42-54. the Healing Nature of Peter Pan Banas P42-54
The Healing Nature of Peter Pan Alyssa Banas Introduction: J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan made its stage debut on December 27th, 1904. Since that day it has kept its audience captive for generations, inspiring literary critics such as Nell Boulton, Peter Hollindale, Sarah Dunnigan, Ann Wilson, Maria Tatar, and Peter Dudgeon to utilize different lenses to interpret the text. After all, as Matt Freeman, a writer for Reading Today, once stated, “Barrie was one of those rare writers who managed to create a story with close to universal relevance and a prodigious ability to endure.” For this reason alone his tale continuously garners attention and scholarly intrigue. Yet, no matter how many times it has been studied only two possible recurring meanings have been put forth, both of which Nell Boulton mentions in her essay “Peter Pan and the Flight From Reality: A Tale of Narcissism, Nostalgia, and Narrative Trespass.” Boulton claims that the tale has a “curiously divided reputation” (307). She notes that some critics, like Freeman, have found the story to be “one of the immortals of literature” and “a symbol, even an archetype, of eternal childhood and innocence” (Boulton 307). While others, she finds, read the tale as “morally suspect, even verging on the abusive” (Boulton 307). In her essay, she discusses the darker interpretation by using Freudian theory to “explore the more perverse elements of Barrie’s vision” and claims that Peter represents Barrie’s suppressed sexuality (Boulton 308). However, I disagree with Boulton’s interpretation. In combining the biographical works of Hollindale and Tatar, and psychologists’ research on the therapeutic nature of fairy tales, I interpret Barrie’s tale as one of innocence with the purpose of healing.
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