In her preface to Artful Dodgers, Marah Gubar concedes that her argument concerning the cult of the child is currently incomplete, and that a fuller understanding would necessitate an expansion of her body of primary sources to include (amongst others) “literary texts aimed at adults” (x). One such text she briefly mentions within Artful Dodgers is Henry James’ What Maisie Knew, which traces the development of a young girl as she is repeatedly handed off into the care of a series of irresponsible adults. This blog post will take a deeper look into What Maisie Knew to test Gubar’s arguments in this expanded arena.

Gubar pulls What Maisie Knew into Artful Dodgers in order to support her claim that: “The Victorian age was marked by a new interest in the child’s perspective and voice” (39). While What Maisie Knew is written from the perspective of an omniscient (adult) narrator, most of what readers receive is filtered through the lens of young Maisie herself, presenting readers with an “adult” translation of a child’s internal monologue. While written for adults, What Maisie Knew is indeed child-focused, and takes up questions of both child-agency and precocity. The title itself alludes to the text’s theme of knowledge acquisition and the blurred lines between knowing and not-knowing, which are often caught up in the novel’s adult-child relationships.

One of Gubar’s central arguments is that Victorian literature: “…represented children as capable of reshaping stories, conceiving of them as artful collaborators in the hope that – while a complete escape from adult influence is impossible – young people might dodge the fate of functioning as passive parrots” (8). Her idea of collaboration (which I agree with Elissa is incredibly capacious) I think largely serves to suggest that Victorian literature represents a blurring of boundaries between children and adults, which helps purport a two-way exchange of knowledge, as well as a breaking down of the assumed “innocence” of childhood which would preclude children from being analytical of adult influences.

So, does What Maisie Knew uphold or refute these claims? What are adult readers supposed to learn about childhood and the relationship between child and adult? And are children viewed as innocent or as artful dodgers?

At the start of the text, Maisie perhaps functions less as an “artful dodger” than as a “passive parrot.” Caught up in the ugly divorce of her parents, she is initially stripped of agency, imagined as “” (16), whose job was to literally parrot back the message of one parent to the other. She does not interpret or translate the messages, but simply repeats, fully under the influence of both adults and not yet questioning their motives. However, her mimicry quickly evolves and dissipates. As Gubar suggests of Victorian children, Maisie indeed comes to be associated with precocity: “It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood , but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before” (9). After repeatedly being put in the position of shuttling back and forth bitter messages between adults – messages which often enraged their receivers – Maisie comes to learn she has another option, namely “concealment . She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.  Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen”  (16). Ironically, Maisie’s precociousness causes her to be dubbed an idiot by the unknowing adults around her; yet, she takes pride in the label because it symbolizes the success of her subversive tactics. Although her agency here takes shape as passivity in the form of silence, it is actively employed and demonstrates that she actually has learned to be an artful dodger of adult influence, refusing to serve as pawn. Such a behavioral shift would support Gubar’s argument of children as artful dodgers, as well as help to breakdown the idea of child as innocent, since Maisie is clearly aware of the adult influence around her, and understands way more about the communication patterns (and love affairs) of adults, as well as her own role in them, than the adults give her credit for.

However, it is also clear that this form of agency is problematic, and that, although Maisie learns how to disengage from adult influences, this also causes her to suffer from forms of oppression (i.e. – silence). Additionally, her precocity is not absolute. James writes Maisie as alternating between precocity and unknowingness. She is still often tricked and manipulated by adults, particularly one of her many caretakers, Sir Claude, who guilts her by expressing how much he and others have sacrificed for her well-being. In response, Maisie: “coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire it should be remarked how little was lost on her. ‘Oh I know! ’” (165). Since the adults in her life have actually made very little sacrifice for her (instead using her as a cover for their many extramarital or out-of-wedlock affairs) her “Oh I know” is actually a statement of innocence and unknowing as she fails to comprehend the manipulation. “Oh I know” becomes a constant refrain of Maisie’s throughout the novel as she feigns intelligence or unquestioningly agrees with adults in order to receive validation.

