The question of Susan

Opposition is true friendship, and on no subject are Kit and hapax more opposed than C.S. Lewis. Loved and hated, uplifting or corrupt depending on who you talk to, Lewis is a writer who is, if nothing else, always provokes strong feelings in his readers.

Here's how we come at Narnia:

hapax: I've always been fond of reading C.S. Lewis, although Narnia wasn't my first exposure to his works. I think that might have been The Screwtape Letters, or possibly Miracles (you have to understand, I was bored with Sunday School by the age of seven, so I used to wander out and sit in the church library and read). Lewis appealed to me principally because he had a knack of expressing complicated abstract ideas with clear and concrete images. Some were notably more successful than others; I was early impressed by his comparison of the Trinity to "personality cubed", for example, but his notorious "Trilemma" never struck me as persuasive or even particularly logical.

As I grew older, and more sensitive to his many many blind spots and prejudices (although the sexism irked me even as a young child), I came to think of him less as a reliable teacher than an entertaining and sympathetic fellow-traveller, who has interesting and amazing observations about the landscape, and some intriguing thoughts about the destination, but who is horribly unreliable about the roadblocks and detours. By this point, I read Lewis as much to challenge my instinctive agreement with many of his positions as to enlighten me about things I don't yet understand.

As far as Narnia goes, I probably read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and all the rest by the age of ten or so; they were undoubtedly considered perfect gifts for a solemn child with a "weird obsession" (in my family's perspective) with religion. I liked them well enough to re-read them several times, and don't ever recall not reading them as analogies for Christian doctrines. I was very well read (for an elementary school student) in world mythologies and religious traditions, and comfortable with allegorical story telling (I think I made up my own elaborate allegorical world at about the same time) so I never felt "deceived" or "preached at", the way many others report their experience.

But they were never my favorite stories, not even of Lewis's. I don't much care for "portal" fantasies (like Mary Poppins, I don't think that respectable persons ought to be popping in and out of chalk pavement pictures), so it's no surprise that the one I re-read most frequently was The Horse and His Boy; but the character I identified with most was Eustace. And that's related to one of the characteristics in Lewis's writing that I liked best: a clear-eyed, compassionate portrayal of a certain set of … well, "sins", for a want of a better word, that neither excused them nor denied the damage they did to self and others, yet still loving and hopeful of the long, frequently difficult, process of change. Indeed, I rather liked that about all the "real world" characters in the Narnia stories; while they were certainly changed by their encounters with Aslan and Narnia, they were also recognizably themselves, faults and all.

But honestly, I never cared much for the characters, or the story, or the world. What I returned to Narnia for, and took back with me, was a large number of powerful images and set-scenes: Edmund in the snow, stubbornly trudging towards the castle of the Witch. The feast at the end of Prince Caspian. Eustace turning into a dragon, and agonizing return to humanity. The horror of the Island of Dreams. Getting lost in the blizzard outside Harfang, and the stench of "burnt Marsh-wiggle" during Puddleglum's triumphant defiance. The tunnel between Polly's and Digory's attics, and the horrid sweetness of the bell that awakened Jadis in Charn. The poor imprisoned Dwarfs after the Last Battle, and Time squeezing the dying sun like a rotted fruit between his fingers.

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Kit: I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as a child, mostly because my school took the class to a stage performance of it. I liked it well enough, but when I tried others in the series I just couldn't get on with them. At nine years old I couldn't quite articulate why, but there seemed to be a sense of unfairness in them; the characters kept getting into trouble for breaking rules that hadn't been explained, for instance, and not realising that Aslan was supposed to be a religious figure, I reacted to him as a character and found him self-satisfied and boastful, full of his own importance for no good reason that I could see. As a heterosexual little girl I did have an impression of virility from how he's described, but I didn't like him, which is of course a big stumbling block when reading the Narnia series, so I didn't bother with the series and went back to Dick King-Smith and the Ramona books.

As an adult, it's hard to describe the visceral anger Lewis provokes in me, and certainly it's hard to describe it without sounding so intemperate that my credibility looks doubtful. The best way I can describe it is to say that I react to Lewis the way many people react to Ayn Rand: I find him an aggressively bullying narrative voice as well as a lazy writer, and there's just a sense of hatred in his work that I cannot consider calmly. It isn't just that it was people like me he was bashing - female, feminist, left-wing on the grand scale, vegetarian, non-smoking and non-drinking on the petty scale (and my, does Lewis strike me as petty) - but that his whole aspect seems to me at once vicious and preening; I truly find him the most loathsome popular author I've ever encountered. I don't intend to ban my son from reading him, but I take him seriously enough that I do mean to make a point of reading E. Nesbit, J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones and whatever other fantasy classics for children my much-more-expert husband suggests before Lewis comes his way, so that if he feels a sense of passionate wonder at his first experience of imaginative fiction, it won't be Lewis he imprints on.

Of course, with this attitude it would probably serve me right if my son grew up to be a Lewis devotee. But the fact remains that of all the authors in the world, Lewis is pretty much the only one I even have this worry about.

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So, with these two attitudes, it's hardly surprising that we have different interpretations of one of Lewis's most famous controversies - what has come to be called 'The Problem of Susan', the moment in which Susan, previously an active participant in Narnia heroism, is suddenly excluded at the last minute:

'Sire,' said Tirian, when he had greeted all these, 'if I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?'

'My sister Susan,' answered Peter shortly and gravely, 'is no longer a friend of Narnia.'

'Yes,' said Eustace, 'and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, "What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'

'Oh, Susan!' said Jill. 'She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.'

'Grown-up indeed,' said the Lady Polly. 'I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.'

'Well, don't let's talk about that now,' said Peter. 'Look! Here are lovely fruit trees. Let us taste them.' †

This short scene (and that's literally all there is on the subject) is referred to as 'the Problem of Susan' because of a Neil Gaiman short story of the same name. The story begins as an elderly female professor, 'Professor Hastings', dreams an apparently recurring nightmare the of mutilated corpses of fantastical creatures, followed by a lion and a witch apparently arguing inaudibly. She then wakes, and goes through an interview with a young woman called Greta Campion about classic children's literature. In it, Professor Hastings describes losing her family in a train crash and having to identify their damaged bodies, and remarks that Lewis's Susan must have undergone a similar ordeal, and that 'a god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well ... he's enjoying himself a bit too much, isn't he? Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse.' The interview ends, and we see another dream of the professor's - or possibly a dying vision - in which God laments that Mary Poppins is absent from Heaven, remarking that He 'didn't create her. She's Mary Poppins.' Meanwhile Greta sleeps, and dreams that a lion eats her except her head, then makes love to the witch in her sight , then eats her head and destroys her; she lies awake imagining death coming in the night 'like a lion'.

We plan to enjoy a friendly disagreement about Lewis. So, to begin, hapax: what's your reaction to the story, and to the so-called 'Problem of Susan' in general?

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hapax: I liked Gaiman's story, as much as I like all his writings; it's clever and beautifully crafted and creepy in a way that insinuates into my waking dreams. But - for me - it has nothing in particular to say to Narnia and Lewis, because I don't see it as either engaging with the text that Lewis wrote or the meta-story that I read into it, both as a child and as an adult.

Of course, I've never really seen the so-called "Problem of Susan". The "Problem of Edmund", sure; his whole story arc in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe raises interesting (and possibly insoluble) questions about free will, sin, grace, and redemption that Christian thinkers have struggled with for over two thousand years.

But Susan? From an in-story perspective, we simply have no idea of her fate. Lewis in his letters refused to commit to a definitive conclusion. All we know is that she is "no longer a friend of Narnia" (the context seems to imply membership in an organized group, not a general disposition) and that some of the other members ascribe it to a shallowness and silliness in her character; and as the text we have closes, she is not currently in "Aslan's country" (either the Narnian or English version) with her deceased family.

I was astonished to discover, as an adult, that a great many people seem to deduce from these facts that she was somehow punished, or even worse, damned. From my point of view, she was the LUCKY one -- the one who got to experience human life, with all its joys and sorrows, to a degree that the rest of her siblings never would - and this was apparently the result of her own choice, to value the "real world" over the Narnian ideal. The apparent sexist reasoning behind her choice didn't bother me at all from an in-story perspective, for reasons I'm sure you'll ask me to expand on. <g>

However, I must confess that it's pretty hard for me to read The Last Battle from "inside" at all. It's definitely the weakest of all the books from a story perspective, because Lewis seems to have abandoned entirely such minor issues as characterization, world-building, plot, and the rest, all to hammer home a series of doctrinal points.

And so "Susan" in this story doesn't bear much relationship to the "Susan" of the first two (although there are hints in those books that seem to point to this outcome, I don't really think Lewis had them in mind when they were written.) To be blunt, Susan in
The Last Battle serves merely as the dogmatic counter-point to Emeth, the Calormene soldier whom Aslan accepts; she is the Designated Apostate to his Righteous Pagan.

Lewis's didactic needs demand that both such types appear; they both function as a sort of a warning to the reader, that it is impossible for any human judge to truly know who belongs to "Aslan's Country", the Kingdom of Heaven, and that membership in the True Church doesn't necessarily correspond the human labels. Therefore, we must neither grow complacent in our status as "Christians", nor be too quick to reject the "Other" as condemned.

Why was Susan cast in this role (or under the bus, as some would argue)? Well, there really wasn't anyone else to take it. Everyone else (except Eustace and Jill) had their own archetypical role to play in this scene, which unfortunately constrained their own personalities as believable characters quite as badly as poor Susan. And yes, I think it was lazy writing on Lewis's part - and quite probably ingrained sexism - to present it the way that he did, which certainly allowed for all sorts of distressing interpretations. But I don't think that they are at all necessary, or even the most consistent with the series or Lewis's own thought.

And that's probably given you more than enough material to respond!

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Kit: I'm very much of the camp that does think Susan is damned. On the other hand, the 'Problem of Susan' is not, for me, the biggest problem in the text.

I gather that Lewis said the odd thing in his correspondence to suggest that Susan might have found her way back to Narnia another way, but whether he meant it or was just obfuscating, I find it contradictory to the whole tone of The Last Battle.

Narnia is not a world with rigid logic to it; a reader preoccupied with 'worldbuilding' will find plenty to question. That's not something I personally have a problem with: Narnia's function is to be a kind of hyper-real dream, and it often works on dream logic - which is a legitimate fictional strategy. On the other hand, one of the few consistent points is that time flows differently in Narnia from how it flows in 'Shadowlands' (that is, our reality), and it almost always flows faster. It's like Tír na nÓg‡ in reverse: decades in Narnia are only a few minutes in reality. Now, I partly attribute this to Lewis's love of cosiness and convenience, and partly to his desire to make it as applicable an analogy to religious experience as possible, because it means the characters can return to reality with no consequences or disruption, but whyever it's the case, time in Narnia flows fast.

So if he had wanted to show Susan's entry to Narnia as delayed rather than lost, there would have been no reason why he couldn't have written, for instance, an elderly Susan running over the hills to meet them. If she loses her connection to this spirit world and then finds it again, we'd expect to see her there. And that's not just a practical issue: more importantly in such a dream-logic series of books, it's a thematic one.

Lewis or others may argue that Susan will find her way back to Narnia by some other route later, but aesthetically it's hard to feel that this could happen. Everybody else is there, so even if we imagine they were all on the crashing train except her - which seems oddly convenient - in terms of theme and mood, it's a final reunion. Likewise, Narnia is shutting down; everyone is going 'further up and further in' and leaving the old Narnia behind. Everything is ending ... so a character's absence from this shut-down feels permanent. The fact that everybody is going further up and further in feels thematically like the Narnia Susan could enter is closing its doors, and the different movements of time in the different realities feel as if the Narnian eternity would have encompassed Susan's mortal span if she were ever going to return.

So I think that when people say that he damns Susan ... he may have said the odd thing outside the book to suggest otherwise, but in terms of the emotional impression and thematic tone he strikes, it's hard to feel that her exclusion is anything other than eternal. And since so much of the book is about the primacy of feeling, he's pretty much set things up for that impression to be convincing.

I suppose you could argue that Narnia is only one form of heaven and she may come to heaven an entirely different way, but that really strains against Lewis's dogmatism in the rest of the series: Narnia is so thoroughly the measure of faith and virtue, even to the point where a (let's be honest here) Muslim can get into heaven by accepting it ... well, frankly suggesting she may get in another way sounds pretty much like Lewis saying, 'Look, if you don't like it, go make up your own ending and leave me alone.' I simply don't buy that exclusion from Narnia isn't exclusion from Heaven: Lewis pushes Narnia too hard, and it too bloody-minded about people who differ from him even to the extent of preferring a different diet (vegetarianism is a ghastly aberration). Differing from him about what kind of Heaven they'd like, when they aren't even allowed to like a different way of getting their protein? It doesn't fit. Even his characters aren't very different from one another: all his goodies have the same hearty good-egg pluck and they're not very distinguished from one another - as witness, for instance, the way Eustace talks to Edmund after his conversion, and immediately takes on the same public school man-to-man tone when conversing with him. Lewis doesn't rejoice in difference, he rejoices in conformity.

And while I see your point about it being thematically necessary to have an apostate ... well, there we actually get on to an issue that troubles me more than the fate of a single character, and which I think may explain why Susan is such a stone in many people's shoes.

