Boys need girls: Gender norms from nineteenth-century boys' periodicals to 'Peter and Wendy'

My thesis shows how J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy uses nineteenth-century gender norms discussed in children's periodicals but undercuts these norms through the interjections of his conflicted narrator. My first chapter demonstrates how two widely known nineteenth-century boys' magazines, the Boys of England and the Boy's Own Paper, portray manly boyhood through the lens of the feminine. These periodicals present conflicting views of boyhood, but both suggest that boys need girls. In the second chapter, I argue that J. M. Barrie expresses these norms, absorbed during his own youth, in his novel, Peter and Wendy. This novel also suggests that boys need girls, employing the ideals of boyhood and girlhood expressed in the nineteenth-century boys' periodicals. The narrator's frequent and disruptive comments, however, undermine these gender norms, drawing attention to the fractures in late Victorian models of ideal boyhood and girlhood.