James succeeds in painting an image of a child who is deeply immersed in the world of adults, and of an incredibly blurred boundary between child and adult. While Sir Claude, similarly to Maisie’s parents, also labels the girl “the perfection of a dunce! ” (200), since this is a novel for adults, and we as readers are acutely aware of Maisie’s intelligence, this perhaps shows that one of the goals of the novel itself is to encourage adult readers to reevaluate our often false and reductive understandings of children. And despite this insult of Sir Claude’s, at other points in the novel, he makes drastically different observations of their dialogue, remarking: “I’m talking to you in the most extraordinary way—I’m always talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain’t I? One would think you were about sixty…” (431). And the narrator comments elsewhere that Sir Claude “was liable in talking with her to take the tone of her being also a man of the world”(102). Thus, Maisie is imagined, even by the other adults in the novel, as a hybrid being – one which crosses boundaries of both age and gender. This forces adult readers to also reexamine the relationships between child and adult, as well as where children lie on the innocent to precocious spectrum.

James’ narrator, in fact, declares that if Maisie can be considered innocent at all, it is an innocence “saturated with knowledge” (233), which Gubar would perhaps agree with as a more true generalization of Victorian children than innocence (or maybe even precocious) alone. Additionally, the narrator sets up for a reciprocal (perhaps in Gubar’s terms – collaborative) relationship between adult and child, whereby Maisie comes to influence and edify the adults around her, even if unwittingly: “I am not sure that Maisie had not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs. Beale’s” (361). Thus What Maisie Knew further breaks down the adult-child binary by proving how permeable those borders truly are. Not only can adults influence children, but vice versa.

Overall, an examination of What Maisie Knew supports Gubar’s claim regarding the Victorian era’s interest in, and complex relation to, childhood. Far from being the ideal of innocence, Maisie instead comes to represent one of the “complex, highly socialized individuals” (181) Gubar claims exemplify the definition of a Victorian child. And the novel importantly opens up questions regarding child-adult relationships, causing adult readers to act as artful dodgers themselves by reconsidering their own definitions of children and how those children do or do not differ from themselves.

Because Suzanne has already summed up Marah Gubar’s argument very well, I will try to avoid repeating what she has already said, and instead point out some of the key terms and strategies Gubar uses, as well as some of the subtle distinctions she makes between her own argument and Rose’s.

Gubar’s most obvious key term, “artful dodgers,” is doing some important work both in setting up her stance with regard to Jacqueline Rose’s argument in The Case of Peter Pan, and in justifying the necessity of analyzing works for both adults and children.

Gubar uses the term “artful dodgers” to refer to a way in which Golden Age children’s authors often depict children as “artful collaborators,” who while they cannot completely escape adult influence, can escape becoming “passive parrots” (6) of adult narratives about them. This term also articulates Gubar’s stance with relation to Rose perfectly–it allows her to dodge Rose’s implication that works created by so-called childhood cultists like J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll were universally dis-empowering to children, without forcing her into the difficult position of saying that they did not fetishize innocence or desire children.

At times, however, Gubar sets up binary distinctions between her argument and Rose’s that like the boundary between child and adults, don’t always hold–namely, the distinction she makes between precocity and innocence, and between the acculturated child and the child as separate and other. This dichotomy doesn’t work in part because the terms in Rose’s book whose prevalence Gubar attempts to refute (innocence and separateness) already imply some of the ambiguity with which Gubar tries to endow them; in other words, the version of Rose’s argument she attacks is a bit of a straw-man.

