The Sexual Politics of Narnia

[truepenny]

I used the phrase the sexual politics of Narnia in a reply to cija, and dude, it's too good and too mind-blowing to waste.

Many many thanks, btw, to papersky and cija who have been going back-and-forth with me and providing useful bits of information and analysis in the comments to these posts. None of what follows is their fault (*g*), although much of it resounds to their virtue.

[ETA, 3/7/03: Added a paragraph down at the end about Aslan.]


First off, for my own amusement, I'm making a list of all the female characters in the books: Lucy, Susan, the White Witch/Jadis, Jill, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, Aravis (whose name, I just noticed, is a kind of semi-anagram of "Avarice"), Lasaraleen, Hwin, Polly. Am I missing anybody, or is that really it?

There are also, of course, the women with walk-ons, cameos, and offstage existences: Queen Helen, Ramandu's daughter, Digory's mother and aunt, the Queen of Harfang, Caspian's nurse (and his horrid aunt--who I just realize I associate with the even more horrid Gertrude in Titus Groan, though I have no idea why), Gwendolen and the Schoolmistress from Prince Caspian ... but there aren't even so very many of those. Caspian's mother, IIRC, is never even mentioned, any more than Tirian's mother is. Plus some Dryads and Bacchantes. The Beasts are almost exclusively male, with the exception of Hwin; there are no female dwarves, no female fauns or satyrs (come to think of it, I don't even know what the females of those species would look like).

So females are underrepresented. Tell us something we DON'T know.

Papersky pointed out that romance in Narnia never goes well. The four Pevensies rule well into adulthood, but do not marry or produce offspring. Susan's "romance" with Rabadash is a ghastly mistake that springs, apparently, from sheer bird-brainedness on Susan's part. Caspian and Ramandu's daughter ... well, we don't know, do we? They do have a kid, but then she gets bitten by that exceptionally Freudian snake and dies. Rilian seems more torn up about her death than Caspian, and Caspian seems to get way more exercised about losing Rilian than he does about losing his wife. Uncle Andrew's "romance" with Jadis is nothing more than an opportunity for that humor which Lewis writes so badly. And Rilian's relationship with the Lady of the Green Kirtle is disturbing on so many levels ... I tend to read it as intensely sexual, but that may just be me. In any event, we can all be sure that it is Bad News.

Aravis marries Cor/Shasta, but that's described in the most plebeian and unromantic terms possible; it feels frankly obligatory, as if Lewis sort of vaguely knows that's what supposed to happen in this sort of story. It's worth noticing that Polly and Digory, whom he seems to care much more about than he does about Aravis and Shasta, do not get married. Polly is still "Miss Plummer" in The Last Battle. I think it also says something quite pointed that Tirian's closest and most affectionate relationship is with a unicorn.

One of the bits I like in The Last Battle is Jill and Eustace's conversation after they've refused to leave Tirian:

"Pole," said Eustace in a whisper, "I may as well tell you I've got the wind up."

"Oh you're all right, Scrubb," said Jill. "You can fight. But I--I'm just shaking, if you want to know the truth."

"Oh shaking's nothing," said Eustace. "I'm feeling I'm going to be sick."

"Don't talk about that, for goodness' sake," said Jill.

(TLB 95)

This is a conversation between friends--friends, moreover, who are equals. In the last four books, from The Silver Chair to The Last Battle, Lewis seems to have reconceptualized his idea of the relations between men and women enough to allow them to be equals in a nonsexual relationship; chivalry may at last be dead. And that does genuinely make me happy.

But it leaves us with the dreadful matter of sexual politics still to struggle with. Cija posits a dichotomy in Lewis's thinking (based on a passage from his autobiography): that one could either worship a woman or conquer her. Susan and Lucy (especially Lucy) are both victims of the former idiocy, and I think the Chronicles' villainesses represent the other.

