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“We Have No Female Companionship”: Tiger Lily’s Transparent Presence in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter Pan, first published in 1911, depicts Neverland as a fictional island home to pirates, fairies, mermaids, lost boys, and indigenous peoples. Despite the island’s numerous inhabitants, Peter Pan convinces Wendy to join them because they “have no female companionship” (Barrie 31). Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell are two prominent female characters who inhabit the island, so why does Peter tell Wendy that the island contains no females? This brief interaction between Peter and Wendy on the night they meet shows that Peter does not believe Tiger Lily or Tinker Bell can provide any sort of “female companionship”, implying that Wendy is the only true female character. As a True Woman, Wendy displays the right kind of feminine and domestic characteristics that Peter needs on Neverland. While scholarship on the female characters of Peter Pan tends to focus on Wendy, I will closely analyze Tiger Lily’s role in the novel. I argue that Tiger Lily does not perform the ideal role of True Woman or display motherly qualities because of Barrie’s stereotyped view of Native Americans. Tiger Lily has a transparent presence in Peter Pan because she does not have her own agency and simply functions as a romanticized character upholding the nineteenth-century image of a “Vanishing Indian”. Published in the early twentieth century, Barrie’s novel Peter Pan continues the common nineteenthcentury trope of the “Vanishing Indian”. In order to understand how Tiger Lily functions as this stereotyped character, we must first look to the history of this popular image. Brian W. Dippie provides a history of the concept of the “Vanishing Indian” in The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. He describes the Indian-white relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and explains how missionaries had consistently believed that the Native Americans could be saved. Missionaries and the Puritans believed that in order for Native Americans to be saved, they needed to become both Christian and civilized, but they worried about which one “should come first, Christianity or civilization” (Dippie 9). The Puritans decided that civilization needed to come first, as civilization would pave the way for the NewWorld, so they ordered the Native Americans to “congregate in ‘towns,’ cut their hair, dress, and live like the Puritans. Before they could find God, they would have to become Englishmen” (10). Although the Puritans and missionaries “never doubted the Indians’ capacity for improvement” (10), the general public and the majority of the community were not as optimistic. The most prominent viewpoint within society was that the Native Americans were destined to vanish and would inevitably become an extinct race; they would never be able to fully assimilate into the white American society and become good Christians. According to Dippie, “Extermination as policy was unthinkable, but a fully rounded version of the Vanishing American won public acceptance after 1814. By its logic, Indians were doomed to ‘utter extinction’ because they belonged to ‘an inferior race of men... neither qualified to rise higher in the scale of being, nor to enjoy the benefits and blessings of the civilized and Christian state’” (10–11). This popular viewpoint, which society based on moralistic judgment, became their “natural law” (11), and the community was unanimous on the opinion that the Native American race would die out in the face of white civilization. The “Vanishing Indian” became a commodity as nineteenth-century writers marketed this popular theme and used sympathetic imagery to emphasize the supposedly inevitable end of a race. Native Americans became a commodity portraying the image of a sympathetic, “noble savage”. Dippie explains how the image of the “noble savage” came into existence. This image is associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and “The noble savage’s primary virtue was innocence of civilized