One of the things about Lewis that truly repels me is his air of - well, I usually call it 'chuckling sadism'. He liked to contemplate certain religious issues, and one of the things he returned to over and over, with a certain relish, was the theme of punishment. Characters are set up for correction constantly in the Narnia series, and the offences that draw these punishments often seem unfair - refusing to step back from the edge of a cliff, ringing a bell when there's no clear reason not to, offences that seem deeply contrived. Which gives me the strong sense that punishing his characters is something that interests him, Lewis, to the point where he'll force misbehaviours on them without much justification so as to allow him to get to where he really wants to go. And we can see this unfairness in lots of ways throughout the books: many people, for instance, think it harsh to judge Edmund so severely for his 'treachery' when he's explicitly acting under magical addiction and all you can really blame him for is 'taking sweets from a stranger'. Or Eustace, who's lambasted from the first sentence we meet him, and his crime mostly seems to be that he's absorbed the values of his parents (whose crime mostly seems to be that they're modern and left-wing): making him a know-it-all and a tease comes after listing what really seems to annoy Lewis, which is that he comes from a progressive family, and so feels like forcing vices onto him to justify a petty political hatred. Or ... well, I get a strong sense of set-up from Lewis's writing. It's an artistic fault - he wasn't a perfect novelist - but it's a revealing one, because it strikes me that he's eager to punish his characters and interested in how to do it. He likes to judge - the whole of The Screwtape Letters is about how to find reasons to damn someone; the dwarves' suspicion of Heaven gets a whole chapter and strikes me as deeply victim-blaming (reality contains many people who are afraid of being hurt twice, and to cast this as unsalvageable, you-have-only-yourself-to-blame folly is simply mean) - and he'll do it whenever he can.

So to my mind, the need for an apostate wouldn't necessarily be a sin in Lewis if he didn't seem to need every other kind of punishable sinner so constantly and so badly. And I think that Susan sticks in people's minds for that reason. He very seldom does it to a character we've been required to identify with - usually he loves punishing Them, and it's perhaps indicative that when he punishes Susan it happens off-stage, as if he didn't enjoy punishing Us quite so much and so saved his detailed punishments for the really satisfying targets - so it jumps to the attention of the 'constant reader' more forcefully. But the other thing is that of all his contrived punishments, it's the worst rendered: there's practically nothing in the whole series the supports it, and it feels very perfunctory. You know how somebody can trouble people for a long time with deniable micro-aggressions that no one quite knows how to challenge, and then they do something that's definitely wrong and everyone rounds on them with the force of long frustration? I suspect something similar is going on with the 'Problem of Susan': Lewis's meanness is usually better rationalised but can leave a nagging sense of discomfort, and here he gets clumsy enough to be called to account for it. Especially as a lot of his meannesses are expressed in ways you really need an academic approach to challenge - or at least to approach the books as constructed pieces of artifice rather than stories one participates in - but the exclusion of Susan is something that's done to a character rather than something implied, so it's easier to spot.

It's one of his clumsiest moments of sexism, of course - the 'silliest time' of a woman's life appears to be her peak sexual years, as the saved women emphasise that it's all right to be a child and it's all right to be middle-aged and motherly, but nothing in between (and you notice that it's 'motherly', not a mother? There are no mothers among the saved, presumably because one can't become a mother without passing through fertile young adulthood) - but again, it struck me as symptomatic of a deeper problem rather than a big shock. Why didn't the sexism bother you?

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hapax: Hmm. I don't think Lewis meant to show Susan's entry into Narnia as "delayed." I think the whole point is that
we don't know. It is equally dangerous to make assumptions about other people's "salvation" as it is about their "damnation." That, in every sense of the word, isn't any of my business. As Aslan said, "Nobody is ever told any story but their own."

Which leads me to comment on the way I read the Narnia books – particularly the later ones The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle are the most characteristic of this point) – and moralistic / fabulistic literature in general (which includes pretty much everything Lewis wrote). These don't seem to me to be so much stories, with all the expected components of structured plot, consistent characterization, logical worldbuilding, as parables. And as such, I read them differently; to put it simply, they really are All About Me.

Permit me to make a short digression into medieval Biblical interpretation. (Lewis's specialty was medieval literature, so this isn't coming entirely out of nowhere.) The standard "fourfold sense" (first codified by Bede, but used from the time of the Church Fathers until, well, the present day) held that every unit of Scripture could be seen in four ways: the "literal" (or plain sense meaning), the "allegorical" (how the elements of the story point to and illuminate the larger story of God's interaction with humanity), the "tropological" or "moral" (how this story gives us guidance in living our daily lives), and "anagogical" or "eschatological" (how this story can be understood in terms of the ultimate end of history). While technically, each approach is valid to every passage, in practice it seems that certain passages work better with particular kinds of stories. And the fable / parable is especially suited to the tropological approach.

The important thing about reading stories in this way is that there is no "Other". Whether I'm reading about Aesop's fox or lion, the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, Susan Pevensie or the Dwarves in the Stable, the parable doesn't permit me to picture Those Folks I Don't Like and say to myself, "See? I knew they were rotten scoundrels." Rather I am required to look in myself and say, "Hmm. How am I shallow, and too fond of ephemeral pleasures? In what ways do I close my eyes to the world around me? Am I Augustine, praying 'Lord, make me chaste, but not yet'? Am I denying my own experiences because they point me to uncomfortable conclusions?" When every character is a virtue or a vice (or a complicated bundle of associated traits), every character is also Me -- at least potentially. And when I contain such multitudes, how can I look upon the failings and triumphs of my fellows without compassion, pity, and shared rejoicing?

Which is why I don't get the same sense of vindictiveness that you do out of Lewis's writings. Where you read a mean-spirited delight in punishment, I read an honest and ruthless self-examination and self-exposure, and feel encouraged to engage in the same. It's perfectly possible that I am far too generous when I read Lewis this way, and his intentions were every bit as petty and abusive as you describe. And we've discussed before how I have seen in some of his books a great deal of fear – particularly where he senses himself most vulnerable and prone to failure – and a tendency to lash out in self-protection. If I feel pity rather than contempt, that's no credit to me; I'm not one of his victims (except in that I'm female, which I'll address below) and it's easy to be sympathetic to those whose faults we share.

But while I certainly won't claim that my way of approaching Narnia – particularly The Last Battle -- is "the correct one" (let alone "necessary"), it isn't in any way something forced or artificial, either. I don't read the text this way because of what I've learned about the history of hermeneutics; instead, that just gives me the language to talk about my interpretative scheme. I don't know if Lewis intended it to be read this way – I think he was a complicated man, with a constant internal battle between his reason and his emotions, his fears and his hopes, his pettiness and his generosity. But I know that even as a young child I read the story this way, have
always read the story this way, automatically and instinctively read the story this way – because that's the only way I could make
sense out of it. It's the same way that I found myself reading Aesop, the same way I read Exodus; because any other choice would have made the story
monstrous.

So in this tropological reading, what am I to take from the absence of Susan in the last chapters of the Narnia series (which, as I said, only makes thematic sense as the balance to the inclusion of Emeth) ? Well, although the major themes of this final section are meant to be reassuring and even joyful (death is not the end, everything works out for the best, no good thing is ever destroyed – not a bad message for a series that started out with characters escaping from the Blitz), I think that a minor counterpoint of uncertainty is necessary to keep from simplistic triumphalism. Perhaps the elderly Susan will swim up the waterfall someday. Perhaps she will choose to walk off into Aslan's shadow. Perhaps, as I speculated elsewhere, she will explore the "true" Bism, or allow her body to peacefully dissolve into the soil feeding the Woods Between the Worlds. The key is that I do not, cannot, know. It's not only that I can not, must not, make assumptions about who is "in" and "out" as far as Aslan's Country is concerned; I can't even be sure about myself. Certainty can lead only to arrogance or despair. The only way to find out whether I am truly a "friend of Narnia", is to walk through the stable door.

Wow, that's a lot, and I haven't even touched on the sexism part yet. Well, in many ways that's an easier topic. There's two ways I deal with it; one from outside the text, and one from inside.

From an outside, critical perspective, of course Lewis was sexist. My elementary school self recognized that, the same way she recognized that Kipling was racist, Heyer was anti-Semitic, and my paternal grandparents were embarrassing in every single way. And although I wouldn't have known it then (all dead writers were equally from "back then"), Lewis didn't have the excuse of being a "man of his times" – there were plenty of contemporary and earlier writers who wrote women as fully human.

But, well – how should I put this? Lewis's sexism annoyed me, but it didn't really bother me, because it was so much like my grandparents' prejudices. It was dumb. It was silly. It was over the top. Lewis writes about women like a man who had never met one. Later, when I grew up and read the misogynistic writings of monastic theologians, I would find exactly the same themes that are present in Lewis. Women are "bad" not because they are female, but because they are naturally deficient men; failed men. Women are "good" insofar as they aspire to "manliness" – rationality, self-control, healthy athleticism – as long as they remember that they'll never achieve more than being "as good as a boy."

But – and this is my good fortune, I suppose – this attitude seemed so self-evidently stupid, so entirely alien to anything that had to do with me or any Real Live (Female) People, that it was hard for me to take personally. I can certainly see why plenty of other people wouldn't find this blatant sexism so easy to shrug off. But it never angered me; just made me sigh and roll my eyes.

From an internal perspective, the other reason I am not bothered by the exclusion of Susan for what seem sexist reasons is that this interpretation is contradicted by the rest of the series. I'm not speaking here of the many strong and admirable women who appear in the series (mostly in secondary roles, true), in all ages and conditions: girls, teens, objects of romantic desire, young single woman, older single women, young brides, mothers of young children, mothers of adult children, old wives, queens and washerwomen… In fact, rather than "there being no mothers among the saved", every single female character (except Hwin the Mare) we see in the "grand reunion" scene was a wife and a mother. Stereotypically "female" behaviors -- cooking, sewing, fashion – and attributes – compassion, grace, beauty, elegance – are not elsewhere condemned in the book.

But more specifically, I find it difficult to take seriously the whole "Susan is damned for being frivolous and sexual" because of a particular favorite minor character, in my favorite book: Lasaraleen in The Horse and His Boy. Since this isn't a discussion about The Problem of Corin, I'll spare you my ruminations about narrative structure and themes in that book, but suffice it to say that you couldn't find a character more enthused about her culture's equivalent of "nylon and lipsticks and invitations" than Lasaraleen, and though Lewis (through Aravis, his viewpoint character for this section) strives his best to make her tiresome and silly; but he completely fails. Utterly. Lasaraleen is simply
likable; she is warm and caring and generous and full of life, and although terribly afraid, conquers her terror (and risks her life) to help Aravis achieve her own goals, even to a life Lasaraleen couldn't comprehend and utterly disapproved of. When we last see her, Aravis (as Lewis's mouthpiece) embraces her friend and says, "I'm sure you'll have a lovely life – though it wouldn't suit me."

Somewhere between The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle, at least two of Lewis's female characters seemed to forget that there were different ways of being a woman – and that was OKAY.

But this female reader didn't.

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Kit: I think we're seeing the fundamental difference between our approaches here: I do think the text is monstrous. That's actually a very good word for the impression it gives me.

I have to say that I don't buy the idea that we don't know what happens to Susan. In the hands of another writer, sure, but Lewis? Negative capability was his mortal enemy. And narratively speaking, I don't think it washes: 'Nobody is ever told any story but their own' simply isn't true in this case. It's not as if we have a single-perspective protagonist: the entire cast is present except for those explicitly excluded - 'Everyone you had ever heard of (if you knew the history of these countries) seemed to be there' - and even then, we see some of the exclusions - the Dwarves, for instances, whose 'story' is perfectly visible to the whole merry gang, and Aslan actually explains exactly what's going on when he says that 'Their prison is only in their own minds.' That flatly contradicts the assertion that nobody ever hears anybody else's story. When Lewis has a point he wants to make, he tells other people's stories with a free and heavy hand.

So if Lewis did assert that we simply don't know Susan's fate, all I can say is that I find this disingenuous. People do not go unpunished or unrewarded under his judging eye. False impressions are, in The Last Battle, being corrected left and right: when our heroes try to argue with the Dwarves, for instance, Aslan steps in and sets them straight. He only stays out of conversations where people are already correct - he doesn't intervene when Emeth tells his story, for instance, and if the characters are debating amongst themselves he leaves them to it as long as they reach the right conclusion - but if people are wrong and confused, up pops Aslan to get rid of any doubts. There's uncertainty as to exactly what the next 'further up and further in' will contain, but only as to detail - it's clear it's going to be better than the one before - and that's as much uncertainty as he allows. The characters' condemnation of Susan goes uncorrected, so I can only assume they are being left alone as they always are when they have reached the right conclusion amongst themselves.

I simply don't see it as judging himself: too many of his poison darts are heavily coded with political Otherness. Susan's sin is that she rejects childhood beliefs; what is the whole Narnia series but a bellowing of 'I believe!'? She rejects his values - and it's people who do it, and particularly with an air of intellectual confidence, that attract the greatest fury, and it's done in an explicitly feminine way. It's not just that she's an apostate: Susan is, in this part of the story, a scaled-down version of the Green Witch who calls his faith childish with a maddening tinkle of female laughter. And the satisfaction he takes in swinging at such women in a story he controls is positively unseemly.

And a lot of his hatreds are coded like that. Witches are the most powerful force of spiritual evil; the closest male equivalent we get is Uncle Andrew, one of whose distinguishing features is that he's 'silly in a very grown-up way', in Lewis's squirming euphemism, for admiring the fiery Jadis. Evil is almost always coded female or female-contaminated.

With Lasaraleen and "I'm sure you'll have a lovely life – though it wouldn't suit me." - I think it's interesting to look at the order of that sentence. Imagine it the other way around: 'It wouldn't suit me, but I'm sure you'll have a lovely life.' Me-but-You is a lot warmer than You-but-Me. I still hear a subtle condemnation in Aravis's farewell: Lasaraleen's life will be 'lovely', but that doesn't mean it'll be good or worthy, just enjoyable. And Aravis, going off on an adventure where she will encounter a higher truth, is too good for that. That's what we learn from the sentence: that Aravis is rising above the merely pleasurable because she has too much mettle, leaving behind Lasaraleen's lesser vision of life. It's not pluralism we're hearing here, it's hierarchy with a brief attempt at manners.

And it's not just femininity he swipes at. I remember as a child being put off by the opening flourish to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: 'There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.' Even as a child, I thought: 'You gave him that name, and you gave him whatever bad qualities you say he has; if you're mad at him, you're mad at him for being what you chose to make him. It's your fault, not his.' And as an adult, I saw this kind of thing: '[Eustace's parents] were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and tee-totallers ... [Eustace] liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools' - in other words, he's chosen to personify socialism in a whole bundle of petty, 'latte libel' gripes. And then Eustace's school is blamed for being 'a "mixed" school; some people said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it' - because it's an environment that takes a 'psychological' rather than a punitive approach to its pupils, with all sorts of ghastly straw-man consequences.