Male villains in Narnia tend to be comically ineffectual once they get down to the villainy bit: Miraz being stabbed by his own courtier in Prince Caspian; Rabadash getting his stupid self caught on a hook and then being turned into a donkey in The Horse and His Boy; the villains in The Last Battle are all male (Shift, Rishda, Ginger), and they are all petty and small-minded and made pathetic by the manifestation of Tash. But the villainesses! The White Witch and The Lady of the Green Kirtle are worthy foes; they have power, both magical and political (that's not quite the right word, but I can't think of a better), they are frightening as Miraz and Rabadash never are, and they must be genuinely defeated by courage and sacrifice. Aslan has to die to defeat the White Witch, and one of the things I admire about The Silver Chair is how much defeating the Lady takes. Puddleglum, Eustace, and Jill escape the trap she sent them into at Harfang, are captured by her Warden; they are rescued from the Warden by Rilian, but then have to follow the Fourth Sign on pure blind miserable faith. Rilian destroys the chair (Huzzah! we think. Victory!), and then the Lady comes in and very nearly re-enchants all four of them. Their struggle against her is agonizing and verging failure, until Puddleglum deliberately burns his foot. And then she turns into a snake and nearly kills Rilian and it takes both Rilian and Puddleglum (with not much help from Eustace and Jill) to kill her. And then the Deep Realm starts collapsing down around their ears, necessitating a very nerve-wracking escape. The Lady is a force, as Jadis is a force. Both of them are worshipped; in turn, both of them must be cast down and conquered.

So women are safe as friends, but romantic love tends to bring things back around into badness, as the example of Susan and Rabadash shows us. We have no on-stage examples of successful romantic relationships. Caspian and Ramadu's daughter's entire relationship (except for a teeny tiny bit of extraordinarily restrained and dignified flirting) takes place in between The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. Hwin and Bree, like Digory and Polly, specifically do not marry each other, and I've already talked about Aravis and Shasta. Digory's father is in India for the whole of The Magician's Nephew. The Pevensies mere and pere never appear at all, except for that one distant view of them waving in Aslan's country, which frankly I can't be brought to believe counts. There is, I suppose, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver (ooh, and Mrs. Beaver is the other female Talking Beast, aside from Hwin!), but they're (a.) animals and (b.) um, romance? Besides, Mrs. Beaver gives me a pain. Romantic love seems to be something Lewis knows happens, but that he can't quite imagine.

There's also the matter of adults. I talked about the demonization of adulthood in a previous post in this sequence, the way in which it is specifically constructed against childhood, as something damaging and contaminating. Susan, poor creature, is the primary example of this, as we learn in The Last Battle:

"... 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 now-a-days 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 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."

(TLB 135)

Poor Susan is now going to be grown-up for real. For, as Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Jill, and Eustace are rewarded for their devotion to Narnia by never entirely having to grow up at all (staying the age they are now, as Polly says Susan wants to), and Digory and Polly are rewarded by being regressed to that same age, Susan is punished for her desertion by having her entire family taken away from her at a single stroke. The punishment does not, frankly, seem in proportion to the crime. (Remember, Lewis is his own Emperor-over-the-Sea here; he's the one who decided this trainwreck was the way to go.)

Most adults we see are ineffectual or unimportant at best; others are destructive or actively malevolent. Back in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (which is the only time we see Digory as an adult until after he's dead), Digory is monumentally unhelpful, tho' comic and unexpectedly understanding. We get a couple of Wise Old Sages (Coriakin and the Hermit), but one of them's properly a star anyway. Polly's speech is the first time any suggestion has been made that there are different ways of being an adult, and since it's very nearly the end of the last book, there's no time to do anything with it. Tirian, although he may be between 20 and 25, certainly behaves more like a prince than a king--as Caspian does in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Adulthood is something to be avoided; its clearest and most appalling depiction is in the struggle with the Lady, whose "adult reality" is, aside from being a lie, depressing enough to make anyone want to retreat into children's make-believe. So of course, romantic love and adult femininity are suspect, treacherous, and signs of betraying Narnia. There's an unbroken continuum between boys having adventures and knights going on quests; adult masculinity in Narnia is allowed to be very little different from boyhood. But adult femininity, what little we see of it, seems to leave little room for adventuring or imagination. If our models of adult femininity are the White Witch, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, and Susan, either in her incarnation as Queen or in her real-world existence, it's no wonder that Lucy and Jill are holding onto their girlhood like grim death.

And thus, the roles for women in Narnia boil down essentially to "friend" and sometimes "lesser hero." (Jill never does as much of the fighting as Eustace, even though Eustace doesn't seem to be terrifically good at it.) They can be girls--and they are, as I said somewhere, genuinely girls, not just boys in drag--but there is no good way for them to be women until they come to Aslan's country, where sexual politics, like so many other things, have ceased to matter. Certainly, the idea that marriage itself could be an adventure is foreign to Narnia.

[ADDENDUM (I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier): Aslan has no mother! There's no Mary-analogue in Lewis's cosmology. It's just Aslan and the Emperor-over-the-Sea, and goodness knows how Aslan was created, but it doesn't seem to have required female participation, just as Aslan is swinging creation all on his lonesome in The Magician's Nephew. Good parental figures are always male; the mother is represented only by the Bad Mother (Wicked Stepmother, Evil Queen): the White Witch, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, or the Absent Mother: Ramandu's daughter, Mabel Kirke.]

