Flight Behavior: Mr. Darling and Masculine Models in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy

Flight Behavior:Mr. Darling and Masculine Models in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy Bonnie Gaarden (bio) From ancient Greece and through much of Western history, culture, as a set of specifically human attributes and activities, was seen as superior to nature, the purely animal/biological realm. But in eighteenth-century Europe, Rousseau and the Romantic movement, Hegelian-style, inverted this traditional hierarchy by associating nature with human freedom and fulfillment, and culture with deadening, even dehumanizing, constraint. As a symbol of culture, the Parthenon gave place to Blake’s “dark Satanic mills.” However, the publication of The Origin of Species in the middle 1800s imbued many people with a new nightmare vision of nature as a relentless maw grinding whole species to extinction: the nature of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, famously “red in tooth and claw” (lvi). At the same time, the aspersions cast on culture by the Romantics remained, exacerbated by the obvious social evils associated with profit-driven industrial production. By the late Victorian/early Edwardian period, to many thoughtful people, nature was a sow that eats her farrow and culture was a heartless “manufactory.” Masculinity, in particular, was envisioned as a battlefield in the nature/culture war. In reaction to the Romantic notion of the “noble savage,” the Victorians developed models of mature masculinity around the fundamental ideal of self-control. “Manliness” was the end of a developmental process in which one learned to repress the native “savagery” manifest in boyhood to dedicate oneself to the greater, social purposes determined by culture (Deane 153). As Andrew Smith puts it, men were expected to leave behind “baser, biological needs” to enter the “morally meaningful world” of public affairs (19). According to scholars such as John Tosh, Bradley Deane, and James Eli Adams, variations on this restraint-based masculine model included the paterfamilias, the entrepreneur, the gentleman, the soldier, and even—when self-rule extended to self-punishment or to heroic asceticism—the desert saint. The ability to rule themselves conferred upon men the ability to rule a family, a business, a society, and ultimately to participate in the rule of an empire (Adams 115). However, by the last third of the nineteenth century, self-control was losing credibility as the hallmark of a “real man.” Andrew Smith [End Page 69] observes that the self-repressed or “civilized” man was increasingly characterized as grey, “hollowed out,” and unable to enjoy life. He sees Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as personifying the dilemma of late nineteenth-century masculinity in its title characters: Hyde is a rapacious monster, but Jekyll is “dehumanized,” cut off from biological energy (37–38). According to Bradley Deane, by the late 1800s, the antiman was no longer the “primitive, bloodthirsty Zulu,” but “the hen-pecked, lower middle-class clerk” (158–59) as a new hegemonic masculinity was constellated: the New Imperial man, physically strong, naturally aggressive, skipping the mid-century maturation process to retain the “savagery” of his boyhood, playing out his adult life in an endless series of homosocial contests on the wild frontiers of the British empire. Deane offers James Barrie’s fantastic boy who refuses to relinquish his savage boyhood as an image of this new masculine ideal: “Peter Pan, seductive and cruel, ludic and lawless, as ready to change places with Captain Hook as to fight him, is entirely a figure of his time” (114). Abstracting Peter from his original context, I concur with Deane’s argument that he conforms in many ways to the New Imperial ideal. In this essay, however, I will stress that Barrie does not offer Peter to his readers as such. In Barrie’s context, Peter represents not a new possibility for satisfactory manhood, but the only escape from all models of adult manhood—including the New Imperial variety—all of which Barrie presents as ultimately intolerable. Deane observes that Peter’s brand of boyishness “was neither frivolous nor harmless” when transposed by British soldiers and administrators into the real world of the British colonies. And for Barrie, the only quality that renders Peter’s savagery desirable is its locus in, and control by, a factor entirely irrelevant to Deane’s...

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