Eighteen or Eighty
By Catherynne M. Valente
One of the most upsetting scenes in literature (or at least upsetting to me) comes at the end of Peter Pan. Wendy, after waiting an entire lifetime for Peter to return for spring cleaning and take her back to Neverland, has grown old. She has children and a house of her own. Peter comes blithely to her window to spirit her off as he promised—and when he sees her age he sees not wisdom or kindness or a life well lived, but is horrified by her, even terrified at her proximity to death, which he will never have to face. Peter throws a small tantrum over the unfairness of it—the unfairness to him that she grew up, as though it was a kind of betrayal, and a far worse one than his broken promise to return right quick. All is made “well” when Peter spies Wendy’s small granddaughter, whom he takes away instead. From the moment the granddaughter enters the scene, Peter does not even look at Wendy. At the girl he made into a mother for all his friends, who he asked to stay home and sew and cook for them while the rest fought pirates. He tells her to stay at home once more, and with finality. He rejects her implicitly, explicitly, and entirely, in favor of a younger, newer version of herself. As though all girls are interchangeable, which of course, for Peter, they are. All that is quite bad enough. The unfairness of the whole business to Wendy always stung me, even as a child. It made me afraid of growing up. It gave me a horror of the passage of time. It made me think there was nothing worse than being old and undesirable. The small version of me actually cried with rage. There was a small end to my innocence in that ending—it came down like a hammer to say: no matter how many adventures you have, you are going to Get Old and Getting Old is an awful, lonely, bleak country. When you are old nothing will ever be good or magical again.
The sentiment is repeated through a great deal of classic literature for children. Childhood is the only country with any joy or sweetness or magic in it. The instant—the very instant—you become an adult, there is nothing left to love or want or do. Nothing that matters, that is. Growing up is the beginning of the end. There is nothing to look forward to. What a nihilistic message to give to a poor kid! Not to mention, one that assumes all children have idyllic childhoods and all adults are dead in the heart. So few classics of fantastical books for children offer any kind of road map to adulthood—a very important issue for adolescent readers! The story ends when the protagonist comes of age. When Peter, and therefore all of Neverland or Fairyland or Wonderland, doesn’t want you anymore.
It should be clear by now that I hate this message. I think it ill-prepares kids to look on the future as a place worth getting to. The peculiar Victorian fetishization of childhood leads both to a loathing of its opposite and a conviction that children are some sort of quasi-fairy Other, entirely another species. In the Fairyland novels, I have, and will continue, to try to argue another way. Childhood is a lovely place, or at least it can be, but to me, there is no age limit on magic. September began her adventures at the age of twelve. She will be sixteen or seventeen by the end of the series. That’s not really an adult yet, but past puberty, past the age of Wendy’s granddaughter, not a child anymore by any means. And at seventeen she will still go to Fairyland. Like many things—even the Fairyland novels!—she will experience the same things one way as an adolescent and another as an adult, understanding on new levels and with new knowledge. But at no point will I ever turn to her and act the part of Pan.
September’s newest adventure, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, brings her back to Fairyland a year older, affected deeply by her time there, a little wiser, but also a little angrier and more independent. She has begun to grow a heart, a new, untried, teenage heart, which does not know its own strength. She will travel to the underworld of Fairyland, where eventually all heroes must go. She will meet her shadow there, a selfish, covetous, wild and gleefully rule-breaking version of herself, pursuing all the desires September could never confess to in her underground kingdom. It is a book about growing up—if only a little bit. It is a book that brings up for the first time the enormous issue of work and vocation. There are first kisses and the capacity for forgiveness down there in the dark.
Throughout all the novels, the idea of a heart as a thing that must be tended and grown slowly, not a thing one is born with, has been a strong thematic note. That is the process of growing up, to my mind. A metaphor that shows the state of maturity not as a thing to be feared, but a country with its own magic and pleasures and adventures, merely different than childhood, rather than a dried up unmagical consolation prize.
In portal fantasies, the magical world often stands as an uneasy parallel to adulthood. Full of incomprehensible rules, people doing whatever they please with the snap of their fingers or the flick of a wand, vague intimations of wealth and power and sexuality barely graspable. So often those worlds are rejected by heroes, especially female heroes. Dorothy and Alice want to go home. They look at the fearful wonder of the other world and say no chance. September, to me, has always been The Girl Who Said Yes. To every adventure. And as I guide her along the weird paths of the heart, I hope to be able to give younger readers that roadmap in all its complexity, beauty, hurt, peculiarity, physical change and hardcore emotional honesty Feelings are hard. But they make us human. And being human is the work of a whole lifetime.
All any writer can do is share what they know. In September and her friends, I am trying, just as hard as I can, to say with honesty and fairy dust, the few things I know about being human on this planet. And one of the things I know is that spring cleaning can come whenever you want.
Find Catherynne M. Valente
Buy The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
Wonderful post! I totally agree with what you're saying, it's not the right message to send kids at all!
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