Among the tragedies of my youth: I was
exposed to Peter Pan too late. I’m not sure when I was first exposed to Peter
Pan--it wasn’t one of those classic books or movies that became fixed as a
cornerstone of my childhood--but by the time I heard about Never Never Land, I
was too mature and responsible to appreciate it for the escapist fantasy it was
supposed to be. When I hear someone exuberantly wish for a place where no one
ever cleans up messes or takes a bath, I imagine a place that smells terrible
and is covered with bacteria, and when I hear that the primary sources of
entertainment in this place are lazing around or picking fights with
pirates--well, the first sounds phenomenally boring and the second sounds
needlessly belligerent. There’s always been something uncomfortable to me about
a place where children are encouraged to be as chaotic and destructive as
possible. Maybe it’s just me. Flying is appealing, so I might have come along
if someone had told me I could spend all my time flying, but I would have wanted
a good library nearby for when flying got boring, and I would have worried
constantly about the Lost Boys damaging my library books.
And the Greeks are with me. If you want to
hear the ancient Greek equivalent of the Peter Pan story, you have to read Euripides’
Hippolytus. But when Hippolytus says
the Greek translation of “I don’t wanna grow up” he doesn’t mean that he wants
to fly off to Never Never Land and pick fights with pirates; he means that he
refuses to get married and assume the responsibilities of the head of a family.
He spends his days in the woods hunting (you don’t have to deal with any women
out there!) and devotes himself to the virgin goddess Artemis, who, despite her
disproportionate devotion to him, will remain perpetually unavailable sexually.
This sylvan seclusion might not have
gotten him in trouble by itself, except he goes so far as to disdain Aphrodite,
to insult her and refuse to participate in her worship. Greek gods tend to be
vindictive about petty slights like this, so Aphrodite’s response is to
engineer his disgrace, his exile, his excruciating death, and the death and
disgrace of several of his relatives (Greek tragedies don’t do things by half
measures). Although Hippolytus has sworn himself invulnerable to love, he doesn’t
count on the effect that love can have on others, and Aphrodite cunningly curses
his stepmother to fall in love with him. The stepmother is a very honorable and
devoted woman, and won’t let herself be unfaithful to her husband. So after
suffering an agonizing obsession with her stepson for an extensive period of
time, his stepmother commits suicide in despair--but in order to maintain her
reputation in death and prevent her husband from noticing her romantic
obsession with Hippolytus, she claims that her suicide was prompted by Hippolytus
trying to rape her. Although she initially comes off as principled and
faithful, by the end her self-interest has eclipsed any good qualities she
might have had, thus prompting the downfall of Hippolytus and disasters all
around.
One thing that the casual reader might not
realize about this play is the ages of all the principal characters. Hippolytus
has to be old enough that people think it’s really weird for him not to be
attracted to anyone, female or male. (And while today most people can respect
an asexual (or celibate, or otherwise unattached by choice) person’s decision
to stand outside of traditional romantic entanglements, such a decision was not
acceptable in the traditional mores of classical Athens: everyone had an
obligation to marry and reproduce.) Hippolytus is probably in his late teens or
early twenties. His father, of course, is old enough to be his father--about
forty, minimum; maybe closer to fifty. But Hippolytus’ stepmother is married
for the first time, and she and Theseus haven’t had any of their own children yet,
which at that time would put her in her early teens, probably no older than
fifteen or sixteen. Her stepson is almost certainly older than she is. And if
you’re a fifteen-year-old girl in a house with your forty-year-old husband and
his twenty-year-old son, which one do you think Aphrodite is more likely to
strike you with a longing for? But then, Hippolytus wants none of that: he’s
rather spend his days hunting and generally avoiding women. And that total blindness
toward sexuality is something that Hippolytus and Peter Pan clearly share.
If you believe Ovid, Artemis in her
devotion to her most loyal worshipper is able to abduct Hippolytus before he
dies and transport him to Italy, where he becomes the mythic, semi-divine “King
of the Wood” made famous in Frazer’s Golden
Bough. Mythologically, Hippolytus is treated as her consort, even though it’s
against Artemis’ nature to lose her virgin status. In many respects, Tinkerbell
in Peter Pan makes an interesting,
and rather nauseating, analogue for Artemis. In Disney’s version of Peter Pan, I always found Tinkerbell’s
attitude extremely off-putting. I read her as a grown woman who is,
inexplicably, romantically obsessed with a boy who refuses to have an adult
relationship with anyone, or even develop an understanding of sexuality. Even
worse, Tinkerbell is antagonistic toward Wendy because Tinkerbell reads Wendy
as a threat to her non-romance with Peter. There is some ground for this, insofar
as Wendy and Peter play house together--they adopt the roles of mother and
father to the Lost Boys--but neither of them really understands romantic love,
so they can’t build a romantic relationship. Tinkerbell perpetuates negative
stereotypes about women to the effect that women only read each other in
relation to men, even though Wendy isn’t the obstacle to Tinkerbell’s
relationship with Peter--Peter himself is. And since coming to understand love
would be “growing up” in Peter’s eyes, he will never become romantically or
sexually available. The takeaway, I suppose, is that it’s pointless to seek a
relationship with someone whose entire personality is defined by not evolving, not
changing, not growing up. It’s much more healthy to mature.