---
WORKS CITED
Lewis, C. S. The Last Battle. The Chronicles of Narnia 7. 1956. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

Comments

[cija.livejournal.com]

There's the hag in Prince Caspian, don't forget the hag.


I never thought Susan was as bad as all that, but I finally remembered who she reminds me of, and it's Mary in the Little House on the Prairie books before she becomes blind and thoroughly good. She (Susan) sticks to the adult-approved answers even when there are no adults around to commend her, which is brave and true of her, however smug and annoying it may also be. Come to think of it, she ought to slide into heaven on the same technicality as Emeth: she was true and loyal and faithful, just to the wrong god.

And I thought Miraz was pretty scary, but I guess it's because we first see him as a Wicked Uncle, from a child's viewpoint - but once you become a man (should you be so lucky) you can challenge him on his own terms and beat him. But an adult woman is always on her own ground, even when you're her equal in age: there's always something she knows that you don't, some way she can make a fool of you. I guess.

Damn it. I used to have a copy of Lewis' letters, but I must have lost it, or sat on it, or eaten it, or something, so I can't quote it at you. I am not sure, but if I remember rightly it indicates that he was at one time at work on or considering working on an epic poem about Medea. That would have been something to see. Whatever I think of his motives, he did female sexual evil very well, as you say. Part of the effectiveness is in his unashamed readiness to admit that beautiful, forceful women are scary - you don't have to poke around for subtext about him devaluing femininity because it's threatening because he comes right out and says it, which I find sort of disarming.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Did you (plural you) ever read the collection of short stories, The Dark Tower? I expect so (but if not, go do it!) There are a couple of examples of incredible misogyny - indeed, one might say that, with one exception, whenever women appear they are treated with contempt (or, at best, pity). The exception is Lewis's retelling of the taking of Troy, and the appearance of Helen, ten years on: except for Digory's mother, who really doesn't even have a walk-on part in TMN, the only positive portrait of a mother in the whole of Lewis's writings - including his autobiography. (Well, okay, I haven't read all his "theological" writings.)

When Menelaus first sets eyes on her, he doesn't recognise her - he's looking for the woman of heartstopping beauty he remembers from ten years ago - but he admires her: her courage in sitting calmly still as armed men approach. Other characters are misogynistic, but Lewis's authorial voice notably - and unusually, in TDT isn't. If I could have one literary wish concerning C.S. Lewis, I don't want the fourth Ransom book and I don't want Father Christmas erased from TLtWatW - i want Lewis to have lived long enough to finish his retelling of the fall of Troy - to have completed it as well as it was begun.

[cija.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes yes yes! (See also: Yes). I had the hardest time not bringing that into a paper on Euripides' Helen; I had to remember that not everyone would have read it.

That is Lewis taking the fact that a woman exists separately from mens' perceptions of her and staring it right in the face. I think it would have been, anyway. It would have been another Til We Have Faces.

What was uncomplimentary to mothers in his autobiography? I may be somewhat biased, since his description of not knowing how to deal with or be at all helpful in the face of adult grief when his mother died was very reminiscent of my own memories of not knowing what to do about my mother after my father died, and I may have brushed by what didn't remind me of myself. I found that he talked around her more than he talked about her, about the family characteristics he got from her, that her relatives shared, but I found that pretty natural.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, the hag. Yeeee!

Susan is like Mary. She's also like Susan in Swallows & Amazons; her notions of "good" have gotten tangled up with her notions of "adult." What irks me, particularly, is that Lewis and Ransome are content to disapprove of their Susans and make fun of them and let them be bad examples (Susan in We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea is like a textbook case of How One Ought Not To Act In A Crisis). They don't show any interest in helping their Susans out of their Susanness or in offering hope that Susans can grow up to be better and more interesting people than they are as teenagers. Susans are foils, poor things, and they're stuck with it.

(I'm thinking I may continue my YA nostalgia trip with The Dark Is Rising sequence, in which case there will be Thoughts about Jane and how she both is and isn't a Susan.)

Also, yes, to your ideas about the upfrontness of scary adult femininity. I agree that's part of the reason the White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle are such unabashed and magnificent villains.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I agree that Lewis didn't approve of Susan Pevensie, but I entirely disagree that Arthur Ransome didn't approve of Susan Walker! To my mind, the Swallows and Amazons sequence is one of the best examples of teamfic - all the children are different from each other, and all of them are real people. It's true that Susan gets to be "the sensible one" (a role thrust upon her as the oldest daughter, I imagine) but her common sense, practical ability, and organisational skills - she never ends up doing all the domestic work, she manages the domestic work - are valued by her brothers and sister, and their friends, as well as by the adults, and definitely by the authorial voice. What about the bit in Peter Duck where Captain Flint triumphantly tells the crew that they don't have to stop for water and supplies in the port where the pirates will have to stop, because of Susan's effective management and recordkeeping?

