peter pan, peter grimes, and a queer case of modernism

ESC 39.4 (December 2013): 33–54

Philip brett argues that the interval of a minor third, with its evil and foreboding affect, “signif[ies] homosexuality” (Allen 280) in the work of Benjamin Britten, thereby suggesting that the queer eyes we’ve devoted to straight guys may have unfairly plugged our queer ears.1 However strange or unlikely it is to find that the empire of Gaydar (that contemporary version of Sedgwick’s “reign of the telling secret” [67]) has extended its reach even to the auditory realm, this queer code cracking begs for a more radically queer departure from the mundanely “homo-sexual” (Allen 280) or biographical readings of Britten’s work. Interpreta-tions rooted in biography are not without precedent in Britten criticism. Stephen Arthur Allen, for instance, claims that Britten was “addicted to schoolboy puns, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that pho-netic interpretations of pitch-classes such as Bb=Be flat! … [or] codes and

“A child is being beaten”: Peter Pan, Peter Grimes, and a Queer Case of Modernism

Lucas CrawfordSimon Fraser University

1 An interval is, quite simply, the distance and relationship between two notes. A minor third is an interval of three semitones (or, in other words, three “half-steps” or three keys on a piano). For more on the minor third and its evocation of creepy affect, even in the human voice, see Megan E. Curtis and Jamshed J. Bharucha’s “The Minor Third Communicates Sadness in Speech, Mirroring Its Use in Music.” For an idea of what a minor third sounds like, one may hum the first two notes of the well-known song “Greensleeves.”

34 | Crawford

signals were not lost on him” (280). I contend that using Britten’s alleged personality and interests as an interpretive code to his work conceals or at least diverts us from a more unsettling queer reading, one that does not merely add homosexuality to the picture but instead critiques the emotional economies of heteronormative attachments to children. To extend Brett’s intriguing, if perhaps too easy, argument about Britten’s homosexual minor thirds, might we instead look to the literal “minors” of this opera? The title character of the opera is a fisherman whose former apprentice, the young boy William Spode, has been previously lost at sea. In the opera, Grimes reboards his craft, “The Boy Billy,” with a new young apprentice, John. The traumatic history repeats, as John too dies in Grimes’s care. Grimes, realizing something, although it is unclear precisely what, about the inevitability of this repetition, kills himself in the end of this opera. In all of these cases, Grimes’s “minor” is far more foreboding when we take it literally.

To radicalize rather than to reject a particularly contentious gay stereo-type, this article asserts that Grimes’s fixation and indirect termination of children is not at all unrelated to “homosexuality.” Indeed, as Lee Edelman suggests in his book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the figure of the child in North American culture, which is neither coeval nor completely distinct from any actual children, is the “anti-queer” (Bruhm and Hurley xiii) in its implied valorization of the future over the present and in its prioritization of the family over any other kind of human coali-tion. Edelman describes the responsibility of the modern queer in language that describes our man Grimes all too literally: “what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here” (29–31). Edelman’s defi-nition of queerness implicitly follows and reignites Foucault’s famous claim (a claim we need to hear more in a culture of increasing homonormativity) that homosexuality “threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (“Friendship” 310). Edelman’s turn to negativity is a ghostly revision of Foucault as well: for him, queerness threatens people as a way of life cum a way of death.

The genre of Britten’s Peter Grimes is central to its reception and our understanding of it, given not only that opera is associated in various ways with queerness but, moreover, that the opera is such a high art form. Because of its genre and milieu, this opera’s refiguring of the (underage) minor itself constitutes another kind of minor: a “minor literature” (16), in Deleuze and Guattari’s phraseology. If a minor literature, as they claim,

“doesn’t come from a minor language, it is rather that which a minority

Lucas Crawford is the Ruth Wynn

Woodward Endowment Lecturer in Gender,

Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon

Fraser University. His scholarship appears in such publications as Women’s Studies

Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly,

The Journal of Homosexuality, The

Routledge Queer Studies Reader, and The

Transgender Studies Reader (vol. 2). His

poetry can be found in The Antigonish Review, Room, Rattle, Rampike, The Nashwaak Review,

Other Voices, prism International, and

elsewhere.

“A child is being beaten” | 35

constructs within a major language” (16), then we have a new way to under-stand why an opera —a rare opera in the English language, at that—has more and not less potential to undo major language and modes.2 Our most major beliefs about protecting children at all costs are subtly brought into question in this English opera. That all of these various modes of “minor” are intimately related is evinced even by Deleuze and Guattari’s advice to their readers on how to become minor in relation to one’s own language; referencing Kafka, they suggest: “steal the baby from the crib, walk the tightrope” (19). Steven Bruhm and Nat Hurley make the point succinctly:

“the child is the product of physical reproduction, but functions just as surely as a figure of cultural reproduction” (xiii). If, then, the production of a major language generates, and is generated by, the reproduction of minors, then this opera’s courageous gesture—it turns a story about the death of children into a tragedy of an adult!—is a refutation of a certain kind of cultural reproduction as well: the reproduction of a world wherein suicide probably is the best option for an adult if someone even suspects he or she has done harm to a child.

While this opera obviously does not adopt as polemical or intentional a tone as Edelman’s—“fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (29)—I argue in this article, nonetheless, that Peter Grimes offers up the queerly dark underbelly of our culture’s primary and primarily anxious narrative of childhood and that this (minor) “third way” of relating to Britten’s own queerness offers much-needed escape from the binary of either condemning or vindicating Britten’s lifestyle, which dominates much of the scholarship regarding this composer.

