Rewritings of Peter Pan: A Hero in Crisis

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Scotsman J. M. Barrie created Peter Pan, a character so successful he was subject to interpretation since his early existence: Barrie himself first conceived him as a baby in his novel The Little White Bird to later transform him into the hero of both a play and a children’s novel. After the death of his original author – and in the context of literary and film adaptations– the character maintains the eagerness for eternal youth and a state of permanent crisis. But he adopts a series of new traits: he becomes, amongst other things, a dreamed child, the ideal of juvenile love, a Dickensian orphan, a young murderer, a vampire, a family man, a lunatic, a punk… Within his new existences, Peter will grow up to be a youngster, an adult and an old man and will experiment the four crucial crises of psychosocial development as articulated by Erik Erikson: the Oedipal crisis, fantasy versus reality, the teenager identity crisis, and the adult ones (Erikson, 1974). Despite the sweet image portrayed by Disney that remains in the unconscious collective, Peter Pan –in adaptation– emerges as a hero in permanent crisis.