Narnia: The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy

[truepenny]

Ooh, look. Truepenny's got more Things to Say about Narnia. Shock. Amazement. Also, my opinions are, um, decided and often intemperately worded, especially in regards to The Horse and His Boy. Just so you know.


Someone smarter than me needs to talk about The Silver Chair as an Arthurian romance. Because I can recognize some of the elements--the Lady of the Green Kirtle is a clear descendant both of Bercilak's Lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and of Duessa in Book I of The Faerie Queene (with an extra dash of Melusina), and fountains are always significant and frequently bad news--but I can't put the pieces together properly to figure out what Lewis was doing.

A related point: why does Rilian talk in such a different style from his father? Caspian talks like an English public school boy; Rilian talks (as well as looking) like Hamlet--or an Arthurian knight. The Silver Chair is arguably of a quite different genre from the other Narnia books, and Rilian is one of the very few adults in the series who gets more than a walk-on. But it's still disconcerting to go from Rilian's courtly language to Caspian telling Eustace not to be an ass. I feel like there has to be a reason behind it, but I can't quite figure out what it is.

And returning to Jill, as I said I would. Jill is interesting (aside from being sympathetic) because the scenes in Harfang make it very clear (brace yourself--jargon ahead) that both Lewis and Jill recognize "girliness" as something that can be performed. Jill, who has been resolutely boyish throughout, turns on the charm in Harfang:

The others admitted afterward that Jill had been wonderful that day. ... she began making a tour of the whole castle and asking questions, but all in such an innocent, babyish way that no one could suspect her of any secret design. Though her tongue was never still, you could hardly say she talked: she prattled and giggled. ... upstairs among the ladies she asked questions about how she would be dressed for the great feast, and how long she would be allowed to sit up, and whether she would dance with some very, very small giant. And then (it made her hot all over when she remembered it afterwards) she would put her head on one side in an idiotic fashion which grown-ups, giants and otherwise, thought very fetching, and shake her curls, and fidget, and say, "Oh I do wish it was to-morrow night, don't you? Do you think the time will go quickly till then?"
(TSC 109-10)

Jill's performance is primarily childlike; its inception is marked by her "put[ting] on her most attractively childish smile" (TSC 107). But that childlike quality is specifically bound up with femininity. Lewis is explicit that "girls do that kind of thing better than boys" (TSC 110). And Jill's prattling includes that question about a very, very small giant--the question of a little girl wanting to be a lady. She isn't just being childish. She's being a little girl, and both she and Lewis recognize that this is a way in which she can cold-bloodedly manipulate the adults around her. It also is quite specifically not natural to her. This kind of femininity is something Jill can do, but it isn't something she is.

We also get an explicit deconstruction of the outward markers of femininity when they are escaping from Harfang: "Jill gathered up her long skirts--horrible things for running in--and ran" (TSC 117). Jill is a girl (and, caroming off wordweaverlynn's point about her last name, the narrative itself calls her "Jill" rather than "Pole," although both Eustace and Puddleglum call her "Pole"), but Lewis seems to have recognized that that doesn't mean she can't be useful and active. She does pretty much go to pieces in the fight against the Witch/Snake, but I'm willing to put that down to this being her first time in Narnia rather than mere frail womanhood.

Jill's downrightness also provides a pointed contrast to the Lady of the Green Kirtle, who hides her serpent nature under what Dorothy Sayers would call "sweet womanliness" (Have His Carcase 235). She is loaded down with femininity: "... the lady, who rode side-saddle and wore a long, fluttering dress of dazzling green, was lovelier still" (TSC 75). And her trilling r's remind me for some reason of Jill's "prattling." And, of course, the Witch's sweet femininity is as much a performance as Jill's.

The Witch also emphasizes a point I made in my earlier post about the demonization of adulthood. Puddleglum's terrific, defiant speech after he's burned his foot in her magic fire is very specific about the superiority of "childish" stories over the Witch's adult reality: "... four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world all hollow" (TSC 159). That entire scene is in fact couched in terms of adulthood vs. children's make-believe, with adulthood being not only dreary and hopeless, but also a lie. (It's also probably worth noting that the enchantment on Rilian doesn't make him childlike, it just makes him a fool.)

