To die would be an awfully...

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“TO DIE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG

ADVENTURE”: THE ENIGMATIC TIMELESSNESS OF
PETER PAN’S ADAPTATIONS

Deborah Cartmell
Imelda Whelehan
Montfort University

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone can be seen, on one

level, as a critique of the attractiveness of Peter Pan’s eternal
youthfulness. Indeed, J.K. Rowling, through Professor Dumbledore,
rewrites Peter Pan’s famous comment, “to die would be an awfully
big adventure” to “to a well-organised mind, death is but the next
great adventure” (Rowling, 1997: 215). In order for the story to
reach to a happy conclusion, the elixir of youth must be destroyed
and the passage of time acknowledged. Contrary to the countless
adaptations of Peter Pan, Barrie’s Edwardian narrative has much
in common with this perspective: the myth of timelessness is,
indeed, a dangerous one.
Originally written as a play in 1904, the success of Peter Pan
was and is phenomenal. It is a story that is completely open to
adaptation and its origins in drama particularly lend it to the medium
of film. It brings together three popular genres in children’s fiction:
the adventure story for boys, the domestic story and the fairy tale.
Restricting ourselves to four adaptations of the text - the 1911
novelization, the 1953 Disney adaptation, Steven Spielberg’s Hook
(1991) and Disney’s sequel, Return to Never Land (2002) - we will
consider four very different constructions of time and timelessness
and show how the trope of childhood innocence is appropriated for
94 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan

quite different purposes in each version.

As has been noted, Peter Pan, in many respects, could be not
only an expression of nostalgia for childhood, but also for a brother
who died at a young age in a skating accident. Certainly for many,
the idea of a forever young sibling would be common, given the
numerous child fatalities in the Edwardian period, those who die
young and therefore will be children forever. This image of “lost”
children echoes both the potentially brutal short lives of the young
and offers an antidote to death itself while the lost boys remain on
the island. In the novel they are described as “the children who fall
out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way”
by Peter; the explanation for why they are all boys is that “girls,
you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.” (Barrie,
1994: 44). Peter Pan first appeared in Barrie’s novel, The Little
White Bird (1902), where he was associated with death and was
given the task of burying the dead children who break the rules and
stay in Kensington Gardens overnight. Like Peter, dead children
never grow older. The earlier novel is possibly recalled in the
alarming description of the first sighting of Peter Pan by Mrs
Darling; the window has blown open and something rushes in,
disturbing the nursery:

He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that
ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was
that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up,
he gnashed the little pearls at her. (Barrie, 1994: 20)

At the time of writing, one quarter of children died before they

reached the age of five. Mrs. Darling’s fears are clearly of a
disease, coming through the window and taking her children to their
deaths. Indeed, Neverland is a place where death is a great
adventure: as for the possibly endlessly multiplying lost boys, Peter
‘thins them out’ (ibid: 72) in cold blood if they do not meet their
death by adventure.
To die would be an awfully... 95

Originally it was Peter not Hook who was the villain of the
piece – Hook was added in a later draft as the play was in preparation
and becomes the evil father figure. Barrie’s well-known closeness
to his mother and Peter’s great desire for a mother is another feature
of the story – ‘the Peter Pan syndrome’, after all, is about fear of
sexuality. Peter wants nothing to do with adult sexuality as evidenced
in his first meeting with Wendy.

She also said she would give him a kiss if he liked, but Peter
did not know what she meant, and he held out his hand
expectantly.
“Surely you know what a kiss is?” she asked, aghast
‘I shall know when you give it to me,’ he replied stiffly;
and not to hurt his feelings she gave him a thimble.
(Barrie, 1994: 41)

“Peter”, she asked, trying to speak firmly, “what are your

exact feelings for me?’
“Those of a devoted son, Wendy.”
“I thought so,” she said, and went and sat by herself at the
extreme end of the room.
“You are so queer,” he said, frankly puzzled, ‘and Tiger Lily
is just the same. “here is something she wants to be to me, but
she says it is not my mother.”
“No, indeed, it is not,” Wendy replied with frightful emphasis.
Now we know why she was prejudiced against the redskins.
(ibid: 146-7)

