Peter Pan

Peter Pan is a fictional character created by J. M. Barrie, best known from the stage play and children's book of the same name. He is a little boy who refuses to grow up, and spends his time having magical adventures.

Overview

Barrie created Peter Pan in stories he told to the sons of his friend Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, with whom he had forged a special relationship while both were married.

The main character's name comes from two sources: Peter, at the time the youngest of the Llewelyn Davies boys, and Pan, the Greek god of the woodlands. Llewelyn Davies' death from cancer came within a few years of the death of her husband. Barrie was named as co-guardian of the boys and unofficially adopted them.

It has also been suggested that the inspiration for the character was Barrie's elder brother David, whose death in a skating accident at the age of thirteen deeply affected Barrie's mother. According to Andrew Birkin, author of J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, the death was "a catastrophe beyond belief, and one from which she never fully recovered . . . If Margaret Ogilvy drew a measure of comfort from the notion that David, in dying a boy, would remain a boy for ever, Barrie drew inspiration."

Peter Pan first appeared in print in a 1902 book called The Little White Bird, a fictionalised version of Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies children, and was then used in a very successful stage play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, which premiered in London on December 27, 1904.

In 1906, the portion of The Little White Bird which featured Peter Pan was published as the book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Barrie then adapted the play into the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy (but most often now published simply as Peter Pan).

The name "Wendy" became popular because of its use in Peter Pan. (For a detailed history of the name Wendy, which Barrie is often said to have "invented," read "The History of Wendy (http://www.wendy.com/wendyweb/history.html).")

There is a statue of Peter Pan, playing a set of pipes, by sculptor George Frampton in Kensington Gardens in London.

Storyline

In Peter Pan, both the play and the novel, the girl Wendy is invited to Neverland to be a mother for Peter's gang of Lost Boys. Many adventures ensue, often involving Peter's nemesis Captain Hook, before Wendy decides that her place is at home with her family.

Themes

The most apparent thematic thread in the story concerns growing up (or not), with the character of Peter wanting to remain a child forever in order to avoid the responsibilities of adulthood.

Some commentators also see the story as containing a sexual theme. Wendy's sexual awakening, and Peter's Freudian feelings for a mother figure, along with his flight, and conflicted feelings for Wendy and the fairy Tinkerbell, each representing different idealized women, loom large in the narrative.

"Peter Pan syndrome" has become a psychiatric term used to describe an adult who is commitment-phobic and/or refuses to act his age.