The Problem of Susan

[truepenny]

Quite some time ago, elisem asked me if I would read Neil Gaiman's story, "The Problem of Susan" (Fragile Things, New York: William Morrow, 2006: 181-190) and write about it. And, well, Fourth Street is coming up, and I am procrastinating like a crazy procrastinating thing, and I finally got around to it.

Spoilers both for the Gaiman story and for, inevitably, C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.


"The Problem of Susan" is essentially an objection to the fate of Susan Pevensie, but what makes the story interesting is that it's an objection on several levels. The objection is articulated openly and directly by both characters in the story: the professor and Greta, the journalist sent to interview her. The easy thing, of course, would be to make the professor Susan, and Gaiman gracefully eschews the easy thing, while never quite letting go of the identity between them. The professor is the right age; she lost her entire family (two brothers, one named Ed, and a younger sister) in a cataclysmic train crash; she is an expert on children's literature. But the Chronicles of Narnia exist in the world of the story; Greta and the professor talk about the books and about the professor's likeness to Susan and, in fact, The Problem Of Susan:

          "You know, that used to make me so angry."
          "What did, dear?"
          "Susan. All the other kids go off to Paradise, and Susan can't go. She's no longer a friend of Narnia because she's too fond of lipsticks and nylons and invitations to parties. I even talked to my English teacher about it, about the problem of Susan, when I was twelve. [...] She said that even though Susan had refused Paradise then, she still had time while she lived to repent."
          "Repent what?"
          "Not believing, I suppose. And the sin of Eve."

I want to hold that thought for a minute, before we go on with the truly crushing blow Gaiman's professor delivers to Lewis's simplistic moral judgment. Before we go on, let's look at the only "solution" to the problem of Susan offered in the story.

It is not, let's be clear, a solution the story embraces. It's second-hand, what Greta's English teacher said to an indignant twelve-year-old girl (and clearly with an eye to reinforcing the allegory): she still had time while she lived to repent. We know nothing about the English teacher except that she was a woman (all the characters in the story are women, except for the lion), and I think the professor's sharp, disbelieving, "Repent what?" sums up the story's response to this idea. But Greta struggles to find an answer--not believing, which is certainly Susan's sin in Prince Caspian, and "the sin of Eve."

And what I want to unpack here is twofold. First of all, "the sin of Eve" is not, as far as I can recall, ever mentioned in the Narnia books. Lewis gives the intrinsic evil of women over to the White Witch. "Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve" is intended (or at least I've always read it as being intended) as a formula of equality. It's not better to be a Son of Adam; Lucy is the hero of the first three books, and it's Edmund who is the Judas and who possibly, depending on how one defines it, partakes of the sin of Eve. That's the other question that Gaiman, drat him, leaves indeterminate: what is the sin of Eve? Disobedience? Greed? Succumbing to temptation? Or tempting Adam in her turn? But the important thing is that none of these is a sin Susan Pevensie commits. Which I think points out something Gaiman (and Greta and the professor) never quite says, which is the fundamental arbitrariness of Susan becoming her siblings' scapegoat. "There must have been something else wrong with Susan," says Greta, articulating the dissatisfaction, but not having an answer to it.

Apparently, in Lewis's canon, Thomas is less forgivable than Judas. Edmund betrays Aslan, repents, and is forgiven. And never betrays Aslan again. Susan willfully disbelieves, repents, and is forgiven--and then, dammit, goes right back to willfully disbelieving again. And here's the other thing I wanted to bring up. In my posts on Narnia, I talked a lot about Lewis's negative portrayal of adulthood, particularly adult femininity, and the way that all his "good" characters sneer at Susan for choosing that over Narnia. That seems to be Susan's sin in Lewis's eyes, and I think it's interesting that Gaiman doesn't articulate that directly, but his critique of Lewis's stance captures perfectly what's wrong with it:

"I don't know about the girl in the books," says the professor, "but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers' and little sister's bodies. [...] My younger brother was decapitated, you know. A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well . . . he's enjoying himself a bit too much, isn't he? Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse."

Gaiman is pointing out, brilliantly, that the smug self-superiority of Lewis and his characters, sitting in judgment on Susan, is only possible because they don't have to deal with the real world anymore. They don't have to--and certainly don't--think about what Susan is going through, about the grotesque, tragic, terrible mess that they've left behind. And that's all right for them, being dead and all, but Gaiman (I think) is taking Lewis to task, quietly and politely, for not facing up to the consequences of his grand moral judgments. "He's enjoying himself a bit too much, isn't he?"

And if that were all there were to "The Problem of Susan," it would be a fantastic story. But that isn't all. There's another layer.

