Roots Of The Rejuvenile

Rejuvenile
by Christopher Noxon

Once upon a time, boys and girls grew up and set aside childish things. Nowadays, moms and dads skateboard alongside their kids and download the latest pop-song ringtones. Captains of industry pose for the cover of Business Week holding Super Soakers. The average age of video game players is twenty-nine and rising. Top chefs develop recipes for Easy-Bake Ovens. Disney World is the world's top adult vacation destination (that's adults without kids). And young people delay marriage and childbirth longer than ever in part to keep family obligations from interfering with their fun fun fun.

Christopher Noxon has coined a word for this new breed of grown-up: rejuveniles. And as a self-confessed rejuvenile, he's a sympathetic yet critical guide to this bright and shiny world of people who see growing up as "winding down" — exchanging a life of playful flexibility for anxious days tending lawns and mutual funds.

In Rejuvenile, Noxon explores the historical roots of today's rejuveniles (hint: all roads lead to Peter Pan), the "toyification" of practical devices (car cuteness is at an all-time high), and the new gospel of play. He talks to parents who love cartoons more than their children do, twenty-somethings who live happily with their parents, and grown-ups who evangelize on behalf of all-ages tag and Legos. And he takes on the "Harrumphing Codgers," who see the rejuvenile as a threat to the social order.

Noxon tempers stories of his and others' rejuvenile tendencies with cautionary notes about "lost souls whose taste for childish things is creepy at best." (Exhibit A: Michael Jackson.) On balance, though, he sees rejuveniles as optimists and capital-R Romantics, people driven by a desire "to hold on to the part of ourselves that feels the most genuinely human. We believe in play, in make believe, in learning, in naps. And in a time of deep uncertainty, we trust that this deeper, more adaptable part of ourselves is our best tool of survival."

Fresh and delightfully contrarian, Rejuvenile makes hilarious sense of this seismic culture change. It's essential reading not only for grown-ups who refuse to "act their age," but for those who wish they would just grow up.

Chapter 1

I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want to be a little boy and have fun.

— J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Before he was a cash cow for Walt Disney, an inspiration for Steven Spielberg, and an obsession for Michael Jackson, Peter Pan was simply a revelation. When J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, subtitled The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, opened at the Duke of York Theater in 1904, it announced the arrival of something entirely new. The theatrical fashion of the time was for so-called problem plays, heart-wrenching melodramas that dealt with social ills and political complexities. Parting that gloom was Barrie's tale of a flying boy, his fairy sidekick, and their adventures in a faraway land where children remained children forever. Part farce, part pantomime, part inside joke, Peter Pan was a tale of pirates and fairies told in the sophisticated language of adults. Based on tall tales Barrie spun to amuse the five sons of a local barrister — his favorite being a rascal called George whom he met in Kensington Gardens when the boy was all of five — Peter Pan was the sort of cross-generational sensation that would become a model for mass entertainments of the next one hundred years.

First of the preteen heroes, Peter Pan attracted a rabid following of young matinee fans. But his real power was over a generation raised on fairy tales and nonsense rhymes and now anxiously adjusting to the social changes and gadgetry of a new century. On the night of the premiere, according to Barrie biographer Andrew Birkin, "the elite of London society, with few children among them, emulated Sentimental Tommy by 'flinging off the years and whistling childhood back.'" Wistful, lighthearted, and condemned by a chorus of critics who saw no good in such open celebration of childishness, Peter Pan was the first of the rejuvenile blockbusters.

Peter Pan was all the more resonant because it was the product of a celebrated public figure who shared his hero's deep ambivalence about adulthood. James Matthew Barrie was a small and moody Scotsman with a bushy mustache and no interest whatsoever in growing up in any conventional sense. Of this, he'd apparently always been sure. "Greatest horror — dream that I am married — wake up screaming," the eighteen-year-old wrote in his college diary. "Grow up and have to give up marbles — awful thought." While Barrie eventually did get married, to a comely stage actress named Mary Ansell, he made few other concessions to adulthood. When he wasn't locked away in his study, Barrie liked nothing more than practicing magic tricks, wrestling his giant St. Bernard, and most of all, playing with the sons of barrister Llewelyn Davies, whom he dressed as pirates, wrote stories for and about, and kept entertained with his vast knowledge of cricket, fishing, and Sir Walter Scott.

