Sunday, January 25, 2009

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling III


When Wendy is ‘captured’ in S&M roleplay with Peter and Tinker Bell, placing her in the position of Barrie’s Native-American character Tiger Lily, she imagines herself, quite literally, taken by pirates:

I couldn’t sleep for cabin-girl fancies, the maddest, filthiest things. On tilting decks they’d make me watch while pirates fondled and sucked each other, or all spent into a tankard I’d be forced to drain. All through the creaking night they’d fuck me, old negro men and little Malay boys...

And that hook of a hand, dragging down my underthing, probing my bottom. I’d frig myself there in the darkness, horrified and ashamed at the thing I wanted done to me. A-and the shame was exciting. The shadows slipped their long fingers up me, and could feel for themselves that I was ready...


Shame, degradation, violence and loss of control characterize Wendy’s fantasies. It is when she is at her most debased that Wendy feels most empowered by her own sexual potency, and effectively ‘allowed’ to enjoy it, sexual abandon being forced upon her, absolving her of any responsibilityand thereby enabling her to sublimate and harness her sexual guilt for her own pleasure.


With this comes Wendy’s own horror as she becomes aware of her parents’ sexual games with the nanny. Wendy is both disturbed by the exposure of their Edwardian upper/middle-class hypocrisies, and aroused by it, remarking 'I suppose that was how everyone must secretly behave.' However, Wendy cannot reconcile her sexual pleasure with her sense of self. Her repression leads to her inability to believe that sexual desire and goodness can coexist, undermining her conception of her whole world:

After everything my brothers and I had been doing, our family’s respectable façade seemed such a sham. So did society. How could everyone act so normally when they all had this heat between their legs; these things they wanted so to do?


Although sometimes joyful and capable of inspiring love, for Wendy, desire can also be violent and ugly. As Wendy masturbates, remembering her father kissing the nanny, her disgust at her father’s betrayal and her own arousal manifests itself into ‘a crashing, angry passion which I didn’t quite understand myself.’ Wendy’s shame is compounded by the voyeuristic intrusion of the Captain, who spies on the lost boys and the Darlings in the spinney. When Wendy realizes this in the most violating and intrusive way possible, with the Captain ejaculating onto her back, Wendy suddenly sees the desire of others as disgusting and ridiculous, saying; 'it was suddenly so silly and so ugly I almost wept.'


Moore and Gebbie cleverly juxtapose Wendy’s fantasies of submission, borne out of her guilt, with the experiences of Peter, who we discover is a child prostitute, servicing the paedophile Captain. The Darlings’ games in the spinney are brought to a crushing halt when Annabel (Tinker Bell) is found raped, we presume by Captain Hook. When Wendy finds the Captain masturbating in the spinney, in the place where Tinker Bell’s body was found, she is plagued and disturbed by her own rape fantasies: 'I was so afraid that he’d catch me, rape me, hurt me...but wasn’t that what I wanted? What I’d dreamed about? What I’d gone there for?'


Wendy’s self-disgust at her fantasies leads her to question, 'I-If I could think such things, then didn’t I...deserve them?' But as the Captain closes in her on her, Wendy is brought to the realization that ‘I could think about what I liked. That didn’t mean I wanted it to really happen to me.’


The power and freedom of the privacy headspace of sexual fantasy enables Wendy to confront Hook, for in defining her boundary separating desire and fantasy, she is able to attack him for his abuse and violence against the lost boys and Tinker Bell. In a wry play on Barrie’s characterisation of Hook as plagued by the agent of his death, the crocodile with the ticking clock buried in his belly, Wendy defeats the Captain, reducing him to tears and impotency when she says:

Children won’t realize you’re inadequate. You can pretend you’re still young like them, that the clock isn’t ticking. That’s why you fuck children, why you dye your hair. You’re afraid of women. And you’re afraid of getting old.


Gebbie’s final fantasy spread shows Hook being swallowed by a large jawed, fleshy crocodile, its mouth painted to resemble an adult vagina (it even has a beard and moustache) swallowing the Captain whole. Although not exactly what you’d call a happy ending, there is something triumphant in Wendy recognising the split between her real and fantasy desire. But the inherent risk and danger that comes with the potential happiness of sexual maturity and fulfilment remains.