(Actually, there are two other layers, one of them being the tangent about Mary Poppins Brings in the Dawn, which shows beautifully the way in which this old-woman-who-isn't-quite-Susan-Pevensie has grown up and left behind the great tragedy and betrayal of her youth. She doesn't dream about C. S. Lewis and Narnia; she dreams about a different children's book entirely, and one--since Gaiman can make it up to suit himself--with a quite different relationship to its Christ-figure and his female opposite number.)

The dreams of Aslan and the White Witch, which may be the professor's, or may be Greta's, or may belong to both, are a much more vicious critique of Narnia than the surface narrative of the story. And a much more vicious critique of adults and adulthood than Lewis ever imagined. In the dreams, Aslan and the White Witch make a deal to betray the children. Aslan eats the girls, and the White Witch does something to the boys ("she stares, unflinching, at the twisted thing her brothers have become"). And then the lion and the witch fornicate. And the terrible last line, with its echoes of being washed clean in the blood of the Lamb, perfectly captures the predatory nature of Lewis's Narnia, the way that it claims for itself and keeps those it claims to love. It isn't that Susan was left behind. It's that she escaped.

Comments

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

3 months ago I went searching the net for your essay on The Problem of Susan. Apparently, I just jumped the gun.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

The problem I had with the Gaiman story was the emotional jerk-round I felt reading the story. "This isn't the Narnia I knew, it's someone else's Narnia."

A much better treatment of the problem of Susan, at least I thought, was in this story (http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/40/theivory.html) which combines Narnia and Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is so funny -- I assigned my student an essay a few weeks ago on Susan's expulsion from Narnia, and gave her both the Chronicles and Gaiman's story. She more or less came to the conclusion that Lewis' point was about disbelief and not sexuality, which makes a lot of sense to me and seems to be more or less what you're talking about.

But that idea of escape is fascinating. And I knew something was niggling at me about the ending of The Last Battle, and that was the complete disregard for the consequences in the real world of everyone's going into Narnia after death. Gaiman articulates that beautifully, and although I found the dream sequence incredibly disturbing and wasn't precisely able to glean what he meant by it, the thought that Susan might have escaped that awful fate is rather heartening.

Fascinating analysis.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

i just read some of the linked essays. I've always (okay, since grad school) thought that Shasta = Aucassin and Aravis = Nicolette.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

stumbling here from elsewhere ...

There are definitely problems with Lewis's portrayal of women, and his portrayal of everything in The Last Battle in particular, but criticizing Susan for choosing "adult femininity" is definitely not one of them.

Look at the text: Jill says that Susan "always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up," and Polly, who is the oldest woman there, replies, "I wish she _would_ grow up," and explains: Susan (who at this point would be about 21) is not being an adult but is stuck at the awkward stage of trying to _prove_ she's grown-up, which is the surest sign that she isn't. Once you actually grow up, you put those silly anxieties aside. It's adolescents, not adults, who are anxious to prove they're too old for fairy tales - so Lewis has argued in many places of which this is just one.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

It's interesting -- I remember my take-home from the Susan issue being that it's important to keep your mind open? To keep the sensawunda? Rather than repudiating the things you loved because they're not supposed to be cool anymore.

This may have been a reading born in projection. *g*

[mattador.livejournal.com]

Hm. It's my week to think about this, I guess- I just reread an excellent but very different take on the Problem of Susan here (http://andrewrilstone.blogspot.com/2005/11/lipstick-on-my-scholar.html).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My other Narnia posts talk about the problems of adulthood in greater depth, but essentially the problem that I see is that there's no place for adult women who don't want to be "one of the boys" (and I'm using that word "boys" very very deliberately). Now my personal performance of adult femininity would (at least on that issue) meet with Lewis's approval, but it's not the only one, or the only good one, or the only one which ought to be allowed. Adult women in Narnia? Dead (or absent) or evil--particularly those who are at all femme, like the Lady of the Green Kirtle. Polly is the only exception (since he carefully kills Jill and Lucy before they have to grow up, a little like the creepy thing in Baum's Oz books where the little girls are going to go on being little girls forever and ever and ever), and she gets the exception exactly by NOT being feminine.

Yes, I am reading against the text in making this argument. But that's because I find the double-bind the text puts women in untenable.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's the Prince Caspian Susan. The one who repents and is forgiven. In other words, no, you weren't projecting to get there. *g*

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

But, remember, Aslan's Mountain *IS* the real world as far as Lewis is concerned; this Earth is just a pale imitation that will fade.

You can escape Narnia, if you will, but you can't escape Death, and after that, your only choices are Aslan's Mountain or, like some of the dwarves, to remain inside a dark and smelly stable when you could so easily walk outside.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If you're trapped in Lewis's allegory, yes.