For instance, the first half of her chapter on Lewis Carroll is devoted to discussing child photographs, which imply, among other things, that children have potential as amorous partners. For Gubar, this shows a preoccupation with child precocity, and demonstrates that children were often seen as enmeshed in culture, rather than separate from it, and capable of agency–in other words, that the line between child and adult was not solid. However, I am not sure Rose would have denied the existence of any of this evidence; she just would have spun it differently. In this case, for instance, Rose would have seen the belief that children could function as amorous partners as proof of the dangers of interaction across a boundary that Rose seems to be saying should be solid, even if it is not. When Gubar says that authors such as Carroll were interested in “blurring rather than policing” (7) the borders between child and adult, therefore, she is actually in wholehearted agreement with Rose, whose invocation of accounts of child sexual abuse in her preface, show that she sees these instances of inappropriately blurred boundaries between young people and their elders as somehow analogous to adult desires for children in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Another important concept to Gubar is that children’s authors often depicted child-adult “collaboration”–a term she uses to imply a variety of modes of child resistance to adult authority, not all of which imply exact creative reciprocity or a mutually-beneficial relationship. At times, I felt that this term, as opposed to the clear, indeed, sometimes overdetermined term “artful dodgers,” had a capciousness that made it almost meaningless. For instance, collaboration can mean becoming empowered to be an artist instead of a governess in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lychetts, being talked down to by an editor who publishes your poetry as a joke in The Treasure Seekers, or getting attacked by a pirate who pretends to flatter you in Treasure Island. Part of the reason Gubar uses “collaboration” so loosely is probably because, as she demonstrates in her introduction, the “cult of the child” has been described in so many different, and sometimes conflicting ways, that it is difficult to find a term that differentiates her from all of these models, while still remaining capacious enough not to reinscribe a reductive, dichotomous model of childhood opposed to the one she is taking down, another “totalizing metanarrative” (32).

Her use of the term collaboration is unique and interesting in the chapters on Carroll and Nesbit, when she discusses more specific terms underneath the umbrella of collaboration–mutual aggression and reciprocal exploitation–an amazing feat, considering how much work is out there on both of them. This brings me to a strategy of Gubar’s that I think works really well for her argument–that of surface reading. In the vein of Victorianist Sharon Marcus, Gubar reinterprets what is in plain sight, often attributing the most obvious significance to details other critics have tried to claim were not what they seemed to be. A good example of this is her interpretation of the precocity of Carroll’s portraits, which she says indicate simply that Carrolll saw children as capable of being amorous partners for adults, rather than seeing children as so innocent that they could not be compromised by photographing them in sexual poses. Likewise, in her Treasure Island chapter, she stays entirely on the level of plot, illustrating that Treasure Island has been misinterpreted in the past precisely because it has been over-interpreted.

I think one of the most important things I am taking from the Gubar book is a practical lesson –how to incorporate both children’s and adults’ literature into our arguments, and how to make arguments that position us in more than one sub-discipline. Gubar clearly articulates the unique role children’s literature play in the debate she outlines, arguing that while authors such as Dickens have construed precocity as dangerous, we have to turn to children’s literature to find the “artful dodgers” she is interested in discussing. Gubar thereby posits that we need to take a closer look at classics of children’s literature as well as texts that have been ignored (as Suzanne notes) in order to see that the  “cult of the child” based on an uncomplicated fetishization of innocence and otherness was not the only way of thinking about children. Gubar also posits that the literature she examines is really about “how much agency one can have as an acculturated subject,” thereby reframing children’s literature as part of a cross-audience debate about human agency (35). I think Gubar’s book is therefore, a great model of a project that straddles the kind of intradisciplinary lines we talked about last class because her project not only includes both kinds of literature; it needs both kinds of literature in order to work. In fact, its entire premise is that the boundaries which we understood to be in place between children and adults, and therefore, also the boundaries between the two literatures, were not solid at this time. Gubar’s investigation of the formation of a boundary such as that between children’s and adult literatures provides one model for how all of us who attempt to balance more than one field can not only succeed within the institutional structures of English departments, but how we can draw attention to the constructedness of the structures within which we work.