Susan Walker is a triumph, dammit, a tribute to the good sense and practicality that underwrites all the most successful adventures, and I will not see her classified with Susan Pevensie without protest.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I know it's probably cheating to look outside the text for this sort of thing, but what the hell, I'm going to cheat. When you look at the development of the handling of female characters over the course of the books one could say that Lewis seems to come to a different understanding of women by the end of the sequence than he had at the beginning. True, he's still not enamoured of Susan's idea of adult femininity, but he seems to have reached the conclusion that this caricature is not the only possibility. I can't help wonder if the growth of Lewis's relationship with Joy Gresham (which went from correspondent in 1950 to husband and wife in 1956) had something to do with it.

I've always associated Lewis with Uncle Andrew for some reason and it's tempting to think that Lewis did too. So in letting us see the Andrew's misogyny for what it is, he is also recognizing and attempting to overcome that flaw in himself.

As for Susan's punishment, I doubt very much that Lewis intended us to read it that way -- though it's hard to find any other reading for it -- I'm more inclined to think that, like Father Christmas in TLtWatW, it's another example of Lewis failing to think things through.

The thing I find hardest to stomach in the Narnia books now is the incredibly unsophisticated views of fall and redemption. The books appear to imply that once Fallen, always Fallen, unless you started the book in a fallen state (Edward), in which case it's once redeemed, always redeemed. There seems to be no recognition (as there is in say, Buffy) that redemption is not a one time thing but a continuing process. As you pointed out when discussing Lucy's mental eavesdropping of her friends, forgiveness doesn't really enter into the Narnian picture very much either (with the exception of Edward of course). It's this complete absence of shades of grey, coupled with a strong implication that there's only One True Way to be good (compare this with the diversity of the forces of good in LotR, where only evil is totalitarian) that makes it hard for me to read the Narnia books these days, though I loved them as a child.

Give me Swallows and Amazons any day of the week; I'll take my escapism without a side order of allegory.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Can someone tell me what's so awful about Father Christmas appearing in TLTW&TW? I mean, yeah, it's kind of dumb, but there seems to be a more principled objection floating around that I haven't thought of.

I agree with you on the oversimplification of fall and redemption. It smacks slightly of Election--although that may merely be because Lewis, as his secondary world's god, DOES decide who gets saved and who doesn't.

The feel I always get with Edmund in TLTW&TW is that the other three are simply incapable of imagining what it was like, or imagining that they might do the same thing themselves, so that it really is more a matter of forgetting than forgiving. Edmund himself doesn't forget--and I think that gives his character hints of depth and interestingness that Peter conspicuously lacks--but otherwise it's like it NEVER HAPPENED. And that's not how those things work.

And his concept of redemption is very much like, you do it once, and then it's done. And (the analogy with Buffy that I was trying to keep myself from making because it's such a huge, huge topic) really, no, it's something you have to do over and over again, and every time you have to choose, there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice. Children's literature does not have to be simple-minded, but Lewis is definitely making some very simplistic choices.

I also have profound objections to Emeth not being allowed to worship Tash in that kind of dreadful Freudian, "Yes means yes and no means yes and silence means yes" way, where he can't say, "No, but really, honestly, TASH IS MY GOD." That's insulting and patronizing, not merely to Emeth and all of Calormen (and to all those Narnians who thought they were worshipping Aslan, but not doing it right), but to the Muslims whose culture and faith is not so heavily disguised under the veneer of Calormen. It also means, very conveniently, that Aslan doesn't have to worry about anybody who does terrible things in his name; that call apparently get automatically redirected to Tash. Aslan's paws are clean, like Pontius Pilate's hands.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think Lewis was a natural polytheist, not just because of his cheerful acceptance of deities from all over into Narnia, but because of that Tash/Emeth thing, which makes so much sense in a polytheistic context and so little sense in a monotheistic one. I know he is spinning in his grave at the thought, I know he's a foremost Christian apologist, but anyway.

As a child, while I felt profoundly uneasy at The Last Battle I did find that bit about Emeth significantly more tolerant to other religions than I was accustomed to find around me in the Church of England.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Can someone tell me what's so awful about Father Christmas appearing in TLTW&TW? I mean, yeah, it's kind of dumb, but there seems to be a more principled objection floating around that I haven't thought of.

