Search Results

This chapter traces how Frances Hodgson Burnett and J. M. Barrie both participated in and resisted the creation of the emerging subgenre of children’s theatre. On the one hand, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Peter Pan drew large numbers of children into the playhouse, and turn-of-the-century commentators credited them with helping to establish the category of “children’s play” as a distinct dramatic genre. On the other hand, when we compare these two dramas to other productions which aimed to attract child playgoers during this time, it becomes evident that Burnett and Barrie were resisting the increasing pressure to cater shows specifically and exclusively to the young. Even as more and more critics began to insist that children needed their own specially simplified and sanitized shows, these playwrights stubbornly continued to include “adult” content in their dramas, clinging to the old pantomime tradition of trying to attract a mixed audience and resisting the idea that children needed to be shielded from such matters and addressed in very different terms from adults. Their plays thus provide a final piece of support for Gubar’s argument that Golden Age authors often resisted the growing pressure to conceive of the young as a race apart.

This chapter focuses on J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. It credits Barrie with discovering the third reason why it is necessary to weigh an infant as soon as possible, aside from weight providing medical information and giving parents the answer to the question often asked by friends and family about the newborn. The third reason why babies are weighed at birth is because they have ability to fly until they have been weighed. The law of gravity does not kick in until the moment that it is physically demonstrated that the dial on a weighing instrument moves when the infant is placed on it.

This chapter discusses J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). The literary and biographical origin of Peter Pan is Barrie's memoir of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), where he narrates his mother's inability to recover from his brother's death—her favorite son. For midcentury critic Peter Coveney, Peter Pan represents the late-nineteenth-century “cult of the child,” which “serves not to integrate childhood and adult experience, but to create a barrier of nostalgia and regret between childhood and the potential responses of adult life. The childhood indeed becomes a means of escape from the pressures of adult adjustment, a means of regression toward the irresponsibility of youth, childhood, infancy.” The play thus exhibits ambiguities, encompassing oppositions between life and death, past and eternal present, and time lost and time recovered.

Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan both originate from beloved British children’s literature. Both stories involve child protagonists that travel to a world of their imagination. Both films were scored by Oliver Wallace, who underscored dialog from authoritative characters in the same manner as recitative. Dream and celestial imagery in “The Second Star to the Right” is investigated as well as the tune’s relationship to Peter Pan’s leitmotif. The chapter also covers “You Can Fly” in terms of rhymed dialog, foreshadowing, dream imagery, escapism, and Mickey Mousing.

Between January 1961 and October 1962, over 14,000 Cuban children under the age of 16, unaccompanied by their parents, departed Cuba for Miami. “Operation Peter Pan” was a clandestine scheme organized by the Catholic Church in Miami and Havana, working with the CIA and anti-Castro forces in Cuba. Parents sent their children out of Cuba for several reasons. As U.S.-Cuba relations deteriorated, and parents could not rejoin their children, many youngsters—about 7,000—found their way into long-term foster care or orphanages throughout the United States. This chapter agrees that the “emotional economy” of parenting, domestic arrangements, and sexuality helps maintain political and economic authority the world over. Fifty years of child migration conflicts have, like missile crises, bombings, and assassination plots, nurtured profound animosities between Cuba and the United States.

This introduction proposes that Golden Age children’s authors and members of the cult of the child were at best ambivalent and often hostile to the growing cultural pressure to conceive of children as a separate species from adults. Rather than wholeheartedly embracing the “Child of Nature” paradigm, figures such as Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame conceived of children as socially saturated, highly acculturated beings—and, unlike Dickens and other chroniclers of childhood writing primarily for adults, these and other children’s authors refused to assume that precocious exposure to the civilized world would doom the child to a depressing fate. Contemporary reviews of Golden Age children’s classics and 19th-century discourse about the cult of the child reveal that Golden Age commentators recognized this: ironically, the two groups most strongly faulted by recent critics for portraying childhood as a static, remote, and idealized state—children’s authors and members of the cult—were censured in their own time for failing to promote a Romantic ideal of primitive simplicity.

