THE ART OF ENGLISH

The Art of English

The Art of English

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to discuss Peter Pan for children who suffer from nostalgia in the state of childhood. The story of Peter Pan is based on a play and a novel. Peter Pan is a play (1904) by J.M. Barrie, in which the title character is the little boy who never grows up. The story begins when Peter enters the nursery window of the house of the Darling family to recover his shadow. He flies back to Neverland accompanied by the Darling children, to rejoin the Lost Boys. Eventually all are captured by Captain Hook's pirates, except Peter, who secures their release and the defeat of the pirates. The children by now homesick fly back to the nursery with their new friends, but Peter refuses to stay as he does not wish to grow up (Barrie, 2003).

However, the major event in establishing Peter Pan in the canon of children's literature was not book publication but the first performance of the play in December 1904. Over and above the texts in which he appears, the character of Peter Pan has attained an independent life of his own as a universally as an understood symbol of eternal childhood. The Neverland can be seen as an allegory of childhood. The emotional and psychological conflicts within the play, sensed by children and understood by adults, concern the struggle for possession of Wendy as a mother, a daughter, and a spouse (Wendy and Peter play mother and father to the boys) and the contradictory human desire to be both free from responsibility and part of a family and society. Peter Pan speaks to these truths, even as it joyously captures the elemental child in each of us (Tatar, 2011).

Peter Pan syndrome is a term used to describe the anxiety associated with the idea of becoming adult and desire to remain associated with child and more generally to describe an adult immature, in reference to the character of the eponymous boy who would not grow created by JM Barrie. However, according to literary analysis, the figure of the child who does not want to grow is the centre of many myths and works of fiction. It can also be linked to the concept of inner child developed in Jungian psychoanalytic theory.

Discussion and Analysis

Peter Pan is the main character of some children's stories by James Matthew Barrie, where the only child who will never grow up. Neverland is a metaphor for eternal childhood, youth, and immortality, but also childish, childishness and escapism seen. All the Peter Pan texts have been subjected to biographical and psychoanalytical interpretations in recent years, and their origins can be confidently traced to elements of Barrie's physical nature, to his early life experiences, and above all to the friendship he formed with the sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies shortly before they were written. Barrie seems never to have matured physically or sexually. Although he was romantically attracted to women, his ...