Patriarchy In Peter Pan

Parallel Narratives with the Victorian Era Patriarchy in Peter Pan
“What are little boys made of?/ Snips and snails/ And puppy-dogs' tails/ What are little girls made of?/ Sugar and spice/ And everything nice.” This nursery rhyme dates as far back as the early 1900s. It is exemplary of the common Victorian views on gender roles, particularly how they should be enforced on children. Boys are adventurous and slightly gross; girls are docile and sickeningly sweet. Also written in the early 1900s, the novel Peter Pan shows many of the same patriarchal expectations on children. J.M Barrie, the author, goes in farther to almost examine the effects of these expectations on children who only know that. Barrie looks at a ringleader boy, Peter, who escorts …show more content…
They run amuck through this island full of sweeping terrain, ample room for them to provoke fights with any of the other equally violent groups residing in Neverland. For as much room and people live there, few adults are seen in the actual canon of the novel. When Wendy arrives, she almost immediately fulfilled the role of a mother, symbolic or not, to the Lost Boys, and even her own brothers. Although at home Wendy had been a caretaker for Michael and John, in Neverland she is the purest form of a caretaker, a mother. Everything in Neverland is shaped somewhat by the expectations of adults and the patriarchy; the children took perceived gender roles to an extreme. The Lost Boys were hypermasculine. If they lived in Victorian England like John and Michael had they probably would have been playing Cowboy and Indians and war games. In Neverland, they act these out with real Indians and Pirates to sequentially challenge, fight, maim, and kill. The Lost Boys take these typical masculine games to an extreme level. Wendy takes typical childhood feminine games to an extreme mother by leveling up from caretaker to actual mother in the eyes of the boys. In Neverland, Wendy is described as “every inch a woman” (Barrie Chapter 3). She is solely, primarily defined by that fact. Meant to be any kids dream land, Neverland only continues to reinforce the gender narrative that was essential to adult, Victorian

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