Daughters of Lilith

[truepenny]

In response to pdcawley, on the subject of Jadis/the White Witch, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, and Adam's first wife.


The White Witch ... well, here's the bit in TLTW&TW:

"... isn't the Witch herself human?"

"She'd like us to believe it," said Mr. Beaver, "and it's on that that she bases her claim to be Queen. But she's no Daughter of Eve. She comes of your father Adam's--" (here Mr. Beaver bowed) "your father Adam's first wife, her they called Lilith. And she was one of the Jinn. That's what she comes from on one side. And on the other she comes of the giants. No, no, there isn't a drop of real Human blood in the Witch."
(TLTW&TW 77)

So the Witch is a kind of stepsister to the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve (and a Wicked Stepsister, too!). We get rather less about Jadis's origins in The Magician's Nephew (although, parenthetically, what's up with Charn being the city of the King of Kings (TMN 59)? Because it always starts Handel's Messiah playing in my head, and that's just wrong.), except for the bits about the destruction of Charn. I've become extremely interested in Jadis's sister--wishing, like Ramandu's daughter, that Lewis had bothered to GIVE HER A NAME!--but that's rather like trying to be a chameleon and live on air. He still intends Jadis to be the White Witch ("the Queen, or the Witch (whichever you like to call her)" (TMN 67)), and the bit about the giants is still there: "'Hardly human' was what Digory thought when he looked at her; and he may have been right, for some say there is giantish blood in the royal family of Charn" (TMN 69). But the part about Lilith has softly and silently vanished away. (And, speaking from a purely writerly perspective for a moment, it would be as easy as pie to have Jadis brag about it.)

There's a throwaway bit in The Silver Chair about the Lady of the Green Kirtle being "a wicked Witch (doubtless the same kind as that White Witch who had brought the Great Winter on Narnia long ago)" (TSC 200). That, coupled with the Hag's sinister remark in Prince Caspian: "Sweet master doctor, learned master doctor, who ever heard of a witch that really died? You can always get them back" (PC 165), induces the gratifying but implausible speculation that the Lady of the Green Kirtle IS the White Witch's sister, brought back by someone who knew whatever it is the Hag knows. I'm in love with this theory now, although it's fairly obvious it's not what Lewis meant (although Jadis's sister DOES seem--from Jadis's extraordinarily biased perspective, of course--to have traits similar to the Lady's). It's just so tidy, and besides, don't Wicked Stepsisters always come in pairs?

---
WORKS CITED
Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Chronicles of Narnia 1. 1950. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

---. The Magician's Nephew. The Chronicles of Narnia 6. 1955. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

---. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia 2. 1951. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

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

Comments

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Okay, see if you can guess who's working from old memories of the books rather than the books themselves. Thanks for that pointer.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

See, this kind of thing is what I've been trained to do over the last *cough*eleven*cough* years as an English major. It's reflexive. Also fun. If this was what academia was like, I wouldn't be preparing to haul ass out of Dodge ASAP.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I'm just staggered by the speed of your rereading. But I've never really learned to skim stuff. Gill (my wife) is a phenomenally fast reader though (she once got sent on a speed reading course and her reading speed at the start of the course was faster than the reading speed of some of the others at the end. Amazingly, her reading speed increased fairly dramatically as a result of the course, but she doesn't like reading at that pace).

Me? I've done no real litcrit since O levels, and I don't think we really had the life experience to do a good job on the stuff we covered. After that it was all Maths, hard science and sf/fantasy reading in my spare time. Doing this is exercising mental muscles I didn't really realise I had.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I just read insanely fast. It has been a source of amazement and despair to family and friends since I learned how to read at the age of three. And rereading is always faster anyway.

I think I was a senior in college before I really got the hang of literary criticism. It went gradually from alien (when the concept was introduced in high school) to foreign to strange to special to normal to habitual to automatic. And then one day I realized I'd forgotten how NOT to do it. And now I can't read anything without having the machinery whirring away in my head. I can't read things that don't measure up to a certain level of competency with English, just for an example. Which, overall, I think I have to call a net gain.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I also baffle people with the speed of my reading - I learned to read when I was three, too. Haven't met many others, though :).

The Narnia rereads are going swimmingly - much thanks.