falling back in love with Wendy Darling

[lotesse]

The first drawerfic I ever wrote - well, I never even dared to write it down, because I had a strong sense of shame & propriety as a kid, and knew it was a subliterary impulse - was about Wendy Darling. It was about how Wendy got to come back to Neverland, and have what she wanted: Peter, and a family, and the Neverland as well. Romance and reproduction and pirates and adventures. I just looked back through my "peter pan" tag here, and saw that I almost compulsively reference this fantasy - I've still never written a word of it down in earnest, but clearly some part of me is burning to express or realize it.

I feel ashamed of it. I had a feeling - still do - that it was wrong to fight against the terrible inexorabililty of the ending. I've always found it easy to fall into fatalistic, obedient acceptance of that particular kind of wrenching ending - the one that asserts that you can't always have what you want, that there's always a price to pay and you can't choose. Narnia and Lord of the Rings and The Dark is Rising and His Dark Materials - the list kind of goes on. This xkcd sums the trope up pretty nicely. I've been working on learning to subvert, to disobey even there. But I've always had a hard time disobeying J. M. Barrie. I was always more cautious and circumspect with the Peter Pan daydreams than with anything else. I have no problem screwing around with Narnia, but even in the context of this journal I don't seem to have ever managed to so much as question Barrie before. I pulled off a Grey Havens rewrite years ago. Why is Barrie so unresistable?

I wonder if it isn't because Wendy Darling is female. And, maybe even more, because she's feminine, and because the things she wants get tangled up in both a reification of gender roles and a reactionary repudiation of the same.



In the cases of the above wrenching endings, a character that I love/identify with is forced to surrender something: fairyland, home, love. Where they have to give up in order to have, or to survive. My desire to subvert them springs from a utopian rejection of that whole concept, a stubborn insistence that you can too have it all. It's rooted in a desire to make it better - for myself, for my world, but also crucially for the individual character. And, now that I think about it, most of the characters that I find myself trying to rescue from this bind are male. Lucy Pevensie, but Lewis says she's "as good as a boy," so there's that. Lyra, I guess, but since she gets locked into fairyland I don't hurt all that much for her. But Wendy Darling, Wendy Darling is the girliest girl ever. Barrie's novel is hugely essentialist, all these children insistently proclaiming their gender differences with the weight of truth from on high. Always girls and boys, never just kids - and Wendy gets aligned with parents, not with childish freedom, and I always hated that, always.

But, well, I get wanting to grow up. I always did - I never wanted to stay a child. Maybe that's why Lucy was an easier figure for me, because her growing up isn't portrayed as contrary to her position as Queen of Fairyland. Wendy's is. Because love is only for grownups, and fairies are only for the prepubescent. But that's just Victorian child-fetishy rubbish. They got weird about kids for a while there - maybe as a side effect of the recent invention of childhood/push to protect child workers?

I don't see why growing up should mean surrendering fairyland. I just don't. Growing up means fully inhabiting fairyland, becoming Queen of the Enchanted Forest, not just the princess in the tower. I've had stakebait's It was some sort of an end to magic, which addresses this via Buffy Season 6, bookmarked forever, because this:

I do not believe adulthood need necessarily come with a loss of magic – certainly not a loss of magic on the level of metaphor. We may not believe in fairies any more, but after all, something you wholly believe in is no more magical, in some senses, than a table. It's half-belief that gives something those numinous edges, and half-belief is as accessible to adults as to children, if they will admit to wanting it and give the requisite sideways glance. Maybe even more so, because adults have more scope to make their own magic manifest in the world. I don't believe the loveliness need be lost

is so intensely true. I don't see that Wendy's desires for love and partnership and family and home can't coexist quite wonderfully with mermaids and pirates and fairies and all the other fun of the Neverland. Barrie wants to reserve that sort of thing for boys, sort of, but he also writes Wendy as always having been a cocreator of it, along with John and Michael and Peter himself. The Neverland also contains things she's imagined - her wolf, her lagoon. She's not a trespasser, though Barrie can't seem to consistently remember that. But the reading is available - Wendy is available - and I'm trying to stop feeling shame at the pleasure I take in that. Writing Peter/Wendy for yuletide was really fun, and I've been watching airie_fairy's vid Somewhere Only We Know and letting myself really go, really fall into all the feelings Wendy Darling can generate in me.

I want her to have it all so, so badly. It hurts me so much that she gets so little, and it worries me how strong my tendency is to accept her ending as just the way of things, inevitable, always already foreclosed. Why not tell the one where she chooses a new home over an old one, chooses one way of life over another, chooses to immigrate to Neverland permanently and set up housekeeping there and develop social networks of her own - she goes hunting with Tiger Lily, and I'm quite sure she occasionally has tea with Mr. Smee - and have her own quests and enemies and trials and travails? And where she grows up and gets her period and has sex for the first time and has an orgasm for the first time and likes it, and where she mothers these orphaned kids in a way that helps them without unduly constraining them, teaching them that mamas can so have adventures, and where she maybe has children of her own body too, if she wants. I want the one where Peter gets the fuck over himself - because she's not making it up, kiddo, you're not okay with letting her go, the masculinist bullshit about not having any feelings really doesn't hold up to scrutiny very well. If Peter didn't love her back, maybe I wouldn't care. That would be a different story. But he does, damn it, and I don't see why I can't have a real happy ending, Barrie, you prick.