That's not All About Me, or All About Lewis. That's vicious and lazy right-wing parodies slipped into a supposed universal fable.

You can't walk through the stable door unless you believe in Narnia. And Narnia doesn't like the feminine, the progressive, the experimental, the non-cosy. I'm perfectly prepared to accept that an honest Christian like you would apply it to your own vices, but I really believe that's more to your credit than Lewis's. Lewis put in too many petty sneers at people whose 'sins' weren't vices Lewis possessed, but virtues that discomfited him. To put that in a children's book and call it a moral parable is disgusting.

* * * * * * * * * *

hapax: Yeah, I think we're rapidly reaching the point where we're going to have to simply agree to disagree.

I'd like to respond to a couple of your points, if I might. I don't think that it's at all true that the Narnia series equated "villainy" with "female" – besides Uncle Andrew, I immediately think of the tyrant Miraz and his (literally) backstabbing counselors, the cowardly slave-trading Gumpas, the oily murderous Tisroc and the vainglorious would-be rapist Rabadash, the greedy opportunist Shift and terrifyingly calculating "rationalist" Ginger – all male, providing memorably chilling portraits of evil that present (to me) in a way that is definitely "codedly male", and interestingly enough evil of "types" that predominate in much of Lewis's later works of (adult) fiction. The two witches you mention always seemed much more ambiguous to me, partially because they were powerful, independent women with few good options in a fantasy world created deliberately patriarchal – although THAT, I freely admit, is a classic case of my imposing my own experiences and prejudices in a manner clearly contrary to the intent of the text. (Although I can, I think, point to Lewis's very real [if ultimately failed] efforts to grapple with just that issue in Till We Have Faces.) But I'm having a tough time coming up with any justifications for the male villains I mentioned, either inside or outside the text.

I think the issue of whether or not Lewis's "poison darts" were aimed at the Other or at Self is probably our biggest disagreement, and fundamental to our very very different approaches to practically everything that Lewis wrote. It's true that we are given a fine display of those who are in Aslan's Country at a particular point in time, so we have a head count of the currently "saved" (to use your term; I don't think the theological meaning usually meant by Christians in general or Lewis in specific applies correctly to what's going on here). But that is one snapshot of eternity; if we had looked at that crowd a chapter earlier, none of the current cast would have been there. If we had looked three books earlier, more than half of those named wouldn't have been. The last words of the series are, after all, tell us emphatically that this "this was only the beginning of the real story." That hardly indicates any sense of closure, that there is no more access to the "further up and further in."

So when I said "we don't know other people's stories", I was thinking specifically of all the persons we don't see: Polly and Digory and Eustace and Jill all have parents, but we only see the older Pevensies. I don't think we can therefore conclude that the Plummers and the Kirkes and the Pooles and the Scrubbs are all irredeemably condemned (well, the last might well be, if it were up to Lewis; still, the first set of parents are almost certainly dead, so why didn't they show up in the heavenly England?) And all the Narnian creatures, who didn't enter on Aslan's right; all we know is that they ran off into his shadow. We might well imagine that they are damned, if we are so inclined (and you seem to think Lewis is); but he explicitly warns off any such speculations.

It's interesting that you bring up Eustace as an example of Lewis's vindictive pleasure at punishing "Others", because I'd see that character as evidence of the exact opposite. From such Lewis scholarship as I have read, and from his autobiographical comments (particularly in The Abolition of Man and Surprised by Joy), if there is any hint of an authorial self-insert in Narnia, it's Eustace. The opening jab at the name "Eustace Clarence Scrubbs" is almost always understood as a joke at the expense of his own much-loathed moniker, and the arrogant, materialistic, self-pitying, applause-seeking Eustace of the opening chapters is entirely consistent with Lewis's self-portrait of his own atheistic youth. Lewis's outsized hatred of "modern education" and all that he associates with it is, I agree, startlingly out-of-place in context (and frankly, not nearly as funny as he obviously thought it was); but it comes from his intimate, personal experience of one example of such trends, and his revulsion at (what he diagnosed as) the effects upon his character.

You might well counter that Lewis reserves a special vitriol for anything that reminds him a past he found shameful, and again I'd agree (although no doubt disagreeing about the unknowable and ultimately irrelevant question of his motivations), but projection is a very different failing from othering, even if both are quite definitely sins against his art.

But what makes Eustace interesting in this context (and, I'll confess, beloved by me) is that his conversion / salvation / "Narnification" / whathaveyou doesn't erase any of these aspects of his character. He is portrayed – and I'd argue, deliberately portrayed – as pretty much a complete prat to the end. In contrast to the (often unbearably) saintly Lucy (who, especially in The Last Battle is forced into the archetypical role of Mystical Innocent), Eustace remains a judgmental, whiny, bossy, overbearing know-it-all, and both child-Me and adult-Me identified with him down to his toenails. The "grace" that Aslan bestowed – through punishment and pain, yes, but more importantly through experiencing a different perspective in Narnia, especially by the examples of Drinian, and Caspian, and above all Reepicheep -- gave him a glimpse of an Ideal to which he could aspire. And he tried. Dear Lord, how he tried. He kept that vision stubbornly before him, and stumbled and staggered and crawled towards it, walking off cliffs and into trees and down holes, and he failed and he failed and he kept trying. And I think it was that sheer bloody-minded determination to be better than he was which was what I so desperately yearned for in myself, and that Lewis was trying to inspire in his readers, because that (in my reading, as always) was the very most that Lewis hoped for himself.

And that, I think is why Eustace took over as the main child protagonist of the (chronologically) last three books (it's interesting to me that Shasta and Digory manifest similar character arcs -- and, to bring this comment back to Susan [oh yeah, we were talking about Susan!] the last words given to all three of those characters is something relatively obnoxious and demonstrably wrong, one of the reasons I feel safe dismissing Eustace's evaluation of her character as definitive.) And that is also why, at the end of the series, he found himself, with all his faults and failures, in the idealized Narnia; that was the place, in the deepest part of himself, where he most desperately longed to be.

Because it's not true that "you can't walk through the stable door unless you believe in Narnia." If we take the stable door as a thinly-veiled metaphor for death (and it's hard to see it as anything else) everybody has to walk through that door: Kings and Queens, dwarves and unicorns, Narnians and Calormenes, English schoolchildren and Jack Lewis and me. What we find on the other side… well, that's where Lewis promises (or threatens) it depends upon where you've set your heart and how you've made your choices. We see those who have chosen Aslan, and what he represents. We see those who (we are told, reliably) have chosen their own fears, and the suffering that leads to (whether or not they can leave this prison is unclear; Aslan says that he "can't take them out", but there's no reason they can’t (as in The Great Divorce) choose on their own exit.) We see those who choose not-Aslan; their fate disappears in shadow. And we're told (not entirely reliably) that Susan has chosen not-Aslan, and set her heart on frivolous pleasures; where that leads, and whether that choice is final, we simply don't know. And Peter (now cast in his archetypical function of GateKeeper) refuses to tell us more.

And I guess I've never seen the "problem" in that. Susan, in a sense, defies the role the narrative tries to force her into. By the power of our ignorance, she retains her agency. And that, I guess, is what (for me) the Gaiman story takes away from her: what I'd call the Triumph of Susan.

And now I've apparently left the chair of commentary to climb into the pulpit. :-) Perhaps this would be a good point, Kit, to give you the final word, and bow out to leave the rest for interested commenters to hash out?

* * * * * * * * * *

Kit: Point taken, saying evil was always coded female was an overstatement. Lewis provokes me and I can get worked up into sweeping statements. But I stand by my basic point that supernatural evil, evil of spirit and self rather than evil of choice and action, is pretty female-coded.

With the witches, it's not so much that the characters are coded female, though they are; it's that their evil is coded female in a way that I don't think translates with the male ones. Shift is deceitful, but so is the Green Witch; Miraz and the lads are violent and autocratic, but so is Jadis: there's no vice the male characters have that female characters don't - and I'd argue there are few vices the male characters have that the witches don't have worse. On the other hand, the male baddies are first and foremost human (or an ape, in Shift's case): one could be a good or a bad man, a good or bad king, perhaps even a good or bad ape. (Though Lewis does like his species essentialism.)

Can one be a good witch in Lewis's world? Not on your nelly. The combination of power and femininity is portrayed as inherently evil. They're not bad people who could choose to be otherwise: the very word 'witch' implies evil selfhood. The captive knight's admiration for the Green Witch is explicitly presented as wrong-gendered: allowing a woman to 'boss' him is wrong just because she's a woman, before we ever meet her and find out what she's like. And that patronising, 'Bless you, aren't you funny?' laugh that Susan and the Green Witch both have? That's a very common stereotype of the infuriating female. I don't think we see the infuriating male so caricactured: the infuriating atheist, yes, but you can be a female atheist. It's their female style as much as their unNarnian behaviour that's frothed over. There are lots of ways to be a bad man, but bad femaleness is very female indeed.

Likewise, the evil women have no good counterparts. You can have an evil king, but you have good kings too. More broadly, you can have an evil adult man, but good ones as well. Where are the good women in their fertile years? Nowhere. Girl or biddy, those are the choices - and if you're a girl, you'd better try to be 'as good as a boy' while you're at it. There's a complete absence of balance which he does not inflict on the men.

And it's notable, too, that most of the bad men you list are also coded 'Other': they're just coded racially Other. So I'm not inclined to see them as evidence of broad-mindedness. They just have a different marker of inferiority. Lewis had more than one brand of lesserness he imposed on people, to be sure, but he was lavish with the feminine brand.

Basically, you have people, whether human or animal, who are good and bad. Then you have supernatural forces, who are absolutely evil or absolutely good, and it's their influence as much as their actions that are spiritually significant, and that influence is not just the power of persuasion or authority, but of magic. Which doesn't seem to be true of men. One may wish to stay out of Miraz's clutches, but one isn't corrupted utterly by his company. One may be put on the wrong path by listening to Shift, but only far enough to have one's good intentions misled, not to become depraved and bespelled like Edward or Rilian. And Shift himself has understandable if reprenhensible motivations: he wants plenty and power, and he wants them for himself: not admirable, but it makes sense on the same level as Miraz or Uncle Andrew or Rabadash. Selfishness and arrogance on a human scale, in other words, and led by a desire for worldly things. But the witches are motivated by a desire for spiritual power: they are the true spiritual antagonists to Aslan. Not as powerful, because that's not allowable in Lewis's cosmology, but the closest Aslan has to serious competition. Divine male, demonic female - both rendered with a vivid, highly gendered sensuality you see nowhere else in the stories.

That's what I mean when I say evil is coded female: the characters who come closest to embodying evil are female ones. And I find that significant. Perhaps Lewis wanted to impress upon us that demonic characters weren't as powerful as Aslan and felt that making them female was the best way to convey this. Or perhaps he simply lacked the vision to conceive of any way women might be powerful antagonists except by using magic (a conveniently nebulous way of making your power felt). But whatever the reason, the femininity of the witches is so highly wrought that I can't help feeling there's more to it than that, especially when there are no unequivocally good and potent women in their prime to counterbalance them. Femininity has been considered diabolical in Christian traditions before Lewis, and his work weighs more on that side of the scales.

As to Polly's and Digory's parents - I can't see that as persuasive, because they're hardly present in the rest of the book either - which means they're hardly characters at all. To make guesses about their eternal fate is basically straying into fan fiction, and if that's what it takes to make Lewis look fair, I don't think it's to his credit at all. The same applies to whatever may or may not be outside this 'snapshot of eternity'. To make it look decent, we have to make things up for ourselves. You intuit better things because you're a better person than him. I can only judge him on what he chose to write, and what he chose to write was mean.

You say Lewis blamed modern education for its effects on his character. Isn't that othering again - attributing faults of his own to external influences? Shifting the blame to his teachers rather than himself? And then making an effigy of it to pummel ... well, I know people who act that way towards their former incarnations. They're generally the people who've changed least in their fundamentals. Othering your former self - and the writing of pre-conversion Eustace is very crude - is a way of closing your eyes to your own nature. It's not honest. And when you say he reads as the same person post-conversion ... I just don't see it. He reads a pretty similar to everyone else, to my eyes anyway: Lewis wasn't much of a writer of character, and the good kids have only very slight variations amongst themselves. Any consistency in Eustace is pretty much cosmetic; it doesn't affect the plot that much, which is the real index of character.

But more than that ... well, just this. Maybe Lewis did intend Eustace to be a mockery of his former self, not of people he disagreed with - but in fiction, nobody's entitled to credit for what they intended. All the reader will react to is what's actually there on the page; if it needs a footnote about how it relates to your life and thought, and if it gives completely the opposite impression of what you intended without one, then it fails. Simple as that: if it gives the wrong impression without an explanation, then that is the impression you have created. If you wanted a different one, you should have gone back and rewritten it. And Eustace, with his non-fiction books and his non-smoking parents and his assonance-based poem (and for Lewis to have his heroes sneer at learning a poetic term while writing a book for children is just barbarous), reads as very heavily Othered. If you give Lewis credit for making Lasaraleen better than he intended (which I won't argue with, though as she's still in the 'harmless biddy' category it doesn't weigh much with me), then I'm holding him accountable for making Eustace more Other than he may have intended. Whether the hatred is aimed at other people or at a caricatured former self - and as I say, hating one's former self is a very low level when it comes to reformation - the impression is simply of hatred. That's what comes through. And since it's directed at a character whose main vice is that he's not a believer, and who is forgiven when he becomes one, that is simply intolerance he's preaching, whether he meant to or not. I'm not a Christian; I don't drink; I vote left-wing. That's me he's insulting, and people like me who want to make this world a better place and are willing to question authority to do it. He fails to do anything more than malign people with different and legitimate ideals from his spiteful little self, and writers are responsible for their - our - failures.

