The Page 99 Test: Kenneth Gross's "Dangerous Children"

Saturday, November 5, 2022

Kenneth Gross's "Dangerous Children"

Kenneth Gross’s books include The Dream of the Moving Statue, Shakespeare’s Noise, Shylock is Shakespeare, and

Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, which won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. A former fellow of the Guggenheim and Bogliasco Foundations, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bellagio Study Center, and the American Academy in Berlin, he teaches English at the University of Rochester.

Gross applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Story, and reported the following:

It’s a little uncanny. Page 99 of Dangerous Children turns out to be both center and side-light. That page comes in the middle of a chapter on J. M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy, where I evoke a “magical boy” more cruel, creepy, unpredictable, and sad than people often remember. Like other imaginary children in the book—Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Henry James’s Maisie, or the girl-child at the center of Lolita—Peter speaks for lost and unknown childhoods. These children are dangerous (also endangered) partly because of what adults don’t understand in them, and in how they remind adults of what they don’t understand in themselves. The children show forms of play and knowledge that challenge adult visions of innocence. They have curious powers of life, continuity, and survival, but they’re also aligned with ghosts, with the world of the dead. And it’s about the life of ghosts that my 99th page mainly speaks.

The revelation is oblique because I focus there not on Peter but on a lesser-known Barrie work, the play Mary Rose. Its title character is a young mother who returns as if from the dead after twenty-one years, still the unready, half-grown girl she was when she married. She haunts and is haunted by a changed world, morphing into an angry child-spectre:
It’s hard to catch the eerie, creepy delicacy of the play. The figure of Mary Rose bears within herself, even more closely than Peter, the loss, fright, and loneliness of not growing up. To her parents, she was and continues to be like a creature who has “never really been born,” to use the phrase that so caught Samuel Beckett in C. G. Jung’s description of one of his patients. Or she’s like a being come into the world “before its time”—that’s what the nameless speaker of Beckett’s Not I, a mouth suspended in darkness, says of the woman whose history she recounts, in truth speaking of herself. The sense of being both in and out of time is here part of the loneliness of ghosts. “Please, I don’t want to be a ghost any more” says the ghost of this childish mother to her unrecognized adult son, hoping that he has power to help her. Alfred Hitchcock, who saw Barrie’s play in its original production, long wanted to make a film of Mary Rose, though he never got further than the draft of a screenplay.
At once ghost-child and ghost-mother, Mary Rose gives us a more extreme version of the uncanny child-life that Barrie conjures in Peter Pan.

At the bottom of the page I do return to the novel, to the description of Peter racing ahead of Wendy, her brothers, and the lost boys as they fly from the Neverland back to Darling’s house in London. Peter bars the nursery window so they can’t get in, wanting to keep Wendy for himself. But he can’t stop watching sad Mrs. Darling as she imagines her children’s impossible homecoming:
“It’s Wendy’s mother! She is a pretty lady, but not so pretty as my mother. Her mouth is full of thimbles, but not as so full of thimbles as my mother’s was.” ... Of course, he knew nothing whatever about his mother ... He ceased to look at her, but even then she would not let go of him. He skipped about and made funny faces, but when he stopped it was just as if she were inside him, knocking.
We see a manic, orphaned imp staring in at a window, haunted by an absent mother even as his mind is invaded by a living one. “It was just as if she were inside him, knocking.” That’s not the Peter Pan I grew up with.

In the book, even on pages filled with play such ghosts arrive.