While their work is important in its own right, many of Britten’s com-mentators do indeed formulate the composer’s love of children as unam-biguously benign or perverted and pathological. From Allen’s valorization of Britten’s “quality of innocence and nostalgia for childhood” (281) and

“childlike musical aesthetic” (283) to the many disapprovals of Britten’s alleged interest in young boys and his “supposedly masochistic character” (Mitchell 6), such accounts make homosexuality into either a problematic matter or something that does not matter at all. The anecdote with which

2 This is an appropriate moment to mention that the libretto (lyrics) of the opera is based on a portion of George Crabbe’s 1910 poem “The Borough.” Montagu Slater, not Britten, wrote the libretto. However, as James Fenton discusses in a 2004 article in The Guardian, it is clear that Britten and his male partner Peter Pears (who first played Grimes) had a very strong hand in shaping the story. In fact, Fenton implies that Slater’s control over the story was relatively minor. In any case, although the authorship of an opera is generally a plural affair, the story of Grimes was chosen by Britten and largely designed by him.

36 | Crawford

Mervyn Cooke begins his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten indicates this subtly heterosexist tendency to defend Britten by making his queerness inconsequential. The following exchange occurs between Cooke and an anonymous partygoer:

“Well,” she said as she sipped her coffee thoughtfully, “I’m afraid I find Britten’s music just too aggressively homosexual, don’t you?” This time I managed to issue a sophisticated rejoinder (the single word “Why?,” if I remember rightly), upon which she rapidly changed the subject. (Introduction 1)

In one word, Cooke feigns innocence in his wholesale dismissal that Britten’s work is intensely queer, that interpreting his work as queer is com-pletely nonsensical, and, most importantly, that the accusation of “aggres-sively homosexual” (1) must be refuted rather than be the very grounds of an argument for Britten’s importance. John Bridcut offers some relief from such assumptions in his recent text, Britten’s Children, which chron-icles Britten’s adoring relationships with pubescent boys by studying the thousands of letters that remain of these cross-generational connections. Such evidence seems only to strengthen an Edelman-bolstered reading of Peter Grimes, although this article turns from even this biographical mode, which would configure Britten’s apparent desires or practices as a case history through which to understand the art he creates. Therefore, to the end of providing some answers to Cooke’s question of “ ‘Why?,’ ” this article approaches the queerness of Peter Grimes in a way that neither forgets Britten’s queerness nor reduces his work to an opportunity for biographical speculation. These scholars’ very desire to account for Brit-ten is very similar to the kind of behaviours that Peter Grimes critiques: the (impossible) imperative to narrate the sexual subject exhaustively and, similarly, to interpret subjects as various kinds of case studies that must be solved. Unlike the confession-demanding townsfolk in Peter Grimes, this article aims to leave Benjamin Britten indeterminate and leave his processes of becoming interminable.

The Queer Peter PanTo refute those claims that Britten’s child-loving reflects only his “delight in the innocence of childhood for its own sake” (Allen 291), I will outline briefly how the story of Peter Grimes reveals the dark version of the child-hood narrative with which we are so familiar. In her book The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Jacqueline Rose provides some ideas about why it is we tell stories about children in the first place. As

These scholars’

very desire to

account for

Britten is very

similar to the

kind of

behaviours that

Peter Grimes

critiques.


Rose suggests, it is not in the interest of freeing or liberating the child in an imaginative milieu but, rather, fixing the child. “Children’s fiction draws in the child,” she argues, “it secures, places and frames the child” in the form of “a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction” (2). Here the discursive tables are turned on those who would seek to protect children from queer adult desire; Rose suggests that narrativizing childhood is itself a form of desiring the child and controlling it. Her use of sexually charged terms like “seduction” brings home for us the fact that “desire” for children can take many forms, and none is purely without the intent to control or the potential to harm. Here, Rose explains precisely what she means by her use of this rhetoric: “I am using desire to refer to a form of investment by the adult in the child, and to the demand made by the adult on the child as the effect of that investment, a demand which fixes the child and then holds it in place” (4). While we might imagine adult desire for children as rather linear, direct, and obviously malevolent—a pursuit of a child with an obvious goal—Rose suggests that we might also be concerned with this

“turning to the child,” this “circulating around the child” (4) that comprises our desire to compulsively tell (both fictional and “non-fictional”) stories about childhood. In Rose’s estimation, we revolve around the child, literally spinning yarns around it as we circulate around it and trade in its images.

The distinction that Rose allows us to draw between the desire to nar-rate the child into place and a sexual desire for children brings us to one of the oddest aspects of Peter Grimes: the young apprentice John never speaks or sings a single word in the opera. For Rose, “what is at stake” in our narrative fixation on children “is not so much something which could be enacted as something which cannot be spoken” (4). Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Grimes’s placeholder child (even his name invokes John Doe, signifier of both death and anonymity) cannot speak. At a crucial turning point in the opera, this inability of the opera to speak its desires takes a step further. When the townsfolk grow suspicious of Grimes because John has appeared with some bruises and is now miss-ing, their obscure, repetitive cry—“Grimes is at his exercise!” (ii, i)—has its power only in its enunciation. This is an accusation that erases, or at least euphemizes, its own accusation. However, if children’s fiction holds the child in place in order to secure our sense of ourselves as protective adults, how can we begin to make sense of this opera that allowed silenced children to slip away without saving or redemption?

Taking a look at its polar opposite may help highlight that even the main plot of this opera is queer indeed. Rose’s exemplary play, Peter Pan, was first staged in London, four decades before the debut of Peter Grimes.

