Flight Behavior: Mr. Darling and Masculine Models in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy

Abstract

According to scholars such as John Tosh, Bradley Deane, and James Eli Adams, variations on this restraint-based masculine model included the paterfamilias, the entrepreneur, the gentleman, the soldier, and even—when self-rule extended to self-punishment or to heroic asceticism—the desert saint. According to Bradley Deane, by the late 1800s, the antiman was no longer the “primitive, bloodthirsty Zulu,” but “the hen-pecked, lower middle-class clerk” (158–59) as a new hegemonic masculinity was constellated: the New Imperial man, physically strong, naturally aggressive, skipping the mid-century maturation process to retain the “savagery” of his boyhood, playing out his adult life in an endless series of homosocial contests on the wild frontiers of the British empire. According to the cultural bargain described by Tosh, as consolation for being a “cypher” at work, Mr. Darling should find an appreciative audience in his wife and family, but it appears that the admiration his “too affectionate nature” requires (61) is largely denied him even at home, where he plays the role that Tosh claims was increasingly assigned to middle-class fathers: that of the “bumbling amateur” parent (160). [...]Mr. Darling does not need physical courage—the courage to kill pirates, or even to swallow nasty-tasting medicine—in order to do what makes him valuable to his family and to his society: that is, to feed his dependents and serve his firm by clerking in an office.