as an adult woman reading the Chronicles of Narnia ...

[truepenny]

I started a jeremiad at heres_luck this afternoon whilst we were allegedly working on our Firefly abstract, and then said, "This is probably an LJ post." And now it's going to be.


I haven't reread the Narnia books for quite a while; mostly this was because I didn't need to--I'd read them (and had them read to me) so many times as a child that reading them again seemed deeply redundant. But Saturday's discussion of allegory (in the comments) enticed me back to C. S. Lewis again for the first time in I don't know how long.

It's different reading them as an adult.

I learned that the Chronicles of Narnia were "allegories" as a teenager, going to a Girl Scout meeting in the basement of a local church and finding the walls decorated with handmade posters proclaiming "ASLAN IS ON THE MOVE." I asked my mother what these church people were doing with Narnia, and she gave me a funny look and said, "Well, it is Christian, you know." I hadn't. I hadn't recognized the allegorical elements, because I was a heathen child and my receiver was not tuned to those transmissions. Now, of course, I've been trained to read Christian symbolism, and the White Witch talking about the capital-L Law would tell me what's going to happen between her and Aslan even if I didn't already know it.

But, although I'm not Christian, the religion in these books doesn't bother me, any more than it bothers me in Milton or Spenser. What bothers me now, as an adult woman, are the other ideologies Lewis is promulgating. melymbrosia has talked about this some, and, for this post, I don't actually want to talk about adulthood in the Narnia books. I want to talk about the children.

First of all, my god is Peter boring! I didn't even notice that as a child; now, I can see a definite progression in Lewis's ability to write characters and dialogue, from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to The Silver Chair, which is the one I'm reading now. (*heart*Puddleglum*heart*, even though it would appall him) But Peter is just fantastically boring, both in the narratological sense I've been expounding re: Faramir and in the plain old *yawn* sense. I keep being struck by this mad urge to set an essay question: "Edmund is more heroic than Peter. Discuss."

Susan, of course, as is the fate of all Susans in mid-twentieth century children's literature, is very feminine and dull and mothering/nagging. I hadn't liked her as a child, and I don't like her now, but my not liking her now is complicated by the fact that I resent the way Lewis is maneuvering me into not liking her. Susan exists in the story (taking The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian together) largely for the purpose of not being liked--which, of course, is completely and triumphantly vindicated in The Last Battle, when we learn that Susan has become too obsessed with adult femininity to bother about Narnia. Bad Susan! Bad! No Rapture-trainwreck and redemption into childhood's paradise for you!

But I wasn't going to talk about that part.

I got mildly annoyed in the first two books with the constant harping on how girls ought not to fight, and ought to be protected and all the rest of that nonsense, but I didn't really start to conduct vituperative little arguments in my head until The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

TVotDT was not my favorite book (that, as loyal readers will know, is The Silver Chair), but it was definitely my second favorite. I love the set pieces of the fates of each of the seven Lords, and I love the fact that Lewis has finally figured out how to write dialogue (the little bits of byplay with Rhince and Drinian are just funny). Reepicheep annoys the fuck out of me as an adult, but that's part and parcel of my primary complaint, which is with what Lewis makes Eustace be a mouthpiece for.

Eustace, I want to be perfectly clear, is a spoiled, rotten, self-serving, selfish, hypocritical little snot. I have no quarrels with Lewis's characterization of him in that way (and I do still cheer at his correlation between Eustace's character flaws and his reading the wrong kind of books), and I don't feel, as I do with Susan, any compulsion to try to read against the text. But it irks me, profoundly, that Eustace is the only character who says anything about pacifism and he is the only character who suggests that maybe chivalry isn't really the way to go.

The pacifism-cowardice conflation I can understand, even if I neither respect nor condone it. These are WWII era books, and the idea of being morally opposed to war is alien to them. That's fine. But Lewis wrote TVotDT after Dorothy Sayers had pointed out, in Gaudy Night (1936) that "a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry" (GN 293). And therefore it ANNOYS me to have the idea that girls aren't weaker than boys lumped in with the rest of Eustace's wrong-headed ideas. (This may be another reason I love TSC--Jill doesn't get the cosseting that Lucy does.) See, Eustace is right to complain about Lucy getting special treatment, even though he's complaining for entirely the wrong reasons, and I deeply dislike the way in which Lewis uses Eustace's selfish reasons to mock the idea he's articulating.

