{"id":165610,"date":"2023-10-02T13:18:38","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T17:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=165610"},"modified":"2023-10-03T10:50:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-03T14:50:26","slug":"on-peter-pan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/10\/02\/on-peter-pan\/","title":{"rendered":"On <em>Peter Pan<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_165611\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-165611\" class=\"wp-image-165611 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-1-photocredit-richardtermine-1024x685.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"685\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-1-photocredit-richardtermine-1024x685.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-1-photocredit-richardtermine-300x201.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-1-photocredit-richardtermine-768x514.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-1-photocredit-richardtermine.jpeg 1225w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-165611\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Scene from Mabou Mines Peter and Wendy with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I remember reading <em>Peter Pan<\/em> as a kid, a version based on the 1953 Disney movie\u2014based on J. M. Barrie\u2019s story. It turned me on. I\u2019m six or seven, and I\u2019m flipping through the pages, and there\u2019s a picture of Peter with his arms crossed and his back to Wendy. He\u2019s angry with her for some reason, and it turned me on. The words, the image, the anger? All of it, some kind of thrill-ball a kid has no words for.<\/p>\n<p>All kinds of people become aroused, in one way or another\u2014when we\u2019re children and when we\u2019re old. It doesn\u2019t start or stop. Aliveness is erotic, the senses awakened. Everyone knows kids get turned on by this thing or that thing without instruction by adults. If you want to know why people lie about this fact and pretend that children\u2014and often female humans along with them\u2014start out sexually \u201cinnocent,\u201d I can refer you to Nietzsche, who blames Christianity<strong>. <\/strong>Sexual feeling is anarchic, sudden, and sometimes inconvenient. It can\u2019t really be contained.<\/p>\n<p>What to call the feelings you don\u2019t have words for? A kind of fainty, oh my God what is this sensation I wouldn\u2019t have spoken about. It wasn\u2019t because I was masturbating. I didn\u2019t learn to masturbate, so I could come, until after I\u2019d had sex. I\u2019m twenty, maybe, when one day I say to myself, \u201cIf he can do that, so, probably can you.\u201d<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>As a child, I wouldn\u2019t have spoken about my \u201cfunny feelings\u201d perhaps because shame moves in early. Also, in childhood, secrecy is all we have\u2014our private inner lives\u2014in a world where adults control so much of us. Maybe, as children, we keep arousal to ourselves because we don\u2019t want anyone tampering with our pleasure. Also, in childhood, there\u2019s no end of feelings we don\u2019t have language to describe\u2014grief, fear, and anxiety about things we anticipate, come to mind. Secrets are sexy.<\/p>\n<p>With <em>Peter Pan<\/em>, the feeling came from reading and looking at pictures on the page. Oh my God, words could do that! Later, when I discovered porn, I was even more impressed by the excitement reading could produce. The metaphysical properties of words, bundled into grammar, producing an inner world you could see and smell in your mind and also made your body vibrate.<\/p>\n<p>Is <em>Peter Pan<\/em> a particularly sexy story? I think it is. Kids as flying runaways, escaping through the window of their house. Freud might not have been right about a lot of things he theorized, but I think he was onto something when he said flying in dreams is sex. Remember all those dreams of flying you had and maybe still have? Until not that long ago, I would dream I was flying down Broadway, close to the ground. It was like swimming, except in air.<\/p>\n<p>Peter Pan is a boy who refuses adult life. As a girl, you identify with his confidence and daring. I mean, who else are you going to identify with? Five minutes after arriving in Neverland, Wendy becomes a mommy figure, tidying up after the lost boys and reading them bedtime stories. In Barrie\u2019s play <em>Peter and Wendy<\/em>\u2014it debuted in London in 1904 and became a huge and lucrative hit\u2014Peter was played by a woman, a tradition that continued far into the twentieth century. Famously, when I was young, Mary Martin played Peter in a musical version of the play that was broadcast on TV year after year, with Mary and the kids harnessed to ropes that lifted them into the air.<\/p>\n<p>The eros of the adults who create children\u2019s literature can\u2019t help but wash over their stories, too, and it goes into us, as children, in a way that\u2019s not mediated or judged. Think of Lewis Carroll\u2019s infatuation with his neighbor\u2019s daughter Alice Liddell, the model for <em>Alice in Wonderland<\/em>. Similarly, Barrie was deeply attached to the five sons of the Llewelyn Davies family, who were near neighbors of Barrie and his wife, and who were the models, he said, for Peter and the lost boys.