Maybe Lewis wanted to be better than he was. But I think he wanted to feel better than other people even more; I think he needed other people to be his shadow so he didn't have to look his own darkness full in the face. That's the nature of a bully. He needed inferiors to feel all right about himself - even down to condemning petty differences of lifestyle. He doesn't locate the stable door in a place that everyone has access to: he locates it in Narnia, where only those who share his pipe-and-slippers fairyland tastes can reach it.

And the idea that people can choose their own way out of their fears and doubts - well, there are two interpretations of that, one worse than the other. At best, it's simply disrespectful of difference: people don't see what he sees, and so they must be wilfully blind and somewhat ridiculous. Putting that in your parable is cheap and stupid. But to assume he speaks of those genuinely incapable of seeing past their own trauma - to call this a self-chosen fate is flat-out cruel. If your faith in happiness has been too badly wounded, no, you can't choose your own way out. That's what being traumatised means. It's like saying someone with a broken leg could dance away their troubles. It feels as if Lewis has found a way to justify dismissing people, and plumes himself on how tolerant that makes him while he argues that their pain is their own fault. To promote such preening coldness as moral wisdom is pure wickedness.

And if we're responsible for choosing to walk out of prisons of our own making, Lewis is responsible for walking out of his. He can't have it both ways. He nurtures and feeds his vices - his spite, his pettiness, his parochialism, his bigotry, his selfish preoccupation with his own comfort and cosiness of mind and body - and dresses them up in doctrine and fairytale. If we're responsible for lifting ourselves up, then he's responsible for that too. And he doesn't. Because he doesn't want to. He's more comfortable where he is.

I wouldn't at all question the honour of your reading, nor your right to like Lewis. But I do think it's telling that you keep referring to explanations that take place outside the text - what happens to characters whose fate we don't see, what Lewis may have intended, what Lewis may have struggled with in his own breast. And this probably comes down to natural sympathies: I'm likely to cut a different writer a certain amount of slack for their texts on the basis of off-page situations too. But Lewis's text spits in my eye at every opportunity, and also I don't think it's a particularly well-written series of stories, and whatever my own faults they're probably different from Lewis's. (I mentioned at the beginning that he reminded me of Ayn Rand, and Rand is an author I'm more inclined to judge with biographical forgiveness, much thought I abhor the effect her books have had on the world - and this is probably because there are aspects of her character that I can feel some sympathy with.) I suspect many of us have an author or two that we're inclined to forgive because there's something in them that we can relate to. But add it all up and Lewis never has been and never will be one of mine. All I can judge him for is the story he actually wrote - and whatever I might wish for the man himself, the story, I simply cannot forgive.

* * * * * * * * * *

Kit and hapax: ...And at this point, by mutual agreement, we shall shake hands and leave it there. In the interests of peace, we shall also stay out of the comment thread.

--hapax

--Kit Whitfield

---

† From The Last Battle, contained in The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd, London, 2004, copyright of The Last Battle 1956, p 741↩

‡ The text originally used the Tir na Nog form of the name. It has now be altered to reflect Irish usage.↩

---

 

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Comments

[www.anamardoll.com]

I love this post so much. I know this had to take a LONG time to compose, so a very resounding THANK YOU is in order. For myself, I tend to fall closer to the Kit side of the spectrum in this issue, however I deeply appreciate hapax explaining her side so eloquently. I love hearing other sides of issues explained so well.

A truly great post, on both sides.

[anamardoll]

Well, that was weird. I think I'm signed in now.

[automaticdoor]

From someone closer to the Kit side of things now but who can also see hapax's POV too, very, very well done from both of you! I love seeing a well-argued debate.

[Yamara]

Ah, poor Jack Lewis. The times caught up with and sped past him, as women turned out to be quite a bit greater in mind body and soul than he could imagine.

I enter as evidence his short story "The Shoddy Lands", wherein a professor engages a fantasy of the disembodied Voice of God warning an attractive young woman, turned naked giantess, about the sinfulness of her tan lines.

Disclosure: Had some small fame in the '90s teasing Narnia mercilessly in Dragon magazine.

[St. Jebus]

I quite enjoyed that debate. Before reading this, I probably would have fallen more toward hapax's point of view. After reading it, I find myself leaning more toward Kit's view.
I first encountered the books in 3rd grade(so, 8 yrs old) and I didn't have the critical thinking skills to catch some of this. I do, however, remember feeling frustrated at some of the events that happened to the characters - the fight in Jadis' dead world at the bell, for example. I wouldn't have been able to put words to why those events frustrated me, only that they did. Kit's POV has actually given me some of those words. Thanks.

[anamardoll]

Can I also say that I am deeply intrigued by the idea of elderly Susan being reunited with them in the end, seemingly five minutes after the conversation? I mean, that would not absolve the text of all problems (imho) by a long shot, but I think it would have been thematically sound and a nice touch of world-building along the lines of the whole Narnia Time theme.

Of course, we'd still be left with the idea that women with sexuality are in short supply in Heaven. So clearly Elder!Susan needs to show up with her sexy younger boyfriend in tow. Or something. Must think on this.

[anamardoll]

And while I'm rolling in the delight that is this post, I appreciate the mention of Kipling being racist (and we may well add Lovecraft) and yet still having some literary value. I was listening to The Jungle Book the other day and the bit where the wolf mother claims Mowgli as her own and challenges Sher Khan in her own den brought literal tears to my eyes. And while it still fits nicely into a stereotype -- the Overly Protective Mother Figure -- I still enjoyed it fiercely.

Ah, I'm rambling. Such a good post, this is. I think I've read it thrice now. :)

[MercuryBlue]

All I've got is xkcd. Also xkcd. And here is the xkcd I was actually after. Which is why, regardless of Lewis's view on Susan, it is utterly unfair of the other Narnia visitors to smack her down for turning away. They're all trying to be Narnian expats. She's trying to be Englishpeople. This is not at all an unreasonable thing for her to do, and her family should know this. It's hardly her fault that the only way she can see to be Englishpeople is to pretend Narnia never happened.

I haven't a copy of Last Battle on hand to check, and I'm not sure I can find the family copy when I get home, so I'm not sure on this. But everybody who's explicitly stated as being in Narnia-heaven, didn't they die at the same time as or earlier than Peter and his lot? If so, either we've got the reverse of 'nobody got to heaven before Jesus' or, and I like this better, we've got no idea if Susan is damned because we're damn sure Susan's not dead.

[anamardoll]

Oh! And!

Or perhaps he simply lacked the vision to conceive of any way women might be powerful antagonists except by using magic (a conveniently nebulous way of making your power felt).

I think this is interesting. Because it sparked in me that for all the Witches' supposed power, we very rarely see it manifest except insomuch as they control me. Jadis enslaves Edmund with treats; the Green Witch ensorcells Rillan; younger Jadis works very hard to seduce Digory to the Dark Side despite there not really being much in it for her. Except, I guess, the satisfaction of the Evul Lolz.

There's also a lot of implied sexuality in all this; the American movies certainly picked up on Edmund/Jadis shipping that I feel there is legitimate subtext for, and Rillian frames his worship of the Green Witch in terms of courtly love, iirc.

So your basic female villains are most noteworthy for ensnaring young men with dark magic and their sensual sexuality. Whereas someone like Miraz is infinitely more straightforward: he wields power in his own right and he wants to chop off Caspian's head. He's not moving and shaking by, say, seducing Susan and using her to provide information on troop movements.

'Course, Jadis does have the stoning wand. But all-in-all, I feel like her power is most expressed In Relation To men. Just like women are usually defined in relation to men. (See that recent speech by President Obama where we were all mothers-sisters-daughters-wives and not, ya know, people.) I think that's interesting.

[anamardoll]

* as they control MEN.

Dangit. That was important.

[MercuryBlue]

Ana: This the post-Aurora speech with the line "They were mothers and fathers; they were husbands and wives; sisters and brothers; sons and daughters, friends and neighbors."? Because if that's the speech you're thinking of, I notice how every female relationship noun is paired with the equivalent male relationship noun, and the following sentence is "They had hopes for the future and they had dreams that were not yet fulfilled." Which is explicitly about the victims as individuals (even though spoken of as a group). Your point about women generally being defined in relationship to men is entirely valid; this is just a bad example to illustrate it with.

Of course maybe you're thinking of some other speech which does illustrate your point well, but if that's the case, transcript link please?

[anamardoll]

@ MercuryBlue, no, there was another one during the Birth Control debate. Hang on a tick...

http://www.shakesville.com/2012/03/president-obamas-message-to-planned.html

For you, and for most Americans, protecting women's health is a mission that stands above politics. And yet, over the past year, you've had to stand up to politicians who want to deny millions of women the care they rely on, and inject themselves into decisions that are best made between a woman and her doctor.

Let's be clear here: Women are not an interest group.

They're mothers, and daughters, and sisters, and wives. They're half of this country. They're perfectly capable of making their own choices about their health.

The interesting thing about the message was that it was a speech TO Planned Parenthood, but it talked like the audience was Men who needed to hear about these strange and elusive 'Women' they keep hearing about. A touch Othering, in my opinion. YMMV.

[Froborr]

Oh wow, GREAT article, both of you!

Othering your former self... is a way of closing your eyes to your own nature. It's not honest.

*looks at his most recent Slacktiverse article*

Ow.

@MercuryBlue: Yeah, I immediately thought of that third XKCD, too. I also think Peter's utterly horrid in that excerpt: "Oh, yes, my sister is still back in not-Paradise, which by comparison to Paradise is of course an utterly horrible place. Whatevs. Oh, hey, FRUIT!"

For that reason, I think even if Susan is *not* damned, she's still extremely problematic. Like the dwarves, she has every reason not to believe--Susan because she must either lie to every non-Pevensie she meets or convince herself Narnia never happened, and the dwarves because they just came from being tricked by a false Aslan--yet is left out of Paradise because she doesn't believe.

[MercuryBlue]

Ana: Okay, point. Dammit, Mr. President, I know you know better than that.

[anamardoll]

@MercuryBlue, sorry, totally wasn't trying to bash him. Just random rambles from my head. Sorry for the derail. *sheepish*

FWIW, I can cut some slack (particularly in light of your more recent quote, which does do all the binaries) figuring that it comes at least as much from a Celebration of Family as from sexism. But a major point that politicians may someday come to accept is that not all of us like our family or celebrate it overly much. ;)

Indeed, some of us go to Planned Parenthood because we don't want *more* family. But whatevs. OH HEY FRUIT! (New catch phrase!)

[Patrick]

Classic Christian apologetics is that everyone knows that God exists, at least in their hearts, but some people willfully turn away so that they can go live lives of the flesh. Doing so is a morally culpable act, and when those people go to hell, they'll have no one but themselves to blame.

Lewis has created a character who knows in her heart (and maybe even her head) that Narnia is real. But she's willfully turned away, and is pretending that it doesn't exist so that she can go live a life of the flesh. Its a morally culpable act in the opinion of the characters and of the narration, and whatever her ultimate fate, she's not presently in a state of grace like the rest of the kids.

One of the classic problems of dime store Christian apologetics is to come up with ways to reconcile a belief that Certain Sorts of People go to hell, and a belief that everyone in hell morally deserves it. Blaming them is a common solution, and one that Lewis seems to have favored. When we know that the text was intended as a Christian allegory, surely we can stray from the text itself to consider his religious beliefs.

[MercuryBlue]

So the kids in the next compartment on the train to the Professor's, some of the many who never got to see Narnia and would have scoffed at the notion had they heard of it, they're to be blamed for not believing in Narnia?

Also am at a bit of a loss for how Buddhist monks are turning away from God to live a life of the flesh.

Also also, it occurred to me that while Susan and the others ruled Narnia, somebody had to make nice with the neighbors to make sure nobody got the bright idea that Narnia was more vulnerable under four ordinary teenagers than under someone capable of stopping the calendar in mid-January and turning oncoming armies to stone. The likeliest diplomat of the four? Susan. This wouldn't involve nylons, but could easily involve lipstick and other forms of performing femininity, and would certainly involve invitations. She's doing the same damn thing in England that she was in Narnia, only on a smaller scale, and I can't imagine her siblings objected to it in Narnia. So why is it such a blameworthy thing to do in England?

[Silver Adept]

This was a wonderful discussion. Having not read the series, I have little to contribute except that reading in-text and context versus body of work as context always producers interesting results, especially between two well-read people who can agree to disagree.

[Patrick Knipe]

@MercuryBlue

That's a good point. My two cents would say that because Susan's method and reason is noble or stately (i.e diplomacy) it's a duty and thus not as wrong, whilst her Nylons and Lipstick Apostate thing in England is probably typified as frivolity that she chooses.

I'm reminded of the events of Horse and his Boy, where Prince Rabadash seems to be deeply infatuated with Susan- the thing to note is that apparently, Susan was more than a little popular abroad, but she never accepted any marriage proposals or the like. That seems to be the sort of thing that might have significance in this sort of text.

[Kirala]

So the kids in the next compartment on the train to the Professor's, some of the many who never got to see Narnia and would have scoffed at the notion had they heard of it, they're to be blamed for not believing in Narnia?

Also am at a bit of a loss for how Buddhist monks are turning away from God to live a life of the flesh.

For the first, presumably they wound up in Eternal-England which is visible and accessible from Eternal-Narnia. I'm fairly certain the Pevensies Senior did not believe in Narnia. For the second, note that Lewis has an expy-Muslim in heaven: Lewis was not at all convinced that one must believe in Christ Aslan in order to turn away from self in an acceptable way. He tended to be quiet on his non-orthodox opinions, though.

[Kirala]

As for Susan, I never saw her exclusion at the end as anything other than a random object lesson in the possibility of Us being excluded - painful, annoying, and poor writing, but as hapax says, a good parable.

The nylons and lipstick made perfect sense to me as a tomboyish little girl. By the time I was old enough to feel differently, I had read That Hideous Strength. I immediately identified Mark Studdock, a major character therein, as Male Susan. (I later identified him as Author Younger-Self-Insert.) Mark is concerned solely with personal advancement socially - with "invitations" to the inner circle, with fitting the coolest appearances, with a "masculinity" which consists solely of denying all heart or conscience so as to fit all worldly expectations. Mark is eviscerated by the author far more than Susan. He also, after being left out of Team Good's paradise during the Armageddon, is given the opportunity to be a far more interesting and useful hero and eventually find his way to Team Good's paradise anyway.

