Never Never Land

      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.