Boys who can't grow up. Notes on Peter Pan as Bildungsroman

Abstract

In 1900, three children played surrounded by nature at Black Lake Cottage in Farnham, England, amid stories and panic-stricken metamorphoses planned by “Uncle Jim”. That experience gave rise to a bizarre book, The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, with photographs and short captions, the first work in which we glimpse the “shadow” of Peter Pan. The following year, James Matthew Barrie “Uncle Jim” published The Little White Bird, an anti-novel in which a six-day-old baby flies out of his bedroom window into Kensington Gardens. Thus began the adventure of one of the most successful characters in world literature, not only for children, with countless theatrical and film adaptations. Despite the subtitle - The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up - of the play that brought him resounding public success in 1904, Peter Pan is a powerful coming-of-age novel, with metaphors hidden beneath the images of shadows, islands and mythological ancestry with the god Pan. This contribution aims to investigate Barrie's most famous literary work in the context of the Bildungsroman, demonstrating how Peter Pan fully interprets the meaning of Bildung: growing up both as a rejection and as an inevitable, yet interpretable and questionable, destiny.