Peter Pan & Wendy: The Uncanniness of 'Writing-Back'

Wendy by Karen Wallace

While writing the first essay of my master’s degree over the past two weeks, (on Freud’s “The Uncanny”), I have been thinking a lot about its relevance to contemporary fiction. The Uncanny denotes that eerie, unsettling sensation when something familiar assumes an air of unfamiliarity; a feeling Freud’s 1919 essay can be quite prescriptive about. His list of unheimlich situations range from peculiarly lifelike automatons and dolls, (or apparently lifeless animate creatures), to confronting one’s double, coincidence, and déjà vu, to name a few. But since “The Uncanny” was published over a century ago, the concept has grown in essence and popularity. This could be partly due to its ubiquity in literature, which Freud believed was “a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life” (n.p.). Subsequent scholarship has investigated its affinity to Gothic texts, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or hauntology, which all employ the uncanny resonances of doubling or liminality. For this post however, I am considering a key aspect of uncanniness - defamiliarisation - in relation to books that ‘write back’.

Sometimes referred to as parallel novels, narratives that write back often do so from a postcolonial or feminist perspective. Closely related is Adrienne Rich’s idea of reading as ‘re-vision’ which Rich describes as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (35). Revisionary reading, also called feminist critique, involves oppositional reading (or reading against the grain) to answer gaps and silences in the text. When combined with novels that write back, we get a combined approach that assumes an uncanny relation to Freud’s conception of the double.

Wide Sargasso Sea is perhaps the best-known example of this genre, for its reimagination of Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Taking the minor and mistreated character of Bertha Mason, Rhys remedies her original treatment by giving her a name and backstory of her own. Writing back is a form of literature then, that centres the story of marginalised or relegated characters in classic fiction. Some other examples include Jo Baker’s Longbourn, which imagines the lives of servants in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Geraldine Brooks’ March which answers Alcott’s Little Women, or O’Farrell’s Hamnet which evokes the real-life tragedy behind Hamlet.

Having read Jean Rhys’s novel, however, I will certainly never experience Jane Eyre in the same way again. Wide Sargasso Sea could be said to haunt Brontë’s pages, defamiliarising the original story, and bringing to light what “ought to have remained hidden and secret” (Freud n.p.).

With this in mind, the novel I am going to discuss focuses Freud’s main theme of the uncanny – the return of the repressed. In Karen Wallace’s Wendy, the titular character radically reimagines J.M. Barrie’s creation, generating a deeply unsettling experience for the child reader. When I first read this novel (many years ago), I was confused by the disparity between the original text and the 2003 adaptation. Not only does the plot diverge, but themes which might be lurking beneath Barrie’s fantastical tale, emerge to the fore fully-fledged. This sense of defamiliarisation was, above all, confusing. I had read Peter Pan before, so why was this book so radically different? Maybe I had misremembered the character names and this book was a wholly different, independent book with a family of coincidentally named Darlings. I looked to the blurb and was both relieved and disappointed to find I hadn’t lost my mind, but neither had this book any official relation to Barrie’s original. I decided to read on anyway.

All was not as it seemed. This children’s book housed some unexpectedly adult themes. As Olga Stein suggests in her review of the book, Wallace’s version is a dark foil to Barrie’s treacly tale (44). While I haven’t revisited the original in any serious way as an adult, the concept of Neverland can certainly be read as a projected escape from reality, with pirates and crocodiles substituting for more complex troubles at home. But another reviewer, Deborah Stevenson, interestingly understands the novel as a prequel, while claiming “Wallace's stiff and angry Mr. Darling seems more kin to Captain Hook than to his character in Barrie's play and novel” (300-1). An undoubtedly Freudian motif, I was alert to the doubling of the two characters from the film Peter Pan (also 2003), of which I was a bit of a fan. In this adaptation, there was no mistaking the oedipal implications of Hook/Mr Darling, played as they were, by the same Jason Isaacs.

But Wallace chooses to fuse Hook and Mr Darling. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Wendy knows only too well her father can flip from “his pink, smooth morning face as he left for the office” to his blotchy “evening face” that seems to be (uncannily?) “made of wax” (25). Furthermore, Letitia and Henry Cunningham, the children of George Darling’s ‘mistress’, are the pantomime doubles and forced playmates of his own Darling children. These untamed and animalistic foils are likened to jungle animals; coiled snakes and imperial horrors intent on playing “Bloody Slaughter” with their toy ‘cowboys and Indians’ (35-6). Letitia is clearly the Tiger Lily of Barrie’s tale, but instead of humanising his imperialistic trope, Wallace leans into the colonial metaphors and presents her as the dangerous, “unusual and exotic” (36) tiger cub waiting to bare her teeth into her Nanny’s hand. Her brother Henry is more of a damning portrait of Barrie’s band of pirates, intent on enacting violent scalpings. Both satirise the ‘innocence’ of childhood and condemn the British imperial project, while at the same time transposing the violence onto American cowboys instead of English gentlemen.

Primarily a coming-of-age story, the novel posits childhood and adulthood as two opposing entities. Exploring dark themes of child abuse, marital discord, trauma, emotional neglect, violence, gaslighting, fear of growing up, civil unrest, and mental illness; this is a challenging novel for any child reader. Wendy is a vulnerable though strong preadolescent, with one good example of maturity in the cook Mrs Jenkins and no one but her brothers, and Nana the dog, to talk to. Apart from them, there is the sadistic Nanny Holborn who beats Michael for wetting the bed and a distant, “never grown up” (92) mother who reads like Rousseau’s ideal woman in Edwardian form - “beautiful and vulnerable” (19).

