Peter Pan Read Online Free PDF

for children. Though Barrie uses multiple narrative devices and shifts the perspective, the “doctoring” narrator is
always
addressing other adults as implicit readers of this novel, just as he does in
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
And, though there is what Rose calls “slippage,” that is, though the narrator is slippery, Barrie, the author, is not. He is clearly in command of the characters, plot, and setting. He knows what he wants to present and does not hesitate to present an image of imaginative play by children.
    Of course, there are multiple ways to interpret
Peter and Wendy
, and Rose’s interpretation is one of the most illuminating. However, some critics have astutely pointed out that the novel and the play reflect male anxiety at the end of the nineteenth century, when modernization was bringing about great changes in the family and workplace. Others have examined the nostalgic longing for an idyllic past of carefree boyhood, or the obvious unresolved oedipal relationship represented by themother role played by Wendy. None have viewed the novel, however, as a meta-commentary on the proper roles of fathers and mothers and as a handbook for adults on how imaginative play must be safeguarded for children so that they can evolve into responsible adults.
    Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter Pan
, which predated
Peter and Wendy
, were incomplete works because they did not explain to adults what was missing in the stories and what the adults were missing in raising children. Therefore, Barrie wrote the “definitive” text to fix the words and notions of childcare—to define our view of Peter and his friends, and especially of Peter and his special virginal friend. Instead of viewing Peter Pan as merely an escapist figure, the eternal adolescent, the unfulfilled son, I would argue that Peter in the narrator’s version is mainly a rebel who consciously rejects the role of adulthood in conventional society because it has failed him. Adults have failed Peter. The educational system is repugnant. In some respects, Barrie’s work reflects his own struggle to conceive a different type of parent and familial relations that he missed during his youth. Therefore, parents and potential parents must be re-educated so that they will grant their children the freedom to fly off into their own realms and receive the nurturing that they want and need. It is through Peter’s help, for instance, that Wendy learns to become a mother, and it is through Wendy that Peter learns what it means to be a father. In Neverland, Peter does indeed become a surrogate father, while Wendy gains a strong sense of her maternal instincts. The entrance and passage through Neverland is a training ground for all children who have the good fortune to be allowed to release their imaginations. This construct enables Barrie to postulate a theory of mothering and fathering in which he strongly believed, even though he never had his own children. In
Peter and Wendy
he could take complete ownership of the child characters to show how a proper parent should treat his or her offspring. Viewed from this vantage point, Barrie’s sublimated neurosis has broader socio-psychological ramifications in his work, for Peter continually returns to children in the conventional world to guide them through experiences that enablethem to love, understand trust, and be loved in a conflicted but nurturing environment. Neverland thus retains a Utopian value as part of what Herbert Marcuse in
Eros and Civilization
designated the romantic “great refusal” to participate in a society bent on “instrumentalizing the imagination.”
    There is a price to be paid for being a rebel. The narrator tells us that Peter “had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.” This is in the next to last chapter, and the play, too, echoes his seemingly lonely position. But