38 | Crawford

Peter Pan weaves a tale of eternal childhood, seaside adventure, kindly domesticity, and a safe return home (for Wendy) and a life of boyhood (for Peter). Rose disrupts any nostalgic fantasies this description might evoke, as she argues that “Peter Pan offers us the child—for ever. It gives us the child, but it does not speak to the child” (1). In a reciprocal fashion, Peter Grimes offers us the child but does not let the child speak. Peter Evans notes, approvingly, that “the boy can be mute just because he exists for the audience only as a symbol of one side of Grimes’s nature” (118 emphasis added). What is remarkable about this statement is that it calmly acknowl-edges that children are merely props in Peter Grimes. John is a prop on stage, as well as an object that props up Grimes’s character; this model of childhood is a far cry from the tendency to represent children as the receptacle of all of our hope, faith, future, and nostalgia. Even when Ellen (Grimes’s seemingly platonic friend) asks him questions, John is silent. In fact, it is only when he is plummeting toward his death that we hear his screaming voice. Peter Pan attests to the continuation of life, the eternal-ness of childhood, and stability. On the contrary, John’s cry subverts our beliefs about childhood by opening out on to finitude rather than on to boundless possibility and by turning the familiar scene of a child’s first cry from one of birth into one of death. The subversive relationship between Peter Grimes’s stark realism and the phantastic Peter Pan goes on. Both feature children who do not grow up (yet, in Grimes, do not live forever), children who work (rather than play) by the sea, who are booty rather than pirates, who fall from cliffs rather than fly, and who deal with (instead of Hook) a fisherman’s reeling violence (or so the townfolk, and perhaps audience, assume). Peter Pan preserves its child as child and leaves the child’s crypt of cultural significance entombed, while the townsfolk of Peter Grimes protect children with a fevered passion that, crucial to the opera’s critique, fails nonetheless. Their obsession produces the opposite effect of its (perhaps partly feigned) intentions, thereby illustrating this particular mode of protection as a failed enterprise, not just because the silent child of this text dies and disappears but because, by virtue of this disappear-ance, the child is not fixed and seduced in the way that Rose describes.

How Peter Grimes Became DangerousIf thus far we have seen a general picture of this opera’s disruption of our “reproductive futuris[t]” culture, then we may move now to a more specific analysis of the character of Peter Grimes and the narrative cre-ation of his suspiciousness and queerness. The question here might be as simple as: How did Peter Grimes become dangerous? Foucault takes up


just this sort of question in a 1978 lecture entitled “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry.” The follow-ing excerpt is Foucault’s analysis of a courtroom scene in which a jurist had an outburst at a criminal because the criminal was excessively blasé about defending himself:

The legislators, the authors of the legal codes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, could not have dreamed of a clearer situ-ation. And yet it happens that the machinery jams, the gears seize up. Why? Because the accused remains silent. Remains silent about what? About the facts? About circumstances? About the way in which they occurred? About the immediate cause of the events? Not at all. The accused evades a question which is essential in the eyes of a modern tribunal, but which would have had a strange ring to it 150 years ago: “Who are you?” (“Dangerous” 1)

It is no coincidence, then, that Peter Grimes opens in a courtroom. From the outset, Peter is framed as a juridical and suspicious subject. The first words of this opera underline that the task of determining the contents of an unknown self will be at stake in what follows. The prologue begins with a booming interpellation of Grimes’s name: “Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes!” This is significant in a milieu and time in which the most important question asked in a courtroom is “Who are you?” This haunting interpellation of Peter Grimes’s name repeats and rings throughout the opera, as if marking time during this ongoing mystery of who precisely he is and what he does. As in Foucault’s example, however, Peter answers with the facts only. Therefore, “the gears seize up” (“Dangerous” 1) because “the accused remains silent” (1). This occurs quite bluntly in the opening scene of the opera:

swallow. Tell the court the story in your own words. Peter is silent. […] swallow. I am told you rescued the boy from drowning in

the March storms. Peter is silent. swallow. Have you something else to say? No? Then I have.

(Prologue)

Foucault might remind us that even this first question—“Tell the court the story in your own words”—is of course impossible. We know that speech is not merely a tool to be fully controlled by the agent who utters

40 | Crawford

it; our speech, words, and bodies betray our attempts at control. (As Freud puts in, apropos of another scene of self-confession that Foucault would critique, “he that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore” [“Dora” 114]). Words are never merely “your own,” especially in a milieu in which one does not retain or practice interpretive authority over one’s own story. Only some words are legible in the genre of testimony. Moreover, these words always already belong to others who will interpret and judge them. Grimes’s confusing behaviour suggests that he is either clueless or resistant with regards to proving himself an innocent self. That is, in this courtroom scene made possible by late modernity’s disciplinary hybrid of legality and psychiatry, Peter not only remains literally silent when asked to speak but, when speaking, he refers mainly to the facts of his case. He refuses the courtroom access to the traumatic and personal story of what happened to his first apprentice, and he cries out his one desire to “thrust into [the accusers’] mouths, the truth itself, the simple truth” (Prologue). What is crucial about this is that Peter appeals only to events and not to selves; he never, ever says, “I am” or “I am not.” He utters none of those words of one’s “own” that might help illustrate what “type” of person he is.