And I don't like the way "chivalry" puts Lucy into a position of constantly being used as justification for the male characters' behavior. Reepicheep says on the island of the Duffers that, if there were any chance they could save Lucy by laying down their lives, they would be obligated to fight. That's a horrible burden to put on Lucy's shoulders, frankly, as is the ghastly moment, when they're arguing about sailing into the darkness around the Dark Island and Reepicheep (prattling on about "honor" again) has blackmailed Caspian into doing something Caspian, Drinian, and the other men all know is stupid, that Caspian says, "Unless Lucy would rather not?" (TVotDT 153), which again places a burden on Lucy she shouldn't have to bear (Caspian's the freaking king--he should be able to make his own call) and also puts her in a bind--much as Reepicheep has just put Caspian in a bind, and it's particularly not-nice of Caspian to turn around and do the same thing to Lucy that's just been done to him.

But the thing that has particularly displeased and upset me, rereading TVotDT, is something that actually surprises me. When Lucy reads the spell to let her know what her friends think of her, and observes Marjorie Preston and Anne Featherstone putting her down, Aslan does, quite properly, tell her off for eavesdropping:

"... you have misjudged your friend. She is weak, but she loves you. She was afraid of the older girl and said what she does not mean."

"I don't think I'll ever be able to forget what I heard her say."

"No, you won't."

"Oh dear," said Lucy. "Have I spoiled everything? Do you mean we would have gone on being friends if it hadn't been for this--and been really great friends--all our lives perhaps--and now we never shall."
(Lewis 135-6)

But Aslan's answer to this is merely to rebuke her (as he does in Prince Caspian) for wondering about what would have happened. He says nothing about forgiveness, about the frailty of human nature, about the fact that what Lucy has done to Marjorie is not really any less reprehensible than what Marjorie has done to Lucy. Aslan (and Lewis) allows Lucy's assumption that she cannot be friends with Marjorie any longer to go unchallenged. And, I'm sorry, that's just wrong. Particularly in books which have allowed characters (i.e., Edmund and to a lesser extent Eustace) to redeem themselves without any particular difficulty or soul-searching (And I'm not going to start drawing comparisons with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.), this seems unwarrantedly petty and spiteful.

And that bothers me more than any of the other things I've been complaining about.

I'll probably have more stuff to say later, after I've dealt with the other books in the series (parenthetical digression for one pet peeve: what is up with Lewis's estate and the whole reordering the books thing? The Magician's Nephew is not and never will be the first book of the series, and putting it first is only likely to turn people off the books entirely. It is not a point of easy entry into the series. Chronological order doesn't matter as much as you think it does. To Aslan, all times are soon.). But the first three books belong together, and, well (*looks at post*), I had things to say.

---
WORKS CITED
Lewis, C. S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 1952. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. 1936. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964.

Comments

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

ivyblossom's Narnia obsession mirrors yours. You guys should talk :)

A Freudian Note

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Jill is a girl, but not, well, girlish in the way Susan is. She is a Girl Guide instead of a fussy little mother/vamp. Take a look at her name: Jill Pole. She's almost always addressed by surname.

I loved the books, though I came to them late. (I was 14 and also reading Radclyffe Hall when I got hold of them.) Since I was raised Baptist, I spotted the Christian imagery right away; what those books gave me was permission to love the other mythologies, to love literature, though I belonged to a fundamentalist church that considered imagination itself a sin and the Bible the only literature worth reading. But there are some deeply jarring notes even beyond those you've mentioned. The overt racism in The Horse and His Boy, for example, is just painful.

If I was a Baptist whose church feared imagination, why was I ready The Well of Loneliness? Because I already knew I was bisexual, and I was already committed to books. What Lewis gave me was an argument the grownups around me might accept. Might. So far as I know, none of the church elders or pastors we had in those years ever read C.S. Lewis. At least they had heard his name, and his books were sold in the Christian bookstore 20 miles away -- the only bookstore in the county.

Re: A Freudian Note

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

ready = reading

Re: A Freudian Note

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, good call on the Freudianism.

Jill's lack of girlishness is precisely why (as I was saying to heres_luck this afternoon) I identified with her more than anyone else in the books; she was like me. And she does seem to me to be a huge step forward from Lucy in terms of realism and just general good role model-ness for girls (which I wouldn't care about if it weren't for the fact that I think Susan and Lucy are such terrible role models). Jill's still a girl rather than merely a boy in drag--unlike, as a random example, George in Enid Blyton's Five books--but no excuses get made for her on the basis of her gender. And she and Eustace snipe at each other just unrelentingly, in a way that I can't imagine either Susan or Lucy participating in.

I never liked The Horse and His Boy; I'm going to reread it for curiosity's sake this time 'round, which may literally be the second time I've read it. I don't remember exactly why I didn't like it, but I suspect the reread will bring it all flooding back.

Your experience with the books seems to be the exact antithesis of mine; thank you for telling me about it.

Re: A Freudian Note

[cija.livejournal.com]

Aravis (in AHAHB) is just the coolest. I like her even better than Jill. She is obviously the right kind of girl from Lewis' perspective, i.e. the kind of girl who thinks other girls are silly - but still. "She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming."