In keeping with our seminar’s theme of movements in criticism as swings of a pendulum, we see Marah Gubar framing her project in Artful Dodgers as a counter to the popular critical idea that the victorian period – and victorian children’s literature in particular – created a complete separation between adults and children. The child, in this critical conception, was the primitive, Otherized “emblem of innocence,” and childhood was portrayed as a refuge from the “painful complexities of modern life” (Gubar 4). Gubar does not deny that such a cult of the child, or even of child innocence, existed; rather, she argues that victorian children’s fiction is characterized not by a total allegiance to childhood purity, but by competing – and sometimes clashing – visions of childhood, including the child as innocent, the child as a small adult, the child as a collaborator, the child as a highly literate interlocutor, and the child as an uneasy partner. In fact, for Gubar, children’s literature is the space that offers the “most serious and sustained resistance to the cult of childhood” (9). When authors like Dickens, who write children as victims in most of their adult novels, turn to children’s literature, suddenly their child protagonists turn into clever heroes, challenging the adult world (52).

According to Gubar, many victorian children’s literature authors did not portray children as untouched by adult influence:

“they generally conceive of child characters and child readers as socially saturated beings, profoundly shaped by the culture, manners, and morals of their time, precisely in order to explore the vexed issue of the child’s agency: given their status as dependent, acculturated beings, how much power and autonomy can young people actually have? In addressing this question, Golden Age authors often take a strikingly nuanced position, acknowledging the pervasive and potentially coercive power of adult influence while nevertheless entertaining the possibility that children can be enabled and inspired by their inevitable inheritance” (5).

Indeed, many of the authors Gubar reads, including Frances Burnett, E. Nesbitt, Lewis Caroll and Robert Louis Stevenson, invite their readers to be suspicious of the act of storytelling, to participate in, appropriate, steal and rework stories into creative works of their own, and to distrust adults telling stories to children. These authors’ view of culture, Gubar argues, is not that culture is inherently corrupting towards childhood innocence – she does not see them as advocating a Rousseau-style, book-free education – but that children may be capable of “reshaping” those same stories and cultural values into something of value to them – that they are not doomed to be passive receivers of the text. Nor was this view simply unbridled optimism: Lewis Caroll, in Alice in Wonderland, proved aware that asking children to participate in the endeavor of story-creation could itself be as oppressive and punitive as didactic storytelling.

One of the great strengths of Gubar’s argument is the breadth of her primary materials – both literary and historical. She uses both canonical and noncanonical children’s literature to advance her case about the complexity of victorian children’s literature. The noncanonical texts she reads, many of which were written by women like Hesba Stratton, Juliana Ewing and Dinah Craik, serve to counter popular critical narratives about the development of children’s literature in the victorian period. Gubar does not just rely on these lesser-known authors: she also reads canonical texts alongside their works, rereading Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland and The Little Princess (among others) in order to find their disruptive, subversive potential. By reading these many texts alongside one another, Gubar persuaded me that she had found an actual trend in victorian fiction – not just that she had found a few striking instances in canonical texts. Gubar’s second major strength in pushing back against the idea that victorian children’s fiction was obsessed with childhood innocence is her use of historical material – specifically of the original reception of the children’s literature she reads. As Gubar points out, many works by authors critics now identify as part of the “cult of the child” were received by critics as being too difficult for children to read, too erotic, too literate, and too allusive: these were not texts, in other words, that the authors’ contemporaries necessarily saw as upholding a division between children and adults, or as reifying childhood innocence (22). Gubar’s use of original reception is one possible answer to our question last class about how critics can responsible portray and understand the way literature was understood in the past (although original reception is probably easier to come by for the victorian period than for the medieval period!)