Although he refuses the interpretive authority of the court by simply not giving them his words to judge, he invests nonetheless in their power and in the concept of an unmediated truth that (although it cannot be said) could potentially be proved. It is this investment that is his downfall; for reasons not disclosed by the opera, Grimes simply cannot take good care of his new apprentice. In his passionate pursuit to show the truth to the court, he oddly repeats his own trauma, as if to suggest his melancholic attachment to the original incident/apprentice. This attachment becomes absolutely clear in the moments before John falls to his death. When John hesitates to get dressed and work in the fierce storm, Grimes starts think-ing of his former apprentice:

Sometimes I see that boy here in this hut. He’s there now, I can see him, he is there! His eyes are on me as they were that evil day. Stop moaning, boy. Water? There’s no more water. You had the last yesterday. You’ll soon be home In harbour calm and deep. (ii, ii)


As Grimes finally speaks “in his own words” (to the only audience he seems able to address with such emotion), he zones out and seems to be reliving the experience. He speaks to the late William Spode and then to John, as the townsfolk approach his hut to investigate Grimes’s behaviour. Even at this moment, when he is about to be seized upon by the town, he prefers to focus on getting himself and his apprentice out to fish in the raging storm. Peter persists—to the death—on a discourse of acts and action rather than of speech and selves, even though he may very well want to be regarded as a consummately respectable self. This emphasis on acts rather than selves, in a sense, is precisely the reverse of the trans-formation that Foucault traces out in criminals, homosexuals, and the insane. (The criminal, the homosexual, or the insane person are knowable kinds of subjects rather than disparate acts.) Cleaving to this older form of deviance means that Grimes meets his demise; his acts repeat. Here, taking the opposite tack, I argue that we can interpret Peter’s refusal to confess his self to the court as his heroic resistance. During this opening court scene, Hobson calls for “Silence!” four times during the scene, but, as we saw, Peter’s talking that fills the silence cures nothing for the court. Re-reading Peter’s refusal to contest his status as a “dangerous individual” allows for a more hopeful interpretation of the end of this opera, which sounds an awfully like the beginning of the opera:

chorus (off). Grimes! Peter Grimes! peter. Grimes! Here you are! Here I am! […]

chorus (close at hand). Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes! peter (roaring back at them). Peter Grimes! Grimes! Peter Grimes! (iii, ii)

Peter returns the interpellation to the chorus, as if to cast blame onto them through the hollow signifier of his own name. This name, which the townsfolk have sought to fill throughout the opera, is all that he will submit to them. He parrots their accusations without having taken on the qualities of obedient and legible subjectivity that would have made him understandable or sympathetic. His culture’s forceful imperative to confess one’s deepest feelings never does penetrate into Peter Grimes’s subjective voice; rather, even his last utterances are elusive and citational. Taking his name (and himself ) as the object of discourse as which it has operated, Peter’s shouts, whatever his intentions, are a taunt and a victory. Although this opera is widely understood as a tragedy, Grimes’s dying without attaching any claims of unambiguous subjectivity onto even his

42 | Crawford

final words might be both his best revenge and also a strong reason to rethink the queerness of this opera.

Although Britten’s own life must not stand in for analysis of his work, it is useful to note that the violence of this demand to speak oneself, to clarify one’s practices, and to defend behaviours that one may not find shameful could not have been unfamiliar to the composer. As Donald Mitchell reminds us, Britten’s relationship with tenor Peter Pears (who first played Peter Grimes) was indeed “criminal” (7). This is worth mention-ing because although it seems so unlikely that this opera could allow for such a seemingly dark reading as provided above, sexual crime permeated the creation of this work. There is no reason to turn Britten into a non-threatening composer who “happened to be gay,” when his own lifestyle was threatening enough so as to be illegal.

Those who write about child sexuality can relate to the very swiftness with which one may be figured and regarded as the most contemptible kind of would-be criminal. James R. Kincaid, theorist of child sexuality, discusses the suspicion he arouses with his work. Reviewers wanted his 1992 book, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, banned because, as he puts it, “I do not exactly ‘recommend the practice or admit to it myself,’ [but apparently I am] annoyingly ‘evasive’ on what I really do in my spare time” (14). Likewise, nearly all of Foucault’s examples in his article are indeed cases of inter-generational violence. These two instances remind us of how this “dangerous individual” only exists insofar as we are able to conceive of some set of people who are somehow naturally at risk or in need of protection. As Paul Kelleher puts it, “the imperative to protect the ‘child’ … defines—and, at the same time, is defined by—the psychological and social ‘danger’ imagined to reside in the figure of the ‘pervert’ ” (152). Insofar as dangerous individuals and children are mutu-ally constitutive categories, it is possible to see Peter Grimes not as a tale of a dangerous individual acting upon a child but, rather, as a tale of the child’s cultural cachet creating the dangerous individual and, ultimately, leading to his death. In sum, the impassioned “seduction” of the child, as it appears in our controlling narrativization of it, both defines adults in potentially harmful ways and also places the child figure in a position of strenuous meaning-making labour. As Edelman leads us to understand, the child in this circulation of images is merely a catalyst through which adults of one inclination exercise power over others.


Initially, Peter’s silences about defending himself seem to reveal his tragic lack of understanding that only certain subjects, rather than certain behav-iours, can be found guilty or not guilty in his culture. Against this grain, this article tries to understand these silences as a kind of resistance to the imperative to confess. While this latter reading offers some queer possi-bilities that are silenced by most discourses, there is, admittedly, no way to read Peter’s silences with any sort of authority. The very same inscru-tability they present to the townsfolk also stymies the critical listener or audience member. After all, no silence (including in this opera) is identical or equal. For instance, the silences that define John and Peter Grimes are emitted from very different positions and to different effect. With this in mind, how may we develop a hermeneutic of gaps and silences in Peter Grimes? Throughout the corpus of his work, Foucault develops precisely that, albeit one that witnesses its own impossibility at every turn. His ideas on this subject are clearest in The History of Sexuality, volume one, where he suggests the following:

Silence itself—the thing one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speak-ers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. (27)3

In Foucault’s words, then, it might easily be said that Peter “declines to say” while John is “forbidden” to speak, although even their own respective silences might mean different things at different times. As Foucault goes on to say, “There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (27). Even in the face of the opera’s queer refusal to valorize the child, John’s particular silences make him an important figure with whom we may begin here. John’s history as a young orphan and child labourer highlights for us how conditions of class can and ought to be introduced to Edelman’s rather

3 Foucault elaborates: There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is au-thorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. (27)

The “Inveterate Silence” of Madness

There is,

admittedly, no

way to read

Peter’s silences

with any sort of

authority.

