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James Matthew Barrie, who is best known for his iconic play Peter Pan, wrote Mary Rose in the summer of 1919 with the similar motif of a child not growing up after her visits in an enchanted island. Mary Rose vanishes twice in her lifetime: As a girl about to enter puberty, she disappears from a Scottish island on her family holiday and comes back twenty days later, she disappears alone again from the same island on her trip with her husband, a few year’s after her marriage, only to emerge twenty-five years later. The inexplicable experience leaves permanent scars in her childhood and adulthood as well as to her three-year-old son, Harry. Unlike Peter Pan and the lost boys who joyfully enjoy their adventure and eternal youth in the Never Land, her loss of time ultimately spoils Mary Rose’s happiness, thus turning her into a sad lonely mother ghost waiting for her three-year old son, Harry. Her eternal youth confined her female body within the unnatural notion of childhood innocence and the forced denial of sexuality. Her absence also left her son motherless, causing a painful familial lack in Harry’s life. Mary Rose is not just a ghost story largely overshadowed by the fame of Peter Pan, and the play portrays the European society in transition and changes from the traditional, pre-war Victorian age to the profoundly damaged world of post-war era. It provides its audience as well as the playwright Barrie himself with the collective and individual healing from the deeply embedded sense of loss.
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J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, Mary Rose, Gendered Innocence, Transitional Literature
