The appeal of flight … I mean, Batman’s got a cool car, but flight is what captures people’s imagination. To take two or three running steps and soar into the air. That’s everybody’s dream.”
— Christopher Reeve
Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie created Peter Pan in 1902, evolving the character out of stories he told children. But Peter Pan’s real origins are far more distant.
As an un-aging, flying figure who spirits children away into the night, Peter Pan was part of a storytelling tradition that stretched back several thousand years. He sits squarely in a mythological tradition of fairies and demons that crosses cultures and includes such figures as Lilith, the half-serpent Lamia, and Shakespeare’s Titania, the fairy queen. Such beings often fly, and they often steal away human children.
“Demon figures and fairies have undergone a series of transformations, but what remains constant is their supernatural power and their association with the concerns of birth, death, and loss,” noted BBC broadcaster Melvyn Bragg.
Fairies are “…supernatural beings who inhabit a space, both conceptual and physical, between gods and me,” said Juliette Wood, associate lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Cardiff University. “They have their world, which parallels the human world, but they’re also associated with natural places — forests, streams — and with the works of man, with bridges and orchards.”
Fairies are often seen as “…stuck at a certain point in life,” said Diane Purkiss, fellow and tutor of English at Keble College, Oxford. “Fairies often represent a part of mortal life that you can’t move on from the way a human being would.”
“Barrie was Scottish, and he knew a lot of Scottish folklore,” Purkiss said. “And what Peter Pan is really about is dead children.”
Peter Pan resembles the ancient Mesopotamian demon Kubu, the lost “little one” who never knew his name and never grows older, being eternally trapped between life and death.
“(Kubu) therefore longs for other children as companions, and that’s exactly what happens to Peter,” Purkiss said. “This is kind of autobiographical, because Barrie had a brother who died when he was still a child.”
Barrie’s elder brother, Davi, died in a skating accident at the age of 14.
“Barrie always envied this little boy because he was his mother’s favorite,” Purkiss said. “His mother never ceased to mourn for Barrie’s dead brother. And the only way not to grow — to be Peter Pan — is to be a dead child.”
Barrie introduced Peter Pan as a seven-day-old baby in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird in a section called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. During the Christmas season of 1904 in London, Barrie premiered his play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. In 1911, Barrie turned the play into a novel, Peter and Wendy.
The character’s adventures in Neverland with Lost Boys, fairies, pirates, mermaids, and Native Americans have been adapted innumerable times, notably in Walt Disney’s 1953 animated feature film and a 2003 live-action feature film starring Jeremy Sumpter.
He’s had his bronze statue in London’s Kensington Gardens since 1912 (the statue now talks to your smartphone).
In 1983, psychologist Dan Kiley wrote the book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up about immature males.
“Peter might be blessed with eternal youth, but that means he makes his sacrifices,” observed Hoai-Tran Bui in USA Today. “Like forgetting what love is, pretending not to care about his friends, and living in a perpetual state of careless abandon.”
Peter’s brave and even philosophical statement that “To die would be an awfully big adventure” is frequently repeated.
“Peter’s trademark line gets tossed around a bit, especially when he’s close to being killed,” Bui wrote. “And less than feeling like a naive child’s statement about death, it feels like an open invitation. Maybe we’re reading too much into this, but Peter was dark beneath the surface, man.”
Peter’s most famous attribute, of course, is his ability to fly. Variously attributed to fairy dust, happy thoughts or the notion that small children are “part bird,” its real source is in human dreams.
“In almost every culture, flying dreams represent freedom or a release from daily pressures,” psychologist Jeffrey Sumder said, adding that while dreams about flying are extremely common, they are more common in adult males than other segments of the population.
“Oftentimes, men in today’s world negotiate issues regarding freedom,” Sumber said. “There is great pressure to perform at work, at home, in the bedroom, financially, athletically, socially, and more and more, emotionally. Thus, it has become fairly common for many males to confront their feelings about this pressure as well as their relationship to the underlying desire to be free, by working it out in flying dreams.”
Children, too young to be left on their own, necessarily feel constrained. And the experience that is the polar opposite of constraint is flight.
No wonder, then, that flight has always figured so prominently in superhero stories. Characters like Peter Pan, Superman and Captain Marvel can literally fly, while others like Spider-Man, Batman, Daredevil and Tarzan move on lines or vines with such physical freedom that they might as well be flying.
“I think that is the natural impulse to be free, to rise above where one has been, to not be pulled back by the gravitational pressures of family or society,” observed psychologist and author Nathaniel Branden. “I think it’s a very natural fulfillment of a metaphoric dream. Everybody wants to fly, and the metaphor for that is literal flying. The flying they want is not physical, but spiritual.”
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