lalalei2001
Since: Oct, 2009
#2: Oct 29th 2025 at 12:08:15 AM
I had a discussion
about that very same topic in the Literature Chatterbox thread a while back!
Total posts: 2

On the subject of Sir James Matthew Barrie's story and character Peter Pan, I've wondered since my early days on the internet. The original 1904 play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up had an earlier considered title of ''The Boy Who Hated Mothers'' and Sir Barrie considered having Captain Hook be a woman played by Dorothea Baird who was in the role of Mary Darling at the time to play on the idea that Peter hated mothers and saw in the female Hook a wicked mother/stepmother figure. [1]
Then how did the part of Captain Hook get changed from female to male in the first place?
Gerald du Maurier was a brother of Sylvia Jocelyn Busson Llewelyn Davies who was the mother of the inspirations for the Lost Boys found in the Llewelyn Davies brothers. He was already in the role of George Darling, but his connections to Sylvia who was a frequent life partner of Barrie's allowed him to beg and plead the playwright novelist into giving him the additional role of Hook in Baird's place. It has since become a tradition of when putting on Peter Pan to cast the same male actor for both George Darling and Captain Hook [2] to play up potential Oedipal coding which has baffled literary scholars to this day.
In a sense, swapping out the Jungian Electra/Freudian feminine Oedipus complex reading of a female Captain Hook representing Wendy's subconscious wish to replace her mother for a traditional Freudian Oedipus complex of Captain Hook and George Darling representing Peter Pan's wish to supplant the father figures in his life.
But WHAT IF... Dorothea Baird was allowed to take both roles of Mary Darling as well as a female Captain Hook whom shall receive the full name of Jacqueline Blair Hook for our purposes and a tradition of a female Captain Hook took root in all future literary, theatrical stage, cinematic, musical, artistic, television and computer adaptations of the Peter Pan property? What would that have done for the story and its various interpretations seen throughout the 20th Century and beyond in audiences' eyes?
I would very much like to see you come up with your artistic renditions, thoughts on and potential timeline changes that fit in with the contemporary history of each adaptation with this change in mind. Feel free to discuss this question and its possibilities in the comments with your interpretations.
FOOTNOTES
1 - https://blog.oup.com/2017/04/peter-pan-captain-hook-woman/
2 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080102032812/http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/introduction.html
Peach Lover 94 It's a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. A far better resting place that I go to, than I've ever known.