Neverland as Psychogeographical Colony: Space, Childhood, and Empire in Peter Pan and Wendy

This article offers a scene-based spatial rereading of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy (1911) through four entwined lenses: psychogeography, postcolonial critique, gendered domesticity, and Bakhtin’s chronotope. It argues that Neverland operates as a “psychogeographical colony,” a landscape simultaneously projected from the child psyche and patterned by Britain’s imperial imaginary. The flight from the London nursery stages a dérive that unmoors the children from ordinary coordinates, while subsequent episodes show how micro-environments—sky, forest, lagoon, ship—modulate affect, group dynamics, and agency. Mapping Neverland’s compartmentalized zones (pirates, “Indians,” mermaids, fairies, Lost Boys) reveals an imaginative geography of Otherness that naturalizes colonial hierarchies even when framed as play. Wendy’s underground home exemplifies intimate imperialism: domestic routines, storytelling, and “good form” reproduce metropolitan values in miniature. Finally, the novel’s chronotope sutures Neverland’s suspended “never-time” to London’s linear temporality. The conclusion reads Barrie’s ambivalence as both enchantment and containment: the text indulges fantasies of perpetual childhood and conquest yet ultimately reaffirms maturation and home. By centering space as an active agent, the essay shows how Peter Pan and Wendy teaches readers that the landscapes of childhood are never neutral—and that growing up entails outgrowing the empire of play.