Book Chapter

Ending Peter Pan

Stirling, Kirsten, Kirsten Stirling

2012

Overview

If the origins, textual and otherwise, of Peter Pan are mysterious, its conclusions are even more so. Neither of the published versions of the story, Peter and Wendy (1911) or Peter Pan (1928), ends in a completely satisfactory way. The most important conflicts of the story-between Peter and Wendy, and even between Peter and Hook-are never wholly resolved, and the endings of both novel and play leave the reader with more questions than answers. This lack of resolution is most obvious in the play of 1928, where the curtain rises and falls several more times following what might seem to be the most natural ending: the children's return home and reunion with their parents. When Wendy narrates the story of the children's return in the Home Under the Ground scene, this \"return-to-reality\" (Gilead 1991: 277) indeed functions as the happy ending, though the rhetorical flourish with which she chooses to close may suggest that she too faced difficulties in bringing the story to a conclusion: \"pen cannot inscribe the happy scene over which we draw a veil\" (PP: 4.i. 183; cf. PW: 166). Barrie's pen, on the contrary, seems quite unable to stop inscribing, and the joyful spectacle of the children's return is followed by a scene showing the Darlings' house from outside, in which Wendy and Mrs Darling converse with Peter from a window, and finally by the elaborate Tree Tops scene, showing the Neverland a year later (PP: 5.ii. 108-64; 165-214). The play thus seems suspended between a fantasy ending and a domestic, \"real-world\" ending, or between ending and not ending at all. Humphrey Carpenter (1985: 180) suggests that \"there can be no ending, only a return to the beginning.\" But to describe the story as circular does not quite capture the sense of indecision that the multiple endings convey. The hesitation between real world and fantasy is not only evident in the published versions of the story, but also in the many drafts and revisions of Peter Pan which document Barrie's difficulties in concluding it. This hesitation affects the resolution of almost every conflict in the story.

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 0415888646, 9781138849693, 9780415888646, 1138849693