Female Characters In Peter Pan

“Lost Girl” written by Kimberly Belflower, a student at the University of Texas in Austin from New York who writes plays with fresh emotions and beautiful language that inspect the relationship between young women’s internal and external lives. “Lost Girl” is a play about adult Wendy Darling, the girl who when younger ran away with the well known Peter Pan. More specifically the play is about Wendy dwelling on her past with Peter and past in Neverland. She is obsessed with him, the lost boy who took her flying and gave her the childhood adventure any child only dreams to be a part of. She clings to the memory in hopes that he will one day come back like he said he would, she even leaves her window open twenty- four seven in hopes that he will

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

Three plays, five movies, and two television shows. The story of Peter Pan has lived on for over one hundred years, dating back to the original play in 1906. Filled with mythical fairies, mermaids, and pirates, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is a beloved story centering around the adventures of Peter Pan, and the Darling Children. Wendy Darling, along with her two brothers fly to the island of Neverland, a place that had lived in their imagination for years, but the true story is unbenounced to most everyone who has read the text or seen the movie. How could such an innocent story have such a dark background?

Peter unveils how children encounter similar difficulties as adults do in society since children do live in a society where there is an organized hierarchy of injustice, struggle, and real-world issues. The rivalry between groups in Neverland is explicit when “the lost boys [are] out looking for Peter [and] the pirates [are] out looking for the lost boys” (Barrie 112). In Neverland this frenzy occurs as there is a mutual disdain between the pirates and the lost boys. The lost boys are playful and rambunctious with the presence of their leader Peter while the pirates are vexed by the boys’ attitudes, especially since “there [never has] been a cockier boy” than Peter (91). Captain Hook also seeks to kidnap the young girl Wendy from the lost boys so that Wendy “shall be [his] mother” and fill the gap of his traumatic past with his parents (146). This tension between the lost boys and the pirates represents the unsteadiness between conflicting social groups that naturally exist in the world of adults. This situation also does not represent typical, innocuous play and is rather a grave activity of fighting that the children in Neverland confidently participate in. The ubiquitous struggle for power commonly seen in the adult world when fighting a war or striving for new heights in a job position is mimicked as Captain Hook attempts to steal Wendy from Peter. Peter’s leadership role in being involved with the logistics of maintaining and striving for power

“Oh, fairytales, where desperate, naïve girls sacrifice everything for their so-called prince charming”. The realities of these childhood classics are controversial, sexist, and dark, yet, it’s also adored by millions of young girls around the world. Cinderella, an often sugar-coated story, is a great example on how sexism and gender stereotypes prevail in literature. The Grimm Brothers touch on a variety of devices, from characterization to symbolism, all revealing the inequality in not only fictional literature but our real-life society as well. A feminist literary critic will interpret these controversial themes and apply their beliefs of equal rights into the study of the Grimm Brother’s Cinderella.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”-(Albert Einstein). Imagination is one of the varieties of themes that are introduced in Peter Pan. It is demonstrated in the novel in an assortment of ways from the children’s actions to Neverland itself. When you are a child imagination encircles the world like Albert Einstein said, and when you are young your imagination is more vibrant. It also configures as you start to matriculate and start realizing reality. In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the theme of Imagination is illustrated by characters, events, and symbols.

Snow White is a fairy-tale known by many generations; it is a beloved Disney movie, and a princess favoured by many kids. But did you know the fairy-tale was made to teach young children, especially little girls, their duties in life? It also values beauty over knowledge, portrays women to be naive and incompetent, and assumes that women cannot understand anything other than common household chores. Throughout this criticism, I will be using the feminist lens to analyze the fairy-tale, Snow White, through the perspective of a feminist.

Original fairy tales restrict the opportunities of female protagonists, allowing their fate to be controlled by male characters and society’s restrictive expectations of women. Authors such as Perrault of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ were quick to provide advice to their suggestible female readers in moral that girls should not try to drift from the path that society has laid out for them. Thus they became ‘parables of instruction’ (Carter) to indoctrinate the next generation in the values of a patriarchal society. Fairy tales of this time consistently remind us that those of the female sex will not prosper if they choose to ignore and defy the social constructs. Pre 1900s, the roles of women were entirely predetermined. A clear female dichotomy was established portraying them as either ‘the virgin’ or ‘the whore’. Stereotypical perceptions of women reduced them to biological functions and stated that they should acquire the role of wife and mother – objectified to such an extent where they were essentially their male counterpart’s possession. Both authors scorn the importance placed on domesticity and conformity, stressing the vital nature of being able to choose and uncover the consequences of societal ignorance. Carter highlights to her literary audience a passive generation of women who face the inability to vocalise their thoughts and opinions in the context of oppressive patriarchy. Within her work ‘The Company of Wolves’ “The