44 | Crawford

homogeneous figure of “the child.” Indeed, the injustice of John’s specific silences has more to do with poverty than with childhood, although the two will never be extricable for a boy raised in workhouses and sold to a fisherman. Two characters in the opera gesture toward this. First, in the background of the scene that describes the purchase of John, Boles the fisherman registers some discomfort with the labour situation, although it goes unremarked upon. To the crowd, he asks, “Are pauper children so enslaved / That their bodies go for cash?” (i, i). Secondly, Balstrode (the retired skipper who is often a source of empathy for Grimes) shows that he has a sense that William Spode’s cause of death is in fact as much based in poverty as any supposed violence on Grimes’s part. “Your boy was work-house starved,” he reassures Peter, “Maybe you’re not to blame he died” (i, i). As a man experienced in Grimes’s industry, Balstrode contextualizes the boy’s death in his class history and labour conditions.

As Balstrode presumes with regards to William Spode, a British appren-tice living in the mid-nineteenth-century setting of Peter Grimes would likely survive one hardship only to encounter another. John’s part-time keeper and Peter’s friend Ellen Orford also pictures just such a trajectory of adversity for the young boy. As they sit together on one of John’s rare days off work, Ellen tries to coax words from her pubescent companion:

I’ll do the work, you talk. […] Nothing to tell me,Nothing to say? Then shall ITell you what your life was like?See if I’m right! I thinkYou liked your workhouse with its grave,Empty look. Perhaps you weren’tSo unhappy in your loneliness? (ii, i)

Ellen may or may not be correct in her estimation of John’s preferred work environment, as the law mediated only some of the working conditions for British children at the time. Britain’s Factory Act of 1850 institutes both a maximum number of hours that children could work per day and also mandatory holidays and mealtimes. However, these rights (extended to children employed in workhouses, factories, and mines, as well as per-formers and agricultural workers) do not address the danger inherent to many of these jobs.4 In effect, the amount of work was limited but the

4 For more information on the lived experience and legislation regarding working Victorian children, see Ginger S. Frost’s 2008 Victorian Children and Michael Lavalette’s edited collection, A Thing of the Past?: Child Labour in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1999).


risk to a child’s life was less so. The 1879 “Dangerous Performances Act” remedies this elision of actual work conditions but does so in a fash-ion that reveals how little the safety of child labourers was valued. Not only is this act tailored largely to street performers rather than to manual labourers such as John, but, moreover, it includes the following caveat:

“except where an accident causing actual bodily harm occurs to any child or young person, no prosecution or other proceeding shall be instituted for an offense against the Children’s Dangerous Performances Act” (quoted in MacDonell 293). Thus, the child (or any potential spokesperson) has no legal grounds for complaint or care until he or she is injured or, as in John’s case, dead. Tellingly, these laws are oriented toward punishment rather than discipline or prevention and are about consequences for the employer rather than prevention for the employee. Most notably, neither of these acts (nor their successor, 1903’s “Employment of Children Act”) mentions apprenticeship. This method of employment slips out of the discourse.

The manner in which the men discuss the arrival of John suggests that this is the model of labour in store for the boy. Ned the apothecary is the one to initiate the working relationship. As he says, “Grimes, you won’t need from now. / I’ve got a prentice for you” (i, i). Balstrode, a retired skip-per, immediately questions the boy’s provenance: “A workhouse brat?,” he asks. As Ned proceeds to explain how he procured the rights to John from the workhouse, he informs Grimes that all he has to do “is fetch the boy” (i, i) and seeks someone to go and pick him up for Grimes. Ned’s hope is to have Hobson (the “carrier”) to pick up John like one of so many parcels he needs to deliver each day. There is certainly no sentimental mentoring and bonding implied in this plan and rhetoric. Indeed, the boy remains nameless and is described in terms of the economic deal through which he was procured: Ned goes on to refer to the boy as “your bargain” (i, i) when speaking to Grimes and as “his purchase” (i, i) when speaking to Hobson.

An apprentice is, at least ostensibly, not simply an employee among other employees; rather, he or she (but really, he) is adopted by the adult, who does not simply pay but also feeds, clothes, shelters, and often men-tors the child. The trajectory of the apprentice is generally understood to be quite different than that of the employee: he or she is meant to eventually occupy the position of the mentor. This trajectory bears some resemblance to family models of mentoring and labour. Like a parent, the adult owns the child and is fully responsible for him or her; the adult is personally invested in guiding the child to his or her culmination as an adult worker; and it is expected that the child will become another ver-sion of his or her adult mentor. The practice of apprenticeship appears to

46 | Crawford

be something other than employment insofar as some sense of nurture is implied, as is an investment in the apprentice’s accumulation of skill and his or her future.