In Neverland, one need never age. Eternal youth and escapism awaits those who dare to fly free from all parental control. But Neverland is a place of freedom, not innocence, and freedom can be a dangerous thing. The lost boys’ desire for Wendy as a real, flesh and blood mother, is as heartbreaking in Lost Girls as it is in Peter Pan. In her maternal, and sexual love for them, she both redeems and comforts, corrupts and threatens. While Moore and Gebbie remain woolly on whether the children’s sexual games actually occur, for our heroine, they are presented as threatening only in so far as they threaten Wendy’s sense of herself, as we are never offered the perspective of any other character. What we are told though, is that the figures of Peter, Tinker Bell and possibly the other lost boys are exploited and abused by the Captain. The last time we see Peter in Lost Girls, soliciting outside a public lavatory, “his face looked...harder.” Although still a boy, Peter is quite literally, lost.


***


Although there is a strong case for the argument that Wendy’s story of Peter is simply her fantasy, one could also read it as her way of sublimating the very real, unseen, abuse that she actually suffered from her father’s business associate, the Captain. This secret, repressed pain may lurk, still buried beneath fantasy and narrative, at the heart of Wendy’s confession. Her defeat of the Captain as a young woman supports this argument, and it goes some of the way to explaining her anger at her parents throughout the story and her own feelings of guilt and self-hatred. I think it’s entirely possible (although also reductive) to read Lost Girls as three testimonies of abuse, for exploitation of power never lies far from the centre of its protagonists’ fantasies/recollections.



However far you choose to take this interpretation, ultimately, although able to confront the Captain’s sexual abuse and corruption of the children in the spinney, Wendy is not able to reconcile and distinguish this perversion of sex with her own desires. Terrified and repelled, Wendy retreats;


My own desire had scared me so badly that I locked it all away in the darkness beyond those railings. Married Harold, twenty years my senior, because desire...w-well, frankly, it wouldn’t be an issue.


Thanks to Top Shelf for letting me use the pics...i.e. please don't sue me....

and no thanks to blogger, which always messes up the formatting on my blog posts :(



posted by raspberry beret @ 6:42:00 PM 1 Comments

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling II



In Lost Girls, Neverland is replaced by the spinney in the park; a place for Wendy to begin her own sexual discoveries. Again, Gebbie and Moore suggest that Wendy’s stories are just fantasies, or at the very least, operate with different rules to normal, non-spinney interaction: “…it felt like a dream, as if the real world were a different country altogether. All the rules were different in the spinney.” This is echoed later in Lost Girls, when Alice describes the hotel in which she, Dorothy and Wendy are staying in as “our island, like your spinney”; a place where each of the women is able to confess and explore their sexual fantasies and experiences without fear of reproach or rejection.



In the spinney, Peter introduces the Darling children to his friends, a ramshackle bunch of boys (the lost boys), and his lithe, gorgeous sister, Annabel (Tinker Bell). Spied on by a vicious, yet publicly respected, paedophile, a man associated with Wendy’s father (Captain Hook), Wendy’s teenage sexual experimentation enables her to indulge her fantasies of becoming like Tinker Bell, who is worshipped and degraded by the boys.



However, as happens throughout Lost Girls, the line between reality and fantasy is constantly challenged and blurred. Thus, as Wendy’s sexual games with the lost boys and Tinker Bell become increasingly elaborate, they collide more forcefully, and more farcically, with Barrie’s Peter Pan. For example, Wendy’s mature female body shocks the lost boys into silence, buoying her up with sexual bravado as she undresses for them before playing their ‘mother’;


I went to each of them in turn, to tuck then in and give a goodnight kiss. The first one was a boy called Tuttle, that they nicknamed ‘Tootles’. When we kissed, my nipples brushed across his hard, bare chest. I put my hand in his trousers, and he called me Mother.


In Barrie’s Peter Pan, Wendy stands in direct opposition to the boys in the story. As a girl approaching adulthood, she stands on the cusp of those permitted access into Neverland. Paradoxically, despite her love of fairytale and her reluctance to grow up, it is only after Wendy travels to Neverland and is dumped into a pit full of little lost boys, that her mature, maternal side is triggered. The boys flock around this sudden injection of female comfort and kindness, begging her to become their mother and Wendy quite literally becomes their “old girl”. She goes from child to mummy in the time it takes her to fly out the window.



