The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction PDF
Preview The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction
LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIE1Y General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin McCabe and Denise Riley Selected titles Mikkel Borch:Jacobsen THE FREUDIAN SUBJECT Norman Bryson VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic ofthe Gaze Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film ofthe 1940s Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETT: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett lan Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of Literary Education lan Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson ON PORNOGRAPHY: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law Andreas Huyssen AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism Louis Marin PORTRAIT OF THE KING Christian Metz PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier Angela Moorjani THE AESTHETICS OF LOSS AND LESSNESS Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Denise Riley 'AM I THAT NAME?': Ferninisrn and the Category of 'Wornen' in History POETS ON WRITING: Britain 1970-91 Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBER1Y: The NewYork School ofPoets Cornel West THE AMERlCAN EVASION OF PHILOSOPHY The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility oj s Children Fiction Jacqueline Rose Revised Edition M ©Jacqueline Rose 1984, 1992 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First edition 1984 Revised edition 1994 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-60401-4 ISBN 978-1-349-23208-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23208-6 For Elofse Bennett who has groum up- Contents Acknowledgements viii The Return 01 Peter Pan ix Introduction 1 1 Peter Pan and Freud Who is talking and to whom? 12 2 Rousseau and Alan Garner Innocence 01 the child and 01 the word 42 3 Peter Pan and Literature for the Child Conjusion 01 tongues 66 4 Peter Pan and Commercialisation of the Child Children are a good seU 87 5 Peter Pan, Language and the State Captain Hooli goes to Eton 115 Conclusion 137 Notes 145 Bibliography 155 Index 172 Acknowledgemen ts I would like to thank Frank Kermode for his supervision of this work in its early stages and for his support and encouragement throughout. I am also indebted to:Marc Soriano, the Central Research Fund Committee of the U niversity of London, Christina M. Hanson at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, the staff at the Enthoven Theatre Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the House Governors ofthe Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children for interviews in 1976 and 1982. The illustrations on pp. 39-40 are based on original drawings by A. H. Watson. Special personal thanks to Gillian Rose, Colin MacCabe and Greg Bright. Vlll The Return of Peter Pan 'Nothing is a precedent until it is done for the first time.' Lord Boyd-Carpenter, debating Lord Callaghan's proposal on rights in Peter Pan presented as an Amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patent Bill in the English House of Lords, after pas sage of the Bill through the House of Commons, 10 March 1988 (The Parliamentary Debates, 1987-88) 'It will be a very different story from the one you've been putting about' First mother to Wendy, John and Michael at the end of the les bian production of Peter Pan, Drill Hall Theatre, London, Christ mas 1991 In 1987 the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London, to whichJames Barrie had assigned copyright in Peter Pan, lost its right to refuse permission in the work. A special amendment brought to the English House of Lords by ex-Labour Prime Minis ter James Callaghan, newly elevated to a peerage, restored the Hospital's share in the royalties but not its control over the inter pretation or, as it is legally termed, the 'exploitation' of Peter Pan. As if in response, Peter Pan has since surfaced as a high-ftying busi ness executive (Steven Spielberg's 1992 Columbia Tristar film Hook) and as a lesbian in disguise (the 1991 Christmas production put on by the all-woman theatre group Dramatrix at London's Drill Hall). It is at least arguable which of these two interpretations - grown man or lesbian - presents the innocence of childhood with its great est affront. Either way, both of these vers ions seem, if not quite for adults only, certainly for the grown-ups. Since The Case of Peter Pan was first published in 1984, the con IX x The Return of Peter Pan ce pt of childhood innocence has been put under multiple strain. Not just by these variations on an old theme which should by defi nition have resisted them, since the only meaning of Peter Pan is the eternal sameness with which it (or he) recurs, but also in the wider culture, in the form of a crisis in the public perception of what, ex actly, is a relation to a child. The amendment by James Callaghan was not without its ironies since the only reason the Hospital was in such dire need of the money was the systematic assault on the Na tional Health Service which had started with the defeat of his own government by the Conservatives in 1979. It is not, objected an other Labour peer, the task ofthe theatre to subsidise hospitals, but the task of the state to fund them: 'Where exactly is it allieading?' Peter Pan, it seems, always provokes a crisis of precedence because of the tension between his eternal repetition and his status as a 'once and for all'. Hence one refrain of the debate: 'a unique situ ation'; 'a unique solution to a unique problem'; 'it is only Peter Pan who never grows up and only rights in Peter Pan that we are pre pared to see continue indefinitely'. Not for the first time in its history, Peter Pan has revealed its fully political dimension: its bizarre appearance in the House of Lords was a symptom of the very ill it was being called on to eure. In the context of the English debate, the fear about setting a precedent concealed a vaguely acknowledged awareness that the case was not aberrant but representative, that charity as opposed to state pro vision, far from being exceptional, was becoming a norm ('this fast moving technological age where we as a society are asked to be more Christian, more forbearing and more supportive of those who are less fortunate, we may weIl be asked, not in 300 years or 30 years, but perhaps in three years, to·a pprove something simi lar'). Conservatism in Britain neglects provision for children in exact proportion as it elevates the principle of the good fairy - 'little people who grant wishes and do good deeds around the world' - into a sociallaw (one version of the child - 'a little person' - doing service for another). Thus Peter Pan managed, almost, to force a recognition of one of Conservatism's central and most cyni cat political and ideological turns. Quirky but significant, the debate in the English House of Lords showed the extent to which sentimentality about childhood ('My Lords, I must tell my noble friend that one of my greatest friends was Tinkerbell') is the other side of guilt. What are we doing to - or not doingfor-children? While this question appeared in the form
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