Lewis also won points with me in another way in that book. The Sage of the Story pontificates about Proper Marriage in ways very similar to Lewis's own work. Later in the story, a woman portrayed as the ultimate relationship expert and Ideal Wife dismisses the Sage: "...he is a man, and an unmarried man at that." If Lewis is self-aware enough to put in that jibe at himself, I can forgive him for his nakedly screwed-up versions of women to some degree. Especially given that he only experienced very warped sexual experiences for much of his life and might have been over-inclined to trust medieval authority over his own instincts or those of any other modern person.

[Kirala]

Finally, I wish to add that I am very sorry that Kit and hapax will be recusing themselves from this discussion, although I respect and understand the reasoning.

[Izzy]

Eustace I didn't mind so much when I was a kid--because I grew up, somewhat unwillingly, in '90's California. I'm very left-wing myself, but there was a strong neo-Puritan element in the local liberal culture at the time, especially if you're going from an elementary school perspective: there were always the kids whose parents Did Not Approve of meat or processed sugar or video games or TV. They generally weren't obnoxious; they were generally sad, and you could see them squirming when they handed out birthday invitations, because nobody wanted an afternoon of carob cake and tofu dogs and playing nonviolently with unpainted wooden dowels*, but our moms would make us go anyhow.

So I saw Eustace and his parents as the mid-century English version of those adults, by which I mean Captain Buzzkill. The more troubling implications didn't occur until later. (And it's true that, while I know people who just don't drink, I also know those who take the CB approach to the whole thing, and oh my God, shut up, that guy.)

Susan bugs me more. Especially because of that whole "reached the silliest part of life and keeps trying to stay there" thing, these days: I'm 29, I like to dress up and flirt, I like the single life and impulse and clubbing and crashing with friends, and I don't have any urge to settle down. So I'm pretty sure that's meant to apply to me, and I find it somewhat insulting: why is having a good time any sillier than marriage and kids?

*Seriously, there are perfectly good things to do that don't involve meat/sugar/electronics, but the direct "substitutes"...not so much, especially not with ten year olds, and that seemed to be all the local hippies did. Do not even get me started on the people who sanctimoniously handed out apples or carrot sticks at Halloween; if anyone has ever begged for an egged house...

[Kirala]

I find it somewhat insulting: why is having a good time any sillier than marriage and kids?

I read the silliness of Susan in the fact that she has invested her identity in her popularity and appeal to others. From what I know of you, you certainly don't.

[Coleslaw]

I read the silliness of Susan in the fact that she has invested her identity in her popularity and appeal to others. From what I know of you, you certainly don't.

I haven't read the work in question, so I could be wrong, but it sounds as though we are hearing about Susan's presumed silliness from the point of view of younger siblings who miss her now that she is growing up, and thus describe her new interests in the most pejorative terms possible. It might very well be the case that they would have described Izzy in the same way, no matter what Izzy is really like.

[Amaryllis]

So Kit and hapax are discussing C. S. Lewis, and the walls of the Slacktiverse still stand?

Imagine that.

If I say that I agree with you both, is it because you're both brilliant or because I'm indecisive?

Seriously, I have to admit the justice of much of what Kit has to say. And yet, like hapax, what I take away from those books is the imagery and the emotion. Details, shmetails, who cares about the plot? Of course, this means that when I re-read them, I'm constantly stumbling over some unfortunate authorial intrusion and muttering, "I forgot about that; oh dear."

As for Susan, I side with the "we just don't know" argument. We don't know, we aren't told. I don't think we have any justification for believing that she's to be cast into eternal darkness because she didn't die at that particular moment in that particular state of grace.

I don't think we can therefore conclude that the Plummers and the Kirkes and the Pooles and the Scrubbs are all irredeemably condemned (well, the last might well be, if it were up to Lewis; still, the first set of parents are almost certainly dead, so why didn't they show up in the heavenly England?)
We don't know that they don't show up, either. In fact, do we actually see the elder Pevensies in the flesh? (don't have my copy of TLB around, or time to go check.) It may be that Polly and Diggory already know that their parents, having been presumably dead for some time, are somewhere in ideal!England or deeper into Aslan's country. It's probable that the Pooles and the Scrubbs are still alive in timebound England, and we know no more of their story. In fact, we know absolutely nothing of their story, except that they're left behind, so to speak, to mourn their dead children. The Pevensies are spared that grief, at the cost of whatever else they might have made of their earthly lives. Why the difference in their fates? One of the things that we are not told. "Why" is a question that, here in the Shadowlands, has no answer.

Nor do I think that we are told the Dwarfs' story, come to think of it. We're told what's happening to them at one specific moment. What happened next, what happened outside "the usual muddle about times", we are not told.

I keep trying to think of examples of "good" adult women, and not coming up with much. Queen Helen, I suppose, but she's pretty much a minor character, and we meet her before she has children. Mrs. Beaver? I can't help liking her, class issues and all, but there are no little Beaver cubs running around, are there? Leaves her free to be a surrogate mother to the Pevensies, and to drop out of sight when not needed in that role.

Lasaraleen? A very young bride, but still a married woman and a presumed adult. But not a mother.

All the good mothers are dead. But then again, from Grimm to Disney, that's the way it tends to go.

And I need to stop talking and go to work, or I'm really gonna be late. Thanks for a really interesting debate.

[Kirala]

@Amaryllis: I would count the adult Pevensie Queens, insofar as one can count them. Then again, unless one counts Tirian (and possibly Drinian), adult humans never seem to play a large positive role in the series.

[Izzy]

@Kirala: Well, depends on who you ask. Popularity with people I like does matter to me; life feels a little grayer when there's not a cute boy or five admiring the way I look in a miniskirt every couple weeks; I identify strongly as someone with a strong sex drive and strong sexual appeal; and God knows I *constantly* read Amazon reviews for my books. ;) So there's that.

I mean, the middle-school/High Society status games are not my thing, and I'm certainly not aiming to become the next Paris Hilton. But I am performance-oriented, both personally and sexually, which involves a lot of wanting to be admired and desired by the right people. Could have been Susan's deal, though the description is vague enough--and, as Coleslaw says, also coming from a "you're no fun any more" set of younger siblings/siblings' friends--that it also might not have.

The disbelief angle about Susan and Eustace *is* a point that makes me dislike those characters, I have to say. Not because of any Christian thing, but the No That Never Happened LA LA LA person in fantasy (or, worse, the No This Isn't Happening LA LA LA person) makes me want to slap them. It's partly to do with the fact that DUDE there is MAGIC it is AWESOME why are you trying to deny this you idiot--I have the same reaction to refusal-of-the-call heroes, a lot--and partly that denial just bugs me. At least Richard Sloat in The Talisman had the childhood-trauma-via-Eldritch-Abomination excuse.

[chris the cynic]

I haven't read the later books, can't even remember if I've read the earlier ones. What know of the setting now comes from Ana's deconstruction and partially remembered movies.

But I've read the excerpted scene several times each time having it presented as all that is said on Susan. And I apparently have a radically different interpretation of "Oh, hey, fruit!" than everyone else.

Peter does not read to me as someone who is dismissive of Susan, his words actions and, importantly, tone (short and grave he speaks) strike me as someone who does not want anything bad said about Susan.

He gives the minimum possible information leaving no detail that could be latched onto for assigning fault or blame.

Then people start talking her down anyway. First the information is factual, if presented in a rude way, then opinion with a negative bent, then straight up insults (from an adult no less).

And at this point Peter says for it to stop. Stop talking about Susan. Which, given what the people were saying, meant stop putting down Susan.

Perhaps Peter would have been a better person if he'd pitched a fit there and then and started an in person flame war over whether being mean to Susan was appropriate. He didn't do that. He said to stop talking about Susan, go look at fruit.

It doesn't read to me as someone who is dismissive of Susan, it reads to me as someone who is dismissive of those who think now is "Lets beat up on Susan" time.

For Peter Susan's absence is grave, for the others its a chance to air their petty grievances, express negative opinions, and throw straight insults.

I think Peter could, and probably should, have done significantly more, but diverting the conversation to fruit seems like something done in defense of Susan, not forgetting about her in favor of the shiny.

-

And, again, the excerpt here is the only part of the book in question I've read, so I could be missing some major things that completely invalidate that interpretation.

[Amaryllis]

Coleslaw: it sounds as though we are hearing about Susan's presumed silliness from the point of view of younger siblings who miss her now that she is growing up, and thus describe her new interests in the most pejorative terms possible.

That's a good point. I had a sudden flashback to the summer I was eleven, I think. And my best friend from the last couple of years suddenly got interested in boys and clothes and pop music, and didn't want to play kids' games or make up stories to act out any more. I was thoroughly confused and kind of hurt; it felt like she was dropping me, but maybe she thought I was dropping her.

[chris the cynic]

Of course, one could also see it as entirely defensive on Peter's part, and thus wholly selfish.

Susan is his sister, (former) colleague, and (presumably) friend. He's spent two lifetimes with her. It would not be unreasonable to think that hearing Susan put down hurts him, reminds him of his pain that his sister/colleague/friend is not with him, and hearing it done by people he likewise cares about hurts all the more.

In which case stopping the putting down of Susan could be all about stopping Peter's own discomfort.

[Beroli]

Also am at a bit of a loss for how Buddhist monks are turning away from God to live a life of the flesh.

No clue, but apparently "Buddhism is only the greatest of the Hindu heresies."

I hesitate to say anything because the comments seem rather...one-sided?...but it's news to me that Eustace didn't get a complete personality transplant when he turned back from a dragon, and it's news to me that Lasaraleen was not successfully presented as tiresome and silly. ["How can you say such things! And about the Tisroc (may he live for ever) too!"]

I don't read Peter as particularly concerned for Susan, either. He's the one who first says she's "no longer a friend of Narnia" (which, in the morality of the books, is about as negative a thing as can be said about anyone who ever was a friend of Narnia) followed by, "Well, don't let's talk about that now." To say that this is because he's bothered by the others slagging her off strikes me as based on pure speculation neither better nor worse than saying that his attitude toward her is so much more hostile than the others that, while the others are comfortable insulting her casually, he would prefer to mention her name as little as possible, lest he start screaming and ranting in an undignified way about how she betrayed them all.

[chris the cynic]

He's the one who first says she's "no longer a friend of Narnia"

He's the one who was asked though. What else could he do? Shuffle his feet and say, "Lucy, why don't you answer that?"?

I mean, I very seriously lack context outside of what's quoted, but in what is quoted Peter does two things:
1 Give a factual answer to a question directly being asked of him, gravely and shortly.
2 Tell the people who are giving less factual answers lightly and longly to stop talking about it.

Yes, there are all kinds of ways to interpret it, and I'm not saying mine is right, but do I fail to see how being the first to answer a question addressed to him counts as some point against him.

[Kirala]

@Beroli - If the comments seem one-sided pro-Narnia, PLEASE comment. I, for one, love to vigorously defend my beloved Narnia, and it just isn't satisfying if everyone agrees. It's downright depressing if defending Narnia becomes bullying or silencing. If they seem one-sided anti-Narnia... I'm not seeing it, but I suppose mileage might vary.

That said:
I hesitate to say anything because the comments seem rather...one-sided?...but it's news to me that Eustace didn't get a complete personality transplant when he turned back from a dragon, and it's news to me that Lasaraleen was not successfully presented as tiresome and silly.

I agree with Lasaraleen, but then, I've always had very little patience/sympathy with the social-fashion geeks - the sort who class all the rest of us as geeks and weirdos. I suspect it would be hard to portray one in a way that would not read as tiresome or silly to me (although Princess and the Frog did awfully well with Charlotte LeBouff).

Eustace... has a large personality shift, but he tends to remain a scathing, judgmental sort of person. (Look at the quote above.) I also love that he retains a sort of determined practicality. I also love that I find this fanfic portraying Eustace as both a loyal Narnian and unapologetic Marxist entirely believable. Eustace got a better sense of when to shut up, when to wait to speak, and when to listen, and he certainly learned to think more, but he remained human. Which is probably why he was my least favorite character as a child and one of my favorites as an adult.

[Mmy]

@Kirala: It's downright depressing if defending Narnia becomes bullying or silencing. If they seem one-sided anti-Narnia... I'm not seeing it, but I suppose mileage might vary.

One of the reasons Kit and hapax decided to stay out of the comments was so that the community can feel free to disagree.

I know how I personally felt about Kit's arguments but then I wasn't exactly an unbiased judge of Lewis' work in the first place. :)

BTW, I experienced his "adult" work and the Narnia at distant points in time and neither experience quite matches with that of Kit or hapax.

[Kit Whitfield]

Just popping up to say that I'm completely happy for anyone to disagree with me about anything I've said here. The whole point of doing a two-hander was to promote friendly disagreement. Have at it. :-)

[Kirala]

Just popping up to say that I'm completely happy for anyone to disagree with me about anything I've said here. The whole point of doing a two-hander was to promote friendly disagreement. Have at it. :-)

Thanks, by the way, for posting the discussion. I know it went up last night, but for today it's the Bestest Birthday Present the internet could have given me. :-D

[Beroli]

Eustace... has a large personality shift, but he tends to remain a scathing, judgmental sort of person. (Look at the quote above.)

Which quote above?

[Kirala]

Which quote above?

Hmm, clearly I've read the book too many times too quickly - I remember Eustace being vicious toward Susan in the passage quoted above, but now that I reread it closely, he's not particularly nasty there - except that he's starting the dogpile on Susan, which is probably what made the impression on my mind. Still, I could try to find exact quotes of him being nasty in the books, if you'd like.

[Kit Whitfield]

Happy birthday Kirala!

(Goes back to being out of the discussion.)

[Brin]

*hangs up "Happy Birthday!" banner*

[Beroli]

Still, I could try to find exact quotes of him being nasty in the books, if you'd like.

