Returning to the Garden: The “Peter Pan” Complex
Makenzi Crouch
Click here for a printable version
“There
is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colours are
brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever
again.” —Elizabeth Lawrence
Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass both utilise the idea of a garden as a symbol of childhood and childlike innocence, where a child is safe, in familiar territory, and ultimately in control, with no adults and no rules. In this sense, J. M. Barrie’s titular Peter Pan and his Never Land are the ideal child and garden; Peter, by remaining in Never Land, avoids any possibility of adult responsibilities and retains forever the innocence of childhood. Unlike Peter, the child protagonists Tom and Lyra must grow up and leave their gardens; this, however, does not prevent them from attempting to return to what they associate with familiarity and safety and innocence.
Tom’s garden is a moment of time in his world, the stilling of growing up. Every moment he is in Hatty’s garden is spent “without spending a fraction of a second of ordinary time” (Pearce 181). However, though time stands still for Tom, those who occupy Hatty’s world are growing up without his realisation. He is too preoccupied with his desire to spend as much time as possible in the garden to realise what is going on around him. In his world, though only ten, Tom is treated as a small adult, but in the garden he is able to behave as nothing more than the child that he is. With few responsibilities, his is the sensation that things will always be the same: the garden is the encapsulation of this childhood. Because his childless aunt and uncle insist upon treating Tom as an adult, he seeks a place where he can be himself, and the discovery of Hatty’s world allows him that opportunity. For this reason, the longer he spends there, the longer he wishes to stay. Having figured out the disparity in time between his world and Hatty’s, he is eager to take advantage of the fact, but recognises that though he “could stay in the garden forever,” that “‘for ever’ sound[s] long and lonely” (142). Some part of his subconscious realises this as well; the more attached Tom becomes¬, the further he is pulled away. Hatty is the first to notice, seeing that Tom’s form is becoming more transparent the more often he returns. This intangible separation soon becomes more concrete as the time Tom wishes to spend there is foiled by the physical distance that he and Hatty put between themselves and the garden as they skate to Ely. Even before this, Tom felt the distance and loneliness as Hatty drew away and began to participate in more grown-up things.
The separation Tom feels finally culminates in the realisation that Hatty has grown up without him. Though he notices she has been getting older, it is not until his brother Peter is introduced as a new element in the garden and points out that Hatty is a “grown-up woman” that Tom accepts the fact that his playmate, who in his eyes has remained a child, has grown up (197). This blindness stems in part from Tom’s eagerness to remain in a place where nothing changes, but the recognition that Hatty has surpassed him makes him realise that being a child forever is no good if everyone else around him continues to age. Such understanding ultimately is thrust upon Tom as he discovers that with Hatty grown up, his place of eternal childhood has vanished and that he is unable to return to the garden at all. In his memories, however, “the garden will always be there,” the idealised place where he, like Peter Pan, did not have to grow up (184).
Unlike Tom, Lyra’s garden exists in and is populated by people from her world. While her haven of Oxford and, more specifically, Jordan College, does not qualify as a literal garden, it performs the same functions as Tom’s. Oxford is “Lyra’s world and her delight. She [is] a coarse and greedy little savage,” but she is a child, living in a child’s world of wars and alliances with little in the adult world to worry her (Pullman 33). Though this begins to change the moment Dust first captures her interest, she is still far more interested in romping about on the roofs of Jordan with Roger the kitchen boy than delving into the world of scientific discovery. She has little concern for anything outside her own contained world, of which she is the leader: her power over other children there gives her little impetus to move on to the world of the adult where her power will be virtually non-existent.