Tinker Bell is, of course, Wendy’s nemesis. She is girlhood epitomised, so tiny and full of tantrums, all sparkle, vulnerability and female cunning. Totally overwhelmed by her feelings for Peter, Tinker Bell deeply resents Peter’s affection for Wendy and will stop at nothing to beat her love rival. No female solidarity here. Furthermore, in Peter Pan her wild mood swings and extreme behaviour are excused due to the fact that she is a mere fairy, and so her small stature prevents her from containing more than one feeling at the same time. In other words, she is a child.



She is also the archetypal bad girl. After all, she can make people fly... Heck, she’s such an archetypal male fantasy even her Disney version is a blonde, sexy Marilyn-eqsue hottie. However, when Peter returns to the Darling house in Barrie’s book, (and he keeps on returning, taking first Wendy, and then her daughter and granddaughter in later books) it is revealed that Tinker Bell ‘is no more’ since ‘fairies don't live long, but they are so small that a short time seems a good while to them’. You can’t marry girls like that.



In Lost Girls, in contrast to the nubile, girlish Tinker Bell, Wendy’s body is full, womanly and maternal. When Peter approaches her as whore, not mother, Wendy feels these two competing sides clash, saying of Peter’s first kiss; ‘it wasn’t an ordinary kiss; the way you’d kiss your husband’. As we see, the adult Wendy’s sexually unfulfilling relationship with her husband is the product of her (and his) inability to reconcile the two.

posted by raspberry beret @ 6:28:00 PM 1 Comments

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling I


continued from 17th October 2008 (sorry for delay...)


One day while playing in the park, sixteen-year-old Wendy Darling and her younger brothers John and Michael spy a young boy and girl having sex in the bushes. As the boy comes, his eyes fix upon Wendy. Later that night, the same boy climbs through their bedroom window. I hardly have to tell you his name is Peter.


When Peter comes to the Darling children’s bedroom, Moore makes it clear that Peter’s desires are fixed primarily on Wendy. As Peter initiates her brothers into the 'games' he and his friends play, Wendy watches in fascinated, horrified silence. Eventually Peter guides her into mutual masturbation before finally having sex with her in front of her brothers. As Wendy recounts this tale to Dorothy and Alice, everything she writes is qualified with an apology.


First, she apportions blame on Peter, focusing on his coercion of her: “Then Peter smiled and everything seemed all right, as if we both knew that this was only a harmless game.” As Wendy’s story progresses, she distances herself from her own experiences by placing it in the realm of fantasy or dream.

“He…he put his hand between my…o-on my private parts, and…and then nothing seemed quite real anymore. I didn’t believe it was happening.”

Shamed by her own behaviour, Wendy asks her audience; “Oh, how could I?”, Peter’s seduction of her treading a fine, and at times uneasy, line between persuasion and exploitation. However, as Peter brings her to orgasm, her shock is replaced by momentary bliss, and a sort of bittersweet sadness:

“I realized that I was…moving myself against his hand, then everything in me seemed to burst and there was such joy. Such perfect joy…

Afterwards came a quiet dreamy time. He told us to visit him in the spinney, but that we must never, never tell anyone. He then left us, through the window, but in my dreams he took us all with him, out over London, up into the sky, like a wish…and that’s how both my real adventures and my dream adventures began: with a vision of flying.”


And everyone knows how we’re meant to interpret flying...


If we read Wendy’s account of her tales as pure fantasy, we can see her conflicting feelings of elation and guilt around her sexual fulfilment, matched with her latent, unsettling interest in, and desire for, her brothers. Peter’s insistence to the Darling children that they keep their adventures a secret can either be read as an actual instruction, or a restriction she places on herself to keep her sexual desires secret. Either way, both of these interpretations reinforce her experiences with Peter as private and sacred but also potentially threatening and dangerous. There is, of course, another more upsetting explanation; that Wendy is recounting the first instance of sexual abuse.

posted by raspberry beret @ 6:24:00 PM 0 Comments