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Almost every child makes up a fantasy place with all of the things
that they think about. Some of these places are "made" alone; sometimes
brothers or sisters or friends help. The book
Peter Pan
by J.M.
Barrie is about one such place. In this book, three young children
named Wendy, John and Michael are taken by Peter Pan, an imaginary boy
who won't grow up, to an island of dreams called "Neverland".
The Neverland reminds me of all the places I used to think up and
transform my room into, even though my fantasy place was totally
different from the one that Wendy, John and Michael visited. One
of the things I think is most interesting about Peter Pan is that
Barrie's characters find things in their Neverland that children in
England during the early 1900's would have been thinking about.
These days, we'd never think of these things. One of my favorite
examples is the phrase, "needlework, murders, hangings, chocolate
pudding day, threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself,
and so on." There are also things in Barrie's Neverland that
most children now still do think about:
Cinderella, "getting into braces", "say ninety-nine".
Many people my age might be disappointed by Peter Pan. It pretends
to be non-fiction but it's really not about real events. The words
seem to tell the story of a boy who never grew up, but what it's
really about is what goes on in the minds of children.
So, in order to appreciate it, you must either be intrigued by the
strange things that young children think about, or you must be young
enough to identify with the thoughts of Wendy, John, Michael and
Peter Pan.
--Miriam Devlin,
May 18, 1998
(age 11)
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book, Peter Pan.
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I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind.
Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map
can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map
of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round
all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature
on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland
is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of color
here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing,
and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and
caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers,
and huts going fast to decay, and one very small old lady with a
hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all; but there is
also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework,
murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day,
getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out
your tooth yourself, and so on; and either these are part of the
island or they are another map showing through, and it is still rather
confusing, especially because nothing will stand still. |
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Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John's, for instance, has
a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting,
while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying
over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands,
Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together.
John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet
wolf forsaken by its parents; but on the whole the Neverlands have a
family resemblance, and if they stood in a row you could say of them
that they have each others' nose, and so forth. On these shores
children at play are forever beaching their coracles. We too have
been there; we can hear the sound of surf, though we shall land no more. |
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