society on the island that could conceivably have “traditional” family structures, the “belle of the tribe,” Tiger Lily, “wards off the altar with a hatchet.” Rather than marrying one of the many braves who would “have her to wife”(Peter and Wendy 56), the indeterminately-aged Tiger Lily focuses her attentions on a prepubescent boy who she knows will never grow up to return them.

By refusing to “grow up,” in the sense that the word generally means, by refusing, not only to grow older, but to follow the course of life that “growing up” would entail, the citizens of Neverland halt reproductive time, step out of the timeline which “responsible adults” like the Darlings will follow. In the words of Kathryn Bond Stockton, Lost Boys resist the “vertical movement upward (hence, ‘growing up’) toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness” (4), instead becoming rather literalized versions of her “ghostly gay children,” with an identity that “is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways” (11). Peter Pan, who is to be found “in the faces of many women who have no children” (Peter and Wendy 16), represents a disruption of heterosexual reproductive time that points to both the queer and the ghostly.

Perhaps it is precisely this stepping out of reproductive time that puts a halt to time altogether in Neverland. It is useful here to think of Jack Halberstam’s ideas of queer time and space. According to Halberstam, “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.”xcii “Queer subcultures,”

he continues, “produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life

experience—namely birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (2). By stepping out of a timeline the ultimate goal of which is reproduction, Lost Boys also step outside of the perpetual cycle of birth and death. A culture that is obsessed with procreation is, after all, implicitly obsessed with death—inherent in the purpose of reproduction is that not only one’s genetics, but one’s culture, live on. In Peter Pan, then, Wendy, a white, non-working-class girl from the “real world,” is representative of reproductive time in a way that the women native to the queer temporalities of Neverland are not. Tiger Lily and Tinkerbelle, who are, respectively, non-white and working classxciii (and, in Tinkerbelle’s case, non-human), pose little danger to Peter Pan’s childishness,

because they can never really invoke the deadly cultural implications of marriage and family that Wendy, as a middle-class, white, British girl, can. Encounters with possible romantic partners of the opposite sex, it is hinted, are what lead to “growing up”, and ultimately, death.

Wendy, a woman in the homosocial Neverland, is the ultimate threat. As “one of the kind that likes to grow up” (Peter and Wendy 178), she seems intent on taking everyone else with her by force – and, with the exception of Peter, she succeeds. Peter, like Miles, is closest to death when he is closest to the woman who would possess him. The one time when we (and Peter) really fear for his life, when he realizes what a big adventure death will be, is when he and Wendy are stranded on Marooner’s Rock:

Two small figures were beating against the rock; the girl had fainted and lay on the boy’s arm. With a last effort Peter pulled her up the rock and then lay down beside her. Even as he fainted he saw that the water was rising. He knew that they would soon be drowned, but he could do no more. As they lay side by side a mermaid caught Wendy by the feet, and began pulling her softly into the water. . . .(97-98)

The same corporeal reality that allows Peter and Wendy to touch and kiss in the novel puts them in a very real danger. The weightless, only-pretend-wounded Peter of the play cannot, we suspect, actually be drowned—Peter in the novel is weak, wounded, and, tellingly, embracing a girl. The one time that Peter and Wendy lie down side-by-side is also the one time that they actually come in dire danger of death. Tellingly, when we last see Wendy in the play Peter Pan, she is leaving Neverland for the final time astride a broomstick, a witch rather than a fairy (Peter Pan 94).

Hook, the one physically adult man who seems to belong in Neverland, also meets his end in the hands (or mouth) of a female. Hook’s greatest fear and ultimate killer is not Peter, but the crocodile that has hunted him since she developed a taste for his flesh after eating his right hand. This symbolic (and hungry) crocodile also ate a clock, and so Hook is safe from her only until the clock winds down and stops ticking, at which point she will again be able to sneak up on him. Interestingly, Barrie makes a point of referring to the Crocodile as “she,” rather than the “it” that might befit this symbolic animal (and Hook uses), or the standard neuter “he” of the time (which Hook’s first mate, Smee, uses).xciv The gendering of the Crocodile seems deliberate, and is

certainly significant—the ticking Crocodile stands out as one of the few female characters in the boy’s world of Neverland. Time, the ultimate destructive force, is marked as feminine. Like Wendy and her mother, who urge Peter and the Lost Boys to grow up, the female Crocodile forcible reminds the Lost Boys and Men of Neverland that death is the only actual way to escape time.