To state what at this juncture must be patently obvious, Peter Pan is a fable of modernity, anxiously negotiating industrial technologies that produced a middle class predicated on instability and which encoded impossible roles for men and women. Given the circulating ideologies of manliness that involved notions of their agency, of being patriarchal masters in their immediate households and in that enterprise of nation predicated on a lexis of “family,” middle-class men at the turn of the twentieth century seem to have been denied any actual way of becoming “real” men. The evolution of industrial capital inscribed their failure. But no less did it regulate middle-class women by locating them as asexual, pure figures whose “natural” inclinations to maternity became the sign of the inherent virtue of whiteness. Mr Darling may be “really a good man as breadwinners go,” but the implication is that “goodness” is accessible only to a middle-class woman like Mrs Darling.

The identification of Captain Hook as a “dandy,” in the wake of the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, is significant inasmuch as it opens the complex issue of Hook’s sexuality. As Ed Cohen (in Talk on the Wilde Side) and Alan Sinfield (in The Wilde Century) argue, the trials (which were widely reported in the popular press in England and, indeed, throughout Europe and the United States) were crucial in the construction of the homosexual as a recognizable social identity. As Sinfield notes, “The dominant twentieth-century queer identity […] has been constructed […] mainly out of elements that came together at the Wilde trials: effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence and aestheticism” (Wilde Century 12). Sinfield’s point is that while these characteristics have since become associated with homosexuality, Wilde’s public personae of aesthete and, later, dandy were not read by his contemporaries as obvious signs of his homosexuality. While Wilde’s dandyism was recognized, celebrated, and reviled, his self-staging did not lead “either his friends or strangers to regard him as obviously, even probably, queer” (2).

In mapping the construction of middle-class sexuality through Peter Pan, I want to draw attention to another aspect of the contrast between Tinker Bell and Wendy. Tinker Bell is a light, but one that is coloured, while Wendy – in keeping with tropes of purity – is associated with white. As Wendy and her brothers approach Never Land, Tinker Bell offers a feigned alert and tells the boys in fairy language that Peter wants Wendy shot (111). The boys shoot at Wendy, who has been “fluttering among the tree-tops in her white nightgown,” almost like a ghost. As if to emphasize the visual cue of the fluttering figure, one of the boys comments, “How white it is!” (111). Wendy is “it” and not “she,” the feminine denied gender, looking ghostly but representing such a threat to the boyish culture of Never Land that she has to be shot down on the instruction of Tinker Bell, who pretends that the instruction comes from Peter. Women (or, at least, female figures – Tinker Bell is hardly a woman) are key to the regulation of sexuality, as evinced historically by the involvement of middle-class women in social purity movements; Tinker Bell’s wanting Wendy shot is a mode of regulation, but one motivated by her selfish desire to have Peter to herself, and so she makes no pretence about serving the social good.

There are other implications to rendering the figure of mother as pure and asexual: as I mentioned earlier in commenting on Mr Darling, middle-class masculinity, produced within industrial capital, may militate against men growing up. As well, the fear of female sexuality as diseased and the resulting celebration of the middle-class woman as “pure” and “chaste,” occurring within the context of a homosocial ethos haunted by fear of homosexuality, which is seen also a

Some topics in this essay:
Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Captain Hook, John Wendy’s, Empire Barrie’s, Tiger Lily’s, Elizabeth Roberts, Diseases Acts, Darling Darling, Talk Wilde, peter pan, middle class, tinker bell, tiger lily, captain hook, public school, female sexuality, stage direction, industrial technologies, industrial capital, tinker bell fairy, instability middle class, wendy tinker bell, contagious diseases acts, attracted peter pan,