Hauntings: Anxiety, Technology, and Gender in Peter Pan

Abstract

J.M . Barrie's Peter Pan (1904) circulates in the popular imagination as a happy tale for children that, through the adventures of Peter and the other children in Never Land, celebrates playfulness. As Mark Twain commented, "It is my belief that Peter Pan is a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age; and the next best play is a long way behind". Tellingly, Twain's comment that Peter Pan is uplifting seems to depend on ignoring the fact that each of the "lost" boys is a baby who has fallen out of his pram "when the nurse is looking the other way" and who, if not claimed within seven days, is "sent far away to the Never Land". The boys of Never Land are dead, and so Peter Pan, arriving at the window of the Darling family, is a ghost. As the stage direction before Peter's arrival indicates, "the nursery darkens […]. Something uncanny is going to happen, we expect, for a quiver has passed through the room, just sufficient to touch the night-lights". As Freud suggests in his 1919 essay, the "uncanny" arouses an experience of "dread and horror," partially because the familiar (heimtich) evokes the unfamiliar (unheimlich), rendering the comfortable and "homey" uncomfortable and alien. The familiar, now both familiar and unfamiliar, generates anxiety.