The fact that J.M. Barrie decides on the nursery for being the location for both the beginning and the end of the novel is symbolic of the importance of family life and maternal care in the novel Peter Pan. After the Darling children return back home from their adventures in Neverland, they come back to the nursery to be taken care of again by their mother and father. Wendy, which

“Everything we read constructs us, makes us who we are, by presenting our image of ourselves as girls and women, as boys and men” – M. Fox

Reading novels is an experience unlike any other. With the crack of a new book, the reader is transported into the pages, into a new land, ready to take on the role of protagonist. Each little girl has the chance to be a pirate-fighting hero, each little boy able to become the doting husband. If that sentence sounds strange, it is because society has socialized individuals to gender any and all activities, reading included. Elizabeth Segel drives this point home in her article “As the Twig is Bent… Gender and Childhood Reading,” which gives an in-depth analysis of gender in children’s book, and the implications it has for readers.

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan tells the story of “the boy who never grew up.” Barrie paints Peter as an extraordinary character living in a mystical world called Neverland, flying through the air, and fighting villainous pirates. He is also the boy who takes a young girl named Wendy from England back to Neverland with him. The interaction and interdependence of Barrie’s two characters, Peter and Wendy, symbolize and spread cultural gender stereotypes by mirroring the stereotypes embodied by the adult characters in the story—Mr. and Mrs. Darling—and by reflecting the ideas of gender roles of the time and foreshadowing the children’s understanding of reality and expectations, as well as their eventual maturation.

When someone mentions the name “Cinderella”, the first thing that usually comes to our minds is the fairytale in which the fair maiden who works so hard yet it treated so poorly gains her “fairytale ending” with a wave of a magic wand. However, the fairytale of Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers has multiple differences in plot from the fairytale we all usually think of. The plot of the Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers, written in 1812, is that a young female’s mother passes away early in the story, departing with the message to Cinderella to remain “pious and good”. Cinderella remained true to this message given to her by her mother, and she showed this in her work ethic. Because Cinderella had remained pious and good, her mother, in return, watched over her in the form of the birds above her grave that gave Cinderella help and material things that she needed. In the end, Cinderella has her “happily ever after”, for when the prince held a festival to find a new bride, she was chosen due to her insurmountable beauty. The feminist lens critiques how females are commonly represented in texts, and how insufficient these representations are as a categorizing device. These representations of women often include them being passive and emotional—staying back while the men do the work. Cinderella relates to the feminist lens because she fits into the typical representations of women created by men. Feminist criticism is important to recognize because women are often falsely represented as helpless, thus needing a man to come to their rescue. It is common in literature to see helpless women, crying and begging for help instead of being able to work out their own problems and hardships. Others, however, may believe that it is still important to uphold the fundamentals of the feminist lens because it keeps the man in power, which they say is important in keeping the man the head of the household. Cinderella thoroughly represents the feminist lens because it shows how women in literature uphold the representations of passive and emotional, created by the man.

Cinderella is a well beloved folktale following the life of a kind hearted heroine trapped in an abusive household, yet despite the obstacles faced, she manages to attend a ball and eventually receives her happily ever after. The story has been reinterpreted in numerous countries where it is estimated that there are nearly seven hundred versions out there. With the continuous popularity of Cinderella, there has been much criticism concerning the representation of Cinderella and the effects it has on the female demographic. By analyzing Cinderella’s gender representation of a particular version in accordance to generated criticism related to the effects it has on the female demographic, it can be determined that as new renditions are being created over time, it can be noticed that Cinderella’s gender representation are gradually becoming more independent, and active.

Children fairy tales are some of the first books we’re introduced to growing up. Typically, the princess is saved by the heroic prince and they lived “happily ever after”. Some may think our life should be like a fairy tales while others don’t. These tales created gender roles in which appeared to be very important. In the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel”, the parents leave the children in the forest to starve due to not having enough money to buy food in order to sustain life. The children later find a house deep in the woods where an old, evil witch lures them in and tried to eat Hansel and Gretel. They eventually kill the witch and find their way home to their father with no stepmother to be found as she has died while the children were away. In the fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel” gender and feminist criticism are highlighted throughout the tale by defining characteristics, consequences from their actions, and societal roles and expectations that were both prominent in German history and modern society.