Poor Tinker Bell. The political prejudices of our day have caught up with the sparkling fairy, and relegated her to a significantly reduced presence in the Disney universe.

Inside the Magic reported “Tinker Bell seems to have left Walt Disney World and is now on her way back to Neverland following a recent change at Walt Disney World Resort.” You can read the tragic tale on their site.

. . . once more, Disney’s animated classic, Peter Pan (1953), is under scrutiny, with Disney issuing a statement regarding Captain Hook and Tinker Bell as characters with potential concerns.

Linking poor Tink to a murderous pirate seems a bit of a stretch, and she has not been fully banished, but she has definitely been demoted. According to TMZ, Disney alleges the company’s “own people felt she wasn’t a good role model for girls in the 21st century.”

Well, eventually she too will be in the public domain, like Mickey Mouse. Actually, her literary portrait as introduced in the play, coincidentally just entered the public domain this year (2024)!

However, should you reside in the United Kingdom, beware that in 1988, the copyright holder, Great Ormond Street Hospital, was granted the rights to Peter Pan “in perpetuity.”

The Creator of Tinker Bell & Peter Pan

Tinker Bell is one of the most memorable characters in Neverland, the creation of James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937). He was a prolific Scottish writer and is best known for his 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy – which initially debuted in the form of a stage play in 1904, as Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

Peter Pan was actually introduced to the world as a baby in The Little White Bird. Tinker Bell does not appear in the novel, but the following description of J.M. Barrie’s fairy mythology is quite fanciful.

One of the great differences between the fairies and us is that they never do anything useful. When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.

They look tremendously busy, you know, as if they had not a moment to spare, but if you were to ask them what they are doing, they could not tell you in the least. They are frightfully ignorant, and everything they do is make-believe.

They have a postman, but he never calls except at Christmas with his little box, and though they have beautiful schools, nothing is taught in them; the youngest child being chief person is always elected mistress, and when she has called the roll, they all go out for a walk and never come back.

It is a very noticeable thing that, in fairy families, the youngest is always chief person, and usually becomes a prince or princess; and children remember this, and think it must be so among humans also, and that is why they are often made uneasy when they come upon their mother furtively putting new frills on the basinette.

Barrie continues, describing how infants are simply following fairy “ways” when they misbehave, and they naturally experience “exasperation, because we don’t understand [them], though [they are] talking an intelligible language . . . fairy.”

Returning to the person of Tinker Bell herself, she outgrew her supporting role as, in the words of her creator, “a common fairy.” She was literally a tinker, who died following the departure of Wendy and her brothers from Neverland. 

Presumably, some of the gatekeepers at Disney would have preferred that the affection of the crowds had not restored her to life. 

The Inklings

The Imaginative Conservative offers an interesting take on C.S. Lewis’ view of fairies. I quote a portion related to our present subject.

Lewis treats the subject of fairies in . . . The Discarded Image. . . . After explaining the medieval understanding of the heavens and planetary systems, Lewis turns to what he calls the Longaevi. He avoids the term “fairies” because it is “tarnished by pantomime and bad children’s books with worse illustrations.” (Probably referring to Barrie’s popular play and Princess Mary’s Gift Book – the book from which Elsie and Frances clipped the pictures they used in their fake photos.)

Jane Douglass, an American actress and playwright, contributed a fascinating essay to C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, and Other Reminiscences. One wonderful portion of “An Enduring Friendship” describes Lewis’ thoughts about the possible dramatization of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 

C.S. Lewis deemed the prospect absurd on its face, saying “I believe plays should be plays, poems, poems, novels, novels, stories, stories, and certainly the book you mention is pure narrative.” So much for a partially surviving 1967 series, the 1979 animation, the 1988 BBC television series, and the cinematic version(s) which began in 2005. Oh, and there is the matter of the impending Netflix telling which remains a closely guarded secret. Douglass continued with a reference to Disney.

He repeated his dread of such things as radio and television apparatus and expressed his dislike of talking films. I said I quite understood this, and that nothing would distress me more than that he should think that I had in mind anything like the Walt Disney shows; I hoped nobody had suggested the book to Mr. Disney.

This seemed to relieve Mr. Lewis to such an extent that I thought perhaps Mr. Disney had been after the book, but of course I did not ask. And in his usual generous way, Mr. Lewis said, “Too bad we didn’t know Walt Disney before he was spoiled, isn’t it?”

Author Jim Denney has a nice article on “What C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Thought of Walt Disney” in which he describes parallels between the live of Lewis and Disney and concludes, “you might think that, with all that C.S. Lewis and Walt Disney had in common, they might have been mutual admirers – but that was not the case.”

Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs debuted in the United States in 1937 and in the United Kingdom in 1938. . . . A few months later, Lewis went to see it again, this time with his good friend (and fellow Oxford professor) J.R.R. Tolkien.

Coincidentally, Tolkien’s first novel The Hobbit had been published in September 1937, just three months before the American debut of Snow White.

Their greatest disappointment was in Disney’s utterly comical take on dwarves and the absence of the slightest air of “the mythic nobility of the dwarves from Germanic folklore.”

Although Snow White is itself a fairy tale, fairy characters are not to be found in the film. In the same way, J.R.R. Tolkien referred to the Lord of the Rings as a “fairy story” for adults, yet they do not appear to dwell in Middle Earth.

In fact, according to The Encyclopedia of Arda, “the name ‘Faerie’ belongs to an early period of Tolkien’s writings, and is never seen in The Lord of the Rings, but it does survive in a single usage in the earlier book The Hobbit.” And even in that case, it refers not to a population, but to a place.

On the Effect of Tinker Bell

Tinker Bell’s significance in the world is not confined to literature, or the interests of children. There is a brilliant application of her legend which has been transposed into the psychological realm. 

It’s call the “Tinker Bell Effect,” and “Be(lie)ve It or Not,” from Psychology Today, offers the following description.

One theory manifesting connections among belief, psychology, and mythology is the Tinkerbell effect named for the fairy Tinker Bell of Peter Pan whose resuscitation depends upon the audience expressing their belief in fairies through clapping . . .

The Tinkerbell effect refers to those things that exist only through imaginative acts and because people believe in them. The Reverse Tinkerbell effect maintains that, somewhat paradoxically, the more people believe in something the more likely it is to disappear. 

In their article, the psychologists parenthetically offer an additional application of Tinker Bell’s nature to their area of study. (It actually appears in the paragraph above, where I replaced it with an ellipsis.)

(because she is so small that she can only hold one feeling at a time, Tinkerbell is also a model for mood disorders and difficulties with emotional self-regulation)

Fascinating. It seems to me this insight opens the door to further literary exploration of the Tinker Bell Phenomenon that would be of interest to writers and literary critics alike. I close with my proposal for a new label for an ancient plague afflicting fictional works. If it interests any scholars among you, I invite you to develop it further and claim it as your own.

Tinker Bell (var. Tinkerbell) Crippling Character Creation Complete Content Complexity Phenomenon: The invention of fictional characters who lack depth and bear no resemblance to real people. Literary tropes that are often referred to as one-dimensional or “flat” characters. (See nearly all Marvel supervillains.)

P.S. – Feel free to abbr. the admittedly verbose proposed title; keeping in mind most readers prefer brief reads.