1: In the beginning....
The Devil I will leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I would wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. -- C.S Lewis "The Inner Ring"
According to the Bible, the first man and the first woman lived in a garden. God gave them only one rule:
"You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die."
But there's also a Talking Beast in the garden(1). The Beast misquotes the rule, and thereby hugely extends YHWH's list of prohibited substances:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say 'You must not eat from any tree in the Garden?' "
You may eat of any tree except... You may not eat of any tree. The serpent knew that you only need to change a couple of words to turn a text on its head. He knew that in the presence of a misquotation, people very rarely go back and check the original. And he knew that if you repeat them often enough and confidently enough, the misquoted words will eventually become better known than the real ones.
2: Being for The Benefit of Mr Pullman.
Phillip Pullman writes books. Some children seem to like them, which is nice; and so do some adults, which is okay. His books are better written than J.K Rowling's, although they don't sell nearly so many copies.
J.K Rowling's books have been turned into hugely successful movies, with the result that she is richer than the Queen. Phillip Pullman's books have been turned into very serious plays by the English National Theater, with the result that he is admired by the Times Literary Supplement and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
"His Dark Materials" has been compared with C.S Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" because it is a serious tale with literary and mythological allusions which uses symbolism to deal with profound religious questions. "Harry Potter" has been compared with the "Chronicles of Narnia" because there are seven books in the series.
When people ask Phillip Pullman what he thinks of C.S Lewis he always gives the same answer:
"Susan isn't allowed into the stable and the reason given is that she's growing up. She's become far too interested in lipstick, nylons and invitations. One character says rather primly: 'She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown up.' This seems to me on the part of Lewis to reveal very weird unconscious feelings about sexuality. Here's a child whose body is changing and who's naturally responding as everyone has ever done since the history of the world to the changes that are taking place in one's body and one's feelings. She's doing what everyone has to do in order to grow up".
"And it is a god who hates life because he denies children life. In the final Narnia book he gives the children the end-of-term treat of being killed in a railway accident so they can go to heaven. It's a filthy thing to do. Susan is shut out from salvation because she is doing what every other child who has ever been born has done - she is beginning to sense the developing changes in her body and its effect on the opposite sex."
J.K Rowling doesn't dislike C.S Lewis and God nearly as much Phillip Pullman does. After all, her books outsell Lewis's and she's richer than God. But her comments about Narnia have an oddly familiar ring:
"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex...I have a big problem with that."
Recently, the newspapers have been talking about C.S Lewis, because there is a new movie coming out, starring New Zealand and a computer. These articles become rather repetitive after a while.
"The reason Lewis gives for (Susan's) exclusion from paradise is that "she likes lipstick and nlyons and invitations". To Pullman this has suggested that Lewis considered a girl reaching sexual maturity to be such a terrible thing she should be banished to hell." (Times)
"Pullman has often spoken of his disgust at the exclusion of Susan from paradise at the end of the stories. She has started to become, not a sexless angel, but a young woman interested in evil snares such as "nylons and lipsticks and invitations." (Independent)
It's clear that nylons and lipstick are the most important things about which C.S Lewis ever wrote, and the offending passage deserves the closest possible analysis. It occurs at the end of chapter 12 of "The Last Battle", which is the final book in the Narnia series regardless of what order you read them in. Seven of the protagonists from the previous books have been re-united in Aslan's country, which they have entered through a magical doorway in Narnia.
"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? 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 you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.' "
"Oh Susan!" said Jill "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grow-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 all 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."
"Well, don't let's talk about that now," said Peter.
Can you see what has happened?
Lewis: "She's interested in nothing except nylons and lipstick and invitation."
Pullman: She's become far too interested in nylons and lipstick and invitations.
Rowling: She's lost to Narnia because she likes lipstick
Times: She's excluded from paradise because she likes nylons and lipsticks and invitations.
Independent: She's interested in evil snares such as nylons and lipsticks and invitations.
The sin of "liking nothing except lipstick..." has become the sin of liking it too much, which has become the sin of liking it at all. Finally, lipstick has become an intrinsic evil. It's rather as if you had read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and concluded that, since the White Witch uses Turkish Delight to bribe Edmund to betray his siblings, Lewis thinks that confectionery is a great evil.
Pullman, to be fair, is trying to make a sophisticated point. He doesn't say that, in the story itself, Susan's sexual maturity causes her to stop being a friend of Narnia. Rather, he thinks that the story allows us to to infer things about C.S Lewis's unconscious attitude to sex. This game - discovering feelings that writers didn't know they had on the basis of things they didn't say - is great fun, and anyone can play it. (There's is a bit-part player in "Prince Caspian" called Mrs Prizzle. Well then, the fact that Lewis chose this name proves that he had an unconscious desire to spank women using the penis of a bull (2). See how easy it is?)
But Rowling and the two journalists have not understood Pullman's subtle point about Lewis's unconscious motivations. They've reproduced his comments without going back and checking the book. As a result "Susan is sent to hell as a punishment for her sexuality" has become one of those things which "everybody knows".
Did God really say...? Did God really say....?
3: What did C.S Lewis say about lipstick?