The Silver Chair seems to me to be the most genuinely novel-like of the Narnia books, with the most realistically fallible characters and a notable lack of the leo-deus ex machina. Aslan is tremendously important to the characters and the book, but he has nothing to do with getting them out of sticky situations. They have to do it all themselves. Which in turn makes it feel that there is something genuinely at stake here, just as Rilian returning only just in time to witness his father's death shows us that adventures have consequences. For the first and possibly only time, Narnia feels real.



I still don't like The Horse and His Boy, and there are all sorts of reasons for that, many of which are thrown into relief by its juxtaposition with The Silver Chair.

First of all, Aslan is ubiquitous in this book, providing the leo-deus ex machina all over the place. And, as with all dei ex machina, that makes it very hard to feel that there's any real danger (except for Aravis and Lasaraleen inadvertently eavesdropping on the Tisroc, because that scene works). Secondly, I really dislike Bree. That was something I vaguely remembered from my first reading, and it has been validated in spades. I really dislike Bree. He's pompous, stupid, condescending ... I frankly don't understand why any of the other three put up with him, much less like him. I like Hwin much better, but she barely gets any attention.

Shasta is completely useless. He reminds me very much of Inga from Rinkitink in Oz, who is likewise effeminate, not very bright, prone to despair and bewailing of his fate, and IIRC coupled with a boyish assertive girl who does all the necessary heroing. And Shasta gets so little proper characterization that, while I think it's a character discontinuity for his speech to become larded with public school boyisms once he becomes Cor, I'm not actually sure. (And I can't see him called "Cor" without wanting to tack a "blimey" onto it. But that's probably just me.)

Aravis, it is true, is delightfully ungirly, especially in contrast with Lasaraleen. But the book as a whole seems to be backsliding from The Silver Chair. The whole trouble of the B-plot is caused by Susan being an idiot in a distinctly feminine fashion, and while Aravis and Lucy both get to be active (although with that weird retrograde motion at the end: "... [Aravis and Lucy] soon went away together to talk about Aravis's bedroom and Aravis's boudoir and about getting clothes for her, and all the sort of things girls do talk about on such an occasion" (TH&HB 205)--excuse me, what? What have you done with Aravis and why have you replaced her with Lasaraleen?), we also have this completely chilling line from Corin: "[Susan]'s not like Lucy, you know, who's as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy" (TH&HB 176). Words fail me, especially since just over the page, we've had Edmund asserting that a boy isn't any good at all: "A boy in battle is a danger only to his own side" (TH&HB 174). Granted, yes, Corin isn't exactly a reliable source, but as with Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we never get the balancing point of view we so desperately need.

In The Silver Chair Lewis seems to be pushing at the limits of both his abilities and his characters', whereas The Horse and His Boy is careful not to. The Silver Chair, it seems to me, is a real novel. The Horse and His Boy is just a children's adventure book.

---
WORKS CITED
Lewis, C. S. The Horse and His Boy. The Chronicles of Narnia 5. 1954. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

---. The Silver Chair. The Chronicles of Narnia 4. 1953. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1960.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

My theory about Rilian's language is that he learned to talk from his mother. I think Caspian's court after he came home and married was very splendid and formal, the way we see it a little at the beginning of The Silver Chair. I suspect the language changed to a more old fashioned and formal one that had been used in the court of his father, from which the vernacular of his uncle's court represented a falling away. I think this language change was brought about partly by the return of the surviving lords, who would have had a lot of consequence in Restored Narnia after that. I suspect it was a very chivalric focused court as well, not just from what we hear, they acted in that stupid way to Lucy while on a boat, they'd have been worse at home.

Caspian himself would have kept to the language of his youth, nobody would have dreamed of correcting him.

Further, I think that what Rilian's language represents is the allure of false chivalry. Rilian is, like Reepicheep, a fool for chivalry, and, unlike Reepicheep, it gets him into severe trouble. The way he talks reflects the turn of his mind. He has grown up in the shadow of his father -- Caspian not only restored the true monarchy and the freedom of the talking beasts and so on, he also sailed to the end of the world and freed the lords. That shadow, along with the fairly early loss of his mother, left Rilian looking for something he could do, and plunging into the worst excesses of chivalry around seems to have been it. At least he had learned just about enough not to leap into chasms to the bottom of the world by the end of the novel.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That all makes a tremendous amount of sense. Thank you.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I don't think for a minute that this is what Lewis was thinking, unless subconsciously on false chivalty. It's a retcon I thought of when reading the books aloud to Zorinth and Rilian's dialogue started to really sound strange to me. There's nothing like reading a book aloud slowly a chapter or two a night to make you think a lot about it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'd like to think Lewis meant it, but really all I needed was something that would let me make sense of it. And your theory works beautifully.

