“So all the children flew away”: The Exclusion of Women in Golden Age Adventure Stories

Written for the course "From Alice to Eeyore: Favorites and Classics from the Golden Age of Children's LIterature"

In Beatrix Potter’s Little Pig Robinson, the narrator says of the young protagonist’s aunts, “we shall not hear very much about them in this story. They led prosperous uneventful lives, and their end was bacon. But their nephew Robinson had the most peculiar adventures that ever happened to a pig” (Potter 25). In this quote, the book, published at the very end of the Golden Age of children’s literature, displays a trend visible in several other books from this period. Golden Age children’s literature is full of adventure stories. Child protagonists sail the seas and explore magical worlds. The relationship of adults to these worlds is complex. In many cases, adults are not present at all; in others, adults exist, but the dynamics between them and the children are subverted from what is expected. The trend revealed in the dismissal of Robinson’s aunts can be seen by examining the stories of the older relatives and family friends of child protagonists. Specifically, I will look at Jim’s mother in Treasure Island, Wendy’s parents and her evolution to motherhood in Peter and Wendy, Alice’s sister in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the narrative involvement of J.M. Barrie, Charles Dodgson, and A.A. Milne. Many scholars have discussed both the complex adult-child relationships and the exclusion of adults from children’s spaces and adventures in Golden Age children’s literature. However, the issue is complicated by gender, as adult women are needed for the beginning of the adventure but ultimately abandoned, while men can often insert themselves either into the adventure itself or into the narration of the story.

Jim Hawkins’s mother is active in the beginning of Jim’s story in Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but Jim leaves her behind once the actual adventure starts, highlighting how adult female relatives are barred from adventure even if they were crucial actors at one point. The narration – provided by Jim himself – barely mentions her after the adventure begins, erasing her previous involvement and excluding her from the most important actions. Jim’s mother accompanies him to the hamlet to look for people to defend the inn, which is a critical moment in the beginning of the action. Once there, Jim is not the one whose appeals we hear – his mother is. When the villagers are afraid to go back to the inn with them, she “made them a speech. She would not, she declared, lose money that belonged to her fatherless boy; ‘if none of the rest of you dare,’ she said, ‘Jim and I dare… small thanks to you big, hulking, chicken-hearted men’” (Stevenson 26). This defiant, courageous speech does not convince the people of the hamlet, but it is still important, because it shows she is a real character with agency. It also gives Jim the motivation to return to the inn. She later suggests where to look for the key to the chest, which Jim was unable to find (Stevenson 27). She is necessary for Jim’s success as he starts the adventure.

Her strength, intelligence, and agency are stripped almost immediately, though; when the pirates enter, she faints. This leaves Jim to be the only one to hear the crucial conversation, and her “weakness” gives Jim and the doctor an excuse to discount her and exclude her from future conversation. Jim visits her briefly before going to Bristol, and she is never mentioned again. She has a use, which is to help her son, and when she stops being physically and emotionally strong, she is pushed out of the narrative and her child’s adventure world, left to maintain a domestic world to which he can return.

The idea of a mother being involved and then abandoned is expanded through multiple generations in Peter and Wendy. Mrs. Darling finds Peter and his shadow, but is left behind, and Wendy must stop adventuring after she grows up, only to watch her children take her place. In a story about adventuring with Peter Pan, it seems reasonable to think that the first person to actually interact with Peter would be important in starting the adventure, and that role falls to Mrs. Darling. She “started up with a cry, and saw the boy, and somehow she knew at once that he was Peter Pan” (Barrie 12). After he flees – upset at seeing an adult – she and Nana find his shadow, and she carefully hides it; the search for and reattachment of the shadow later are important parts of Peter’s first interaction with Wendy. Yet her contributions are never recognized, and she is abandoned. As much as Peter was barred from his mother’s home, Mrs. Darling is barred from his world of childhood. Even the stars are “anxious to get the grown-ups out of the way. So as soon as the door of 27 closed on Mr. and Mrs. Darling there was a commotion in the firmament, and the smallest of all the stars in the Milky Way screamed out: ‘Now, Peter!’” (Barrie 22). Clearly, even nature itself is adamant that Mrs. Darling not be allowed to be a part of this adventure.

Wendy herself falls victim to the same trend within the text. The novel is titled for her; it is her adventure. After returning home, however, she grows up, and her adventuring is restricted. She is able to return to Neverland for spring cleaning for a few years, when she is in a stage between childhood and adulthood; in this stage, she has access to the adventure world, but only briefly, and primarily for domestic activities. Once she becomes an adult, she, like her mother, is completely unable to go back with Peter. And like her mother, she watches her child abandon her.

In Peter and Wendy, at least, unlike Treasure Island, the narrative occasionally remembers the mother after leaving her behind; the children quiz each other on facts about Mrs. Darling while in Neverland, and the narrator comments on the cruelty of children going off and coming back after some time expecting to be rewarded (Barrie 97). Yet there is still a clear sense that children will always be cruel and adventure in worlds which adults will never be able to enter. The lost boys feel certain “that one can get on quite well without a mother, and that it is only the mothers who think you can’t” (Barrie 98). In other words, mothers need their children for their identity and importance, but children can take their time returning to their mothers and have identities separate from them. This kind of sentiment makes sense in this book, since Peter Pan is king and his identity is grounded in a hatred of adults, but it is also clearly part of a greater trend.

