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Peter Pan is one of the great icons of childhood. He exists in popular consciousness as the "boy who wouldn't grow up," and J. M. Barrie's dramatization of Peter's story,1 which he called a "Fantasy in Five Acts," was an immediate theatrical hit. Peter Pan premiered as the Christmas entertainment at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1904 and was revived as the Christmas show there for a number of years thereafter. The plot of the play owes a clear debt to the conventions of pantomime, and the eponymous role is a part of the English stage tradition of the principal boy, but Barrie's play has always been as much for adults as for children. A "W.T.S.," in a review of the first production, noted: "The touches of tender pathos, the exquisite picture of a mother's love and suffering and joy can come home to but a few of the young ones."2 While it amuses children with Indians, pirates, and the famous ticking crocodile, Peter Pan manages at the same time to demonstrate and reify the "appropriate" spaces and roles for gendered Edwardian bodies. I argue here that the traditional casting of a woman in the title role is precisely what allowed the play its early success; by avoiding the presentation of a male body refusing to grow into its legitimate and ordained place in the structure of British gender roles and imperial politics, Peter Pan negotiated for itself a theatrical space that presented an eternal male youth without threatening the social status quo.
By the 1880s, British pantomimes had taken the form they still use today. The story of a panto is a fable for children; the hero of the story undertakes a journey or adventure which requires him to defeat a villain, and the experiences of his quest help him to reach maturity and to win the hand of the heroine. It is traditional to cast a cross-dressed woman to play the "principal boy," the romantic hero. Peter Pan utilizes an actress in the role of Peter, in keeping with tradition, but although both Wendy Darling and Tinkerbell might wish otherwise, Peter never evolves into a credible romantic interest; the principal boy becomes a new type in Peter Pan? He is the...