Fantasy as Antifantasy: 5 Heartless Children

5 Heartless Children

In Peter and Wendy, the maintenance of justice is not questioned at all. Neither Peter nor the children are on the side of justice, whose duty it is not to fight injustice with a strong sense of morality, and their foe, the villain Captain Hook, does not actually function as an absolute evil that defines the moral polarity of the work world. (note)

note:
In The Lord of the Rings, the existence of Sauron as absolute evil functions as the constituent principle of the fictional world, and the basic grammar of the acceptance of the story world is mainly based on the author’s method of presenting the narrative structure, so the question of ethics is rather simplified. However, in the case of Peter and Wendy, the paradox of ethics was placed in a very ironic way at the center of the basic grammar related to the acceptance of the fictional world.


Furthermore, far from shelving the ethical paradox of “eating,” the “cruelty” that can be overtly seen in the actual behaviors of killing for pleasure that many of the characters in the story carry out, is actively emphasized as a condition of aesthetics that determines the value standard within the work world, as if to mock the existence of the ethical dilemma that accompanies to “eating.”
Peter really doesn’t care about killing people. On the way to bring the Darling children to Neverland, Peter asks nonchalantly. “Would you like an adventure now, …or would you like to have your tea first?” (p. 46) Wendy, who has common sense, immediately says, “tea first” and Michael, who is a timid boy, squeezes Wendy’s hand tightly, relieved. But John, the brave eldest son, can’t afford to miss the opportunity for a heroic adventure so easily. John asks Peter, “What kind of adventure?” Peter replies to him, saying.

“There’s a pirate asleep in the pampas just beneath us, …If you like, we’ll go down and kill him.


When John is frightened and asks, “Suppose, he were to wake up.”, Peter indignantly replies,

“You don’t think I would kill him while he was sleeping! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That’s the way I always do.”


Unlike John’s pragmatic sensibilities he inherited from his father, which discerns it preferable to attack the pirate in his sleep, Peter’s approach is certainly fair. But Peter is not on the side of justice who forces himself to act only in purity in the name of destroying evil. The basic principles that govern Peter’s actions lie elsewhere. This will have to be discussed in more detail, in the later argument. (note)

note:
For Peter, what constrains his actions instead of ethics is a very subtle notion called “good form” by the narrator. It may be an aesthetic criterion that is unique to the children’s mental world. This subject will be discussed in the article “Goodform and Reflection: The Melancholia of Captain Hook”, included in Fantasy as Antifantasy, Kindai Bungei-sha (2006).


John asks Peter, overawed, “I say! Do you kill many?” And Peter nonchalantly replies, “Tons.” (p. 47) For Peter, bloody killings with pirates are a daily occurrence. In Neverland, there are many pirates waiting to fight against. However, Peter also has a stern look on his face when he mentions the name of the pirates’ captain. His name is Jas Hook. Strangely, the children know his name. (note)

note:
The reasons for this will be discussed later in “Goodform and Reflection: The Melancholia of Captain Hook”, Chapter 9 of Fantasy as Antifantasy, as an examination of the fundamental theme of Peter and Wendy.


Captain Hook, was a notorious pirate who had been the bo’sun under Captain Blackbeard, the only one that even Captain Barbecue feared. “What is he like? Is he big?” John asks. Here’s Peter’s answer to John’s question: “He is not so big as he was.” “How do you mean?” “I cut off a bit of him.” Peter had previously cut off Captain Hook’s right hand. In the fatal feud with Hook, the obvious brutal perpetrator is the side of Peter.

Peter has no ethics that are supposed to be the norms that govern his actions. Peter kills and injures people not for the sake of eating, which is the unavoidable cruel act of sustaining life, but for the purpose of whimsical play. And the children, under Peter’s command, willingly join in this barbarism. Some of the Lost Boys on the island actually killed pirates, and some lost their lives in the conflict. One of Peter’s henchmen, Slightly, coldly counts the number of pirates who are slaughtered one by one during the final battle between Captain Hook and the children, as the story comes to a grand finale. (p. 132) When it comes to the brutality with which they are willing to kill lives, children are no different from pirates. As proof of this, after defeating Captain Hook and taking his ship, some of the children want to become pirates themselves.

Some of them wanted it to be an honest ship and others were in favour of keeping it a pirate; but the captain treated them as dogs, and they dared not express their wishes to him even in a round cabin [robin].


The children are no different from their enemy pirates in their nature of brutality and meanness. Peter, who treats his minions like dogs, behaves exactly like Hook, and the children, who can do anything immoral in accordance with the absolute power of their boss, are somehow making mirror-image of the pirates submitting Hook. Even Michael, the youngest and most timid of the Darling family, kills a pirate with his own hands. And when Michael returns home at the end of the story and sees his father, Mr. Darling, for the first time in a long time, he compares his father to the pirate he killed, with some disappointment.