There has never been any evidence that Barrie's relationship with the Davies boys was anything but friendly, but their closeness has nonetheless prompted psychoanalytic suspicion and prurient interest ever since. Critics have scoured his biography for clues to explain Barrie's lifelong fight against traditional adulthood. Was he stunted by the death of his older brother, the doting of his indulgent mother, or the rejection of his loveless wife? All those things undoubtedly had a profound impact on Barrie, but one ultimately learns very little attempting to attach this misery or that to his rejuvenile tendencies. Barrie's legacy has less to do with his private sorrow than his articulation of childhood as a poetic and primitive life force that can linger long after its expected expiration. More than a fairy tale, Peter Pan announced the arrival of a new and enduring breed of adult.

The Invention of Adulthood

When I set out to learn about the roots of the rejuvenile, I didn't expect to find much. I figured a quick historical survey would turn up little scraps here and there — a few childish eccentrics in ancient Rome, maybe a popular children's game in Colonial America, perhaps a juvenile fashion craze from the 1920s. But early in my search for historical precedents, one thing became clear: This has all happened before. In seemingly every book I opened on social history, children's literature, or popular culture, I landed again and again on parallels from the same few decades. 1865: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is embraced by children and adults. 1893: Grown-ups flock to the first amusement park at the World's Fair in Chicago. 1893: The first newspaper comic strip, featuring a one-toothed, bald-headed ragamuffin called the Yellow Kid, is published. 1907: The Scouting movement is founded by a self-described "boy-man." And at the very peak of that kidcentric period was the 1902 premiere of Peter Pan, which neatly summed up the myth of the eternal child.

For rejuveniles today, all roads lead back to Peter Pan and the turn of the twentieth century. The natural capacities of children, which for centuries had been viewed as weak and wayward, were over the course of these few years discovered as a primary source of inspiration and profit. It would be another century before the rejuvenile rebellion we know today, but resistance to what historian Woody Register calls "the enfeebling prudence, restraint and solemnity of growing up" began here, with the first flight of Pan and the dawn of the twentieth century.

The temptation today is to think of adulthood as a historic and natural fact. In a 2004 essay on "The Perpetual Adolescent," Joseph Epstein wrote that historically, adulthood was treated as the "lengthiest and most earnest part of life, where everything serious happened." To stray outside the defined boundaries of adulthood, he wrote, was "to go against what was natural and thereby to appear unseemly, to put one's world somehow out of joint, to be, let's face it, a touch, and perhaps more than a touch, grotesque." A quick survey of history, however, reveals that adulthood is neither as ingrained or ancient as Epstein and other Harrumphing Codgers assume. Before the Industrial Revolution, no one thought much about adulthood, and even less about childhood. In sixteenth-century Europe, for instance, "children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, the same fairy stories. They lived their lives together, never apart," notes historian J. H. Plumb.

This shouldn't suggest that people in olden times didn't distinguish between kids and grown-ups. Of course they did. The distinction forms the basis of rites of passage that are as old as human history, as well as some of more recent vintage. Amazonian initiation rites, Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, Muslim Khtme Qur'ans, Christian confirmations, American debutante balls — all serve the same basic function: to formally announce the end of childhood and the assumption of new duties and freedoms. It's a mistake, though, to confuse maturity with adulthood. The maturity celebrated in traditional rites of passage — assured variously by the onset of menstruation, the acquisition of literacy, or the ability to stalk and slit the throat of a large prairie mammal — is not the same thing as the idea of adulthood hatched a century ago by a coterie of Victorian clergymen and society ladies. Maturity is old. "Adulthood" is new.

The fact is that, for most of human history, age simply didn't matter much. Everyone from Aristotle to Dante had idly puzzled over the comparable merits of each stage of life, with an obviously middle-aged Aristotle arguing that middle age was best, since young people exhibited too much trust and old people too little. But such distinctions were mostly made by philosophers; for average people, age was more a matter of biology than identity.

Copyright © 2006 by Christopher Noxon. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Christopher Noxon has written for The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and Salon. He lives with his wife and three children in Los Angeles.