Comments

[esteven]

I so wish you would write that, because she deserves to be with Peter. :D

[lotesse]

Maybe someday. I have to unlock a few more shame structures, first - but I know I've written things in the last few years that I never thought I would, so maybe I'll get there someday. I'd very much like to.

[esteven]

I will wait patiently. :D

[ilthit]

"Barrie, you prick" is right. I'm not sure I would love the story as much if it gave me what I wanted, just as I might not love LotR as much if Frodo hadn't left Middle-Earth, like that hurt is a necessary part of it that makes it better. But I see where you're coming from.

[lotesse]

Tolkien has more right to it than anyone else, I think, because it all hooks up with the book's underlying ambivalence about war. Without the dual tragedies of the Scouring and the Havens it would all be way to rah rah kill em all - those endings give the entire thing a weary undertone that's really important to the significance of the whole, I think.

But that forces Frodo into functioning as a personification of all the harms of war, which I increasingly find unfair to him as an individual character. The Havens are necessary to the novel - but not, I think, necessary for him. Poor bb.

[anthimeria]

I have to echo esteven, because as little as Wendy is one of my girls (I'm actually very not fond of Peter Pan, but that's a IMO thing), my first reaction when you started talking about this story was, "I want that." We'll wait, but oh, that story.

I'd also love to point you to the song Wicked Girls, by filker Seanan McGuire. I love this album and this song and your reaction of "She deserves her own story, dammit" resonated vividly for me with the song. Link to lyrics: http://seananmcguire.com/songbook.php?id=238

[lotesse]

L, these are like twenty-year-old fantasies. Little tiny girl dreams. Approaching them feels really intense - but I dunno, I think Eilonwy's been good practice for me this year. Writing her has, I think, allowed me to grab ahold of the good id-material of those little baby fantasies and then work it without falling down the id vortex - the way I think I did back in undergrad writing Caspian/Lucy that went too far.

The encouragement helps! I'll try and see what I can break down. Other people have shame barrier about porn - I just have them about nineteenth century kidlit.

[anthimeria]

Do take it slow if you need--just because the barrier's in a nonstandard place doesn't make it any less intense. But I think your kidself had the seed of a very powerful idea.

(I'm a little biased, I admit, because about a month ago I successfully wrote a story based on a concept I've had hanging around for a dozen years, and it might've been awesome. Would like to share the awesome!)

Good luck as you embark--it might take a few tries and a lot of time, but there's something compelling there.

[lotesse]

ooh whatdjoo write?! Email it to me if you want; I'm always glad to see your stuff.

[anthimeria]

Sent!

(Let me know if you get it--the e-mail address I have for you is possibly out of date.)

[wishfulclicking]

This was interesting to read. I'm only familiar with the Disney version of Peter Pan, is it very different from the original? Like Little Mermaid different?

[lotesse]

Hmm. It's not as different as Little Mermaid - nothing is! - but it still doesn't feel the same to me. Part of that is just historical: Barrie's fin-de-siecle fairy delicacy is very different tonally from the brasher, brighter, more aggressively comic pitch of the Disney film. Barrie is a very active narrator, and the loss of that voice in adaptation/performance changes the thing a lot. Of course, Pan was originally a stage product, so there's that - the Disney film isn't that different from classic filmed stagings, like the one with Mary Martin and Cyril Richard.

But it was the book I knew first. And it does feel ever so slightly - stranger. Sadder, too. Or - not sad, but melancholy. Not just at the end but all the way through.

[wishfulclicking]

Okay I'm going to have to read the original now.

[lotesse]

Do eet - but be warned, it's a weird book, and I kind of can't imagine what it would be like to read it for the first time as an adult.

[theprimrosepath]

In terms of movie adaptations and tone, would you say the underlying feeling of the book compares more to, say, Finding Neverland,/i>, though that's not strictly a book re-telling?

[lotesse]

Hm. I'm not sure how I feel about FN. I - strongly dislike - readings of Peter Pan that go overboard on the Llewellyn Davies business. And Depp isn't quite the right kind of freak in it.

The main problem I have with FN, actually, is the way it imagines Peter Pan as not inherently containing Wendy, as being a Boys Own game with a girl thrown in at the last minute. Wendy has too much narrative centrality for that reading to be legitimate.

[slashfairy]

i *heart* your thoughtfulness.

[theprimrosepath]

I know, right? I'm simultaneously charmed, intrigued, and inspired. :)
Hello to you, by the way!

[lotesse]

I heart you right back!

[theprimrosepath]

I don't think Barrie was any more capable of writing that ending than you are - yet. You call Wendy the "girliest of girls," and she really, really is - but a girl who has to grow up into a Victorian Woman. I think, for Barrie, trying to imagine an ending where Wendy could really have everything, family and fairies, would have led to him to a very "The Awakening"-esque sort of impasse.

I think it's why I re-read Edith Pattou's East so often - Rose actively fights to tbe true to herself, to resist the compromise of expectations.

[lotesse]

I .. have never read that book. It sounds like I need to, if it does what you say! *scrambles off for her TBR list*

But yeah, I think you're spot on. Tho it doesn't make it any less frustrating for readers!