Although Peter does refer to John as “young prentice” (i, ii), when he grows frustrated with Ellen’s insistence that John deserves Sunday off, Peter’s language betrays his sense that an apprentice is indeed a piece of property. As he asserts to Ellen, “He works for me, leave him alone, he’s mine” (ii, i). The three thoughts expressed here—one about a labour situ-ation, one an instruction about how to treat John, and one about owner-ship—meld together with two comma splices, which makes their inextri-cability more obvious. That is, for Grimes, employing an apprentice is to possess him and is to control who may speak to him. This mode of labour reflects the norms of the time but, presented in the 1940s as the opera is, also functions as a retrospective comment on the dangers of this type of employment and its ill-defined boundaries and attendant relationships. Therefore, while John is indeed an apprentice in this opera—a model that presumes some closeness and care—Grimes cannot live up to the emotion of it. If a mentor-apprenticeship relationship is more akin to a parent-child relationship than that of the workhouse or employee, then Grimes is a failed owner-parent.

John’s silences, then, are not only perpetuated by his social condition-ing as an unprivileged labouring orphan but also are corroborated by the law’s own silences with regards to apprenticeship. As is subtly codified in the “Dangerous Performances Act,” no working child is permitted to protest until it is too late. His silence, then, does have something to do with being a child; however, it is his unprivileged status as a poor child that defines what being a child means for him. While we certainly do not trust (or even hear) many things that children are saying (and not saying) in our culture, John is a different kind of child than the child figure whose first words are awaited with bated breath, whose kindergarten notes are saved by eager parents, and whose every movement or cry as a baby is considered a form of crucial communication. His silence is perpetuated and seems very little like any kind of resistance or escape from subjective capture.

Turning to Grimes’s own silences, we see that even if, as suggested earlier, Grimes’s silence allows for some (even unwitting) resistance, his status as a suspicious rural fisherman hardly offers him a detached and privileged standpoint from which to speak or not speak. Foucault’s earlier genealogies of silence capture the way in which legality and silence col-lude in the guilty subject. In Madness and Civilization, he suggests that modernity sees the prisoner

Foucault’s

earlier

genealogies of

silence

capture the way

in which

legality and

silence collude

in the guilty

subject.


delivered from his chains, [but] he is now chained, by silence, to transgression and to shame.… Classic internment had been a silencing. But it was not total: language was engaged in things rather than really suppressed. Confinement, prisons, dungeons, even tortures, engaged in a mute dialogue between reason and unreason—the dialogue of struggle. This dialogue itself was now disengaged; silence was absolute. (261–62)

As indicated earlier, Foucault abandons this idea of “absolute silence” in The History of Sexuality. However, the very idea that a new prison system could be designed on the basis of strategic silences reveals the extent to which silence is never unambiguously an act of resistance, obedience, or even absence. Peter’s silence, for instance, remains interpretable in a way that ultimately harms him. Perhaps the best one might hope for in Peter Grimes is precisely what Foucault says is produced by the modern prison: the “inveterate silence [of madness]” (262). If silence can be invet-erate—incurable—not only is it a disease for the individual who bears it but, moreover, its defiance of psychiatric institutions of cure also make it a threat to the social body that produces it. As such, “inveterate silence[s]” do not merely reflect the madness of a subject. They generate and reflect a kind of madness in others, even to the point at which townsfolk form an angry mob whose feverish search for answers actually occasions two deaths. As much as Ellen would like to change Peter Grimes, he retains his silences. As with its protagonist, the many and varied silences of Peter Grimes are indeed inveterate, which is to say, unsolvable. Such a conclusion offers anything but respite, as it is the madness generated by the silences’ indeterminacy that is vital to the opera’s critique. Even the process of adapting Crabbe’s poem into the Peter Grimes libretto was, in a sense, a strategic selection of silences. Peter Pears reportedly “encouraged [Mon-tagu, the librettist] to cut out the pederasty (or most of it) and to tone down the sadism” (Fenton). For Pears, this was crucial for keeping queerness from dominating the story (Fenton). Yet, the opera’s resultant silence with regards to pederasty and child beating is very conspicuous. These acts become the curious unresolved silences at the centre of the opera. Below, I offer a way to understand the effect of these silences.

Cases in PointEspecially in a discussion of silence, it is necessary to conclude by way of naming and responding to the figure lurking behind the many references to Foucault found herein. In studies of childhood sexuality, Freud is para-mount. Although Foucault’s work on silence in The History of Sexuality

48 | Crawford

aims to critique the imperative to confess of which psychoanalysis is a sign and a basis, the two may co-operate here in the following way. With the character Grimes we see (in line with Foucault) how silences about

“who one is” can prove deadly in a culture of “dangerous individuals.” His character helps us see the reason that Foucault so adamantly diverges from Freud. The townsfolk in this opera, however, operate in a much more Freudian mode. Not only are they the agents of confession—feverishly demanding the story and the self of Peter Grimes as they do—but, as we shall see below, their psychopathology bears much resemblance to one of Freud’s well-known cases.