This chapter focuses on the psychoanalytic interpretation of and popular case writing around the Golden Age classics Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Case writing on children’s literature undertakes not only the education of the reader but also a broader critique of innocence, ignorance, or immaturity. With both Alice and Peter Pan, critical case writing takes a cue from psychoanalytic case writing and from broader anxiety about man-child sexuality, discernible in popular retellings and adaptations. The Wizard of Oz has also been assumed as having a repressed adult history. These and other Golden Age texts are addressed to adult as well as child subjects.

This chapter examines how the Peter Pan brand of peanut butter lost its market dominance. Through the years, Peter Pan has generally recieved favorable reviews from consumer publications such as Consumer Reports; it has been lauded variously for its spreadability, sweetness, and having a lot of peanut chunks in its crunchy variety. In 1972, however, two samples of Peter Pan crunchy tested by Consumer Reports contained insect fragments and rodent hairs. Even more objectionable was the first Salmonella outbreak in peanut butter in U.S. history, which happened to Peter Pan in 1971/1972. In 2006/2007, Peter Pan suffered its second Salmonella outbreak at the Sylvester, Georgia plant. In the end, ConAgra Foods, owner of the Sylvester plant, was found responsible for 714 reported cases of Salmonella poisoning in forty-seven states. Peter Pan has since fallen to a distant third behind Jif and Skippy in the race for peanut butter market leadership in the United States.

In his obituary of J. M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw called his plays ‘terrifying’. Although Peter Pan (first performed in 1904) had long become a cherished children’s fantasy and a staple of Christmas theatricals, Shaw seemed more perturbed than enchanted by it (1993: 151). Barrie is seldom described as a Gothic writer, although his own well-known and often reductively understood biography has been ‘Gothicised’ into a dark psycho-narrative. Rather than use the latter to suggest Barrie’s election to the Scottish Gothic canon, this chapter takes its cue from recent work by R. D. S. Jack (2010), Valentina Bold and Andrew Nash (2014) and others, who demonstrate how Barrie is a writer of complexity and contradiction. The generic and thematic range of Barrie’s writing means that he is not a consistent or fully fledged Gothic writer but nevertheless Gothicism still inks a recurrent pattern of motifs and ideas in his work.

After a false start on one project for MGM (which did ultimately resurface for them a few years later), Comden and Green discovered that Gene Kelly loved an idea they had had for a follow-up to the stage musical On the Town, and that scenario (about three guys reuniting ten years after their service together in World War II) became the basis for their newest film. With music by André Previn, the movie, It’s Always Fair Weather, starred Kelly, along with Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd. Before they completed work on the screenplay a call from Jerome Robbins had them at work on their next stage project; they contributed additional songs to the new version of Peter Pan he was staging. It was the classic that starred Mary Martin.

The death of a brother or sister affects the survivors throughout life. Psychoanalysts have focused on ‘the replacement child’ born after the death of a sibling. Parents become overly protective or frozen in grief, unable to respond to the living child. The lost sibling becomes a saintly figure impossible to compete with or live up to. In a period of high mortality and large families, the death of a sibling meant rearranging accustomed patterns of seniority and responsibility. Religious belief, mourning rituals, and sharing grief with extended kin helped contain bereavement, but death of siblings in old age wiped out shared memories. James Barrie had lost his brother in boyhood. The ongoing popularity of his hero Peter Pan, the boy like his brother who never grew up, reflects the generations who reduced the numbers of children they bore and then lost so many to the devastation of the Great War.