Since Gubar argues that victorian children’s authors encourage their readers to appropriate parts of their work, I’m going to do the same to Gubar and latch onto one specific moment in her argument. I was struck by Gubar’s fleeting reference to Felicia Hemans’ poem “Casabianca,” given our last few readings’ discussions of pedagological texts (137). In “Casabianca,” a young boy is trapped on a burning ship and will not leave until he receives his father’s permission; unknown to him, his father is already dead and the boy perishes. “Casabianca” is a highly appropriate intertext for Gubar’s work, because it’s traditionally been read by critics as a conservative, patriotic poem that celebrates a child’s innocent devotion. In recent years, however, scholars have started to read the piece as a critique of parental and national authority (most of my understanding of “Casabianca” comes from Catherine Robson’s article “Standing on the Burning Deck,” which I will upload to the dropbox in case anyone is interested). So in theory, “Casabianca” seems like a poetic version of the texts Gubar discusses – one that may teach children to question adult and parental authority. However, what complicates this reception of “Casabianca” is the fact that it was used as a recitation text – a text young victorian schoolchildren were meant to memorize and recite. They were meant to “parrot” the text. I bring the history of “Casabianca” up because I wonder how the existence of recitation texts and the victorian school system in general impacts Gubar’s argument. Recitation texts like “Casabianca”, to me, seem like a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they create the highly-literate child (including the E. Nesbit character who referenced Hemans) who can then shape and appropriate cultural texts to their own ends, but on the other hand, they also suggest that the texts Gubar examines can be appropriated by the education system and turned into works that children are just meant to parrot (and indeed, we know that some of them, like Peter Pan and Treasure Island, were turned into educational texts). Moreover, is the victorian school system necessary to creating the “highly literate child” who can enjoy some of these more allusive works? What kinds of children are then excluded from participation in these subversive texts? Since Gubar doesn’t touch on victorian education often, I’m wondering if a consideration of education would extend and build on her argument?

Some of you expressed interest in Japan’s order to close Humanities, Law, and Social Science departments in their universities. This is an important moment for higher education. It is also one that is going on under the radar for the most part.

TIME: Alarm Over Huge Cuts to Humanities and Social Sciences at Japanese Universities

The World University Rankings: Social sciences and humanities faculties ‘to close’ in Japan after ministerial intervention

Bloomburg View: Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities

As someone deeply invested in exploring genre and its limits, I was excited to read Westman’s article. From what I could gather, her main argument is that as children’s literature scholars, we need to consider how our field can speak to and illuminate conversations happening about genre and periodization in literary studies more generally. Westman starts by emphasizing is that genre is a performative, not material or static, category that changes depending on audience and context. As such, children’s literary has a unique potential to extend outside of its traditional subfield to inform other areas of literary studies.

In terms of critical approach, I think Westman certainly falls under the broad category of “historicist” because she believes that context is crucial in understanding a text. More specifically, Westman draws on reception theory and book history—she’s interested, for instance, in the publishing and re-publishing of Goodnight Moon and how the work has been read by audiences over time. I also see Westman implicitly relying on poststructuralist thinkers (such as Foucault) in that her piece examines how the seemingly stable structures we use to categorize things like literature—in this case, periodization and genre—are not only arbitrary but historically mediated.

In reading the article, I was initially captivated by Westman’s call to arms of sorts, that as students in this field we have the potential to rethink large-scale structural problems in literary studies more generally. At the same time, I felt that Westman failed to discuss the institutional barriers within academia that might make this type of cross-disciplinary work challenging. If children’s literary studies has been somewhat segregated from English scholarship, how can we collaborate with literature critics to create these sorts of more inclusive, comprehensive analyses? And how can scholars publish non-traditional, genre-bending articles if literary journals tend to be periodized as well? Periodization seems like a deeply entrenched institutional issue, as well as an epistemological one. That’s not to say that moving beyond issues of genre isn’t possible, only that I think it will be more challenging than Westman lets on.

However, Westman’s article was originally read aloud as a “manifesto” at a couple of literary conferences (Notes, pg 468), so I can understand that the context might not have allowed her to delve into specific solutions to the problems she addresses. In any case, this article left me with a lot to think about as I begin writing my paper for this course—especially that I should look into scholarly conversations outside of children’s literary studies even while studying children’s literature.

– Anna Zeemont

Sometime in the month before the Comps, something inside me starting having a very visceral response to the word “period” (read: it makes me twinge on the inside now). So when Westman titled her article “Beyond Periodization,” and then – within a paragraph – referred to children’s lit as “the disempowered stepchild of literary history” (so deliciously campy, and thus so deliciously children’s lit… meta), I was in love (464).