There's no denying the racism in that book, but the Calormenes have plenty of good points: "Aravis immediately began, sitting quite still and using a rather different tone and style from her usual one. For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made-up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays." Even as a child I couldn't miss the skin color bits, but it honestly didn't occur to me that we were supposed to automatically prefer Narnian culture - I mean, who wouldn't want to be "grave and mysterious" and have orange trees and beehive-shaped Tombs of the Ancient Kings and iced sherbet and things? Plus the pointy slippers and curved scimitars. All that Narnian manliness and straight shooting and fair dealing and rustic pastoralism is very nice as far as it goes, but it only goes so far.

Actually, all the Calormen culture is probably why I like A Horse and His Boy so much. But I don't dislike any of them except possibly The Last Battle , not because it's bad, but because it's the end. Oh! and the part where, after Jill does something daring, Eustace says "If she were a boy, she'd have to be knighted", and Rilian says "If she were a boy, she'd be whipped for disobeying orders" - and it's dark, so she doesn't know if he's joking or not. I remember that word for word, just like in TLTWTW where someone says, "Battles are ugly when women fight."

And I was going to start out by saying I couldn't stand the slightest bit of criticism of the Narnia books because I love them so much (and I do), but the sexism is the one thing I can't defend. But I do think Lewis wrote much better girls than boys, contradictory as that may seem. Edmund and Eustace are riveting when they're being wicked, but not so much afterwards. Aravis is a better character than Shasta; Lucy's better than Peter. It seems as though girls are allowed to be flawed but basically good, while boys are either interesting sinners or redeemed paper cut-outs. But I haven't reread the whole series recently and there are probably lots of holes in that theory.

Re: A Freudian Note

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The Horse and His Boy stuff will have to wait until I've reread. But about characterization ...

But I do think Lewis wrote much better girls than boys, contradictory as that may seem. Edmund and Eustace are riveting when they're being wicked, but not so much afterwards. Aravis is a better character than Shasta; Lucy's better than Peter. It seems as though girls are allowed to be flawed but basically good, while boys are either interesting sinners or redeemed paper cut-outs.

The great advantage to having been a traitor--or a selfish, conniving, hypocritical brat--is that afterwards you seem to be allowed to speak your mind. Not in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which seems to be so heavily freighted with symbolic action that nobody can settle down to being human properly (although the White Witch is one of the best villains we get), but in Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund gets to be sarcastic. This always goes in the credit column in my record-keeping, so it means that I like Edmund even though that is actually the only character trait he has. (And I have big problems with the whole "traitor" thing anyway, but that's messy, complicated, and not properly articulated yet.) Eustace and Jill (as I said upthread) are quite nasty to each other, and I wonder if perhaps Lewis equated that with their terrible school. Susan and Lucy and Peter are bright-eyed, upstanding, young Englishpersons, and therefore can't descend to the level of backbiting that Edmund and Eustace do. (Except when Susan's being a bitch, but that's foreshadowing for her Going Bad, suggesting that even a good boarding school cannot cure all ills.) It's one of the lamest pieces of handwaving ever, when Lewis decides he has to explain why Edmund has been such a rotten little shit throughout TLTW&TW: "[Lucy] found him standing on his feet and not only healed of his wounds but looking better than she had seen him look--oh, for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face" (TLTW&TW 177). No explanations offered of why the Pevensies should send one child of four to a "horrid" school while the others are clearly going to the sort that teach clean living and good sportsmanship; no explanations offered for how, a year later, Edmund is going to the same school as Peter. It's a lame bit of rationalization, but I think it does explain how Lewis's mind worked on the subject, so Jill and Eustace's normal, realistic complaining and quarreling and frequent snippiness can probably be laid (in the books' logic) at the doors of Experiment House.

It's very difficult, it is true, to write characters who are both interesting and capital-G Good, and it is not a task at which Lewis has notable success. Will have more thoughts on this later, when I've reread the last three.

And I love the books too--even seeing their flaws. It's just that I'm long past the point where I can turn off the critical faculty when I read. I'm tearing them to pieces with love, I swear! *g*

---
WORKS CITED
Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1950. New York: Collier Books, 1970

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm just getting warmed up. :) Tell her to come on over. Narnia party at my LJ!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've always thought, well, maybe not when I first read them when I was four, but certainly by the time I was six, that I'd have insisted Eustace have the cabin for goodness sake. He was ill!

Chivalry (in the sense of boys having all the fun) and battles being ugly when women fight, have annoyed me forever.