“Let me see father,” Michael begged eagerly, and he took a good look. “He is not so big as the pirate I killed,” he said with such frank disappointment that I am glad Mr. Darling was asleep.


In this story, the atrocity of murder is actually equivalent to treating parents heartlessly in this way. Both of them are a clear indication of the self-centered nature of children. The children easily abandoned their parents succumbing to Peter’s temptation. Moreover, the first to fall into this temptation was Wendy, the oldest child in the Darling family, who played the role of sensible “mother” in Neverland. After visiting Neverland, the children did not completely forget about their abandoned parents. In fact, things are much worse. Children are far more brazen and helpless creatures than adults think. Here’s what the author had to say about Wendy:

But I am afraid that Wendy did not really worry about her father and mother; she was absolutely confident that they would always keep the window open for her to fly back by, and this gave her complete ease of mind.


The minds of the children, including Wendy, are remarkably self-sufficient, and there is no room for the thoughts of others. As proof of this, the relationship between mother and child is, according to the narrator, as follows:

They knew in what they called their hearts that one can get on quite well without a mother, and that it is only the mothers who think you can’t.


The phrase “They knew in what they called their hearts” literary means that they actually don’t have hearts. This is rightly the hallmark of children. They are heartless creatures. It’s a hard fact that is reiterated in Peter and Wendy. For example, the children who are captured alive by Captain Hook are told by Hook that he is ready to accept two of them as cabin boys. If they can be a cabin boy, they won’t have to go through a cruel execution. However, when Tootles received this offer, he responds in this way:

Tootles hated the idea of signing under such a man, but an instinct told him that it would be prudent to lay the responsibility on an absent person; and though a somewhat silly boy, he knew that mothers alone are always willing to be the buffer. All children know this about mothers, and despise them for it, but make constant use of them.


He would reply to Hook more cleverly than ever.

“You see, sir, I don’t think my mother would like me to be a pirate. Would your mother like you to be a pirate, Slightly?”


The children thus take turns giving a definitive answer to their peers, each of whom turns down Hook’s offer with his mother as an absent spokesman. For children, mothers are just convenient tools to be used in this way. And precisely because she is very convenient for them, they despise their mother, who is blindly loving. For children who are excited about their whimsical adventures, whether at home or with their parents, they are no more than convenient temporary shelters. So, the Darling children, who abandoned Neverland and returned to their home, show great selfishness here as well.

They alighted on the floor, quite unashamed of themselves, and the youngest one had already forgotten his home.


Not only are the children losing a solid memory of the home they were born into, but they don’t feel any pain when they find Mr. Darling living in a kennel to blame himself for their departure. (note) In fact, they are so selfishly surprised by the uncertainty of their memories.

note:
Mr. Darling, who admitted that he was the cause of the children abandoning the Darling family and flew away, imposed the punishment of “living in the dog kennel” on himself, attracted people’s attention and became a celebrity because of this. At some point, he learned to enjoy this “social success” and overplayed the father grieving the loss of his child, and was reprimanded by his wife, “But it is punishment, isn’t it, George? You are sure you are not enjoying it?” (p. 140) Mr. Darling, like his children, has fallen under the spell of self-sufficient make-believes. Speaking of which, in the screenplay version of Peter Pan (1928), the script reads, “All the characters, whether grown-up or babes, must wear a child’s outlook on life as their only important adornment.” The dangerous effect of make-believe threatens the psychological polar contrast of the “adult-child” structure, in the process of world perception in the subject of consciousness. Adults are not as mature as they think they are, and children are not as young as adults think they are. We are not sure when we stopped being children and began to be adults, and above all, we are not sure what we are.

“Surely,” said John, like one who had lost faith in his memory, “he used not to sleep in the kennel?”
“John,” Wendy said falteringly, “perhaps we don’t remember the old life as well as we thought we did.”


The children don’t even feel guilty for their actions of abandoning their parents and flying to Neverland on their own. In fact, they blame their mother for her carelessness when they come home she doesn’t greet them properly.

“It is very careless of mother,” said that young scoundrel John, “not to be here when we come back.”


It is the selfish creature called the child that is extremely unreliable in terms of morality. They have no sense of responsibility, no conscience, no compassion. Confusing make-believe with reality, and living contentedly alone in a world of his own, is the true identity of the evil conscious body of a child. “Then are you not really our mother, Wendy?” asked Michael, who was surely sleepy. This heartless childishness is fully depicted in the wily story of Peter and Wendy, which is disguised in the appearance of a modern fairy tale. And even the main character, Peter Pan, who wields tyrannical powers, is spectacularly betrayed by the selfishness of these children. The Darling children, who suddenly remembered their home and began to consider returning to their parents, invited even the Lost Boys who lived with Peter, and they also began to seriously consider being adopted by the Darling family. This is one of the new adventures they have never had before. Leaving Peter alone who refuses to accept their offer to return to the real world, they decide to return to the real world with the Darling children. The author, who depicts the discord between the children of Neverland, is even a little elated.

Thus children are ever ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.