Neverland
November 5, 2010
DAWN EDEN writes about the works of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, in The Weekly Standard:
Throughout his career, his men remain boys. They may be boys who have charm, or pride, or courage, or brains, or (like the title character of The Admirable Crichton) all of the above. In his final play, the biblical drama The Boy David, he turned the young king of Israel into a proto-Peter Pan—even to the point of, as with Peter Pan, writing the role for a female actress. Not only are his men boys; his women are boys and, like David, are destined to rule, but minus the divine call to parenthood. Theirs is the independence of pure isolation from responsibility, the kind that the 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton championed: an impregnable “solitude of self.”
— Comments —
Fred Owens writes:
Woman love boys because they understand boys. If you are a mother who has raised boys, you know what they are like and you love them.
For the same reason, women love men who act like boys.
But when a boy becomes a man, and truly becomes a man, he becomes something that his mother and other women do not fully understand.
Men are different than women, and stand apart and have different thoughts and different feelings. But if we remain as boys, we might seem a little easier to love.
Laura writes:
That’s profound and reminds me of Robert Frost’s words “A man must partly give up being a man/With womenfolk.” Though I don’t think women necessarily understand boys, I think you are right. The boy-man doesn’t exist so radically apart from a woman.
Fred writes:
Most men have a bit of the boy in them, and it might come out in a flirtatious way when a man meets a woman he likes. Or it might come out when he’s late for dinner and soused, a bit of the boy to be scolded. But there is a kind of manliness that women don’t understand at all. How many times has a woman said to her man, ” I want to know how you’re feeling.” That is an understandable desire. But to be honest, we men have different feelings. We have feelings that women don’t have.
I am sure of this, because there are men in my life whom I am close to as friends and brothers, and sometimes they are the only ones who understand what I am feeling. You might say, and I would agree, that women are more empathetic, and I have receive good emotional comfort from women in my life — wives, lovers, sisters, and friends. But we are different. Men are humble enough to admit to this. They will easily say, “Oh women! Who can understand a woman?”
Women might adopt that same humility toward men — in that a certain part of our thoughts and feelings are simply not accessible or understandable.
It’s a mystery and isn’t that lovely?
Laura writes:
That spirit of humility is important. We will never fully understand the inner world of the opposite sex and at the same time, it’s important to try and know, to investigate the matter.
