HIS WORKS
Barrie’s most famous and best loved work is undoubtedly his play
Peter
Pan, performed since 1904 and most recently immortalised in film in
2003.
The story is the classic tale of the child that does not want to grow
up and
Barrie clearly felt that it was, in part, the condition of humanity to
feel
always in exile from the innocence and freedoms of childhood. The
societal
constraints of middle-class domestic reality are enacted in the
Bloomsbury
scenes while the Never-Land is a world free of these Victorian social
constraints, a world in which sexuality and morality are crucially
ambivalent.
From this point of view, the familial nucleus represented by the
Darling
Children acts as a metaphor for social order and stability while Peter
and the
Lost Boys exist out with parental (and by implication societal)
control. The
brutish pirate scenes, in which the Darling Boys indulge with relish
(although
Peter himself also indulges, and is both infantile and devilish) are the
embodiment of anarchic disorder and in this way represent the innate,
but
repressed, desire for social deviance. Similarly, Wendy can be regarded
as the
epitome of ‘the good wife and mother’, a role which is playfully
challenged by
the more flirtatious and untamed Tinker Bell in the parallel dimension
of Never
Land. George Bernard Shaw’s description of the play as ‘ostensibly a
holiday
entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people’,
suggests his
understanding of the deeper social allegories at work in Peter
Pan.
Perhaps the best known, though by no means the
finest,
of Barrie’s fictional output are his early Thrums stories, Auld
Licht Idylls
(1888), A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister
(1891).
Literary criticism of these works has been unfavourable, tending to
disparage these
early writings as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial
Scotland
far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century.
Criticism has
perhaps judged these early works too harshly. For one thing,
regionalism was in
fashion at the turn of the century, as exemplified in the fiction of
Thomas
Hardy and George Elliot. Moreover, Barrie’s descriptions of humble life
are
acutely observed and the painstaking detail he devotes to describing the
conditions in which the rural poor lived offsets some of the more
idealised and
romantic characterisations and plots. The Thrums tales do not ignore the
problems of alcoholism and temptations of adultery in lives
characterised by
boredom, monotony and poverty.
Many of J. M. Barrie’s stories were drawn from his mother and
his own
memories of Kirriemuir life, and Barrie is unusually faithful to the
dialect
patterns of his native community at a time when the commercial demand
for
easily digestible and ‘polite’ English prose was particularly strong. A
re-assessment
of the value of his early fiction should note that one of the pervasive
themes
of the Thrums tales is that of change and, in particular, the movement
from
cottage industries to large scale industrial cities. If Barrie’s Thrums
fiction
does tends towards the nostalgic and the idealised, it is, in part,
because his
books sought to represent the values of a community life that Barrie
perceived
to be fast fading from view.
Barrie wrote many other works of value besides
those
for which he is best known. In drama, The Admirable Crichton (1902)
is a
bold analysis of the class structure and prejudices of Edwardian
society. The
play enacts a modern fable whereby the values of an aristocratic family
are
literally isolated (the family being stranded on a desert island) and
deconstructed in a play which debates the conventional ideals of class
and
gender. Gender roles and restrictions are also skilfully satirised in
Barrie’s
excellent and neglected play What Every Woman Knows (1908).
In fiction Sentimental Tommy (1896) and
its
sequel Tommy and Grizel (1900) give the lie to the idea that
Barrie is a
facile, sentimental writer. These novels offer a complex psychological
study of
the impulse of sentimentalism itself, characterized by Barrie as the
inability
to sustain strong emotional feeling oneself whilst being able to
instinctively
merge into the feelings of others. It is this trait, Barrie suggests,
like
Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, that is both
the
gift and the curse of the writer, and is the romantic allure as well as
the
impenetrability of Tommy himself.
A summary of Barrie’s writing should not
neglect his
final prose masterpiece Farewell Miss Julie Logan (1932), a
haunting
short novel drawing on the folkloric and ballad traditions passed on to
Barrie
by his mother. The story describes a young minister’s enchantment under
the
spell of the amorphous Julie Logan, thought to be the ghost of a
Jacobite
heroine believed to have sheltered the Young Pretender. The novel
maintains a
powerful ambivalence, common to Scottish writing, between the spectral
evocation of the haunted Scottish landscape and the powerful rendering
of a
fractured psyche torn by repressed desire and human isolation. This
novel
epitomises the best of Barrie’s work in which the condition of exile
and the
predicament of human isolation is the basis for the best of his fantasy
and the
most profound of his considerable psychological perception.
© http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writ
ers/j_m_barrie/works.shtml
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Academic year
2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
©Marta Soler Gamero /marsoga@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press