I think the point of "The Problem of Susan" is imagining a Susan who isn't trapped in Lewis's little box.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

This is true -- Lewis does make that point, but it was one that bothered me. One of the things I like about Pullman and His Dark Materials was that he doesn't privilege one world over another. To be honest, I only read The Last Battle very recently -- before I had to teach it, as it happens -- although I'd read three or four of the other Narnia books as a child. Also, I'd read them with absolutely no knowledge of Christian symbolism, which means it's probably a very good thing I didn't read TLB, otherwise I'd have been traumatised and confused.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think part of the point is that it isn't "your" Narnia or "my" Narnia. It's Narnia as seen from the perspective of someone who has been horribly betrayed by it. So, no, it doesn't look right.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

I would completely agree with that -- a Susan who is willing, unlike all the other children, to believe in a world other than Narnia. While that is against the authorial voice, as it were, I think it speaks far more strongly to older readers, or to readers who aren't themselves as deeply enmeshed in the allegory.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Or who, as I did, felt betrayed by The Last Battle.

In other words, yes, exactly.

[britmandelo.livejournal.com]

Oh, bravo. That was one of my favorite pieces in his collection Fragile Things. I nearly wrote an essay on it, but I ended up going for "October in the Chair" instead.

This is a fine piece.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, we're discussing Lewis' allegory. I find it difficult to imagine a Susan separate from the story that she inhabits.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily. I was a child when I read the Narnia series, and I understood clearly what TLB represented. I was exalted by it; I thought and still think it a wonderful representation of the next part of the adventure.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Lewis was, in fact, very anti-femme and paternalistic until he actually met and married his wife. The only fiction he ever wrote that didn't have some sick-making chauvenist piggery in it someplace is Till We Have Faces, which was written after her death.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

The phrase "willfully disbelieve" always jumps out at me and makes me wonder how one is supposed to do it. You can't choose what you believe or not. It seems more like "pretending to disbelieve." But why would someone pretend they didn't believe in a land where they were queen? How deep does her denial go? How do her siblings and the others know what's in her heart? Do they think she's lying? Has she just made the mistake of enjoying her real life and that made the other belief go away? Is that like a test?

[cija.livejournal.com]

Brief comment, since I am at work [1] -- I have a long essay about this somewhere on my computer, but my greatest difficulty with Susan's fate was always that the feminine, sexual part of being grown-up that is symbolized by parties and nylons --there's a Lewis letter somewhere where he congratulates a Christian woman on having got much better things to think about than 'jazz and lipstick', it's the same thing -- is flatly not the same kind of sinful femininity that Susan is seen to demonstrate over and over as a child. Because her two great sins in the books are 1. nagging and 2. pity. Pity especially--she's the one who spoils the fun by shuddering at bloodshed.

So I would agree with the commonly-voiced objection to critics of the Susan Issue, it is pretty unfair for readers to identify her falling away from Narnia with sexual maturation, except that it's a confusion that Lewis made himself, and first. The adult Queen Susan who goes around breaking hearts and getting courted offstage in The Horse and his Boy, who is the Susan who grows up in the real world to wear nylons and go to parties, is not the Susan who used to wring her hands and worry about what their parents would think. And that was the Susan who was damned from the beginning. I think that Lewis fell victim to the temptation of mapping his two great hates onto each other--the 'femininity' of nagging domesticity & the 'femininity' of beguiling sexual wiles--without caring that they are two different things, and in many ways opposed to each other.

[sarahtales.livejournal.com]

I was always enraged by the - well, the terribly pi, to be an Enid Blyton schoolgirl about this - attitude of the dead towards living Susan, but somehow my mind never took the leap to identifying the bodies.

To think of Susan with the corpses while people talked about how they wished she'd grow up with not a thought of how she would have to grow up pretty sharpish now she was alone in a world turned into a nightmare makes me want to shake Lewis and ask him why he didn't think it through.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Same here. I never felt betrayed by it at all.

Father Time awaking and blowing his trumpet to call the stars home? That was COOL.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sense. Susan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian is sort of drearily practical, the sort of person who sucks all the joy out of everything by being a nag and a worrywart and "practical": "mothering" in its worst connotations. Susan in The Last Battle--as we see her through the disparaging comments of her friends and loved ones--who echoes the version of Susan we never really see in The Horse and His Boy is exactly the opposite, focusing on fripperies, on vanity, instead of on what Really Matters. Both are "bad" performances of femininity, but you're right that they don't match up.

[deepad]

Interesting analysis.
My own reaction to Gaiman's story was one of disappointment, because I felt that he had taken the easy way out. Easy, that is, compared to fanfiction writers (Ob disclaimer: I've written one story in the fandom myself) who wrote against Lewis's text while staying true to canon.
That is, Gaiman seemed to make his argument by going AU, and I felt that there was more meat and subtlety in the stories that didn't.
I would love to hear your thoughts on how this sort of 'profic' vs fanfic divide plays out when interacting with source texts that are being argued.