I don't have a particularly principled object to Father Christmas, hell I enjoyed it at the time. I think it's used almost as a shorthand for those occasions when Lewis fails to think through the implications of his story. The Father Christmas thing jars because it's so obviously out of place in the allegory that it's easy to point to.

The whole 'there but for the grace of go I' thing that the other Pevensies fail to understand about Edmund's fall seems to be glossed over because I'm not entirely sure that the writer understands it either. It's apparent from the beginning of TLTW&TW that Edmund is a Bad Egg; his temptation by the White Witch is not seen as something that could happen to just anyone, but merely the end result of the preexisting weakness in Edmund's character.

It's (possibly) interesting to compare the Narnian view of fall/redemption with that in evidence in the Lord of the Rings. Without wishing to accuse Tolkien of deliberate allegory (at least not of the heavy handed kind practiced by Lewis), Tolkien's evil is totalitarian; much of what is evil about it seems to stem from its desire to replace the diversity of cultures in Middle Earth with some ghastly (industrial) monoculture. The forces of good in LotR are, by comparison a patchwork of different peoples, with their own goals and traditions. Tolkien seems to be say that there are many ways to travel and they're all good, but Evil is all consuming and monolithic.

In Narnia the boot is on the other foot. Lewis has a totalitarian view of goodness; everything is offered up to Aslan, even when people don't know that that's what they're doing (how patronizing can the man get?) and we see a variety of different forms of evil, from the White Witch's stultifying everlasting winter to the insidious evils of Shift as he perverts poor Puzzle's good intentions to his own mundanely selfish ends.

Both Tolkien and Lewis offer up a stark black and white view of good and evil with almost nothing in between, which is probably why they are so popular; they shy away from the complexities of real world morality in favour of an almost tabloid yes/no view.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think the Calormenes are supposed to be Muslim. The whole culture is Indian and Tash has quite a few arms, and there are multiple gods, so I think we must conclude that they're Hindus.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Um - the Calormenes are not Muslims. Muslims worship exactly the same God we do; the Arab word for God, used by my fellow Christians in the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East, is Allah. The Calormenes are pagans.

That said, it is true, as you say, that a lot of anti-Arab and anti-Indian prejudice can be seen in the depiction of the Calormenes (even though I love Aravis.) My sister and I were just talking about this.

And - I hope you don't mind my jumping in here. This is a fascinating discussion! I'm here from the deathtocapslock community

Note re. Susan

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine wrote a lovely filk song ("Susan At Eighteen") about Susan Pevensie. If I can get her permission, I'll post it here.

Sexual Politics in Narnia

[netninny.livejournal.com]

I'm making a list of all the female characters in the books: Lucy, Susan, the White Witch/Jadis, Jill, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, Aravis (whose name, I just noticed, is a kind of semi-anagram of "Avarice"), Lasaraleen, Hwin, Polly. Am I missing anybody, or is that really it?

Mrs. Beaver? She's not human, but she's definitely female. I'd call her a sympathetic, nurturing, married adult female. Her relationship with Mr. B. is very old-fashioned, of course.

There are also, of course, the women with walk-ons, cameos, and offstage existences:

In addition, I would suggest Eve as a strong metaphorical presence (given that the girls in the story are referred to as "Daughters of Eve," which in itself tells you something about their options in the Narnian world). ;-)

There's an unbroken continuum between boys having adventures and knights going on quests; adult masculinity in Narnia is allowed to be very little different from boyhood. But adult femininity, what little we see of it, seems to le ave little room for adventuring or imagination. If our models of adult femininity are the White Witch, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, and Susan, either in her incarnation as Queen or in her real-world existence, it's no wonder that Lucy and Jill are holding onto their girlhood like grim death.

Lewis certainly treats adult--and to a certain extent youthful--femininity as Other, and often a dangerous Other. But the literary ramifications of such a pattern may differ from the moral ones. What are the results for characterization? Peter is perhaps the model of the chivalric boy adventurer and you've noted previously that you find him profoundly uninteresting: is this just because you find yourself reading against the grain because of your gender and your moment in history? I would suggest that Edmund and Eustace are presented as canonically more interesting to the reader, and both of them are portrayed as somewhat "feminine" characters--Edmund for feeling and succumbing to the lure of the White Witch, Eustace for bucking the chivalric ideal. In the same way that the sympathetic young female characters in the Narnia books have more than a bit of "boy" in them, I would say that the male characters in whom we are most encouraged to emotionally invest ourselves have a recognizable quality of "female" otherness to them.