It is necessary to mention, first, that many critics, including leading opera scholar Philip Brett, dismiss the usefulness of Freud with regards to Peter Grimes. In his essay, “The More Vicious the Society, the More Vicious the Individual: Peter Grimes and its Message,” Brett claims that Britten

had to de-sexualise Grimes, indeed he had to rid him of all Freudian implication because he understood well enough that society, not knowing how to deal with difference, had fallen back on a pseudo-medical way of both explaining it and con-trolling it. (17)

As I have shown, Grimes is in no way de-sexualized. His odd habits regard-ing children are imbued through and through with sexually charged norms and with ambiguous desire and care for children. And, of course, sexuality and the complexities of human relationships and love are not absent in an abstinent life, including that of Grimes. Moreover, Grimes has many desires. His failed attempts at heterosexual respectability are much in evidence. Although Balstrode (a retired skipper) tells Grimes that Ellen would certainly have him immediately, Grimes insists that only when he has money and a house will the marriage be right. Proving his respect-ability is foremost in his mind, and heterosexuality is merely one prong of his plan:

ellen. This unrelenting work This grey, unresting industry, What aim, what future, what peace Will your hard profits buy?

peter. Buy us a home, buy us respect And buy us freedom from pain


Of grinning at gossip’s tales. Believe in me, we shall be free! (ii, i)

Peter overestimates the degree to which heterosexuality respectability earns one “freedom” or respite; such respectability requires a continu-ous investment and can never be owned and achieved once and for all. His priority in this plan is clearly not a romantic relationship with Ellen. Rather, her role seems secondary to the house he purports to want to buy for her; such a relationship might bring about happiness, but only inasmuch as it is a necessary step in the respectability he so desires. This relationship is not entirely unlike contemporary “beard” arrangements, although a failed one.5 His ineptitude and reputational priorities as a beau do not, however, make him de-sexualized. It reminds us how eager he is to participate in heterosexual economies of property and respectability, both of which are imbued with narratives of sex and desire. The desire to be properly respectable is, in other words, also a desire for heterosexuality and its cultural cachets. Regardless of whether or not Grimes pursues any sexual acts (and we cannot be sure, as his relationship with John is myste-rious and ambiguous) he is not simply de-sexualized or free of “Freudian implication.” To dismiss this opera’s connection to Freud—to see it as a celibate opera—would therefore be to reify many problematic norms of child sexuality. It would be to assert that neither attachments with children nor desires for heterosexual respectability have any sexual implication or payoff with regards to one’s sense of oneself as properly adult.

While Rose, Bruhm, Hurley, Kelleher, and others all look, appropriately, to Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality to illustrate Freud’s influence on our ideas of childhood, I want to end by invoking a case history that speaks all too clearly to what this paper tries to describe in Peter Grimes: Freud’s 1919 case entitled “A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions.” In this essay, Freud describes a com-mon fantasy shared by many of his hysterical or neurotic analysands. As he quotes such patients, “A child is being beaten” (“Child” 179). Not only is this fantasy common but, moreover, “the phantasy has feelings of pleasure

5 Later, when arguing about John, Peter slaps Ellen. This incident easily fits into this reading of Grimes as a would-be but failed heterosexual subject. Of course, this act aligns all too neatly with many models of sexual subjectivity. This slap could also be understood as a sign of his general carelessness with others or of the inarticulate physical expressions that unfortunately stand in for Grimes’s ability (or willingness) to verbally express himself. This incident deserves its own analysis, but for the purposes of this analysis, suffice it to say that the slap evinces both his inclusion and exclusion from intimate heterosexuality.

50 | Crawford

attached to it” (179). Freud notes with interest that very little detail could be determined past these simple recollections. “Who was the child being beaten?” (179), we might ask? “Nothing could be ascertained that threw any light upon all these questions—only the hesitant reply: ‘I know noth-ing more about it: a child is being beaten’ ” (181). Although it may seem impossible to consider child-beating a fantasy, perhaps this describes quite accurately the conspiracy-theorist townsfolk in Peter Grimes who might share this very fantasy. They love (to hate) to conjure up images of beaten children, as we do. The more significant point here is that Freud’s patients, with absurd consistency, each formulate their fantasy without being able to imagine the subject who is enacting the beating and with only a limited sense of who the child might be. The beater is indistinct and the beating unspeakable, much like those in Britten’s opera. Ellen says only, “it’s begun” (ii, i), asks only “where the youngster got that ugly bruise?” (ii, i), and cannot quite take Peter to task or even name the act at hand. Furthermore, the present continuous verb tense of this formulation

—“a child is being beaten” rather than the simple present “someone beats the child”—literally leaves the beating in a passively continuous present that bears no sign of its action, its having started, or any indication of its ending.6 The beating is a state of being rather than an event. This is the way in which the townsfolks conceive of Peter’s activity. Even audience members, after our juridical introduction to Peter, probably envision him abusing John before we receive any evidence (since we never do receive any conclusive evidence). Peter Grimes never beats a child, but Peter Grimes is beating a child. The opera’s economy of silence is dependent, that is, on an equally strong economy of the open secret. Balstrode the retired skip-per says as much here, when he suggests that the court’s most detrimental judgments are its implicit ones:

Then the Crowner sits to Hint, but not to mention crimes,

6 Edelman discusses the odd construction of this phrase when critiquing the temporality of pro-family rhetoric. As he writes,

“A family is created”: like Freud’s “a child is being beaten” (which no doubt must follow in the fullness of time), the phrase strategically elides the agency by which this end is achieved. No fucking could ever effect such creation: all sensory experience, all pleasure of the flesh, must be borne away from this fantasy of futurity secured, eternity’s plan fulfilled, as “a new generation is carried forward.” Paradoxically, the child of the two-parent family thus proves that its parents don’t fuck. (41)


And publishes an open verdict Whispered about this “Peter Grimes”

The temporality Freud illustrates is—like that of the court and townsfolk —sustained by a fantasy of future violence, the adult fantasy of protec-tion, and the circulation of “open verdict[s].” The psychopathology of the townsfolk is violent but all too normal; as if writing a case history, they are eager for Peter to testify not about what he has done but about who he is. We witness the violent repercussions of this culture of the case; legal and psychoanalytic cases demand from the subject an artificially coher-ent narrative of selfhood (as Freud practiced and Foucault challenged).7

