» Sunday, 18 April A.D. 2010
commentary on peter pan
I have meant to blog about Sympathy for Hook: Toward a Christening of Peter Pan ever since I read it several months ago. Even re-reading it today, it stirred up the same mix of emotion (“cool!”, melancholy, thoughtfulness) that it did originally. To whet your appetite:
Peter Pan is about the death of children, long a daunting challenge to both simple faith and learned soteriology. It is, however, equally about deadly parental neglect--about not wanting or loving children. It is all too timely for our era of selfishly infertile and casually feticidal adults. Perhaps we miss Peter Pan's central themes in part because child death post partum has become far rarer than it was a century ago. We also may miss them, at least in part, because we dismiss as mere caricature the story's main adult character, Captain Hook: We fail to recall and give due weight to the tradition, which goes back to the play's first staging, under Barrie's direction, that Hook be played by the same actor who plays Mr. Darling, a flawed father. Mr. Darling and Hook are, in fact, the same character, operating respectively in this world and in Barrie's limbus puerorum, Neverland. Although, as G.B. Shaw noted, Peter Pan “is ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people,” appreciation of its burden for grown-ups requires attention to its main adult character. Appreciation of Peter Pan requires sympathy for Hook.
Recommended reading, particularly for parents and doubly so for fathers.
Tricia and I started reading Peter Pan this past summer and were somewhat taken aback at the tone and violence in the book (thanks, Disney!). But this essay makes me think that completing the book will definitely be worthwhile. Now to find the road trip to read to each other...
posted by Nate @ 9:23PM