Interested not only in tickling my anti-period sensibilities and affinity for all things campy, Westman wants readers to come to understand “the viability of children’s literature for rethinking our narratives of literary history” (464). Just from the start, I have great respect for this mission: not only is Westman here establishing her interest in elevating children’s literature to the (masculinized) “seriousness” that it has been denied through its erasure in periodization (*internal twinge activates*), but she is also making it her mission to use children’s lit not to join the ranks of literary canon per se (an arguably conservative move), but as a way to fundamentally restructure how all of us think about what we study.

Bold moves, Karin. Bold moves.

Building into the perpetual scholarly conversations on whether or not children’s literature even exists (and if so, how and how do we know when something’s children’s lit, anyway?), Westman argues that thinking through the genres (and “intergeneric potential”) of children’s literature is extremely productive in helping us delineate histories of the field, target audiences of the field, and when individual works are worthy of receiving accolades in the field (465). In doing so, Westman cross-sections her work with the deconstruction of periodization as the dominant mode of classifying literary history.

Using the example of Hurd’s Goodnight Moon, she argues that this text (and by extension, other works of children’s literature) “repeatedly and frequently exceeds its initial generic performance of ‘picture book’” (467). Tracing the renewed iterations of this book (Goodnight iPad comes to her mind) since its original publication in 1947, she asserts that this work fundamentally “challenges periodization as a defining method of literary history” (467).

Reading this, I couldn’t help but persistently wonder how this framework of analysis could have fundamentally changed/contributed to Adams’s article on medieval children’s lit. If she’d traced the moralistic educational works, for example (or the Bible, for that matter), out of the medieval period and into their manifestations throughout more recent history, could her argument have been even more readily apparent to the ‘non-experts’ she kept referencing?

I also can’t help but wonder whether, had Westman more explicitly elaborated on the importance of performance theories in “instances of generic performance across established periods” (which she referenced several times), her own analysis could have been more complex (467, emphasis added). Do the texts we classify as children’s literature perform differently as their expected audiences change? As their medium of re-production changes (picture books, chapter books, YA, interactive ipad books, ‘you choose’ books, books that children get to read to themselves rather than having a live-and-in-person adult read to them, etc.), how does the performative power of these works change? What does it mean, anyway, for a work of literature to engage in performative action? Had Westman explicated some of these thoughts, all of which are held within her repeated references to texts’ performativities, perhaps the analysis would have been able to reach further into the intergeneric potentials of children’s lit.

Apologies for the late post, everyone. I’m very fond of Peter Pan, especially the 1911 novel version of Peter Pan and Wendy. An Omnibus review, quoted by Rose, of the 1982 RSC theatrical production states that “‘Peter Pan goes straight to your centre . . . to something about which you are defenceless’” (114). I feel this way about Peter Pan and Wendy. The novel goes straight to some soft underbelly that has to do with life, death, transcendence, liminality, and the secrets of the universe beyond the vault of the sky. Naturally, I wanted to get to the bottom of all that in this blog post.

First, down to business. In the interest of brevity, a few things that stand out to me from the readings are (i) Gubar’s “kinship model” of childhood, with which I agree; (ii) Perry Nodelman’s somewhat conservative review of The Case of Peter Pan, with which I partially agree (minus his Freudian and sexual readings); and (iii) Chapter 5 of The Case of Peter Pan, “Peter Pan, Language and the State,” which diverges from the book’s thrust but nonetheless offers a fascinating history of language in British schools that I had never encountered before.

Enough of business; back to soft underbellies. Rose and children aside, I love stories about long-lost, primitive truths that transcend the social and political present and cause the veil of mundane reality to shimmer. I read such stories reparatively, and I am not terribly interested in whether children or adults were Barrie’s primary audience, because Peter Pan and Wendy’s audience is me. In my forthcoming work on whimsy, I argue that works of whimsy communicate with a self-selecting audience without defining or insisting on the categorical nature of that audience. You either like it or you don’t; you either relate to an unapologetically idiosyncratic expression and the inexpressible, ineffable glob of ideas it signifies, or you stand there with your head cocked grasping for a Freudian explanation. I first read Peter Pan and Wendy as an adult, but every time I read it, I feel personally addressed by the narrator’s confidential tone and gleeful indifference to dissent. I was puzzled by Rose’s discussion of Barrie’s reluctance to convert the play into a novel because I think the narrative voice is so powerful; I can’t figure out where she was going with that, although it unsettles me.