Barrie seems to have had a preference for boys over girls and
the Neverland, on at least one level, is surely a male fantasy. It has
been given a Freudian interpretation, an escape from the abusive
father where the children witness, first hand, Hook’s obsessive
search for Peter – it is no accident that Hook and Mr Darling are
almost always played by the same person when the play is staged
(Rose: 1994).
96 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan

Peter is obsessed with the figure of the mother – he doesn’t want

a girlfriend, he wants, as the lost boys do, a mother; in part someone
to protect him from his evil abusive father, as, of course embodied
in the sadistic, gratuitously evil Captain Hook. This Freudian reading
can be expanded if we look at the narrator’s position in the novel.
Barrie uses an adult narrator who seems to be strangely complicit
with the children rather than the adults. Once the voyeurism is
detected, the experience of reading becomes an uncomfortable one.
As Jacqueline Rose notes, “the narrator veers in and out of the
story as servant, author and child” (Rose, 1994: 73). The film
adaptations perhaps recall some of the feel of the stage play by dint
of the disposal of this intrusive narrator so crucial to the shaping of
narrative fiction, but displaced by the mise en scène of cinema. His
point of view shifts at the end of the story where he becomes like a
mischievous reader of his own book, favouring the figure of Mrs
Darling over the children:

Some like Peter best and some like Wendy best, but I like her
best. Suppose, to make her happy, we whisper to her in her
sleep that the brats are coming back. (Rose, 1994: 219)

The novel was written in what is often referred to as the golden

age of children’s literature, beginning with Alice in Wonderland in
1865 and ending with The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. In this
period, there was a great deal of focus on children, especially the
middle and upper classes who idealised them – this is reflected in
the huge increase in toys, books and children’s fashions. Barrie
himself was fascinated by children and met a family of boys prior
to the writing, the boys he eventually adopted after their parents’
premature deaths.
Barrie himself oversaw adaptations of his work and sanctioned
the removal of Peter’s infamous comment “To die will be an awfully
big adventure” during the First World War when most of the
audience consisted of soldiers on Christmas leave. Indeed, one of
To die would be an awfully... 97

the boys who Barrie adopted and who the story was written about,
died in the first world war. Undoubtedly in Barrie’s own lifetime,
certain characters and events portrayed in the story became
increasingly problematic, in particular the “redskins”, the pirates
and the portrayal of violence.
The story started really as a holiday narrative constructed by
Barrie to entertain his five adopted boys, the Llewellyn Davies
children – boys he befriended in London and whose parents died
prematurely. Its second appearance was in the novel, The Little
White Bird, then the play, and the novel (novelization) based on it,
Peter and Wendy, which became widely circulated under the title
Peter Pan, the text we have, originally published in 1911.
Originally the play called for a boy to play the part of Peter, but
licensing laws in 1904 forbid this and therefore a woman, Nina
Boucicault, was chosen as the first Peter. This has been the tradition,
up until about twenty years ago. In films this has been different,
although the first version – the silent film of 1924 – cast a female in
the part. In 1953, Walt Disney produced an animated Peter Pan.
Changes were many, especially Tinker Bell who instead of a magical
light, became a real figure, often thought to be modelled on Marilyn
Monroe, but actually modelled on the pin-up girls of World War II,
such as Betty Grable. The animated version was hugely influential
in subsequent stage adaptations; and, although the novel exists, it is
not regarded as a sacred text in the way that Shakespeare, for
example, is.

Peter Pan, 1953

Disney was very keen to get the rights to Peter Pan and the
animated version proved the most popular yet. Disney’s famous
embracing of innocence in his films makes it immediately clear
why he would be drawn to Peter Pan which comes complete with
its own “magic kingdom”: “Innocence in Disney’s world becomes
98 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan

the ideological vehicle through which history is both rewritten and

purged of its seamy side” (Girous in Bell et al. 1995: 46). The first
impression that we have of this post Second World War production
is that the violence is tamed down, the threat of death is removed,
and the focus is on domesticity and the differences between boys
and girls, as well Europeans and “natives”. Wendy is clearly linked
with her mother – she visually replaces her on screen, and she has
a maturity that is contrasted to the other children (with the exception
of Peter) who are dressed in animal costumes, reflecting a need to
be tamed by a mother. The sexualisation of Tinker Bell, together
with a grown-up looking Wendy (a mini Mrs Darling) function to
endorse the desirability of growing up, to conforming to society’s
rules – particularly for girls. Wendy exists on the periphery of
Neverland adventures – she is disliked by Tinker Bell, the bitchy
mermaids and Tiger Lily, all who regard her as sexual threats in
Peter’s regard for her. The implication is that friendship is a purely
male domain. The women are stereotyped as either seductresses
or mothers and Wendy’s more wholesome charms win out over the
scantily clad Tinker Bell and the mermaids.
In addition to the cult of domesticity, this film presents the Indians
as unequivocal stereotypes. They are identified by the colour of
their skin – in fact this is their sole identity. The Native American
genocide is described in the book as one great ‘adventure’ and this
is reflected in the film. Interestingly, the Indians are excised in
Spielberg’s Hook, remembered possibly in the costumes of the Lost
Boys, especially the leader, Rufio, whose skin and costume recall
that of the original inhabitants of North America. In the 2002 Return
to Never Land all that remains is a totem pole. Disney goes further
than the novel in 1953 in his portrayal of the Indians, asking the
question “what makes them red?”
Wendy, the quintessential English little lady, is appalled at the
rituals of the Indians, which imply something more primitive than
her own society. They are linked to the children and Wendy’s
disapproval of them is similar to her disapproval of the children.
To die would be an awfully... 99

Tiger Lily’s kiss literally turns Peter Pan red – the blushing Peter
provides the answer to the question why is the Indian red. The red
men and women are portrayed as if in a permanent state of sexual
excitement (constantly blushing) and are thus more akin to animals
than are the white Europeans (see Byrne & McQuillan: 1999). The
film perpetuates a myth that the Indians are inferior as they exist on
a lower physical plain – all but Tiger Lily are portrayed as corpulent
and grotesque.
At the end of Barrie’s novel, the travellers return to heartbroken
parents, as if coming back from the dead. They are able to literally
turn the clocks back. Mr Darling also literally comes out of the
doghouse and is restored to his family, and the Lost Boys are
admitted into the Darling household. The boys all grow up and
become ordinary adults. What is striking about the ending is how
quickly time passes – compared to the timelessness of the
Neverland, where no-one grows old. Here we have time passing at
an alarmingly quick pace:

As you look at Wendy you may see her hair becoming white,
and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane
is now a common grown-up with a daughter called Margaret;
and every spring-cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter
comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where
she tells him stories about himself; to which he listens eagerly.
When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be
Peter’s mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children
are gay and innocent and heartless. (Barrie, 1994: 242)

The final paragraph comes as a shock – the pace is so quick –

the fear of growing up, implied throughout the narrative – is replaced
with the harsh reality of time passing. The male-centred story has
changed too – the focus is on Wendy, not Peter – possibly suggesting
that while men stay the same, women are changing, developing at
an alarming rate and Peter has been left behind. The ending of the
100 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan

novel presents the future through the matriarchal line and this focus
on the changing female might be accounted for by the changing
position of women in society at the time in which Barrie was writing.
Yet ultimately women are merely designated “mothers” and
“daughters” who represent the cycle of life and reproduction and
are perhaps seen in relation to it. Barrie is possibly suggesting that
men are the ones who are fearful of change: so while the men
remain stubbornly the same, women are progressing, changing at
an alarming rate. It is possible, that central to the novel, is the
belief that a girl is “more use than twenty boys” (Barrie, 1994: 40).
Women’s functional roles are portrayed as overlaying their very
individuality, whereas Peter and Hook, not to mention all the lost
boys, have their own histories, their own personal explanations for
how they came to be (for example we’re told about Peter’s mother
and Hook’s public school education). Lynda Haas asserts that “the
mother and the mother-daughter relationship are, as yet
unsymbolized in our cultural imaginary. There is no maternal
genealogy, no importance attached to a mother’s heritage.” (in Bell
et al. 1995: 196). Whilst Barrie figures precisely that – a maternal
genealogy – at the end of the novelisation of Peter Pan, the mother
remains indeterminate, a girl’s destiny.
What surprises us about the Disney ending is the removal of the
parents’ pain – they are not left for days without their children and
the fear of loss through death is entirely excised. Mr Darling isn’t
in the doghouse, but is reconciled to the dog, and the Lost Boys do
not return with the children to the Darling household. The period,
renowned for its creation of the nuclear family, remains intact:
two parents, three children and a dog. Indeed it’s almost as if the
whole thing was a dream; and Wendy and her father are totally
reconciled – she’s prepared to grow up and he is prepared to accept
her as she is. Typically, the father has the final word in this - “I think
I saw that ship a long time ago” – and with this clue that the father
recalls his own boyhood we are left with the feeling that patriarchy
has been restored and that the women are now in good hands.
To die would be an awfully... 101

