Fantasy as Antifantasy: 9 Good Form and Reflection -- Captain Hook’s Melancholia concluded

For Hook, who has given up hope for life, his wish is no longer to destroy this demon. Hook’s only hope is to get Peter to play “bad form.” Hook sets fire to the ship’s powder magazine. If ever you can see Peter’s panicked look, the purpose will be achieved. “In two minutes, the ship will be blown to pieces!” shouts Hook.

Now, now, he thought, true form will show.


However, Peter emerges from the powder magazine with the shell in his hands, and calmly fling it overboard.

What sort of form was Hook himself showing? Misguided man though he was, we may be glad, without sympathising with him, that in the end he was true to the traditions of his race.


The author seems to be sympathetic to Hook, whose pride has been trampled on, his authority has been destroyed, and he has finally reached his final moments. Hook no longer sees children mocking him. His heart goes back to his nostalgic school days, when he was pure and untainted.

...his mind was no longer with them; it was slouching in the playing fields of long ago, or being sent up for good, or watching the wall-game from a famous wall. And his shoes were right, and his waistcoat was right, and his tie was right, and his socks were right.


The author gave Hook a final chance to play as the villain in the story. He was allowed to avoid the “bad form” of surviving and the aesthetic end of ruin was offered as grace. Here’s the author’s last words to Hook:

James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell.


When the author mentions Hook directly, he has a interesting tendency to make a gesture of degrading him more than necessary. In fact, this is probably the result of the author’s disguise who instilled his own thoughts into the character of Hook. We cannot help but point out here the distortion of the author’s mind. Another aim of this chapter is to point out the perversion in the author’s manner as he narrates the story in front of the reader, to outwit the author’s deception, and to reveal the truth that has been cleverly hidden. So, it is impossible not to suspect traces of disguise in the words of the author, who says “Some like Peter best, and some like Wendy best, but I like her best.” (p. 139). Barrie does not dare to challenge the industrial capitalism represented by the modern vulgar middle class, which imposes despair on faith and even more desire on material life. Because Barrie knows of Oscar Wilde’s example of playing a dandy who mocked the vanity of the Victorian age but ended up as a clownish loser. Barrie does not dare to turn his back on “modern” popular tastes, and depicts the tiny, winged fairy Tinker Bell, who may be attractive to easy public desires. Lewis Carroll, a precursor of antifantasy, is said to have made a mockery of faith in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), but Carroll did not necessarily attempt to deny faith itself. In addition to demonstrating skepticism and ridicule of customary faith in those works, Carroll later tried to explore a new faith in “Love”, in Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). Lewis Carroll, who was a friend of George MacDonald, who could be said to be the founder of typical fantasy literature, was also a literary figure who left a strong influence on 19th-century fantasy literature in a certain respect.
In contrast to these pioneers of fantasy literature, Barrie was a pioneer of 20th-century modernism literature with his peculiar irony and sober nihilism. As a next-generation fantasy writer following in the footsteps of Lewis Carroll and George McDonald, Barrie brilliantly illustrates in the form of “sincere nihilism”, the ironic mental attitude of modern man after Romanticism’s lofty metaphysical attempt to restore spiritual order in the chaos of the modern world through means of returning to Nature and the unconscious, has been miserably abandoned by the intellect. Barrie’s particular style, which seems to manipulate wanton fantasy like parlor magic, succeeded in opening up a new perspective of antifantasy in a unique work named Peter and Wendy, which is actually a brilliant fruit of cleverly manipulated ideation.