When it comes to characters like Jadis and the Lady of the Green Kirtle, I'm torn. I know that in a more enlightened fairy-tale world, there would be a role for strong female characters besides that of mighty opposite to the force of good represented by Aslan. Yet I love their magnificent villainy, and I'm aware that in a less enlightened fairy-tale world even *that* magnificence would be denied them. Put it this way: in a stage or film version of the books, which role would you prefer to play--Peter or Jadis?

*

Re: Sexual Politics in Narnia

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Put it this way: in a stage or film version of the books, which role would you prefer to play--Peter or Jadis?

Jadis. Ten times out of ten.

I have to say, I think Peter is uninteresting simply because he isn't given any characterization. None of the children are particularly in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; Peter is Eldest, Susan is the Voice of Adult Responsibility (as I said in a reply to someone else), Edmund is the Bad Egg (as pdcawley puts it), Lucy is the child/reader: our point of entry, our viewpoint. They're all very broadly drawn archetypal English children. This is only just beginning to shift in Prince Caspian, which is the only other book in which Peter and Susan have any major part to play. Susan is clearly starting to Go Bad (denying Aslan like St. Peter denying Christ--or is that too much of a stretch?), whereas Peter stays pretty much what he was in TLTW&TW: High King, eldest, leader, hero, etc. etc. I think the only bit of CHARACTER we get out of Peter is that Lucy is his favorite sister, and by the time Lewis trots that out, Susan's already been such a whiny troll that that just seems like a sign of sanity.

I've said elsewhere that it's very difficult to write characters who are both Good and interesting and that I don't think Lewis ever does a very good job of it. I think Lucy is boring, frankly, and the semi-worship of her in later books makes me ill--there's Narnia's analogue to Mary, not a mother but a daughter.

But I also think you're right; the interesting and sympathetic characters are the ones like Jill and Polly, who are boyish girls, or Edmund and Eustace, who aside from the markers of femininity you've noted, are also extremely bitchy--a word I'm using quite deliberately for the full range of its connotations. If he were female, I think Eustace might well be labeled a shrew in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Like Edmund, he becomes much more masculine once redeemed, suggesting--along with the increasing boyinshess of the female characters (Polly, Jill, Aravis, the specific contrast between Lucy and Susan in The Horse & His Boy, that Lucy goes out with the archers and Susan (the cause of all the trouble) stays home)--that more masculinity is better. Jadis, especially in The Magician's Nephew, has masculine traits: strength, what the Romans called imperium and I can't think of an English word for at the moment, the fact that explicit parallels are drawn between her and Uncle Andrew. Unlike the Lady of the Green Kirtle, Jadis seems to be supremely unaware of her own feminine charms (both Digory and Uncle Andrew fall under the spell of her beauty (metaphorical spell, not literal), but she doesn't USE that, and I think she would if she had any idea it was happening). The Lady of the Green Kirtle, like Susan, is almost pure, undiluted femininity, and thus she is capital-O Other and supremely dangerous. Jadis can only overpower people; the Lady can charm them.

Re: Sexual Politics in Narnia

[netninny.livejournal.com]

Like Edmund, he becomes much more masculine once redeemed, suggesting--along with the increasing boyinshess of the female characters [snip]--that more masculinity is better.

True. Ultimately, the sexual politics of the Narnian stories are strongly influenced by Christianity and the medieval Christian romance tradition, both of which tend to regard femininity with a great deal of suspicion.

Jadis, especially in The Magician's Nephew, has masculine traits: strength, what the Romans called imperium [snip] The Lady of the Green Kirtle, like Susan, is almost pure, undiluted femininity, and thus she is capital-O Other and supremely dangerous. Jadis can only overpower people; the Lady can charm them.

Good distinction. The White Witch does a bit of charming in the Turkish Delight scene with Edmund, but it's very clearly signalled as a performance of femininity, rather like Jill's at Harfang.

*

Re: Sexual Politics in Narnia

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

More masculine is better in Lewis's book - in That Hideous Strength (I think) he comes out with the statement that the relationship of God to Man is as masculine to feminine.

Re: Sexual Politics in Narnia

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder what the 'real' Lucy thought of book Lucy.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this essay: the subject of Sexual Politics of Narnia is one which I've mulled over (sometimes biting pencils in half in sheer fury) for most of the lifetime since I read the books.

I'm going to stick my neck out, by the way, and suggest that Lasaraleen Tarkheena is one very rare example of a Narnian female of a recognisable real world type who is both feminine and actually treated with a credible lightness of touch. Yes; she is keen on clothes and giggling girlishness, but she is also loyal to her friend, and doesn't actually scupper the plan by feminine idiocy, although she comes rather close at one point.

