Fantasy as Antifantasy: 5 Heartless Children -- concluded

Children never unite in a relationship of trust between them. There is only the power relationship of domination and subordination, and the very heartless act of betrayal and abandonment. And Wendy, who stole the Lost Boys from Peter, gets a severe retaliation from Peter. It is the scene Wendy calls to Peter as he is about to return to Neverland alone.

“Oh dear, are you going away?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t feel, Peter,” she said falteringly, “that you would like to say anything to my parents about a very sweet subject?”
“No.”
“About me, Peter?”
“No.”


Not only is Wendy casually rejected a sincere offer to take Peter into the Darling family, but she is also coldly denied any confirmation of the affinity between Peter and herself. This is the undeniable reality of the children’s world. The psychological perspective of the world of Peter and Wendy must be that, fully aware of the mysterious charm of glimpsing such a consciousness world of children. The narrator tells about the fun of such an ideological play that looks into the mental world of children, full of irony as below. This is another peculiar feeling that only adults who know the taste of bittersweetness can have, which children will never understand.

Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.


The author never idealizes or glorifies the world of children like Victorian writers of children’s literature. He is well aware that such a thing is an illusion held by stupid adults full of hypocrisy. Nor does the author generously develop the world of unbridled adventure in response to the selfish desires of children in Peter and Wendy. The world of philosophical reflection that can only be enjoyed by educated adults with a kind of peculiar entertainment with a perspective that looks at the child’s world from a distant outside, which these children have no way of knowing, is unfolded in this work in a subtle and exquisitely poisoned manner. This is because these points about the selfishness of children actually serve as keywords that urge a cold recapitulation of the peculiar ideological forms contained in the literary genre of fantasy.