This article follows Foucault in this regard, refusing a “case study” her-meneutic of either Peter Grimes or Benjamin Britten. Despite Brett’s claim that Peter Grimes is in no way sexualized or relevant to psychoanalysis, the common critical commitment to using Britten’s personhood as an interpretive code for this opera is itself steeped in the very “case study” hermeneutic of types and species that Foucault critiques. Peter Grimes, anticipating the challenges Foucault would propose, does not call for (even preemptively diffuses) such critical approaches to itself. This article attempts to show that whether or not Britten is “guilty” or not of writing a “homosexual” opera is the wrong question. If we can leave the case of Britten’s queerness open by leaving Grimes and the opera’s silences inde-terminate, we can understand that this opera is more profoundly queer: in its literal rendering of the fact that the child circulates between us as a commodity; in Peter’s refusal to confess himself (that is, to come out); in its ambiguous and inveterate silences and words; in the gap of absent beatings at the very centre of the opera; and, in the idea that our norma-tive ideas of child protection may very well be violent.

The comparison between Peter Pan and Peter Grimes now assumes its full meaning; although suffering very different forms of abuse, John’s death and Peter Pan’s preservation are both violent, even if one looks like a fan-tasy. This is evoked more by an autograph inscribed by Peter Pan’s author in one of the first-edition copies of the text: “Peter is only a sort of dead

7 While psychoanalysis and the psychiatrization of law were concurrent phenom-ena, and while they share inclinations toward confession, cure, and teleology, it must be said that Freud understands narrativity in a much more artful way than does the court. Indeed, in “A Child is Being Beaten,” Freud follows his arguments with a self-reflexive and blatant admission of his own artifice/artfulness. As he suggests, his description of the patient’s past has “never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account” (185).

The comparison

between Peter

Pan and Peter

Grimes now

assumes its full

meaning.

52 | Crawford

baby—he is the baby of all the people who never had one” (quoted in Rose 38). This problematic formulation brings together our two characters: John is a dead child, while Peter is forever a child who is actually a “dead baby”; both live a kind of death. Edelman’s figuration of queerness as the death drive of reproductive culture resonates here; it demands of us a negativity that more than flirts with an aggressive approach to the normative child figure, that might take more queer pleasure in Peter Grimes than in Peter Pan. We cannot definitively attribute to Peter Grimes any pure sense of queer resistance or agency, but Edelman might remind us that acceding to one’s figuration as the death drive of culture is, after all, not a matter of agency or choice. It is, rather, to circulate in narratives as harbingers of death—not as they who kill children but as they whose ruins change any narrative of childhood that seduces, lures, and pins the child down onto the dangerous, if mundane, bed of sexual normalcy.

AcknowledgementsThank you to Brad Bucknell and two anonymous reviewers for excellent readings of the original manuscript of this article. Thank you also to Cecily Devereux and the rest of the esc staff.

Works Cited

Allen, Stephen Arthur. “Britten and the World of the Child.” Cooke 279–91.

Brett, Philip. “The More Vicious the Society, the More Vicious the Indi-vidual: Peter Grimes and its Message.” Peter Grimes. Ed. Brett. London: Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers, 2006.

Breuer, Joseph, and Sigmund Freud. Studies in Hysteria (1895). Trans. Nicola Luckhurst. Toronto: Penguin, 2004.

Britten, Benjamin, and Montagu Slater. Peter Grimes. Perf. Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. London: Decca, 1959. cd.

Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

———. “Introduction.” Bruhm and Hurley, ix–xxxviii.

“Chapter viii: Children’s Dangerous Performances Act (42 & 43 Vict. c. 34 [1879]).” The Law of Master and Servant: Part I.—Common Law. Part II.—Statute Law. John MacDonell, ed. London: Stevens and Sons, 1883.


Cooke, Mervyn, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten. Cam-bridge: Cambridge up, 1999.

———. “Introduction.” Cooke 1–10.

Curtis, Meagan E., and Jamshed J. Bharucha. “The Minor Third Commu-nicates Sadness in Speech, Mirroring Its Use in Music.” Emotion 10.3 (2010): 335–48. Web.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1976.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke up, 2004.

“Employment of Children Act.” London: publisher unknown, 1903.

Evans, Peter. The Music of Benjamin Britten. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1979.

Fenton, James. “How Grimes Became Grim.” The Guardian. 3 July 2004. Web.

Foucault, Michel. “About the Concept of ‘Dangerous’ Individuals in 19th Century Legal Psychiatry.” Law & Psychiatry. Ed. D. Weisstub. New York: Pergamon Press, 1978. 1–18.

———. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” Foucault Live: Collected Interviews. Ed. S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. 204–12.

———. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. 1978. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

———. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1965. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Freud, Sigmund. Case Histories I: “Dora” and “Little Hans.” Trans. Alix and James Strachey. Ed. Angela Richards. Penguin, 1901.

———. The Standard Edition of the Completely Psychological Works of Sig-mund Freud, vol. 17. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. James Strachey. Toronto: Hogarth Press, 1955.

Frost, Ginger S. Victorian Childhoods. Santa Barbara: abc–clio, 2008.

Kelleher, Paul. “How to do Things with Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the ‘Child in Danger.’ ” Bruhm and Hurley 151–72.

Kincaid, James R. “Producing Erotic Children.” Bruhm and Hurley 3–16.

54 | Crawford

Lavalette, Michael, ed. A Thing of the Past?: Child Labour in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Liverpool: Liverpool up, 1999.

Mitchell, Donald et al. Letters from a Life: the Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976, vol. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1990.

peter pan, peter grimes, and a queer case of modernism

Documents