<\/p>\n<p>In 1997, Mabou Mines, the great avant-garde theater company, presented a version of the Barrie tale that mined its eros of longing, lostness, and escape. I wrote about the production, directed by Lee Breuer and presented at the New Victory Theater in New York, for <em>The Nation<\/em>, unaware at the time of its connection to the stirrings I\u2019d felt as a kid. Only now do they whoosh together, the girl alone in her bed and this show that lifted off its moorings of innocence and sentimentality to become a meditation on exile so plangent all of us in the audience sobbed.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_165612\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-165612\" class=\"wp-image-165612 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-3-photocredit-richardtermine-1024x758.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"758\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-3-photocredit-richardtermine-1024x758.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-3-photocredit-richardtermine-300x222.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-3-photocredit-richardtermine-768x569.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-3-photocredit-richardtermine-1536x1137.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/pw-3-photocredit-richardtermine.jpeg 1800w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-165612\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Scene from the Mabou Mines production of <em>Peter and Wendy<\/em>, with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The brilliant actor Karen Kandel played Wendy and Mrs. Darling. She also spoke as ventriloquist for all the other characters, who were represented by puppets and manipulated by a crew of handlers in beekeeper costumes\u2014as Edwardian-style equivalents of Bunraku handlers. Some puppets required several handlers, like Nana the dog, who appeared in act two wearing a crocodile mask as she hunted for Captain Hook. Some puppets were mere toys and two-dimensional shadow puppets on sticks. Some sets were as simple as origami-style models that looked like the miniatures in pop-up books.<\/p>\n<p>There was live music as well, based on Irish shanties, with tough-minded lyrics by Breuer, Liza Lorwin, and Johnny Cunningham. In the songs, the characters struggle for a balance that humans can&#8217;t actually achieve. The nursery has mommy but no freedom. Flight is glorious but lonely. Everyone wants a mom, including Hook, but no mom can measure up to the fantasies people form, and even Wendy&#8217;s mom, who is devoted to her children, has \u201ca mocking mouth with one kiss Wendy could never get.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tinker Bell glories in being abandoned. Peter is sexy but infantile\u2014he\u2019s everyone\u2019s trick and no one&#8217;s dependable object of desire. \u201cIt is only make-believe that I am their father,\u201d he says, referring to the lost boys. No one can ever really be man enough, the show says, unless they remain a little boy.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of act one, the wolves of Neverland lament their outsideness at the same time they howl for the joy of running free. The mother tries to tidy up her children&#8217;s minds and can\u2019t. The map of a child&#8217;s mind is Neverland\u2014a sky with stars depicted by pin lights. At the play&#8217;s end, the lost boys, having returned to humdrum existences, ache in phantom parts of themselves they no longer have but can still sense, singing for all of us, &#8220;Oh magic island, dream of us, set us free.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><span class=\"il\">Laurie<\/span> <span class=\"il\">Stone<\/span> is the author of six books, most recently<\/em> Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing that is Happening,<em> which was long-listed for the PEN\/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes a column for <\/em>Oldster Magazine<em>,<\/em><em>\u00a0and the <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/lauriestone.substack.com\">Everything Is Personal<\/a>\u00a0Substack.<\/p>\n<div>Peter and Wendy<em> at Mabou Mines was written and produced by Liza Lorwin, directed by Lee Breuer, and designed by Julie Archer. Music was by Johnny Cunningham, <\/em><em>and the part of narrator was performed by Karen Kandel.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Is Peter Pan a particularly sexy story?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2320,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68717],"tags":[3618,67827,3065],"class_list":["post-165610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-childrens-books","tag-childrens-books","tag-featured","tag-peter-pan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>On Peter Pan by Laurie Stone<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 2, 2023 \u2013 &quot;Is Peter Pan a particularly sexy story?&quot;\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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