Wendy is not replaced with Jane – her daughter – in this

adaptation. This Peter is a more romantic one than in Barrie’s text
and therefore incapable of exchanging one Wendy for another one
or forgetting Tinker Bell. He still has his milk teeth in the novel that
would place him around six years old – in Disney, he appears to be
between eleven and fourteen, on the verge of sexual maturity. As
the Barrie version flirts with a matriarchal conclusion, the Disney
version provides us with a decidedly patriarchal ending; everyone
is reconciled to their position in society, just like Nana, who at the
beginning of this film, hands Mr Darling the rope, willingly allowing
herself to be restrained. Indeed, the dog is the moral centre of the
film in its preaching of conformity over rebellion and its celebration
of a patriarchy to which everyone willingly submits. Whereas in
the novel, we have argued, patriarchy is indeed at crisis point with
Mr Darling being conveyed to and from work in his kennel, having
made a misjudgement which placed his family in jeopardy.

Hook, 1991

While the Disney film preserves the period in which the book
was written, Hook translates it to the late twentieth century – and
this is, indeed a translation, rather than interpretation or preservation
of the text. “Updating” or “modernizing” the text entails a number
of necessary changes – it would be no longer appropriate to refer to
“redskins”; the children can’t be abandoned to the care of a dog in
a live-action film. In fact, awareness of paedophilia today ensures
that children would not allow themselves to be taken away by an
intruder in the middle of the night. This is a period which saw
reported a huge number of child abductions – and this would be an
ultimate taboo in a film directed at children. You can’t have nineties
kids running away with an intruder who, in reality, is a very old
man. As a consequence, these children have to be kidnapped – they
don’t go on their own volition. They are, however, like the children
102 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan

in the original story, insofar as they are displeased with their father
– although he is not abusive, he is negligent. He has forgotten what
it is like to be a child - in fact, he has forgotten that he is Peter Pan.
We are told that Peter Pan saw Wendy’s granddaughter and fell
in love with her. Wendy arranged for him to be adopted by
American parents so we have, in the Disney tradition, an American
Peter Pan. And in the tradition of Disney, the good guys are the
Americans and the bad guys – the pirates – are British. Purposefully,
the American actor, Dustin Hoffman, who plays Hook, adopts an
English accent for the role. Typically we see London through the
eyes of an American, signifiers of London – such as Big Ben, taxis,
and the furniture and period of Wendy’s house, give us a clichéd
tourist account of London, just as Big Ben and Tower Bridge are
used as key signifiers of London in the 1953 and 2002 animations.
In fact the house itself seems to be frozen in the past – the decoration
reflects a nostalgia for the past – but the past as it is recreated in
the present. Rather than the first decade of the twentieth century,
the house reflects the last decade of the 20th century in the taste in
Edwardian antiques, especially to do with children’s toys, such as
rocking horses, dolls’ houses and teddy bears. The appearance of
an Edwardian-looking Wendy, played by Maggie Smith, and a late
twentieth century Peter, played by Robin Williams, reinforces the
initial gap between then and now.
Although, seemingly a departure from the original, the film pays
homage to the source material on a number of occasions. We are told,
by Wendy, that the story was recorded by J.M. Barrie who used to
live next door to them. Indeed Wendy is honoured by Great Ormond
Street Hospital – the hospital Barrie left the rights to Peter Pan to – and
to this day, the hospital benefits from Barrie’s profits, thanks to an
extension to the UK copyright, which expired in 1987, to in perpetuity
as well as copyright extensions in Europe and the US to 2007.
The film picks up on the theme of nostalgia – it’s not just a
nostalgia for childhood, but a nostalgia for the period in which the
novel was set. The technological present, symbolised by Peter’s
To die would be an awfully... 103