I did notice that although Rilian is as stupid as Caspian about wanting to go to Bism (I'm 100% with Jill on that one), he doesn't need a special visitation from Aslan to tell him he can't, just some nudging from Puddleglum and Jill. (Poor Puddleglum does end up playing everybody's conscience, but he's also perfectly credible as such.) So he has learned the dangers of false chivalry.

It's also true that Rilian's language is like the formal and elevated speech of Ramandu's daughter (and can I just mention how much it irks me that Lewis never bothers to give the poor woman a NAME!?), and I imagine actually that Caspian can put such language on and off (as Peter does in Prince Caspian); perhaps I can even go so far as to suggest he has retained his schoolboy speech-patterns out of admiration for Peter & the others.

Again, I don't think that was in Lewis's head, but it does kind of make sense.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Ramandu's daughter, Caspian's wife, Rilian's mother, Plot Device -- my other theory is that she got so sick of everything that she pretended to die of snakebite and she is the lady in the green kirtle and the snake. Snake kills good mother, snake becomes bad mother. It's weird, there are all these people pointing at Susan as an example of Lewis disliking women, when in fact Susan appears to me to be a closely drawn from life portrait of all the girls I went to school with, while there's that very Freudian snake...

I adore Puddleglum, by the way, it's Puddleglum I identified with all through that book, always look on the bright side.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ramandu's daughter,
Caspian's wife,
Rilian's mother,
Plot Device

I love this. I want it on a T-shirt. Or at least a button.

Susan, it seems to me, is a reflection of Lewis's contempt for a particular kind of woman. The Lady of the Green Kirtle shows a more general distrust of women, shading into outright misogyny. Although, it's also interesting that in The Magician's Nephew, the explicitly misogynistic statements are put into the mouth of Uncle Andrew, who is not in any way, shape, or form imaginable, speaking for Lewis. Lewis is contradictory and vacillating on the subject of women/girls. (There's another post coming, on The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle, and I'll try to get my feminist reading of Narnia in some sort of order for it.)

And Puddleglum is the best ever.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

I find your analyses fascinating. I haven't reread the Narnia books in years. Not since I reread The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and realized I was being smacked in the head with Christian allegory. I never got around to reading them from a feminist point of view.

On a completely different note, in a comment on papersky's journal, you wrote:
I have a tremendous weakness for scenarios in which characters are horribly misjudged by those around them--it's my second favorite kind of angst

Which prompts me to ask: What's your first favorite kind of angst?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Maybe he felt guilty about misogyny. I mean he knew Dorothy Sayers, he must have been aware not all women were like Susan and Lasraleen and the "Shoddy Lands" girl.

The reason I always defend Lewis on the charge of Susan is that I found it profoundly helpful, when all my friends and acquaintances turned into her, to have that metaphor to see what it was that was happening to them, and to reassure me that it was not, in fact, a good and inevitable thing, nor one I ought to be making efforts towards.

The examples of romance in Narnia are all terrible now I come to think of it -- Caspian and Ramandu's daughter, Susan and Rabadash, Shasta and Aravis (I like Aravis, but then I like Bree too, and I can see how not even "The Tisroc, may he live forever" scene would redeem that book if you don't like Bree) and Uncle Andrew and Jadis of Charn!

Poor Lewis.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're enjoying them. I've been feeling like maybe I've been just running the whole topic into the ground, so it's nice to have somebody else say they're interested.

And, to answer your question, my first favorite kind of angst is the sort where person A and person B are in a sexual relationship, A is madly in love with B and thinks B doesn't give a damn about A, and moreover A feels that A has no right to demand anything of B (for whatever situational reason is convenient).

Subcategory 1: B is uncomplicatedly in love with A and doesn't realize that A is having all these terrible feelings of doubt and worthlessness (because, yes, B is just a bit thick).

Subcategory 2: B feels exactly the same way about A as A feels about B.