It's been a long time since I've read the books. I can't say I found the male protagonists to be--very distinct in personality when I did (that is, given a list of "in one of the Narnia books Character X said Y," I could probably figure it out by "well, that's clearly a reference to events of The Horse and His Boy, so I can cross off Caspian," but not by "this might be a thing that Shasta would say but is at odds with Edmund's/Eustace's personality").

I am somewhat curious about what Eustace says post-conversion that goes with his pre-conversion personality; nothing stuck in my mind as such.

[anamardoll]

I personally always saw Eustace as getting a new personality post-conversion, but I haven't read DT or SC recently enough to defend that position.

Mind you, I don't think the children have distinct personalities. There are sections in PC where I *genuinely* have to scramble to tell who is saying what. If they took the name-tags out of the "all four speaking" conversations, I could really only pick out Susan. At best.

[anamardoll]

And this isn't helped by the fact that Edmund, post-coversion, is COMPLETELY SILENT. He just... stops talking in LWW.

I've privately suspected that Lewis was either uncomfortable with trying to write a recent convert or (more meta-speaking) he had no real use for Edmund to talk anymore and so he didn't.

And then when Edmund walks onto the page in PC, he's talking about Narnia not like he's been there, but rather in terms of "Robinson Crusoe" and fictional things like that.

Personalities just don't strike me as deep or consistent in this series, and I chalk that up to one of the reasons why we all have VASTLY different interpretations of pretty much every character. But I could be wrong!

[Angelia Sparrow]

I always thought Susan deserved exactly what she got. She gave up her Stories to conform. She did exactly what all the teenage girls around me were doing: put her real self on a back burner, buried her deep away, and put on this silly, slightly stupid mask to appeal to the boys around her.

The real Susan, the one who could keep a death-watch with a deity, the one who could swim and shoot, she went away in favor of looking pretty, having nice things and giggling at appropriate times so the adults would approve and the boys would like her.

I understand the pressure. My own grandmother (a tad older than Susan would be, ~5 years) constantly reminded me to not look too smart, to not respond in class, and when I got married to make very sure my husband earned more than I did and was smarter than I was. She was always after me to give up the book, give up the geekery, and take an interest in clothes and socializing. My mother never got over being pretty and popular when she was a teenager. (Staying at the silly spot as long as possible) She fought aging right up until her hair went snow white.

I stood firm, being exactly who I was even though it cost me male and adult approval. Susan caved under social pressure and became one of those silly, stupid, useless girls that surrounded me. Interestingly enough, now that they are no long teenagers, those same girls have become interesting women, with ideas and lives and hobbies.

So I have always maintained that when you sacrifice Who You Are and What You Know Is Real to conform to worldly standards, you deserve what you get, because you are a liar and a hypocrite and a traitor to your very self. And in Christianity, what you get does include damnation.

These days, reading Ana Mardoll's deconstruction, I am liking Susan, the REAL Susan, better, which only makes it that much more bitter that this brave, strong girl gives it all up to be an ornament.

[anamardoll]

Oh! And pet peeve: I always hated it that Aravis and Shasta grow up to be basically the same as they always were and constantly fighting and making up until they decide "hell with it" and get married. Did not like.

Not sure why I hated that so much, but maybe because I wanted more growth than that. Also, I hate-hate-hate fighting and I'd *deeply* identified with Aravis (though I got the impression even then that I wasn't *supposed* to, so...) so that was unfulfilling for me. I felt like she deserved a lot better than Shasta, let alone Perpetually Immature Shasta.

/TMI

[Beroli]

It's been a long time since I've read the books. I can't say I found the male protagonists to be--very distinct in personality when I did (that is, given a list of "in one of the Narnia books Character X said Y," I could probably figure it out by "well, that's clearly a reference to events of The Horse and His Boy, so I can cross off Caspian," but not by "this might be a thing that Shasta would say but is at odds with Edmund's/Eustace's personality").

I just realized this is unclear. Unfortunately, I can't edit on Typepad. The parenthetical bit should read: (that is, given a list of "in one of the Narnia books Character X said [quote]," and asked to guess who "Character X" is based on the quote, I could probably figure it out by "well, that's clearly a reference to events of The Horse and His Boy, so I can cross off Caspian," but not by "this might be a thing that Shasta would say but is at odds with Edmund's/Eustace's personality").

[anamardoll]

I stood firm, being exactly who I was even though it cost me male and adult approval. Susan caved under social pressure and became one of those silly, stupid, useless girls that surrounded me.

But, well, we don't know that, do we? Who's to say that Susan isn't happy?

Being "girly" and being interested in sports and swimming aren't mutually exclusive. If we accept the Patriarchal-imposed narrative that we can either be Girly or Tomboys but not both, then we only end up hurting women more.

I suppose that may well have been what Lewis was going for, but I don't see that framing as feminist-friendly. Beyond anything else, it seems to be saying that women don't have the right to be silly. Seriousness is not a moral imperative!* As long as Susan is happy in what she's doing, I don't feel like it's our place (or Aslan's) to judge.

* Stolen from "Health is not a moral imperative," via fat and body acceptance, but I think it absolutely applies here.

[anamardoll]

Or, to put it another way, I'm far from convinced that Swimming Susan is any more "real" than Nylons Susan.

[Kirala]

@Beroli:

I am somewhat curious about what Eustace says post-conversion that goes with his pre-conversion personality; nothing stuck in my mind as such.

In Dawn Treader, he's less nasty but still utterly practical:

"Crazy, you know. Sailing on and on into that with no idea what we may get into."

"But how does the food keep?" (regarding the feast near the end of the world)

"In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas." (which I always read as, "Okay, I've learned my lesson about contradicting Narnian reality, but seriously?!")

In the midst of a discussion about falling off the edge of the [flat Narnian] world: "But look here, this is all rot. The world's round - I mean, round like a ball, not like a table."

"They can't be lilies - not what we call lilies." The narrator immediately affirms "Probably they were not," with an unspoken "irritating pedant" that I always read in.

In Silver Chair, he gets nastier (or at least crankier). When he runs into Jill crying, he asks abruptly if it's Them to blame, then starts to lecture: "Now, look here, there's no good us all - " (I wanted to cheer Jill for cutting him off there. Sympathy before know-it-all advice.) He calls Jill a "blithering idiot" for succumbing to vertigo at the top of a cliff. (In panic, but still.)

When he and Jill reunite, he's understandably snippy at first ("So you've turned up again, have you?") and less understandably brushes Jill off every time she tries to explain Aslan's instructions. Then he blames her when she tells him he's failed the first Sign - "But how was I to know?" "If you'd only listened to me when I tried to tell you, we'd be all right." "Yes, and if you hadn't played the fool on the edge of the cliff and jolly near murdered me - all right, I said murder, and I'll say it again as often as I like, so keep your hair on - we'd have come together and both known what to do... He must have blown you quicker than me. Making up for lost time: the time you lost."

He's self-important: Jill has to remind him at the Parliament of Owls that Aslan sent both of them, not him alone. I'm never quite sure, either, whether his repeated reference to his friendship with Caspian was purely remembering a friend or also namedropping.

Eustace becomes a much nicer character after the dragon episode, but he'll never be even as tactful as Edmund generally is (Trumpkin and bratty cousins excepted).

[Kirala]

@Ana: You have a definite point with characterization being inconsistent in this series. (I think you have an even better point when you have the space to expound at length as you do in your blog. I hadn't noticed before how tidily Susan's pettiness appears at the exact moment when it's needed and not a shadow before.) I would say, though, that Susan seems happiest when she is quietly focused on doing the right thing (seeing to Tumnus, caring for her family, keeping vigil with Aslan) and less so when she is focused on her own momentary comfort (hiking downhill!) or on Shiny Things (Rabadash). Some of that - maybe most of it - is Railroading Author, but there is absolutely nothing in the books to support the idea that she finds joy and fulfillment in being a Popular Girl. I suppose there's nothing to support the opposite, either, but... well, I've said how I tend to conflate the character of Susan with Mark Studdock, whose character is drawn for more than mere convenience. And Mark very definitely finds no pleasure in his worldly pursuits - he merely deceives himself into believing them fulfilling.

[Steve Morrison]

I agree with Chris the Cynic (and I have read all of the books). Peter always sounded to me as though he found Susan's desertion a painful topic; he never criticizes her, he answers the initial question gravely and briefly, and he's the one who insists on changing the subject. (Though one of the fascinating things about such discussions is learning that some very bright people see completely different things in place of what I thought was the obvious subtext!)

[Steve Morrison]

Literally seconds after I posted that last, I came upon this quote by Lewis:

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or right the readers will most certainly go into it.

[Gospodin Dangling-Participle]

This is a fantastic discussion. I've been reading along with -- and eagerly anticipating the next installments of -- Ana Mardoll's Narnia deconstructions, so I've been thinking about Narnia lately. And my daughter is getting to be the right age for the books, too.

I agree with Kirala on the Susan Problem: Lewis wanted to show that nobody was safe, and Susan was the most easily converted into an object lesson. But like a lot of people, I disagreed with what Lewis was doing even though I could see why he was doing it. We don't even need to invoke Meta-Susan: as Ana has shown, in the text itself Susan is a levelheaded sensible asskicking archer-queen. For Lewis to toss her off the sled like that was awful.

[The Kidd]

It was such a pleasure to read this post. This is extremely well-articulated, well-informed, insightful literary analysis. Thank you. I will refrain from indicating which writer I found the more convincing.

One of the concepts I have never been able to get my head around with regard to The Problem of Susan is the idea that it is terrible for a young female child to grow up (and take an active and public role in the world). This achievement of independence and the accompanying acquisition of knowledge and skills, both obviously really good things, seems to be viewed as terrible when females do it. Of course if one believes females shouldn’t be independent then one would rather they retained the mindset of a young child as they grew up. This is related, I think, to the still too prevalent practice of referring to adult women as ‘girls’ more often than referring to adult men as ‘boys’. This whole idea of keeping females uneducated and unskilled is a way of keeping them submissive and powerless. When I first read the Narnia series I was struck by how wise old Aslan was so rigid and quietly cruel when confronted with anyone disobeying him. I was also struck by how dismissive he was at the departure of Susan, as if she had suddenly turned into something nasty by having the nerve to grow up. It was almost like Lewis was afraid of this character he had created. Imagine what Lewis would think of Hermione Granger or Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter books, or Captain Holly Short in the Artemis Fowl books.

The issue comes up again in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. One of the concepts Pullman uses is the idea of dust. According to the angel Xaphania, humans create dust “by getting wisdom and passing it on.” On the other hand the powerful religious authorities view dust as “something evil and wicked”. Pullman seems to see dust as a manifestation of Original Sin. I wonder if this is the sort of thing Lewis had in mind when he writes about Susan’s rejection of Narnia. I must say here thatI have read the Narnia series twice. The first time I read it I found parts of it so nasty and mean-spirited I decided not to read it again. The second time it was involuntarily (for a university course on Children’s Literature) and that was decades ago so my memories of the book are quite hazy.

[Kirala]

One of the concepts I have never been able to get my head around with regard to The Problem of Susan is the idea that it is terrible for a young female child to grow up (and take an active and public role in the world).

I always took Polly's line to be the author's reassurance that it was NOT a problem that Susan grew up; the problem was that she mistook shallow adolescent behavior for "adulthood".

Combine it with the Silver Chair, and you can see something else: "Even in this world, of course, it is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up." The problem is less the embracing adulthood and more the rejection of childhood. And of course Lewis believed "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty." I suspect the same would apply to some extent to passions other than reading.

[Izzy]

What Ana said re: Susan. I myself like male approval--for certain varieties of "male"--and am fond of earrings and makeup and girl drinks. I also like reading and video games where you shoot many zombies, and I theoretically like martial arts* and horseback riding and so on. People are complicated--and while I think it's important not to sacrifice what you like for what society thinks you should like, I'm not sure there is just one Who You Are for all time. I'm not the same person I was five years ago; sometimes, I'm not the same person I was five minutes ago.**

That's something I wish teenage/YA "be true to yourself" literature recognized a little more.

That said, the choice to give up the stories and to be all denial-y about it does bug me, for the reasons I've mentioned before. Granted, we don't know that Susan didn't do that as a defensive mechanism after Peter etc. were bugging her about the whole thing, but we also don't know that she did. And the denial thing in general gives me the same "oh, for fuck's sweet *sake*" irritated reaction that means I couldn't get through the Thomas Covenant books even if the hero hadn't done a totally unforgivable thing in the first chapter.

So...I'm mixed. On the one hand, I see and appreciate what Lewis was trying to do. On the other, he took an annoying and sexist approach to doing it. On the third hand, I hate LB anyhow, despite mostly liking the rest of the Narnia series. As a child without an extensive Christian background, it just seemed awful to me: the world ends and they've been dead all along and...yay. YAY? Seriously? Are you on a lot of crack, CS?

Which is to say that I didn't spend a lot of time reading that one.

*Although I would be way more willing to take them up again if I could find one that didn't place as much emphasis on belts and tests and tournaments, in which I have no interest.

**Talking about fictional characters with a friend recently, I noted that any fictional character is almost unavoidably shallower than a real person *because* story and reader/player expectations require them to be more consistent. Most people aren't consistent: I'm one person at work, another with my parents, another with my friends. Certain traits carry across, but the differences can be pretty drastic.

[Kirala]

@Izzy: And the denial thing in general gives me the same "oh, for fuck's sweet *sake*" irritated reaction that means I couldn't get through the Thomas Covenant books even if the hero hadn't done a totally unforgivable thing in the first chapter.

As someone who made it through the first three Thomas Covenant books in the hope/expectation that he would at least try to atone for that unforgivable act, because surely no series could center around such a vile man: I envy your choice to quit.

[Leum]

@Izzy: you might likr Aikido. My dojo only uses white and black belts and therr are no tournaments.

I don't think Susan's damnation is something the reader csn easily deny; I can't think of any example of someone going from believer to nonbeliever to believer in Narnia except the prince in Silver Chair, and that was due to enchantment.