Here are a few raw allegorical interpretations of Peter Pan (yes, I am going somewhere with this): Peter represents (i) childhood mortality (he’s like an airborne disease that blows into the nursery and takes/kills all the children one night); (ii) mortality in general, (iii) anything addictive but unhealthy and detrimental to progressing along a normalized bourgeois path (thumb-sucking, heroin, infatuation, etc.); (iv) irresistible, charismatic, unattainable objects of infatuation who perhaps tend towards the dangerous end of the sociopathic spectrum; and (v) refusal of a particularly beige script of conformance, monotony, sacrifice, aging, and death that constitutes “growing up” in the modern industrialized west. These are wildly different interpretations, and yet they all work. Peter is both good and bad; the Neverland is both good and bad. It’s wonderful to fly, but terrible to be cold, hungry, sleepy, or forgotten while flying. Peter is enchanting, but he’s also out of his mind and won’t fulfill your needs. Make believe is fun, but too much can get tedious or eclipse memories of relationships to which we assign meaning when not under make-believe’s influence, like getting lost among the lotus-eaters.

I offer this list because these matters pertain to young, medium, and old people alike, and because there is so much going on that a reading focused on sexuality or the adult-child relationship seems somewhat arbitrary. Balancing responsibility and desire, choosing objects to which we assign meaning, a longing to aestheticize our own mortality and make it somehow okay, feeling drawn to romantic things and people that aren’t sustainable in the long run without great sacrifice—these are the unresolved and unresolvable challenges of life in all stages. In the end, we just choose; the Darlings and the Lost Boys choose London and Peter chooses the Neverland. Even falling out of the pram as an infant is represented as a conscious and perfectly valid choice, not to be judged. All simply live (or die) with the consequences and the universe is essentially indifferent.

So how does this kind of absurd existentialism reach that soft underbelly and conjure up those lost secrets beyond the vault of the sky? Peter Pan validates our longing for transcendence amidst these unresolvable matters, and it renders the phenomenon of unresolvability its own source of wonder and transcendence instead of comedy and horror (a la Beckett). Peter’s absurd world offers a colorful, imaginative, aesthetic option, and even if we choose London in the end, traces and memories of the experience linger with us. The Neverland is also a resolution to—a reparation for?—the sense of loss of something precious and the longing to find it again, or at least to find some evidence that this lost pearl is “real” beyond the individual imagination, and therefore, though lost and forgotten, it will one day find us again. This kind of longing isn’t unique to adulthood and it need not idealize the child. I embrace Gubar’s “kinship model” of childhood in part because I remember vividly my own fascination with stories about long-lost, primitive truths when I was a child. What could be more compelling at any age than the idea that we glimpsed these as we came into being—and will therefore come to know them again someday?

I think the Oedipal complex and many of Freud’s ideas are twaddle, but I’m mildly obsessed with Freud’s description of the “oceanic feeling” in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” so I have to bring it up. Though Freud says that he, himself, has never experienced this “oceanic feeling,” he describes it as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,” and the sense that “we cannot fall out of this world.” He speculates that this oceanic feeling “may” [Freud’s emphasis] be a surviving trace of the infant that does not yet distinguish his ego from the external world. I am less interested in the origins of this oceanic feeling (early childhood for Freud and cultural myth for Jung, as Rose points out), as I am in Peter Pan’s ability to conjure it up. The novel’s acknowledgment of feelings of loss and longing for recovery/resurrection does something to conjure up that indissoluble bond beyond the self, unto itself; we can fall out of a pram or out of the sky, but we cannot fall out of the world. The infant who died of smallpox continues to be in the world as though Neverland is an afterlife without gods. Or, maybe Freud really was right, and the lost pearl is just the newborn infant’s inability to differentiate the ego from the outside world, and the Neverland is just that state of being.

Or… maybe I’ve just wandered off into Neverland with this post.