This chapter charts the history of the Peter Pan brand of peanut butter and the hydrogenation process. The 1920s saw progress in the peanut butter industry with the introduction of hydrogenation. Hydrogenation raises the melting point of peanut oil so that it is solid at room temperature, preventing it from separating from the peanut solids. This is why peanut butter with hydrogenated oil doesn't need to be refrigerated. Joseph Rosefield of Alameda, California is widely acknowledged for the first patent to hydrogenate peanut butter. But it was Pittsburgh inventor Frank Stockton who filed a patent for hydrogenating peanut butter on March 17, 1921—almost three weeks before Rosefield. Peter Pan is ordinarily credited as the first hydrogenated peanut butter, but that's not accurate; credit goes to Heinz, whose hydrogenation pedigree dates to 1923.

The story of Operation Pedro Pan (or Operation Peter Pan) and the Cuban Children’s Program remains a highly contested one, still regarded in Miami as an urgent humanitarian “rescue” mission while in Havana it is viewed as a scheme that hoodwinked parents into sending their offspring out of the country as unaccompanied minors and sometimes even described as a mass kidnapping. This book moves beyond Cold War tropes about threats to the Cuban family by the revolutionary government and uses the episode to examine in detail the social reforms that unfolded in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and how these changes encouraged a new revolutionary youth culture of political activism and challenged the United States’ historical, political, and economic control and cultural influence in Cuba. By focusing on the generation of young Cubans who came to maturity in the early 1960s and tracking the parallel trajectories of the Pedro Pan children and their siblings, friends, and classmates who stayed on the island (100,000 of whom participated in the 1961 national literacy campaign), this book for the first time takes a broader view and presents a more nuanced explanation of this history.

The image of Peter Pan pounding on the window trying to get his mother's attention as her arms are wrapped around another child and Barrie's account of his childhood project of begging Margaret to answer the question “What about me?” are so clearly alternative versions of the same story that they require little comment. At this juncture, however, objections can be raised about having located and latched onto a childhood memory that happens to coincide with a plot in a story and exaggerating it far beyond its true importance. This chapter discusses the convening of a diagnostic council, described in Chapter 5, whose members were charged with the task of studying case materials and arriving at a consensus regarding critical components of a person's life.

The fifties musical was in its vigor and maturity, and getting newer all the time. We see this particularly in its treatment of old subjects, in effect reinventing them. For instance, Jerome Robbins, in his first job as director-choreographer, made Peter Pan the musical (1954) seem like the newest show yet, not just about youth but made of it. While Peter Pan marks the musical's passéiste side, its love of old things, House of Flowers (1954) shows off its need for innovation: a musical written by a composer and a fiction writer, featuring a mostly black cast at a time when the musical was routinely all-white and on a subject so sexy Cole Porter and Herbert Fields would have said no. Other musicals during the period are discussed.

This chapter focuses on J. M. Barrie's childhood. Jamie Barrie was born in 1860 in a small cottage in Kirriemuir, Scotland. For his first three years, Jamie was the youngest of seven living children. In 1866, his brother David, seven years older than little Jamie and barely known to him, was killed in a skating accident. His mother, Margaret Ogilvy never recovered from the tragedy. Over the ensuing days, weeks, and months (lifetime one could say), Jamie spent much of his time trying to make his mother forget about David. Both Margaret and Jamie discovered a way to periodically escape the emotional turmoil that had been triggered by the family tragedy. Throughout the many days that Jamie spent at his mother's bedside, an opening into a conversational safety zone emerged that involved Margaret reminiscing about her childhood.

As the television industry struggled to establish its identity in the late 1940s, it looked across town to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and embraced the deep-rooted, highly lucrative, popular musical and its music as sources of inspiration. It turned to the familiar sounds of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein—music which fueled Broadway ticket sales and the recording industry. Focusing specifically on commercial television’s first decade, 1944–1955, this chapter explores how network programming sought to absorb both the sweeping popularity and cultural legitimacy of the musical genre and Broadway stage in pursuit of much-needed viewers and a more established cultural image or cachet. Further, it explores how visuals were transported from Broadway houses to small screens and how the first glimpses of Broadway on television would emerge as the medium set the stage for decades of small-screen singalongs.