Absent her, though, and things look pretty bad.

Lewis clearly cannot see strong women as anything but Bad (note Jill's comment to Rilian in The Silver Chair to the effect that in her world people don't think much of husbands who are bossed about by their wives). Actually, if you read Mere Christainity on the subject of headship in marriage, it is apparent that strong wives are not merely despised but damned, and this is spelt out in a piece of fallacious reasoning which Lewis would, on any other topic, quite rightly have kicked his dimmest undergraduate student out of his study if it had been presented to him,

"If there must be a head, why the man? Well, firstly, is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman? As I have said, I am not married myself, but as far as I can see, even a woman owuld wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door....There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and and despise the husbands whom they rule. But there is also another reason; and here I speak quite frankly as a batchelor, because it is a reason you can see from outside even better than from inside. The relations of the family to the outside world - what might be called its foreign policy - must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world..."

It is this vision which informs all the female characters, in my reading of Narnia. Women who are allowed to be uppity are stepping outside their God-ordained place - they are, in fact, rebelling against heaven because of the sin of pride. And Lewis's constant reminder that girls are Daughters of Eve, whereas boys are Sons of Adam (why not the other way round?) reminds us of exactly what happened last time that sort of thing was allowed to occur.

Caspian's aunt is called Prunaprismia, by the way, which may account for the Gormenghast links.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Right. Now that I'm done frothing over the horrific sexism of that appalling quote (*gnaaarrrgh!*) ...

I think you're right about Lasaraleen Tarkheena; she's a useless bit of fluff--shallow, selfish, self-aggrandizing--but she doesn't betray Aravis (when she very easily could), she doesn't get them caught by anybody, and she does help Aravis escape. She also offers an excellent example of how one can be friends with someone at school and have not the slightest hint of things in common in any other setting. (Georgette Heyer does something similar in The Corinthian with Piers and Pen, and there's at least one other example bumping around in the dark of my back-brain, but it refuses to come out.) Lasaraleen's overdone, of course, but that moment when Aravis abruptly remembers just what Lasaraleen is like rings very very true.

Even in the middle of my mini-essay on The Silver Chair, I managed to repress that ghastly remark of Jill's. (Because I love The Silver Chair, goddammit, and I want it not to do appalling things.) There's no getting around that one or finding some way to make it less ghastly, and I think the fact that he assigns it to Jill shows very clearly how alien women were to Lewis, and how threatening. Queens in Narnia are either evil or come with Kings attached.

***
Prunaprismia => Prunesquallor? Was that what my brain was doing?

It's just a tremendously Gormenghastlian name, and it kind of comes out of nowhere--nobody else in the books has a name like that one. Somehow I just think of her as vast and red-haired (which, in fact, she is) and sullen and spoiled, very like the BBC's rendition (http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/gormenghast/std/char/gertrude.shtml) of Gertrude. (I haven't yet seen the BBC's Gormenghast, btw, just drooled over the webpage (http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/gormenghast/).)

Queen Prunaprismia's name, of course, properly comes (like Miss Prism's in The Importance of Being Ernest) from Little Dorrit (see Brewer's entry (http://www.bartleby.com/81/12096.html) for "nimini pimini"), but I still can't figure out what the heck Lewis thought he was doing with it.

And I'm wandering off into a different obsession--and quite possibly boring on about things you already know--so will stop here.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Certainly not boring - anyone who can comment on the sexual politics of Narnia with footnotes (it was the Fontana books 1955 edition of Mere Christianity, btw) is hardly going to do that.

I considered the "man of his era" argument and rejected it. Ransome was writing a decade or so earlier, and he managed to produce splendid female characters, including, of course Missee Lee (female pirate chief, master strategist, Classics scholar and superb sailor). And I don't agree about Susan Walker's management of the crisis in WDMTGTS. She's got every right to panic, and in fact does pretty well; keeps the crew warm and fed, stands a night watch during very hairy weather indeed, remembers to bandage cuts and scrapes in the dark on a pitching vessel - certainly acting as a key member of the team throughout.

Lewis just had problems with women which can't, I think, be divorced from the fact that he believed in a historic Eve who had, historically, been responsible for the Fall of Man (Perelandra, if you recall, has The King contemplating what he must do if The Lady succumbs to temptation).

I think "Prunaprismia" is intended to set up associations with prune, prissy and prude.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

The whole 'Daughter of Eve' thing makes me wonder if Jadis and the Lady of the Green Kirtle are Daughters of Lilith. Wasn't Jadis specifically refered to as a Giant?