I haven't read the Great Divorce, but I know it presents the *possibility* of leaving Hell for good, but does anyone actually do that? Because if not the book may be an argument for why God doesn't have to *bother* giving the damnes that option.

[Leum]

Ack, sorry for the awful spelling. I'm typing this on a touchscreen which I'm not used to.

[Steve Morrison]

@Leum: Yes, one of the sinners does repent and leave Hell (the man with the lizard representing Lust, if memory serves.)

Re Eustace's parents: Someone on Tor.com blogs last year pointed out that the Scrubbs are probably based on a pair of Nesbit characters called the Sandals; of course, Lewis's portrayal is far more malicious than Nesbit's!

[St. Jebus]

@ Izzy and Kirala I couldn't get through the Thomas Covenant Books either. I managed to get through the first one, and when I picked up the second one, Thomas just seemed like more of the same asshole that I just lost interest entirely.

And as far as his first chapter act: I kept waiting for him to get some sort of punishment, karmic or otherwise, but the worst that I saw happen was some other characters said, "That was bad, mmkay?" Completely disgusting.

[Izzy]

Yeah--I get that it's a deconstruction, and that we're not supposed to like or sympathize with the hero. But...this is why I don't generally like deconstructions; see also Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'm not sure if there's ever been one with a sympathetic protagonist or with a storyline that doesn't involve multiple gutpunches, but as it stands, I avoid the hell out of 'em.

[St. Jebus]

Hm. I am not familiar with Neon Genesis Evangelion. Heard the name, never seen any part of it, or even read about it.

I think that a talented author can make an unlikeable protagist sympathetic, though. For example, I don't care for Roland(The Dark Tower) all that much. I don't think that I'm necessarily supposed to like him. But, he is sympathetic in many ways.

[Izzy]

Anime. Interesting metaphysics, irritating characters (admittedly, I don't do well with parental issues), total mindscrew ending. Supposedly deconstruction of giant robot anime of the 1980s and 1990s.

Ah, see, I quite liked Roland. For me, it's hard to sympathize with an unlikeable protagonist--and the problem with redemption arcs is that I often have a hard time caring whether or not such-and-so is redeemed or eaten by a bear. (q.v. Dead Like Me.)

Which is sort of the opposite of the problem of Susan, actually: we see her at her best, it would be awesome to see how she is "redeemed" (assuming the least charitable interpretation of lipstick-and-nylons is true, and she's become Regina St. George from Mean Girls or something), and nothing more gets said about it.

[Froborr]

I always assumed Susan was damned (or at least cursed to horrible mundanity and never seeing her siblings again, before I recognized the allegory). I mean, we have a scene of people who denied Aslan being damned,* and then we find out Susan denied Narnia, which is the next best thing to denying Aslan. She's toast.

*As a kid, the idea of people disappearing into his shadow TERRIFIED me; I was certain there was something unspeakably horrible in there even before I recognized Narnia as an allegory, because Lewis had always made such a big deal of how fierce and untame Aslan was. What he does to the dwarves is even more horrifying--and don't tell me that was their doing, there is clearly some sort of magical illusion affecting them and Aslan is the only person around with the ability to pull it off, that much was obvious to me even at 10.

[St. Jebus]

Content: Mental illness

@ Froborr I had the unfortunate luck to be raised in a very fundamentalist family, and so I was, eh, "conditioned" is probably the best word, to not think too hard about the punishments people were getting. I do remember thinking something similar to you about the dwarves - that either Aslan was making them not see the good place they were in, or they had some sort of acute onset mental illness. Either way, I didn't see it as their fault - after all, if you're seeing a dirty stable, you'll probably react as if you're seeing a dirty stable.

[Froborr]

That scene has always summed up to me as Lewis saying, "Hey, you know that filthy stable you live in? You should listen to the person telling you it's really a lovely field, and not the person telling you it's a forest, or the one telling you it's a cave, or the one telling you it's a much filthier stable, or... Also, because it should be *completely obvious* to you which one of these people is correct, we're all going to laugh at your foolishness and/or condemn you to eternal torment."

[St. Jebus]

Yeah, that sort of "Well, obviously, we have the only right answer and will mock, mistreat and love-bomb you" RTC attitude is what drove me away from the church in the first place.

[Mike Timonin]

I often have a hard time caring whether or not such-and-so is redeemed or eaten by a bear. (q.v. Dead Like Me.)

Which character didn't you like in DLM?

[Izzy]

@Mike: George. Whiny slacker* emogirl. I was willing to put up with the whining and the slacking and the emo for the first episode--although *man* was I ever rooting for the toilet seat--but when I got to the one where her little I-don't-want-to-do-this hissy meant a guy woke up in post-autopsy body...yeah. No. Hate.

Also, the thing where a character finds him or herself in a new place, is told the rules, and immediately proceeds to break them right and left because they're special and their emotions matter so much more than everyone else's in the history of ever...I am tired of that thing, and by "tired of" I mean "never had much patience for in the first place".

*I am not a giant fan of unbridled capitalism. But capitalism is the system we have, and that means, when you're eighteen and not in school, you get your ass out of bed and get a temp job before your mom makes you, and you do not proceed to be a giant pain to everyone at said temp job. And HATE. See also: Girls , Jesus fucking Christ.

[Mike Timonin]

Ahhh. See, I liked George. I think the struggle with the rules is sort of human - the assumption that everyone does it "this way" just because they haven't considered any other way of doing it (even if that assumption is patently absurd) is the way (some) people move through life. Also, it served a useful narrative purpose - why, says the viewer, would anyone follow those restrictive rules? Because, says the show, to not do so is to incur particular badness.

[Izzy]

@Mike: Yeah, but I kind of hate those people, in the same way I hate most of the cast of RENT. I mean, it's one thing to question things like gender roles, or stereotypes, or whatever. It's another thing to go all Rebel Without A Cause on day-to-day life: my fallback example is the notion that deodorant and showering are just another tool of The Man, and no, they're not, and hate. Or the guy at company meetings who has to take up half a goddamn hour of everyone's time asking why we organize things like X instead of Y when the rest of us couldn't care less and just want to take our donuts and go.

And when you're dealing with literal life-and-death situations...the shit George pulls seems like the equivalent of pushing the big red button because they told you not to, or at least of driving eighty down a residential street because *you* need to go somewhere fast. Guh. It's one of those realistic things where the realism gets drowned out by the fact that I want to punch people like that.

Narratively...yeah, I agree, but it also makes certain viewers hate the main character. I mean, I never asked why anyone would follow the rules: it's a weird metaphysical afterlife, I assumed there are weird metaphysical consequences.

Granted, from a storytelling perspective, you kind of need rules to get broken: there's a Chekov's gun sort of thing where, if you get told not to cross the streams in Act 1, you need to cross the damn streams by Act 3. But I feel like you also need to give characters a better reason to do so than "I rilly rilly want to, you guys."

[Phoenix]

I enjoy these discussions far too much without participating to want to chime in here with my perspective.

But I have two compliments, one augmented with a sincere thanks.

First, I've always been deeply impressed with the ability of Kit and Hapax to disagree so virulently on this subject and retain a sense of camaraderie through it all. By funny coincidence, I am currently working my way through Ana Mardoll's incisive commentaries on the Narnia series thus far and every time I get to a discussion in which the both of them participate, I feel a happy little leap.

Second, this quote:

And I guess I've never seen the "problem" in that. Susan, in a sense, defies the role the narrative tries to force her into. By the power of our ignorance, she retains her agency. And that, I guess, is what (for me) the Gaiman story takes away from her: what I'd call the Triumph of Susan.

Hapax, this quote neatly echoes something you said to me months ago when I wrote a piece for the Slacktiverse about my religious history. And as I told you then, it lifted me up in a way I didn't think I could ever be lifted again. Reading it again here as applied to Susan reminded me of how much joy I felt when I read it then as applied to me.

Inconclusive evidence, perhaps, but I think that you might be one of the kindest persons I have ever encountered. And I just wanted to say thank you for sharing that kindness with us.

I know you two are not participating but I hope you're both reading.

[Phoenix]

P.S. - I haven't read the comment thread yet, but Ana Mardoll, if *you* are reading, special thanks to you for the Narnia series. I haven't enjoyed a deconstruction series so much since the happy day I discovered Fred Clark's blog. I hope you eventually work your way through all the books in the series; the idea of reading your thoughts on THAHB makes me giddy.

[Mira]

Aw man, apparently my long comment didn't work.

TL;DR - agreed with Hapax on Lewis being most critical of his own flaws, and writing those into his characters; based on other writings ("The Great Divorce," essays in "God in the Dock"), I think he didn't enjoy the idea of punishment, but felt it a necessity for repentance and growth. I also think he was a product of his time and a lack of interaction with women for most of his life, so his deeply problematic writing about women was more an issue of ignorance and patriarchal surroundings than a well-thought-out choice or position. I'd be a lot harsher on him for that if he were writing now. (On the other hand, I do get the sense of smugness Kit reads in from Chesterton, and can't really stand his stuff. I'd probably feel that way about Lewis if I hadn't come across so much of his stuff at such a young age.)

He was not a great novelist though, all the ways people have listed his characters as "types" show that. The entire ending of Narnia is terrible so the "problem of Susan" is symptomatic of that. I'm sorry, even if you believe in heaven, all your main characters dying is NOT a happy ending; I'm Christian and it still seems messed up to me to have a system where you pity the ones who stayed alive. That is not at all psychologically realistic.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

Mira,

The entire ending of Narnia is terrible.

I can't remember where I came across the remark that Narnia has two villains — Jadis and Tash — and neither is a fallen angel. And that means that he was prepared to make an imperfect allegory for the sake of his story. (He also said, in one of his essays in Of This and Other Worlds, that his stories came to him in pictures, and the allegory was painted on top later.)

In The Last Battle I get the impression he was sick of the whole thing and was writing purely for the sake of the allegory with no thought at all to the story. And that's why that book is completely meaningless to me. It has nothing going for it as a novel. Nothing at all. Or, at least, nothing I can see.

I'm Christian and it still seems messed up to me to have a system where you pity the ones who stayed alive. That is not at all psychologically realistic.

I dunno about that. It's written from the perspective of dead people, so who can say what's psychologically realistic? Maybe they're just sad the alive ones are not there with them.

TRiG.

[Patrick]

Mercury Blue- I was interpreting C. S. Lewis, not reality.

He was a popular Christian apologist who also wrote fiction, and he wrote a popular fictional Christian allegory. In this Christian allegory he addresses a common problem of Christian theology- how to explain the existence of people who don't believe in Christianity. Some popular explanations are things like, "they know it to be true but they're just pretending for morally culpable reasons." Unsurprisingly, ideas very much like this feature in C. S. Lewis' Christian allegory.

We're not restricted to just the text in interpreting it- he wouldn't have wanted us to be, and there's no reason to be. Its worthwhile to interpret it in light of popular Christian beliefs.

[chris the cynic]

I'm Christian and it still seems messed up to me to have a system where you pity the ones who stayed alive. That is not at all psychologically realistic.

I dunno about that. It's written from the perspective of dead people, so who can say what's psychologically realistic? Maybe they're just sad the alive ones are not there with them.

I had a story in my head once called The Devil's Coat, as I recall, because it began with the devil negotiating with someone to get his coat (it was the devil's favorite type and vengeful angels, restricted from doing direct harm until the Apocalypse, took it upon themselves to destroy every instance of said coat and the factory in which it was produced when they learned that she liked it, they only missed one) and then things went wrong and, to prevent him from dying before they could close the deal (she really wanted that coat) the devil offered coat-haver a job as a reaper, ferrying the souls of the dead to the afterlife.

Him taking the deal provided a loophole through which she could save his life where otherwise she could not.

Naturally the souls he ferried were damned but this was a setting where Hell was good and Heaven was... not necessarily evil as a whole but extremely exclusionary and tending toward militant, so that was actually a good thing.

At some point someone asked said reaper of souls if his job, dealing with newly dead people, got him down and his response was that it did the opposite. He listed off a litany of triggering situations he'd encountered and pointed out that it was his job to tell the person that just exited one of said situations that this is when the hurting stopped, and then deliver them into a situation where they'd be cared for, loved, and subject to some of the best psychological care ever to exist. (Not to mention really good music.)

I could see people in that story pitying those left alive. Especially since the dead trying to help the living would have triggered the Apocalypse, which Hell is trying to indefinitely postpone (they can't cancel it, that would throw the ball into Heaven's court, but they can evaluate the situation every five years and, at every evaluation, decide to push it back to "ten years from now.") because at that point they'd be wiped out and that would be bad.

[St. Jebus]

That sounds like an awesome story. Nice inverting of the Heaven/Hell dichotomy. That sounds pretty cool.

[Mike Timonin]

Izzy - yeah, I can see how your view of George fits with your position on people who refuse to believe the magic in the magical world they have been transported to (which also irritates me) - I don't know why I liked George, but her character sorta worked for me.

[Izzy]

@Mike: Hey, matter of taste and all that.

For me, it's what one of my friends said when we were all doing character creation for her game: there are people out there who don't/won't/can't deal. We are not telling stories about them.

@chris: Sounds awesome!

@mira: I hear you.

I'm mixed on Chesterton. Or rather, I'm mixed on The Ballad of the White Horse, which is what I've read of his. On the one hand, awesome use of language (and some wonderful ancient "the gods who made the gods" stuff), and I love the "I tell you naught for your comfort" desperate-end-of-times battle, and also Mary's point about Heaven not guarding its stuff.

On the other hand, the Yay Christianity Boo Pagans bits...yes, I know, man of his time and place, but it bugs.

[MercuryBlue]

the gods who made the gods

Does this boil down to some gods being parents of others, or to a supreme deity or two creating the rest, or to something interesting? And if it's the last, tell?

[Izzy]

@MercuryBlue: It's very not explained, and sounds cool and titanic-ish.

[lonespark]

I am sure you are all having an utterly fascinating discussion about this which will be an example of the best aspects of this place.

