Growing Up And Motherhood In Peter Pan

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“All children, except one, grow up.” The sentence you just read is the opening sentence of Peter Pan - a fictional novel by James Matthew Barrie. Peter Pan is a fantasy with many themes like growing up and motherhood. The main characters consist of Peter Pan, Wendy Darling, Tinker Bell, and Captain Hook. Most of the story takes place in Neverland in 1904. Barrie also wrote novels such as Half Hours and multiple plays. Throughout Peter Pan, the reader is taught different life lessons while enjoying a story about a boy who never grows up!

Peter Pan is a story of a magical lost boy who believes he can fly and refuses to grow up. At the beginning of the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Darling get married and soon have three children, Wendy and her two little …show more content…

Throughout the novel, Peter Pan embodies the theme of growing up and childhood. Peter, the boy who refuses to grow up, makes a decision to forever stay a child and avoid being an adult. The author was probably trying to make the point that we lose our imaginations as we grow up and gain responsibilities. At the end of the story, when Mrs. Darling decides to adopt the lost boys, Peter almosts joins him. The reason he did not is because he asked if he had to grow up and Mrs. Darling told him he did. The other lost boys realized they had to grow up at some point and stayed with the …show more content…

Motherhood is represented by Mrs. Darling and Wendy. Throughout Peter Pan, Mrs. Darling keeps hope in her children and believes they will return. Wendy represents motherhood by becoming a mother figure to the lost boys. Peter Pan doesn’t trust adults. Before making the decision to forever stay a child, he had a mother himself. She didn’t believe that he could fly so he proved he could. He flew to Neverland then immediately returned home, only to find his mother had already replaced him with a different boy. This is what antagonized him to make the decision to forever stay young. Peter lost all hope in