Peter Pan example essay topic

428 words
"He is a man because of his age, a child because of his acts" Peter Pan epitomizes the "immature male" in today's society. In the story, Peter's age was not specified. He was only referred to as the boy who would never grow up. On a superficial reading, one could translate that attribute physically, but essentially it talks about the character's mental set-up. "If I don't think about it, it will go away; if I think it will be different, then it will be"Peter Pan symbolizes the essence of youthfulness.

When we allow Peter Pan to touch our hearts, our soul is nourished with his fountain of youth"Was not Peter's desire to stay young actually a militant refusal to grow up?"Peter Pan offers us a child-forever. It gives us the child, but it does not speak to the child"Peter Pan has never, in any easy way, been a book for children at all"The sexual act which underpins Peter Pan is neither act nor fantasy in the sense in which these are normally understood and wrongly opposed to each other. It is an act in which a child is used (and abused) to represent the whole problem of what sexuality is, or can be, and to hold the problem at bay."Whose (Peter Pan's) own patriarchal values extend to reconstruct the family with Wendy firmly as the nurturant, hardworking mother figure with little or no time for exciting adventures outside the home. On one hand, fantasy is a timeless mode, inflected within various forms within various forms, within various different cultures and at different historical phases, but as central to the adult as to the child experience. From another perspective, though, fantasy narratives are afflicted to childhood, particularly early childhood. In this latter sense, they would seem to contain something which we believe we must give up as we mature into adulthood, a Never Land in which only lost boys (and girls) are allowed endlessly to defy death and claims of experience over and ultimately triumphant optimism.

.".. (Secret Garden and Peter Pan) shows children who desperately want to invite adults into this place, and adults who take an unseemly interest in invading it". Secret Garden and Peter Pan are neither pornography nor erotica, whether about or for kids. They encode adult desire and anxiety at a level that never becomes overly erotic and is in any case never concerned with genital acts or even with the preliminaries to love that are staples of adult romance".