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this whole discussion; I've enjoyed it immensely. Will try to contribute something when I've had a chance to think.
(You don't know me, but another livejournal person suggested I read the discussion.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dude. Listen to my ego purr.

The only thing I ask is, sign your posts with something? It doesn't need to be your real name (just as "Truepenny" isn't mine)--just some signifier to attach to what you have to say.

V.v. pleased to have another contributor to the discussion!

[(Anonymous)]

I think the thing one must remember with The Chronicles of Narnia, is that they are children's stories. Children aren't all that interested in romance (at least, they weren't when The Chronicles were written! They're obsessed with it now, thanks to media and the prevailing culture). So romance doesn't figure very largely in the books. Also, Lewis was a man. And a man's man, too. He lived in a very masculine setting, with all those men (like Tolkein and the Inklings) at Oxford. And while he has a lovely love story of his own in his life, as did Tolkein, he focuses a lot on masculine camaraderie. Also, I've noticed that in the stories I write, the men (particularly in romances) end up very two-dimensional, simiply because I'm a woman, and so I look at things from that point of view. I think Lewis may have had the same problem. But to have a good female villain, he exaggerated their villainous and powerful qualities. I agree; I love Jadis, even if she is terribly wicked. She's fantastic.
But Jill and Lucy are both well-realized characters. Lucy is a very GOOD person, just as Peter is a very GOOD person. Edmund is less so at the beginning, which I think is why he's my favorite character by the end. But Susan is a bit of a flat character. Her most interesting attribute is the fact that she ends up not believing in Narnia. You seem to think that this is demonizing adulthood. It's really not. Adults are often villains in the Narnia books because the villains in real life are generally adults! Other than the fact that the heroes from our world are children, everything else is kept more-or-less realistic in that respect. Now the reason why it's not good that Susan no longer believes in Narnia, is that she has lost her child-like innocence. Jesus said that we had to have the faith of a child to enter heaven, and while the rest of the Narnia crew enter "the real Narnia", or heaven, Susan, no longer having the faith of a child, does not. You notice that Miss Plummer, who is a white-haired lady and well-advanced in years, is the one that points out that she wishes Susan would grow up. Her "grown up" obsession with romance and boys and society is not true adulthood, of the kind that Polly herself evinces--true wisdom, still mixed with the innocence and faith of a child. Susan's 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." Our culture is obsessed with youth; there's no denying it.
And obsessed with romance, as well. Definitely not saying romance is a bad thing, but we're just so inundated with it! I kind of like the understated romance of the Narnia books.
And it says at the end of LWW that both Lucy and Susan were desired by the princes of the adjoining lands. And Lucy is a strong female character to the end, fighting with the archers in the battle in The Horse and His Boy. Susan is "Susan the Gentle", remember, and although she carries the horn and is a pretty good shot with an arrow, she's not into fighting. It's just her personality, and the others don't disparage her for it. Lewis gives us two different kinds of femininity right there: a lively, courageous kind, and a gentle, peaceful kind. It's also reflected in Peter and Edmund: Peter is the warrior, while Edmund is "great in counsel", although he takes his masculine responsibility and fights well when he needs to. You commented that you liked it when chivalry was dead. But I don't see where you get that impression. Think of Lucy the Valiant and Susan the Gentle. Lucy is brave and fights in battles and is honored by the men for it. And Susan is gentle and prefers NOT to fight in battles, and is honored by the men for it. Men in these stories give women respect, just as EVERYONE in Narnia respects EVERYONE! No matter whether they prefer to be valiant or gentle.

sorry, ran out of space

[(Anonymous)]

Can you imagine what would have happened if one of the children HAD gotten married while in Narnia? And then they went home again? That would be terrible! And if the Pevensies' parents figured largely in the stories, we'd be worried about them, as the children would probably be upset that their parents were worrying about their missing children.
I don't think the girls in these stories are at all "lesser heroes" (I AM skipping around a bit, aren't I? Sorry.) While I agree that Eustace does more fighting, Jill is definitely the better woodswoman, able to disappear into the dark, grab the donkey and run! And neither Tirian (a warrior) nor Eustace have any idea where she's gotten to.
Finally... Of COURSE Aslan has no mother! Mary was Jesus' earthly mother, not his REAL mother, as God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are three in one, and while God and Jesus' relationship is described as father and son as a symbol, it's not LITERALLY father and son. Aslan was not created, as God was not created. He is. God described himself in Exodus to Moses as "I am". "Tell them I AM sent you."