Similarly to how Wendy is relegated very quickly to the role of mother rather than girl, and increasingly pushed from the adventure world, the exclusion of Alice’s older sister from Wonderland as well as the way in which Dodgson inserts Alice’s sisters and acquaintances reveal that even older girls do not have as much agency and access to adventure in what should be a child’s world as men do. This suggests that there is a – very young – age when Golden Age girls must stop adventuring, and no cut-off for men. Alice’s sister is indirectly involved in starting off Alice’s adventure, because it is her book – which has “no pictures or conversations” (Carroll 9) – that tires Alice, prompting her to drift off down the rabbit hole. It is unclear how much older she is, but she is old enough that she, unlike her little sister, is unable to enter Wonderland. When Alice tells her story, the sister has a dream as well. She “half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality” (Carroll 111). She can imagine Alice’s adventures, and come very close to experiencing the same kind of magic, but she is never able to fully give herself to the dream. Very revealing is the fact that even as she is contemplating this child’s adventure world, she also contemplates growing up, picturing “how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood” (Carroll 111). This suggests that she is aware that she has outgrown her own access to adventure, and that before long Alice too will access Wonderland only through memory.

Alice’s other sisters are also referenced in the book, but they are brief, coded mentions. Prima, Secunda, and Tertia in the opening poem, Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie in the Dormouse’s story (Caroll 65) and the flowers in Through the Looking Glass represent the girls, but these minor, sometimes metatextual characters are not important to the action. The flowers are the only characters who really exist, and they stay in one spot. All of the sisters’ personas are props more than participants in the adventure. Additionally, these clever insertions of real people are not alone, as Dodgson also inserts characters that symbolize teachers, a governess, and political figures. Thus the girls, even in a child’s adventure, not only have very little identity or agency but are overshadowed by adults.

Some of the Golden Age works, namely Peter and Wendy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Winnie-the-Pooh also display an adult male presence emerging through the narration. The narration style in these works allows the male author to be an indirect part of the adventure even if he cannot literally be a character physically present in the child’s fantasy world. Although J.M. Barrie and the narrator of Peter and Wendy cannot be equated, the knowledge that Barrie was a family friend of the children on which he based Peter, combined with the intimate, sometimes sexist narrative style makes many readers draw a connection to a male figure, one who inserts himself into the adventure. In one instance, the narrator uses first person to decide which of a great many adventures to describe, as if he witnessed them all (Barrie 72); this cements his presence in Neverland. Dodgson, or Carroll, was also a family friend of Alice and her siblings, and he too inserts himself into the story. The Knave at court and the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass are thought to symbolize him, much like the aforementioned characters representing Alice’s sisters and acquaintances. A.A. Milne is perhaps most interesting, as Winnie-the-Pooh is told in such a way that Milne as narrator telling the story to his son is crucial. Milne, therefore, can be seen manipulating the world in which Christopher Robin plays. And while Winnie-the-Pooh does not have the obvious exclusion of adult women that the other books do, it is certainly present; Christopher Robin’s mother is mentioned in the acknowledgements, so clearly she is important to the story, but she is nowhere to be found within the work. The narrative self-insertion of these three men allows them access to adventuring as a child, even as they actively bar their female characters from the same opportunity.

Female characters in Golden Age children’s literature are pushed to grow up and fill their roles as mothers quickly, and once they do so, they are shut out of children’s worlds of adventures, even if they were the ones who enabled the adventure to begin. Critic Richard Rotert observes that when Wendy grows up, she “acknowledges the repressed youthfulness her adulthood would conceal… Peter Pan’s return reminds Wendy of her childhood and of the repressed figuratively dead child within her” (Rotert 122). While Rotert places this idea in the center of a larger argument about psychoanalytical theory, which I cannot explore in this paper, I would argue that it also displays the idea that girlhood, and the adventures experienced as a girl, are pushed down in women. Men in these novels do not have the same restrictions. The adult male characters often act very child-like, as observed by many of my classmates, and the male narrators are often able to insert themselves into the adventure. The trend is clear: women are more important than men setting up the adventures of their younger relatives, but they are given less agency and ultimately excluded in a way their male counterparts are not.

Works Cited

Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan: Peter and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Ed. Jack Zipes. 1911. Penguin, 2004.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Ed. Peter Hunt. 1865. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. 1926. Puffin, 2005.

Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Little Pig Robinson. 1930. Frederick Warne, 2011.

Rotert, Richard. “The Kiss in a Box.” Children’s Literature, vol. 18 no. 1, 1990, pp. 114-123. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/chl.0.0056

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Ed. Peter Hunt. 1883. Oxford University Press, 2011.

(quote in title: Barrie 96)