http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/comment/story.html?id=25e6e589-1e5c-4471-b506-fb2219cad009

Barbara Kay 
National Post 
December 22, 2004

Dec. 27 marks the 100th anniversary of Peter Pan's opening to instant
success at London's Duke of York theatre. I well remember my own
Christmastime childhood introduction to its magic. Adding to the
excitement of my first live theatre experience, Peter was played by my
cousin, the beautiful and talented actress Toby Robins. What astonishment
I felt when her slender body suddenly defied gravity and flew gracefully
through the air.

Memories of my afternoon's enchantment at that downtown Toronto theatre
are today clouded with melancholy for a vanished era. My cousin Toby died
tragically young, at the zenith of her glamour and success. And the
sweetness of Peter Pan as an artistic creation has died too, because of
what has perished in our culture: the sexual innocence of childhood.

"All children, except one, grow up." These are the opening words of J. M.
Barrie's 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy. The name Peter Pan no longer recalls
a pre-sexual motherless boy, torn between his drive for autonomy and his
yearning for mother-love. At best it now conjures up the psychological
profile of a seductive, but irresponsible man who evades sexual
commitment, at worst our generation's puer aeternus, the gruesome Michael
Jackson, whose personal Neverland, supposedly an homage to Peter Pan,
lends grossly ironic redefinition to the original story's band of "lost
boys."

Indeed, so profoundly and overtly sexualized is our culture, so early do
our children understand and experience sexuality, the very word "children"
has lost the sense of inviolateness it had when Peter and Wendy were
conceived. In the latest film version of Peter Pan, for example, Wendy is
said to have "a hidden kiss, in the right hand corner of her mouth" --
today's young girls know all about kissing, and more -- but in his novel,
Barrie attributed the "hidden kiss" to Wendy's mother.

The pedophilic impulse isn't peculiar to modern times, but before the
sexual revolution, media saturation and the Internet, it operated under
the radar of permissible public discourse. The innocence of childhood was
heavily romanticized in the art and literature of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. Naive Victorian aesthetes were sheltered from the
unacknowledged desires that were later deconstructed by post-Freudian
aesthetic sleuths possessed with (and by) today's sexual omniscience.

Culturally and religiously prevented from acting out perverted desires,
Victorians like J.M. Barrie sublimated forbidden impulses with socially
acceptable artistic or voyeuristic strategies. You see it as well in famed
British artist John Millais (1829-1896), whose work, a postmodern art
historian reported in 1994, exhibits "a strong cultural bias to adore
children, to asetheticize them and to honor childhood as a center of
innocence and potential virtue, but it can also be seen to eroticize
childhood."

Examples of eros wrapped in innocence abounded among Victorian-era
authors. Dickens often served up marriage-age heroines who are passive,
waifish creatures offering the pedophilic fantasy of the seduced child,
but in a culturally sanctioned union. Lewis Carroll was obsessed with the
charming little girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. He also liked
photographing scantily dressed or naked prepubescent nymphets. Victorian
novelists Anthony Trollope and Mark Twain, as well as art critic John
Ruskin, said and did things around little girls that would at least raise
eyebrows today.

Curiously, given our culture's morbid fascination with pedophilia, a
current biopic of Barrie, Neverland, takes a normalized view of its
subject. In life, Barrie looked nothing like virile Johnny Depp. Barely
five feet tall, with a gnome-like high forehead and curling mustaches, he
was something of a Pan-like "betwixt and between." As one biographer said:
"He was old but not grown up." He was almost certainly a homosexual, the
likely reason for his marriage's failure. Nobody today would believe that
Barrie's all-consuming adoration of his muses, the Lewellyn Davies boys,
was normal or benign, however sexually circumscribed his behaviour with
them.

Barrie's halcyon interlude with these charming lads ended all too soon.
George Lewellyn Davies died at the front in the First World War, Michael
by drowning (a possible suicide) in 1921, and finally in 1960 Peter, who
called Peter Pan "that terrible masterpiece," threw himself in front of a
train. What childhood secrets did they take with them? Sexually obsessed
inquiring minds -- sadly that means everyone today -- want to know.

--- Peter T. Chattaway ---------------------------
peter@... ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
   claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee

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