Abstract:

Disney’s popular adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has, with its sentimentalizing of childhood and celebration of the spirit of youth, obscured the play’s critique of the romantic child and its eponymous character’s close association with death. With antecedents for Peter Pan in the dying and rising deities of the Graeco-Roman world, as well as connections between Neverland and the underworld, Barrie’s “eternal boy” may be seen as central to a modern myth both fascinated with death as the path to immortality and repelled by the inevitable aging of that mortal journey. When a person dies in childhood, this corporeal process is subverted, catapulting her or him into immortality as perpetually youthful and often heroic while clashing with the idea that a child’s death is a sacrilegious event. In this paper I will explore these tensions in the Peter Pan myth by following the boy’s fatal “adventure” through its various cinematic iterations. Drawing on films from both Hollywood and world cinema, I will show how performances of juvenile masculine death function as memorials with shifting emphases on the place and role of boyhood “adventure” within their narratives. Particular attention will be paid to the presence of religious imagery and an afterlife, which appear alongside non-religious ways of conceptualizing the possibility of human immortality.