Fantasy as Antifantasy: 7 Peter’s Ignorance and Mysterious Wisdom

7 Peter’s Ignorance and Mysterious Wisdom

As has become clear, Peter was the embodiment of the collective unconscious and the embodiment of instinctive intuition. Naturally, therefore, this boy has nothing to do with social common sense or worldly knowledge. However, though Peter retains this kind of ignorance, at the same time, he also exhibits mysterious wisdom that seems to be connected to the source of the universe. In this article, we will examine these two points in a faithful reading of the progression of the text.
Peter finds his own shadow he had lost, but he doesn’t know how to attach it to himself. He tries to stick it to his body with a piece of soap he finds in the bathroom. (p. 29) When Wendy offered to sew the shadow for him, he doesn’t even know the word “sew.” He ignorantly asks, “What’s sewn?” (p. 30) When Wendy is able to sew the shadow successfully, he forgets that it was Wendy who sewed the shadow this time, and he flutters himself, thinking that he has accomplished this difficult task by himself. What’s more, Peter doesn’t even know the word “kiss.” When Wendy says to him, “Shall I give you a kiss?”, he mistakenly thinks that he will be handed some kind of item, and he happily holds out his hand to receive it. It was because of his ignorance that Peter was able to take the kiss from Mrs. Darling’s mouth so easily, which no one else could take away. Wendy has to fake a “kiss” and give him a thimble so as not to hurt his feelings. (p. 32) In this way, the meaning of kiss and thimble are exchanged in this story. In the overlapping part of Peter’s and Wendy’s consciousness, one of the possible worlds is generated where the kiss is a thimble, and the thimble is a kiss. This sense of understanding physical reality as one of the aspects of the superposition of consciousness is in fact indispensable for considering the subtle capacities of a purely ideological being like Peter Pan.
　When Peter is asked by Wendy how old he is, he can’t even tell his age. But he remembers something strange.

It was not really a happy question to ask him; it was like an examination paper that asks grammar, when what you want to be asked is Kings of England. “I don't know,” he replied uneasily, “but I am quite young.” He really knew nothing about it, he had merely suspicions, but he said at a venture, “Wendy, I ran away the day I was born.”


Peter says in a haphazard guess that he fled the human world on the day he was born. And in his case, what he guesses at a venture is always true. Why did Peter have to run away from the real world he was born into? About the secret of Peter’s existence he tells himself:

“It was because I heard father and mother,” he explained in a low voice, “talking about what I was to be when I became a man,” he said with passion. “I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies.”


Normally, children have a strong longing to grow up and become bigger. As you get older, you will be able to reach higher, you will be able to run faster, and you will be able to experience various impracticable things that you used to only follow others doing with your eyes. They even have the bizarre illusion that when they grow up, they will be able to take care of themselves more freely. And yet, having learned how boring it is to be an adult from the day he was born, where did Peter get such sad but profound wisdom? There is a great mystery to Peter, who can feel the sorrow of life that haunts everything in this world from the moment he is born. In fact, Peter's very existence is a great riddle. This issue will have to be revisited in the later argument.
Peter even knows the secret of the creation of fairies. According to Peter, this is how the birth of fairies occurs.

“You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about and that was the beginning of fairies.”


Peter’s theory of the generation of fairies differs somewhat from the views examined earlier in this study in relation to the worldview based on the idea of Romanticism, which presupposes the organic connection between all things. However, since Peter, who is actually one of the ancient gods who lives with fairies, means it, we will not be able to judge that his guesswork is entirely wrong. If we were to make a correction to our understanding, Peter’s theory of the birth of fairies would be interpreted as implying the following view. In other words, the essential attributes of the fairy, which is one of the manifestations of the primordial Supremacy itself and the embodiment of the energy that pervades the universe, are as joyful as the voice of a baby who laughed for the first time in its life. This is in stark contrast to the Christian worldview of the church system, which is threatened by prophecies of destruction and bound by a strict covenant with God. The generous worldview granted by Eastern teachings, such as Vedic philosophy, which preaches that if one can regain one’s lost essence by accepting the world as it is and by observing one’s own inner mental world, it will lead to the happy and true way of life, is implied in Peter’s theory of the birth of fairies. If this is the case, Peter’s explanation of the birth of fairies, which should have been made as a random venture, is following the same optimistic worldview that assumes the inseparable unity of the universe contained in fantasy literature, similar to the one examined in the previous argument. However, Barrie also adds an ideational play in this work that attributes the origin of the fairies to the laughter of babies. In this conceit, Peter and Wendy can be said to be a work that deviates greatly from the trajectory of fantasy literature as a modern allegory, as worked by George McDonald in the previous century, which was intended to be a new alternative to religion; and pursues a very ironic sense of 20th-century modernism. If we take into account the factor of the spiritual world component of the existence of fairies, the other information about fairies that Peter speaks of conveys the idea that there is a close organic relationship between the inner world that our psyche constructs and the outer space. When Wendy questions the meaning of what Peter says when he told there was supposed to be one fairy for each child, she is taught about the mysterious relationship between fairies and children.

“Ought to be? Isn’t there?”
“No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that fall down dead.”


When children lose their faith, fairies die. Here we can also see a complementary mechanism of spirituality similar to that played by the symbol “fairy” in the metaphysical allegory of the German Romantics. In Peter and Wendy, while the fairy image introduced by the Romantics is innovated in the birth myth, its allegorical implication is certainly inherited.