Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Peter Pan, the popular fictional character created by J.M. Barrie, first
appeared onstage in Edwardian England in 1904. He went on to become a
cultural icon of the 20th century, the subject of musicals, films, and
cartoons. This book approaches the archetypal character of the puer
aeternus—the eternal boy—from the perspective of Jungian analytical
psychology in order to throw some light on the allure and meaning behind
the promise of perpetual youth and joy that has so fascinated
20th-century society. Through an examination of the archetypal and
mythological roots of Peter Pan (as well as a close psychological
reading of the 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy, through which the character
became best known), the author reveals the ambiguities and complexities
of a well-known but little-understood figure, and the layers of creative
and destructive energies that Barrie’s “lost boy” represents to
the postmodern Western psyche.

Arguing that the essence of the Peter Pan character has been largely
lost through a process of sanitization and Disneyfication, Yeoman
explores the roots of the figure of the eternal boy in both classical
mythology and Christian iconography. She shows that Peter Pan’s
endearing characteristics of childhood innocence and imaginative
spontaneity are also combined with less popular character traits that
have been downplayed in popular re-creations of the character:
narcissism, the inability to relate to others, a lust for power and
control, and a fear of the changes that come with time. Pointing to a
clear mythological paradigm within which Barrie was writing, Yeoman goes
on to examine Peter Pan’s story, as told in Peter and Wendy, as a tale
of “soul-making” in which the archetypal eternal boy’s freedom,
magic, and imagination challenges others to question and eventually
transform their accepted reality.

Yeoman’s depiction of the Peter Pan narrative as one that speaks to
both the conscious and the unconscious levels of the psyche
simultaneously, thus representing our own continued struggle with
rootless consciousness and the unknown new, provides a new and valuable
contribution to the literary discussion of a flawed but nonetheless
beloved character.