Peter Pan Vs. Jenny Waynest
Actually I bet they'd get along famously.
I was talking with my friend Alex the other day about these things I call “Harpy stories,” which get that name because of The Last Unicorn, which happens to be one of my two favorite books. (The other is Watership Down.) These are also her favorite books, so we actually got off on a tangent before we got anywhere with it… but she had just finished reading another of my favorite books, Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane, which is how we got on the topic of how there are kind of two kinds of stories about the mundane intersection with magic.
One of them is the Narnia story, where people from the mundane world are transported to a magical one and must, in the end, be returned home to use what they learned there in their everyday lives. One of my favorite such is a book called Black and Blue Magic, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Another that I love is The Fledgling, by Jane Langston.
(Why yes, if I could have a superpower, I would absolutely pick flying.)
The thing about these stories when they are done well is that they acknowledge that people and especially children pass through liminal spaces in their lives. We have experiences that we can only have once, and then we move on, return to the everyday, and go forward stronger and better for what we have endured. Tempered by the numinous, as it were, they return to their responsibilities and social connections. They give up magic for community and duty.
And then there are the books where the protagonist’s growth is mediated either by the knowledge that they cannot hold the magic: they must let the magic do what it will. The Last Unicorn is like this. We see it in the eventual fates and choices of Schmendrick the magician and of the Unicorn herself. And of course, the Harpy, who appears in only a couple of chapters in the middle of the book, but who is a deeply thematic figure nonetheless.
So often the worst of these stories (and in some ways the Narnia books fall into this trap) tell us that we can never have magic: that the only choice is the return to the workaday world. But of course the real truth is that you can have magic, or you can have predictable safety. You have to choose.
And both of those choices are valid.
I often think that Peter Pan is misread, because critics will argue that either Wendy’s choice to abandon Never-Never Land and go home to her family is a failure of her strength, or that Peter’s choice to stay a Lost Boy is a failure of conversion to adulthood. But it seems to me that the book argues that both of those choices are valid ones, in their own way—the tragedy is that sometimes people who love each other make different choices.
But that’s not wrong. Sometimes it’s okay to stay where the wild things are, so to speak.
Dragonsbane is a story that ends with the protagonist, Jenny Waynest, making such a decision: to follow magic and her apotheosis, or to go home and be responsible.
I think it’s a mark of the excellence of that particular book that every time I re-read it, I wish she would make a different decision than she does… but I also know I’d cry just as hard if she had gone the other way.
Best,
Bear