However I am not caught up, so I will post something that crossed my mind reading the OP: Would it be possible to write that scene, of Susan being lost from/to the others, from a different religious perspective? How would it be the same and different? I wonder that, because as a Pagan, I can't think of an equivalent idea I can really entertain. And yet similar subjects come up all the time: people often discuss how to honor the Christian ancestors, and whether they might see them in an afterlife and how the Christian folk will feel about that.

[Froborr]

Hmm... I'm pretty sure it could happen from a Muslim, Zoroastrian, or Buddhist perspective--the first two have eternal hells, the latter permits reincarnation into different planes of existence/modes of being (one thing I've always found interesting is that although humans are beneath gods and IIRC Suras, the human plane is actually the easiest from which to escape the cycle completely and attain Nirvana).

It could not happen from a Jewish perspective--Gehenna, for those few Jews who believe in such a thing, is temporary, closer to purgatory than Hell.

From an atheist perspective (Aslan is a Sufficiently Advanced Alien who can transfer people between parallel universes) it can of course happen, it just requires Aslan to be a sadistic bastard Sufficiently Advanced Alien (as most of them generally are). I will be honest, it's been a couple of decades since I've really thought much about The Last Battle, and re-examining it now, I'm hard-pressed to really see how Aslan is better than TurboJesus. Oh, he doesn't visibly revel in the destruction and suffering he creates like TurboJesus clearly does, but he's still doing it, so from the perspective of Joe Random Narnian Who Goes Into the Shadow, it doesn't matter much which you're up against.

[lonespark]

Also, Ana, can Elderly!Saved!Susan's younger, hot boyfriend be Hawkeye from The Avengers? (The timeline probably doesn't work, huh? IDK, Jasper, wormholes, something...)

[lonespark]

If I say that I agree with you both, is it because you're both brilliant or because I'm indecisive?

Both, of course, and I am with you, Amaryllis.
But not entirely: my opinion is constrained; I never read the Narnia books myself, and don't quite remember enough of having them read to me as a wee one to have informed opinions.

[lonespark]

Peter does not read to me as someone who is dismissive of Susan, his words actions and, importantly, tone (short and grave he speaks) strike me as someone who does not want anything bad said about Susan.

I got this too, or at least someone who finds it painful to discuss. I like that first bit and wish it had been left at that. Although the part where the other characters attempt to explain the ineffable reminds me of a Sufi teaching story or two.

[lonespark]

while I think it's important not to sacrifice what you like for what society thinks you should like, I'm not sure there is just one Who You Are for all time.

Yeah, this.

I do get a certain flavor of what Angelia Sparrow was saying... It reminds me of the book Reviving Ophelia. (Pro Tip, y'all: if you are a teenage girl, and your dad is reading that book, it is quite likely BAD NEWS. It may be funny many years and grandchildren later. Maybe.)

[Anonymous]

@Izzy: on the jerks who go about breaking the rules because the rules don't make sense to their newbie self and they can't imagine that they might have been put in place for a reason:

I hope I don't do that to other people, but I might, because I sure as hell do it to *myself*. For example, I'll say "why am I using a dish towel to take stuff out of the oven? Don't normal people use +heat-resist oven mitts?" And then I will put on the +heat-resist oven mitts and discover they're also -16 dex and that I can't quite grasp anything, I just have to push and pull with them and I spill my lunch all over the oven and only then do I remember that I had previously determined that dish towels are optimal for removing things from ovens.

I do hope that I don't do this to other people too. If I do, then I hope they call me on it as it comes up. I wish I'd stop doing it to myself though.

[hf]

And the denial thing in general gives me the same "oh, for fuck's sweet *sake*" irritated reaction that means I couldn't get through the Thomas Covenant books

Well, seeing orc-like creatures and violations of the laws of physics normally does indicate a dream. And the vividness of your surroundings would not help you decide one way or the other. Having the ability to read and lacking the ability to levitate would argue against the dream theory, and it seems like Covenant could update his beliefs on such evidence, but I cut him some slack on that one point. He knows that some of what he's experiences just doesn't happen.

On the third hand, I've used Thomas Covenant as an example of how not to do lucid dreaming. I could summarize the problem by saying, 'try to remember the possibility of an expected value calculation, even when you can't do one (which is most of the time).' That means you should not only take into account the rough probability of various different explanations, rather than forgetting all except the single most likely one, but also try to take into account what each of them says will happen. Think about the good or bad effects that might result from a given action.

This goes back to my problem with Lewis and the dwarfs (I'll connect it with Susan in a second). He claims people can refuse to see Heaven rather than admit their mistakes. OK. If Heaven is real, though, his mental picture of it will certainly get some detail wrong. (Say each part of his belief has 99% probability in his own mind. The whole picture probably has more than 100 of these logically distinct details.) So by his argument a believer who refuses to change any opinion could share the fate of the dwarfs. That says to me that people in Lewis' worlds should train themselves to form beliefs based on the evidence and change them upon new evidence. Sticking with one theory come Hell or high water seems suicidal.

The OP calls Susan "the dogmatic counter-point to Emeth, the Calormene soldier whom Aslan accepts". But that seems entirely wrong to me. Emeth's counterpart would reject Aslan for not fitting the picture of Aslan in his head (see The Horse and his Boy) or for associating with the wrong sect. Lewis, I think, can't show this because he lied about the nature of his religion. Narnia does not have an official church or official doctrine to get in the way of accepting reality. People just mysteriously share the same emotional reactions.

[lonespark]

Anonymous, that sounds stupidly familiar. I do the same thing to myself.

I do it to other people sometimes, when we've been through a a whole decision-making discussion that I subsequently forgot.

[Amaryllis]

TRiG: I can't remember where I came across the remark that Narnia has two villains — Jadis and Tash — and neither is a fallen angel. And that means that he was prepared to make an imperfect allegory for the sake of his story. (He also said, in one of his essays in Of This and Other Worlds, that his stories came to him in pictures, and the allegory was painted on top later.)

I find that totally believable; the pictures are the convincing parts. Most of Narnia doesn't really work as straightforward Christian allegory. Lewis should just have trusted his pictures to convey his emotional truth rather than, as Tolkien put it, denoting this and that by this and that and wobbling between the two modes. As it is, you've got imperfect allegory for the sake of story, and you've got imperfect story for the sake of allegory.

Tolkien, for all his professed dislike of allegory, wrote a better Christian allegory, or at least an allegory for a particular Christian view, in Leaf by Niggle.

Are we ever told exactly what Tash is, if not a fallen angel? A created-evil spirit-- in which case, who's responsible for creating the evil? Not to mention a whole nation being enslaved to it and taught to call it good? but then, things like that do happen in the real world, and had happened within Lewis's own recent past.

A symbol of the evil that lurks in the hearts of men (and women), then? That works better, but then you're back to treating all of Narnia, not as strict allegory, but as extended metaphor for the struggles and aspirations of an individual human soul. Which would work better if Lewis seemed to have more sympathy for actual people.

[Theo]

In-universe, Tash clearly isn't a Satan figure or, really, any supreme principle of evil.

He's not at all interested in fighting Aslan, in fact he plays no part at all in the apocalypse except for destroying those who foolishly summoned him while not believing in him (come to think of it, in this respect he mostly resembles Clive Barker's Candyman...). And he buggers off quietly when Peter tells him to. He seems just to be an idol (who actually exists), a nasty demonic creature setting itself up as a god in order to be fed human sacrifices.

Out of universe, Tash was barely mentioned before TLB and in THAHB, IIRC his name mostly appears in exclamations. There's no suggestion in any books before TLB that the Calormenes practice a religion of evil. Hell, Aslan even instructs the polymorphed Rabadash to go back to the temple of Tash in order to have his curse raised. That would be quite odd if Tash were supposed to be Satan.

[Theo]

Oh, and I love this post and comment thread. :D

[anamardoll]

People are complicated--and while I think it's important not to sacrifice what you like for what society thinks you should like, I'm not sure there is just one Who You Are for all time. I'm not the same person I was five years ago; sometimes, I'm not the same person I was five minutes ago.

This. SO MUCH.

I cannot count how many men have poked and prodded at me in order to see/meet/find/experience the "'real' Ana". I *am* real. The fact that I have differing moods and different interests and different personalities and different voices for different situations and I can go from being super-extroverted to super-introverted at the drop of a hat doesn't mean that there's some essential facet of me that is more "real" than the rest. It means I'm complicated.

I see women subjected to this far more than men, but that may well be Confirmation Bias. But I suspect it's an artifact of the Hollywood "one personality per woman" mandate (i.e., Tomboy. Girly. Seductive. Sweet. Etc.) *and* a cultural need to cast dichotomies in order to restrict women (i.e., you can like martial arts, but if you do, you can't like makeup or short skirts).

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@Chris: that story brought tears to my eyes, and reminded me a little of Brom's "The Child Thief" which is (a) a re-imagining of Peter Pan and (b) super triggering, so maybe don't go and look. But basically the "lost children" (not "lost boys") are children Peter takes from abusive homes.

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I had more thoughts but they seem to have evaporated. How much do I love this thread? So much!

[Izzy]

@Amaryllis: Agreed. It's telling, to me, that the first Narnia books hold up relatively well for me even now that I know the Jesus element: hell, the willing-sacrifice-gives-you-power thing is prevalent in a lot of religion and mythology and fiction. But LB seemed like a straight shot of allegory, and bleh.

@lonespark: Oh, likewise, and me too, though I haven't read that book in a while. As usual, there's a whole conflict between doing what you like versus doing what society says you should do, and whether actually liking what society says you should do is an issue or what. (See also: Shaving Your Legs, The Five Hour College Debate.)

Also, I now want to read Susan/Captain America. Or maybe Susan/Loki, if we're going AvengerVerse. Although it would have to be pre-I-Fell-Through-Space-and-Lost-1d100-SAN Loki.

@hf: Sure, I'm with you on that, up until the bit where thinking he's in a dream means he goes around refusing to do a damn thing about anything. Just...argh. The books are probably good, objectively, and I certainly have friends I respect who like them a lot, but oh my God do I want to slap TC silly.

@Anonymous: Oh, likewise. And I'm sure I've done it on occasion myself. It's just that when it seems like someone's primary way of relating to the world--and when they never stop to ask "So, why *do* we do this?" before breaking said rule--that's when I start wanting the character-devouring bears to enter.

[Izzy]

@Ana: Damn straight. It's a prevalent thing in geek culture, and it can often bug: I've seen people discuss things like dressing well or developing social skills derisively because "that's not being myself, and people should like me for who I am", because argh.*

I've gotten that reaction from guys, too--although mostly I've gotten guys telling me that they Know The Real Me, which always translates to "I've seen you cry" or "I've gotten you to talk about your feelings". Now, I apparently do keep my guard up a little, so that's a thing, but I was under the impression that *so do most people*. Most of us aren't buffeted by tidal waves of feeling most of the time and most of us don't discuss our philosophy of life and our angsty backstory with people we've known for five minutes, because most of us aren't bad RPG characters. And few people assume that, because an otherwise flippant/tough guy cries at his grandma's funeral or gets all "d'awww" over a kitten, the flippant/tough thing is just a facade.

Well, I think few people assume this. There's a whole lot of bad fanfic that proves me wrong, I suspect.

*See also: Compulsively Honest Guy. I hate Compulsively Honest Guy. Cordelia Chase could get away with "Tact is just not saying true stuff," because she was fifteen, and so was I the first time I watched that, but: no.

[anamardoll]

TW: Micro-Aggressions, Shouting, Brief Mention of Rape

@Izzy, in my case, it was always a man saying that they'd seen the "real" me after I'd lose my temper. Presumably because I cry frequently but lose my temper less often? Apparently micro-aggressions (such a good term, Kit!) calculated to push me from a low simmer to a full boil "I. Am. Not. Comfortable. Discussing. This. Further. Right. Now!" shouting match is something that many dating partners have considered worthwhile uses of their time.

I'm torn on the "love me for me" front because on the one hand, sure!, but on the other hand, remember that no one *owes* love. If you want/need to be super non-conventional (here thinking of the Schrodinger's Rapist post with the guy who had the neon cockroach tattoo), that's completely your right, but it seems too often paired with the idea that people who aren't immediately 100% on-board with that in a romantic partner are stuck-up or shallow or "not GGG" or something equally shaming. Basically, it's one of those "fine, but don't be an entitled jerk about it, because everyone else deserves their choices too" things. (Funny how many things in life can have that sentence applied to it.)

Re: Susan, I absolutely never felt like she was anything but happy with her choices. I assumed she was budding into her sexuality and enjoying lipsticks and nylons and that There Should Be Nothing Wrong With That. She's mentioned, iirc, as reveling in beauty and attention in both DT and HAHB, and while Lewis may have meant me to see that as a red flag o' sinfulness, I just assumed she liked being popular. What's wrong with that? My best friend was the Most Beautiful Girl In The World (and a Cheerleader!) and while I secretly wished I was as popular and pretty as she, I never begrudged her what she had -- not even when the boy we both like Completely Predictably went with her despite me being (in my mind at the time thanks to Nice Guyism and Hollywood) a better, geekery match.

Indeed, that scene in DT never really read true to me, when Lucy is wanting to be as Beautiful As Susan. Because it starts out being as beautiful as Susan (which I get) and then segues sharply into "and then everyone thinks Susan is trash". Which I did not get AT ALL, because while I frequently wanted to be as pretty as my friend, I never wanted her to be treated badly in order to build me up. I chalked the scene in DT up to Sibling Rivalry, which I have little experience with, but I still feel like that scene is very sexist, like all women secretly hate each other for being pretty.

Speaking of DT, someone has mentioned in the past that Susan was taken to America with their parents. Which would seem to indicate that either they thought she would benefit most from the trip OR they thought she needed close watching, but it also indicates that they don't think there's any harm in pulling her out of school for an extended vacation. Which raises the question: is Susan separating herself from her siblings/Narnia and pursuing worldly pleasures because she wants to or because her parents are molding her to?

If the former, she doesn't deserve approbation. If the latter, then LB is even more sad because she's just trying to follow the rules. Again.