Though Lyra wants nothing more than for the things in her world to continue, she has no choice but to accept that “the part of [her] life that belongs to Jordan College [and Oxford] is coming to an end” (62). Her separation from Oxford is both a mental and a physical one, beginning the moment she leaves Jordan College with Mrs Coulter. In the Garden of Eden, the snake offered Adam and Eve knowledge, and that knowledge took away their childlike innocence. Similarly, in living with Mrs Coulter, Lyra begins to gain knowledge of the world and learn things that start to separate her from her childhood. Even Pantalaimon feels the change, that Lyra is beginning to grow up and their carefree adventures are fading away, as when Lyra bathes he “avert[s] his eyes modestly from these feminine mysteries … He had never had to look away from Lyra before” (69). This sense of developing of one’s sexuality is a key point in Lyra’s movement away from her garden; as she moves toward adolescence and toward the attraction of Dust, her childlike feelings begin to disperse. In Oxford, she does not see herself as a girl; she is simply another child, one with power over the other children. Her gender has little, if anything, to do with her interactions with other children. It impacts her relations with adults insofar as that her actions colour their perceptions of her as a child who does not act as she should, but as far as her friendship with Roger goes, it does not matter that she is female and he male. This changes, however, toward the end of the book as Lyra, endowed with knowledge and experiences from her journey, chooses to sit outside as Roger bathes, though “they had swum naked together often enough, frolicking in the Isis or the Cherwell with the other children, but this was different” (321). The ease with which the children interacted in the Oxford/Jordan garden has melted away as they have grown, leaving in its place the awkwardness of adolescence and the sense that to be in the same room with someone of the same gender while they are unclothed is not a done thing. This break of the shield of innocence marks Lyra’s separation from her garden and the childhood she had there. Though “it [doesn’t] seem to Lyra that she [will] ever grow up,” even if she returns to Oxford and Jordan, it will not be the same as she recalls, because her experiences in leaving and entering the world of the adults have forced her to grow up (147). Despite this, she, like Tom, will continue to long for her garden as long as she is away from it, even as an adult, because childhood is locked up in every stone of Oxford.
J. M. Barrie reminds us that all children, except one, may grow up, but even adults seek a return to the garden (Peter and Wendy 1). The biblical Garden of Eden is Lord Asriel’s garden; before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were innocent. They were “naked in the garden, they were like children,” but when the serpent tricked Eve, she and Adam lost that innocence: they essentially grew up (Pullman 326). In Lyra’s world, the moment one’s dæmon settles on a form, a person becomes an adult, coinciding with the ability to know good and evil. In the Garden of Eden, this ability to know good and evil meant that God threw Adam and Eve out. To grow up meant leaving the Garden of Eden, just as by growing up Lyra, Tom, and every other child must leave behind their havens. Unlike Tom and Lyra, however, Lord Asriel does not seek to return to his own childhood, but rather to the garden of humanity’s childhood. Eden, the “ultimate garden,” is representative of the world before the introduction of sin, and therefore of childhood and innocence; children are often seen as pure and without the capacity for evil, and it is to this state that Lord Asriel seeks to return. The end of childhood is at the settling of one’s dæmon. This is linked to the attraction of Dust, which is linked to original sin; Lord Asriel acknowledges Mrs Coulter’s thought that “if the dæmon were separated from the body, [they] might never be subject to Dust––to original sin” (329). To return to Eden would be to return the world to a state of childlike innocence, where there is no shame or sin, and where everything is pure and free of responsibility. As in the child’s garden, where the child can live freely and without worry because all responsibility is shouldered by the adult, in the Garden of Eden God provided all so Adam and Eve could live in peace. Like the child, humanity can constantly seek to return to childhood, but this search, for adult or child, is ultimately in vain.
Though a literal return to the garden may be possible, everyone retains only an impression of their garden within them, and upon return to the place they discover that it is not necessarily what was sought. Tom wants desperately to stay in Hatty’s world forever, but he eventually realises that his memories are centred on Hatty, and that it is his recollections of her that he wishes to return to. The more difficult Lyra’s journey away from Oxford becomes, the more she wants to return to Oxford, which in her mind is associated with pleasant memories of childhood and, most importantly, life without trial and difficulty. Lord Asriel seeks a return to Eden, but what he truly seeks is a world where there is someone else who takes responsibility for the difficult aspects of life. All three idealise their gardens as a place where things were better and a place where, if only they had not had to leave, the wicked or unpleasant things they underwent and endured would never have occurred. To have remained would have followed Peter Pan’s desire to “want always to be a little boy and to have fun” (Barrie, Peter Pan 32). Without the conditions that existed at the time that Tom, Lyra, or Adam and Eve occupied their respective gardens, however, it is not the same; the return to the garden, should it transpire, would never live up to expectation.
Works Consulted
Barrie, J. M. Peter and Wendy. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Pearce, Philippa. Tom’s Midnight Garden. New York: Harper
Sons, 1911.
---. “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up.” The Plays of J.M. Barrie in One Volume. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956.
“Elizabeth Lawrence Quotes.” Thinkexist.com, 2006.Pearce, Philippa. Tom’s Midnight Garden. New York: Harper
Trophy, 1958.
Books, 1995.
