Motherhood Theme Analysis

Peter Pan is the novel’s hero, a boy so charming and brave that even his enemies find it difficult not to love him. Yet it is Mrs. Darling whom the narrator loves best. And it seems as though everyone but Mrs. Darling is fixated on mothers: Wendy, who wants to become one, Peter, who wants not to need one, the lost boys, who want simply to know one, and even the pirates, who admit with a dash of longing that a mother is like a Never bird who would die to save her eggs. And all but Peter agree that a mother is a person miraculously gifted at measureless, selfless love. They know that motherhood’s dullest chores are all tuned to some sort of white magic, and that magic inspires in them a confused awe.

Mothers and children are bound by a painful symmetry, at once a likeness and a fierce deadlock. The sublime extreme of a mother’s love is an inversion of the sublime extreme of children’s indifference, children who are “ever ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.” The magic of motherly love is commensurate to children’s “heartless” magic, a likeness that creates deep sympathy between them. But the mother’s magic quietly transforms the child: a mother longs to change a creature incapable of love into a person who can return love, a person no longer “gay, innocent, and heartless,” a person who can no longer fly. Motherly magic envelops children’s magic and slowly, lovingly wears it away.

Peter distrusts mothers because he believes that his own mother betrayed him, but he dislikes them because they turn children into adults. “Keep back, lady,” he yells at Mrs. Darling: “no one is going to catch me and make me a man.” This an odd remark: one would assume time to be the primary culprit, along with schools and workdays. But Peter is wiser than he may seem, and less innocent. Peter dislikes mothers because he knows that, in loving his magic, they would eventually take it away. Mothers know this too, and it is this awful knowledge that makes us love them.