Peter Pan

Caroline Mytinger's sketch of Peter Pan is the closest web source I could find to my idea of him - ruffled curly hair and eyes full of kisses stolen from Mrs Darling's lips.

What a lovely, lovely story. How I long to be one of the Darling children (and I think we all do) and take flight from this reality.

As a character, Peter resists definition. One can only point out the discrepancies in his personality. Peter is innocent, yes; he doesn't understand or know that Tink, Wendy and Tiger Lily want romantic love from him. This idea, it appears, of romance, is completely lost on Peter. Perhaps it is inaccurate to say he is ignorant or does not understand; the sense one gets is that such an idea does not even exist to Peter, that is he above and beyond concepts that hint at any definite morality (the assumption is that Peter is innocent because he does not understand like, love, or attraction, and by implication, does not understand sex nor the need for it, which, therefore makes him innocent, i.e. GOOD). In the final chapter, upon realizing that Wendy has grown up, he cries - I think - not because of unrequited love or any of that mainland rubbish but because the sublime experience of childhood, the time of flight of imagination (both literal and otherwise), has passed for Wendy, and he mourns this loss on her behalf. Yet, despite this innocence (see parenthesis above), Peter kills swiftly and, just as easily, 'forgets them after'. Wendy is aghast at this and tries to make him stop. She does this by inventing a game where he does nothing all day except sit on his stool and go for walks to improve his health, but he soon gets bored. He is youth and joy, the embodiment of a Platonic child with strange mixes of mischief, purity and amorality.