mobile phone, has overpowered the simpler more rewarding

pleasures of life, as reflected in a previous time. The children are
linked with an earlier age to suggest that life was purer and simpler
in the past: Maggie is seen performing in the play Peter Pan (literally
becoming her great-grandmother as the novel version foretells) and
Jack takes part in a baseball game. Rather than a romantic
association between Peter and Wendy, we have the “family
romance” where Peter Banning must rediscover his own origins in
order to understand his actions as a father. The Neverland is a
place, where the family isn’t forgotten, but remembered and
restored: Tinker Bell (played by Julia Roberts) attempts a seduction,
but gracefully gives way to the pulls of marital monogamy and
parental responsibility. Maggie takes the place of Wendy; whereas
in the Disney film she is a “young lady”, here she is clearly a little
girl who learns to believe that Peter Pan is her father.
While Barrie’s text challenges patriarchy and while Disney’s
film celebrates and affirms it, Steven Spielberg presents fatherhood
in a more ambiguous light. Peter has become the bad father, the
Mr Darling at the beginning; visually this is signalled at the end by
his visiting the doghouse. This version owes as much to other
“parenting” films of the time as it does to Barrie’s texts – best
represented by Baby Boom (1987) (where Diane Keaton plays a
Yuppie who “inherits” a small baby and she tries to combine its
care with big business, and ends up setting up her own home-based
work) and Parenthood (1989), a rather mawkish Steve Martin
comedy which follows the tribulations of three generations of one
family, but focusing on one father’s (Martin’s) troubled relationship
with his eldest son. Hook is also a parenthood text and Hook himself
tries to usurp the fatherly role by telling Jack some home “truths”
such as “Before you were born they were happier” and suggesting
that parents only tell stories to send their children to sleep. Maggie,
the daughter is never beguiled by Hook and continuously identifies
with her mother, becoming the mother when she sings. The struggle
between Pan and Hook, therefore, becomes the struggle over the
104 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan

son and heir. Peter only recalls the times he has let his son down
and it is only the father-son relationship that is portrayed as fraught
with difficulties, as it is in all versions of the Peter Pan story, where
fathers disappear or become emasculated.
Spielberg turns the story inside out by bringing Peter home, uniting
father and son and changing the meaning of the text from “to die
would be an awfully big adventure” to “to live would be an awfully
big adventure”. The fear of death and the horrors of child mortality
are removed entirely from the 1991 retelling of the story. As in the
1953 story, patriarchy has been restored and its crisis is resolved
by Peter’s reinvention of the role of father for the postmodern age.
Perhaps because this film emerges just after the Gulf War (which
ended in March 1991) we are lulled into feeling that the women and
children are in good male hands once again.

Return to Never Land, 2002

Disney’s recent sequel is, in common with most Disney sequels,

partly a homage to the Disney “original” as well as, more cannily
a vehicle by which to profit from the “classic” status of the 1953
version. Unlike Hook which signals a return to Barrie’s novel version
when the adult Peter finally remembers his past in order to reclaim
the “happy thought” that will enable him to fly (“I wanted to be a
Daddy”) this sequel takes as its lead the closing passage of the
novel and focuses on Wendy’s daughter, Jane during the period of
the Second World War.
Jane is significantly the opposite of her mother who still lives in
the fantasy world of Neverland, telling endless stories to her small
son Daniel. Jane is a pragmatist, always armed with her notebooks
and giving her younger brother a pair of socks for his birthday – a
sensible wartime investment. Given that she takes no part in listening
to her mother’s stories, Neverland has to come to her, in the form
of Hook’s flying ship, last seen silhouetted against the moon and
To die would be an awfully... 105

