May 18, 2024 9:16:32 AM

Peter Pan Subliminal (at the time) Colonialism [Part D1]

What I came away with is that the story is SUPER imperialist and I am still grossed out by the overt racism present.

Frequently Peter Pan has been received as a fairy tale, a charming fantasy that captures the innocence conventionally associated with childhood.

But the play’s political unconscious is rooted in real stories of violent conquest, the British Empire, and Victorian notions of racial difference (3). The adventures of Peter Pan is a tale of escapism in an unknown world, yet the British author, J. M. Barrie, …seems to create the same world from which he tries to escape—one that propagandizes colonial ideology (2). …When Barry ﬁrst submitted the manuscript for production he titled the play The Great White Father (3).

And you said you'd come and get me, but you were twenty-five

And the shelf life of those fantasies has expired

Imperialist conquest does not just occur on the battlefield, with military might. It’s also a cultural war, fought with ideas. A simple children’s story becomes a justification (using the innocence and goodness of a child’s thoughts) to buttress the oppressing group and downplay the victimization of the marginalized group. Specifically, in Barrie's text, the crude imperialistic, white-supremacist, and capitalistic desire to brutally conquer the world and subjugate colonized peoples is filtered and purified through the immaculate innocence of the child and children's play and games (3).

You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes

[Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince/Lover]

And I lived in your chess game, but you changed the rules everyday

[Dear John/Speak Now]

…too young to be played by your dark, twisted games

[Dear John/Speak Now]

In the original text, the pirates are led by the dark and fearful’ Hook, whose ﬁrst mate is a ‘gigantic black’, said to be terrifying to children. Considering the period of the play’s inception, it would be difﬁcult to read Barrie’s choice of the name ‘Swarthy’ (dark, dark-complexioned) to represent the ‘baddie’ in his boys’ game outside the context of colonial thinking on race (3). There are frequent small pitched battles over territory with Hook and his men on one side and the ‘pale-faces’, Pan and his followers, on the other (11).

Victorian religious ideology created a heterogeneous and contradictory mythology of racial identity (p. 225). This included a presumption of the natural superiority of white over black peoples, with Darwinism used to explain the stratiﬁcation of perceived racial differences between white British and the diverse ethnic groups they ruled over in their imperial holdings. At the same time, it allowed to Christianity a potential civilizing agency: the idea that black people, despite their presumed ‘natural inferiority’, might be raised out of primitivism by virtue of contact with the civilizing inﬂuences of white culture (3).

I forget how the West was won/…Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best/Clutching their pearls, sighing "What a mess"/I just learned these people try and save you/... cause they hate you/…Soon enough the elders had convened/Down at the city hall/"Stay away from her"/The saboteurs protested too much/…I don't cater to all these vipers dressed in empath's clothing/God save the most judgmental creeps/Who say they want what's best for me/Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see/…And undo the destiny/You ain't gotta pray for me/…Time, doesn't it give some perspective/…I'll tell you something right now you ain't gotta pray for me

But Daddy, I Love Him/TTPD

My friends used to play a game where/We would pick a decade/We wished we could live in instead of this/I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for/the highest bid/Everyone would look down/Cause it wasn't fun now/Seems like it was never even fun back then/Nostalgia is a mind's trick/If I'd been there, I'd hate it/It was freezing in the palace

I Hate it Here/TTPD

Like many a colonial governor before him, Pan rules the island largely by intimidation. The boys who make up his followers are described as ‘like dogs waiting for the master to tell them that their day has begun’ (Barrie, Peter Pan, p. 39), and who know that ‘they will catch it’ if they do not satisfy Pan (3). Pan revels in the exercise of authority that occupying the position of the top male in his society affords him. He is completely comfortable with external, public shows of patriarchal power (3).

Barrie’s description of Never Land clearly reproduces the same colonial mindset: There are piccaninny braves on the warpath, whose expressions are limited to degraded forms of English (3). At one point Captain Hook says, “These Redskins know this island better than I know my own ship,” when reading his map of Neverland (12). Here is a very complete list of the portrayals through the years:

https://perrynodelman.com/neverland-and-our-land/