Pacifism, in Eustace's 1930s appeasement sense, is actually wrong. I also can't condone (although I have some respect for) the Quaker position of refusing to fight for anything in any circumstances. Sometimes the barbarians come over the hill. Distinguishing their intentions when they come over the hill an art of civilization which should be practiced as assiduously as any other of the arts of civilization, but when they do come with fire and the sword, it's time to stand to arms.

And at that point, hand Eustace the bandages and Lucy the sword, because goodness knows that's where their capacities and their hearts are. People with bandages will be needed, I agree with the people trying to tell me that it's very important, and I'll agree even more when I come back wounded.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think I put my point about Eustace and pacifism badly. I agree, Chamberlain-style appeasement is what "pacifism" represents here (totally aside from the fact that Eustace is using it to try to get out of the consequences of his own nastiness) and, in fact, no, I don't agree with that. What I'm objecting to is that that's the only point (at least in the first three books) that the idea of NOT FIGHTING is even alluded to. Reepicheep drives me insane now, precisely because for him everything should be settled by the sword, and I don't think that that viewpoint is sufficiently balanced by anything else. Caspian GIVES IN to Reepicheep's specious and stupid argument about approaching the Dark Island, and, while the consequences of that decision are frightening, (a.) they rescue Lord Rhoop, which is definitely a good thing and (b.) nobody ever says, "This is what thinking with your overdeveloped sense of 'honor' gets you."

Lewis was writing after WWII; I'm writing in the middle of this insane and stupid situation with Iraq. The fact that Reepicheep looks to me like a warmonger is my baggage. But Lewis's version of Christianity does not seem to be about peace, or about turning the other cheek, or particularly about loving thy neighbor. It's very Anglo-Saxon and muscular; Aslan may sacrifice himself to the White Witch, but he also gets to go roaring onto the battlefield to destroy her. I think peace is harder than war (it takes thought and effort and communication and compromise), and therefore more honorable, and I don't think Lewis agrees with me.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think peace generally gets a bad deal in fiction because it's hard to dramatize. It's that Le Guin thing again, what's to say about it? A battle is exciting, reliable roads and drinking water are invisible. But you have a good case against Lewis beyond that. Some of the most dramatic and memorable things in the Narnia books are powerful visions of order being violently overturned -- the brilliant scene with Bacchus in Prince Caspian and the marvellous end of The Silver Chair. I think Reepicheep is a loon, and a perfectly acceptable character to have to drag them into action, but there should be someone admirable and sensible to balance him, and there isn't.

Lucy and Marjorie

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I had never thought before that Lucy could have forgiven her. It had never crossed my mind, because of course it's utterly unforgivable -- because it's real. You can forgive your brother for being a traitor and your cousin for being all the things Eustace is, (and he almost deserved it) but never a schoolfriend who betrays you in that tone of voice in a raliway carriage.

I went to a school like that -- as did Lewis of course -- and I failed to find the doors in the wall through which lions and warriors would come to destroy it all. Mine would not have used the flat of their blades! I think Lewis, and even Aslan, forgot Christian copybook virtues in the reality of the unforgivability of that.

I suspect if he were alive and you pointed that out to him, he'd be feel quite a lot of chagrin.

Re: Lucy and Marjorie

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And the fact that it's real, to me, makes it all the more vital that it should be forgiven. Because it's the sort of thing that DOES happen, whereas being tempted with enchanted Turkish Delight is really not a problem most of us have on a day to day basis. I didn't go to that kind of school (being American and all), but I do understand what you're saying about the particular mortal sins that that social structure defines. Aslan is a very public school kind of Christ-figure, with the virtues and defects that entails.

The Narnia books are children's books, and they tend to skirt the really hard parts of redemption, atonement, and forgiveness (like you were saying about peace, it's boring); the problems set before the characters in Narnia (in the first three books) are very much child-sized problems, no matter that they're being played out on a grand stage with kings and witches and centaurs and giants. Adulthood is clearly perceived of as contaminating Narnia, and those who care about adult concerns are always villains. Caspian may be a fabulous king, but running off to sea to find danger and adventure is not the gesture of an responsible adult towards his subjects; Susan is the only one of the four who says, Maybe we shouldn't keep following the White Stag, and she gets talked down with the same rhetoric of adventure and honor that Reepicheep uses on Caspian. I think that's one of the things that makes the books so appealling to children, that all those things you don't want to do are things you shouldn't want to do (witness the ill effects of Eustace's reading), and it's much better than the preachy sermonizing about adulthood that he could have indulged in and books like The Back of the North Wind do indulge in. But it's tremendously un-nuanced, which children's literature does not have to be, and that makes me uneasy.

Edmund

[(Anonymous)]

'I keep being struck by this mad urge to set an essay question: "Edmund is more heroic than Peter. Discuss."'

I like this. I've long thought of Edmund as Lewis's self-portrait...