piloted by Pan in the 1953 version but now manned by Hook and his
crew, a sinister accompaniment to the planes and bombs all around
her family. She is a heroine in the model of latter-day Disney
productions such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast,
Pocohontas and Tarzan, who can fend for herself and is suitably
scornful of Peter’s rescue of her, denying kisses and refusing to be
“mother”. She still wears the prim nightdress that Wendy wore, but
the outfit is completed by a pair of sloppy socks. Ultimately she will
rescue Peter from Hook’s clutches; but in some ways conforming to
one abiding feminine stereotype of Eve, she will have been the source
of his destruction, having initially entered into a pact with Hook. Even
where this film overtly “updates” the kneejerk sexism of the 1953
version, particularly in Jane’s claim to be the first “lost girl” it re-
enforces the social power of gender difference. The fact that she is a
lost girl takes on an entirely different resonance: Jane has been made
a “grownup” by the war and by her father’s request that she look
after Daniel and her mother while he goes into combat; more than
that he has made her a “man”. Perhaps her cynicism about fairies
(which almost costs Tinker Bell her life) and Neverland pre-empts
the feelings of the contemporary child viewer who, so often bombarded
with the rawest images of current conflicts and atrocities, might feel
the necessity to share Jane’s cynicism. Jane’s conversion gives them
“permission” to believe in fairies and to recreate a barrier between
fantasy and reality, broken down by a decade and more of “reality”
television. On her return home she immediately embraces her brother
and begins to tell him stories herself, taking on the mantle of “mother”
when she is released from her more “masculine” role of head of the
household when her father is seen returning.
The placing of the events of this film at such an important modern
historical juncture invites a more historicised reading of the film so
that the timelessness of Neverland is more emphatically juxtaposed
by the passing of time and its consequences. Just as Peter Banning
is assailed by the trappings and responsibilities of modern life so
that he has lost the simple pleasures, so Jane’s journey to Neverland
106 Deborah Cartmell & Imelda Whelehan

is undertaken on the eve of her and Daniel’s planned evacuation into

the country. The war is presented from a more child-centred view
where the enemy is not portrayed, simply the effects of war, the
bombing and destruction, air raids and scenes of children being shipped
away from danger. Symbolically the American view of their role in
the Second World War becomes dominant when Wendy tries to escape
the island on a raft fashioned by herself and decked with a union jack,
only to sink ignominiously to the strains of “Rule Britannia”
The moral of the story, as in Hook, tells us that we, as adults,
are in danger of becoming “lost boys” insofar as we have forgotten
what it is like to be children. But, significantly, each text that we’ve
looked at has constructed children, race, gender, and nationalism
differently. We have suggested that the novel, unlike the film
adaptations is a critique of timelessness as evidenced in the absurdity
of Peter standing still while Wendy becomes an important part of
the historical process. Through the novel we can call into question
the position of women, the massacre of the indigenous population
of the island and the class system (the nurse is not only treated like
a dog, she is a dog).
The adaptations, in their attempt to capture the timelessness
of the Peter Pan narrative, a story which Barrie himself was
reluctant to claim authorship of, display their own historical periods
boldly. Disney, whose stories favour harmony and closure, shuns
the starkness of the ending of Barrie’s novelisation with its
melancholy message of death and forgetting. In each of the Disney
versions it is the mother who is first greeted on the children’s return
and yet the narrative is not complete until the father returns to the
heart of his family. In the 1953 version he is made to see sense and
recognize that the nursery is women’s (or females – women and
dogs) domain. In the 2002 version the return of the father does not
just suggest familial but also national cohesion in its suggestion that
the war is coming to an end. Neither father is shown to self-
consciously interrogate what fatherhood might mean when
motherhood is so obviously symbolically attached to biology and
To die would be an awfully... 107

nature, but Hook’s Peter does. Set in a period when anxiety increases
over the role of parenting, because so much social dysfunction is
attributed to upbringing, and in a period which makes much of sexual
equality (“parenting” as opposed to “motherhood” and
“fatherhood”), Williams’s portrayal of Peter is of a man in crisis.
Like the men, bewildered by feminism who sought their primitive
selves through movements such as Robert Bly’s “Iron John”, Peter
Banning returns to his boyhood self only to discover what made him
want to grow up. His desire for Wendy’s granddaughter Moira is
figured as the desire for children and the conception of the family is
cleansed of all the sexual complexities identified by Freud at the
time Barrie’s play emerged. In each adaptation subsequent to the
novel it is the family itself which represents timelessness: a concept
cleansed of history, ideology and social dysfunction.

References

Barrie, J.M. (1911; rpt. 1994) Peter Pan. London/New York: Penguin.

Bell, Elizabeth,k Lynda Haas and Laura Sells (1995) Mouse to Mermaid: The
Politics of Film, Gender and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Byrne, Eleanor and Martin McQuillan (1999) Deconstructing Disney. London:

Pluto Press.

Rose, Jacqueline. (1984, 2nd ed. 1994) The Case of Peter Pan, Or the Impossibility
of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan.

Rowling, J.K. (1997) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London:
Bloomsbury.