Subcategory 3: B is madly in love with A but feels obligated to pretend otherwise (for whatever situational reason is convenient).

Subcategory 4: A is completely misreading B, in particular B's relationship with person C.

Each subcategory has its own peculiar charms; subcategory 3 may be my absolute favorite (Georgette Heyer uses it in Venetia, although sadly without the sex).

Someday I'll figure out how to write a story that combines both major kinds of angst, and that will be a very good day.

[cija.livejournal.com]

I know what Lewis thought of the biographical fallacy and I know he was right, but there's a line out of his autobiography that neatly sums things up, when he's talking about the first woman who 'spoke to his blood':

"I did not feel at all like a knight devoting himself to a lady; I was much more like a Turk looking at a Circassian whom he could not afford to buy."
(Lewis, C.S.: Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Harcourt Brace &co., 1975, p. 69.)

And that's it, really; those are the two ways a man can want a woman. One could say this is just a circumlocutive way of distinguishing the desire of the heart and the desire of the loins, but the fact remains that the opposition he thinks of is between worship and conquest. And since naturally a woman would have to be out of her mind to want to deliberately arouse either of those emotions, any woman interested in clothes, makeup, or other forms of sexual attraction has to be either silly or sinister.

There's also a thing somewhere in either his diary or his collected letters, where he says in the tone of someone having a revelation that a lascivious man thinks about women's bodies whereas a lascivious woman thinks about her own. And this is, like, discovering what two plus two equals; he's by god found the truth here. So if male desire is acquisitive and female desire is narcissistic, no wonder romance is fraught with peril.

I think he also thought that personal beauty, or awareness of personal beauty, inevitably corrupts. There's Susan; there are also countless horrible horrible scenes in That Hideous Strength. And for a person who only finds women beautiful, the mistrust of women naturally follows.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

I know nothing at all about Lewis's biography or other writings (aside from Tolkien's friend, Inkling, yada yada), so I was worried that my half-assed speculations were going directly counter to something else he'd written or something he'd said or they way he lived his life. It is a great intellectual relief to discover that the stuff I'm seeing is stuff that's really there.

(I don't like biographical criticism, either, but there are moments when you need it as a reality check.)

Also, I like your analysis of Lewis's attitude toward women: worship/conquest coupled with acquisitive/narcissistic does go a long way toward explaining the sexual politics of Narnia. (Oh good grief--I can't believe I just perpetrated the phrase, the sexual politics of Narnia. Yowzers.) That's going to help a bunch with my women-in-Narnia post.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Situation 1 Subcategory 2 is my absolute favorite.

It would never have occurred to me to break them down so neatly.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, it didn't occur to me either until I started trying to explain the angst. And then I realized that there were all these different variants on the basic situation and went all Proppian.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

No wonder you like Swordspoint so much!

[rinue.livejournal.com]

My opinion on the difference of language between Caspian and Rillian is one of station. Language, rather than money or fame, is the primary tool of social stratification - it's the reason people with certain accents are characterized as "stupid", and the reason close-knit groups tend to adopt their own slang. Caspian treats his crew as insiders, and so he talks to them as equals. Rillian views Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum, (along with everyone else,) as people who are beneath them, and he conciously or unconciously moderates his speech in order to assert this.

As for my solution to Horse and His Boy, I mostly pretend it doesn't exist.

-Romie

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah (she says sheepishly, not having made the connection before). That does make sense, doesn't it?

more biographical Lewis foo

[diony.livejournal.com]

The major relationship Lewis had with a woman (until he met the woman who became his wife in, I believe the mid to late 1950s) was with the mother of a friend of his who died during WWI. She was by all accounts vain, shallow, petty, uneducated, snobbish, selfish, and demanding -- but completely devoted to Lewis in a bizarre half-motherly half-loverly way. Lewis seems (from his letters and diaries and from his brother's letters) to have started off very emotionally attached to her (his mother died when he was quite young) and ended up resenting her -- but he'd made a promise to take care of her and did so to the best of his ability until she died.

I agree about the biographical fallacy, but I cannot help but think the relationship Lewis had with this woman strongly shaped his idea of what sort of people women could be and what sort of relationship men could have with them. It shows up in The Four Loves; women and men cannot easily (if at all) be friends, because they have fundamentally different interests and that gap can only be bridged by romantic love.

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