Wendy’s repression emerges early on in the novel and results in uncanny sensations - she “began to feel frightened and she didn’t know why” (26). From her hiding spot on the landing, she witnesses a clandestine kiss between her father and Lady Cunningham. While John is young enough to transfer his trauma to a sanitised explanation, Wendy is old enough to have trouble repressing what for John will no doubt resurface at a later age. Freud’s return of the repressed is apparent throughout the novel, forcing Wendy to repeatedly face her ultimate fears of growing up.

Which brings us to the novel’s most troubling adaptation. The boy who never grew up is envisioned as Wendy’s secret brother; a young man named Thomas who in modern terms, would be on the autistic spectrum. Thomas has been hidden from the Darling children, living apart on their uncles’ Edenic estate, Rosewood, with only occasional visits from his loving mother. Wendy only realises midway through the novel that the friend she always loved so dearly, is in fact her brother. As a child, I remember being far more interested in this character than the heroine. Marginalised in Wendy, much like her role is constricted in the original, I was fascinated and moved by a portrait of a boy who sounded very like my own brother and the treatment he might have received growing up in Edwardian repression. But Wallace unfortunately restricts Thomas’s agency, making him more an impetus for Wendy’s ‘growing up’ than a character who develops in his own right.

Rosegrove is presented as the picturesque to Neverland’s ‘exotic’ jungle; a tamed wilderness “with neatly clipped box hedges and rows and rows of flowers” (70-71). Elsewhere it is described as a “gingerbread palace” (137); a sugary crust that can crumble to reveal the decay at the heart of this family – their shame at having a son who is less than Mr Darling’s standards of perfection (240). Wendy is terrified that Thomas won’t want to be her friend if she grows up, and presumably ‘surpasses’ him to join the ranks of those awful adults. In microcosmic form, Wendy’s doll’s house miniaturises and summons the dreamlike safety of their uncle’s idyll whenever they need it. Perhaps there are elements of Susan Stewart’s contention that the “terrifying and giganticized nature of the sublime is domesticated into the orderly and cultivated nature of the picturesque” (75). Those sublime incomprehensible feelings when youth is prematurely confronted with adult reality, seeks safety in the manageable form of the picturesque doll’s house.

Rosegrove then, becomes the stand-in for Neverland. Here, Wendy and Thomas, both deemed lesser than the ideal male, form a strong bond. Everyone claims Thomas is “soft in the head” (47), but Wendy believes him a ‘genius’, and a somewhat “magical” one (47). Much like Peter Pan, who dwells in the trees and wears a costume of leaves, Thomas is a talented sculptor of logs which he carves to guard his cottage. Though figuring him as closer to nature, it might be that Wallace underscores the potential injustice of such ‘affinities’ which open the way for denigration. When applied to Thomas, it becomes apparent that equating the marginalised and misunderstood character with nature is just another form of prejudice. But Wendy and Thomas - Peter’s reimagined double - have access to powers other characters cannot dream of. They are the only two to gain permanent access to the state of childhood. In dreams she conjures the pair of them flying “to a place that glittered with the colours of a thousand rainbows that grown-ups will never be able to see” (289).

The story ends neatly with old grievances mended, marriage restored, her mother “like the angel in Thomas’s drawing”, and her moustache-less father looking “much younger” (288). Wendy promises never to eavesdrop by banisters, and everyone settles in a state of youthful oblivion once more. But this childlike promise never to misbehave again, reads like a promise to retreat from the curiosity and questioning that must eventually guide us through adolescence into adulthood. One critic notes how in Peter Pan, the window marks the boundary between the nursery/domestic sphere and the outside/public sphere (Cuenca 3). But In Wallace’s Wendy, the banister replaces the window as a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience. It is a place associated with sight and hearing, spying and eavesdropping. By renouncing her spot on the stairs, her vantage point whereas a powerless child she can survey the adults below and learn by overhearing, does Wendy also give up what little autonomy she has? Meanwhile, the boy who never grew up is troublingly replaced by the boy who could never ‘grow-up’, in the neurotypical sense we limit adulthood to be. Thomas could cynically be conceived as a plot device for Wendy’s simultaneous coming of age and regression to a state of childish unawareness, which can only be reached “so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless” (Barrie 185). What is clear is that “[a]ll stories comprise within themselves the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to exclude” (Sinfield 21).

Works Cited

Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. 1911. Penguin, 1995.

Cuenca, Jaime. ‘“Father’s a Cowardly Custard’: Peter Pan and the Crisis of Victorian

Fatherhood.” Journal of Family History, vol. 46, no. 3, 2021, pp. 263-274.

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.” On Lies, Secrets, and

Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978, Norton, 1979.

Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading, 1992.

Stein, Olga. "Wendy." Review of Wendy, by Karen Wallace. Books in Canada, vol. 33, no. 1,

2004, p. 44.

Stevenson, Deborah. "Wendy." Review of Wendy, by Karen Wallace. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, vol. 57, no. 7, 2004, pp. 300-301.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke UP, 1993.

Wallace, Karen. Wendy, Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Widdowson, Peter. “‘Writing Back’: Contemporary Re-visionary Fiction.” Textual Practice, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 491-507.