Lady, a better sculptor far
Chiseled those curves your smudge and mar,
And God did more than lipstick can
To justify your mouth to man -- 'Epigrams and Epitaphs'
It is probably fair to say that Lewis did not spend much of his career thinking about lipstick. Women have been painting their mouths since ancient times; Desmond Morris helpfully points out that artificially reddened lips resemble a vagina and are therefore very sexually arousing to men. But modern "lipstick" was first sold in 1915, when Lewis was 17. Obviously, women's tights couldn't have been made from nylon until the 1930s; but once they became available, they were greatly preferred to the unattractive and inconvenient cotton variety. "Nylons" were hard to come by and therefore greatly sought after during the war and into the 1950s. (In the film "Vera Drake" one pair of nylons is swapped for eight packets of cigarettes.) Lewis must have regarded both of them as relatively new-fangled items.
Lewis may not have quite approved of women's make up in general. Arguing that something is not necessarily important because it is in a newspaper, he remarks in passing that "a very commonplace protest against make-up would be News if it came from a film star."("Letters to Malcolm" XXII) So he evidentially thought that disapproving of cosmetic products was a unremarkable thing to do.
Perhaps this simply shows that Lewis was a little old fashioned, and still believed, like his Victorian parents tthat make-up was appropriate for prostitutes and actresses, but not respectable women. But he also felt that the cosmetics and fashion industries "manipulated" men's sexual tastes and encouraged women to aspire to an imaginary idea of "beauty" that it's impossible to live up to.
It's all a fake, of course, the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full grown woman to be. ("Screwtape Letters" XX)
Feminists would probably agree with him about the falsification of women's bodies for commercial ends; although they might doubt whether the Devil is creating "the beauty myth" in order to stop people from marrying the partners with whom "spiritually helpful, happy and fertile marriages are most likely." (Screwtape is, incidentally, very proud of the fact that most women now dislike men with beards. "There is more in this than you might think." Occasionally, Lewis says something so off-the-wall that I actually can't imagine what he means.)
So, 'she likes lipstick and tights' doesn't mean 'she wants to look nice and attract men'. It means 'she wants silly, expensive, new-fangled consumer goods in order to conform with what the fashion industry says is pretty this season.' Do Pullman and Rowling have an – er – unconscious belief that the only way a person can make themselves look nice is by buying stuff? That would amuse Screwtape no end.
4: What did C.S Lewis say about heaven and hell?
"It's all in Plato; all in Plato, bless me what do they teach them in these schools." -- "The Last Battle".
Lewis believed in a literal heaven and (up to a point) a literal hell. He also believed in purgatory, but let's not worry about that for the time being. He thought that whenever you desire something on earth, you are really desiring heaven; but that nothing on earth can ever really satisfy that desire. He believed that if you love heaven more than anything else, you will in fact, go to heaven; but if you love anything more than heaven, then you won't.
The idea that we should desire heaven and nothing else could be very austere and puritanical. Pullman, typically, says that it is a life-hating creed. In fact, the opposite is true. Lewis can come across as almost cloyingly romantic. He rejects asceticism, the idea that they material world is evil and we should turn away from it and seek heaven. The material world is good, because it is heaven's reflection. His image of "visionary gleams" shining on us from another world is pure Wordsworth:
"There have been times when I think that we do not desire heaven; but more often I have found myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desire anything else?....All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.("The Problem of Pain" )
For Lewis, of course, these glimpses and promises came through Wagner, William Morris and the landscape of Southern Ireland; but he quite acknowledges that other people experience "joy" through different things -- through sport, or gardening, or hobbies such as woodworking or sailing. These are all Good Things. In "The Last Battle" it is strongly implied that Edmund is a railway enthusiast, and it isn't remotely suggested that this innocent pleasure is a barrier to him coming back to Narnia. They only become Bad Things when you start to love them instead of heaven. For Lewis, literally anything apart from heaven is an evil if it is allowed to become an end in itself, rather than the means to an end. The devil in Screwtape doesn't remotely care whether human beings are soldiers or pacifists, provided soldiering or pacifism become more important to them than heaven. Even love, according to Lewis, "ceases to a be a demon only when it ceases to be a God."
This idea is absolutely central to Lewis's thinking. You mustn't confuse means with ends; you mustn't confuse copies with realities; you mustn't confuse reflections for the original; you mustn't confuse a secondary, partial good with a primary or total good. "You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first." The idea pops up over and over again in different forms. He says that classical Paganism was a Good Thing in so far as it was a reflection or shadow of Christianity; but a bad thing otherwise. He say that, as a little boy he used to snaffle his father's tobacco, and because he wasn't an experienced smoker, came away with the idea that cigars are a second rate substitute for cigarettes. He says that the human race is like an ignorant child preferring to carry on making mud-pies in a slum because he has no conception of what is meant by a holiday at the seaside.
"The woman who makes the dog the center of he life loses, in the end, not only her human useful and dignity but even the proper pleasures of dog-keeping. The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication ....If Esau really got the pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception."
To be damned, then, means to turn away from heaven and instead pursue some little earthly substitute -- which can't, by definition, have satisfy you. Hell is populated by little people who have become so atrophied as human beings that they have become incapable of wanting any kind of happiness. On no possible view does Lewis send Susan to hell as a punishment for liking lipstick. He may, however, define hell as "That state in which you would rather have pretty red lips than be Queen of Narnia."
5: What happens to Susan?
"I think that there are in the end only two kinds of people: those who like happiness, and those who really don't"
It is untrue to say that Aslan expels Susan from Narnia. Susan isn't present at Polly and Diggory's re-union dinner; presumably, because she choses not to be there. Since she isn't there, she doesn't witness the the phantom of King Tirian calling for aid. Therefore, she doesn't play any part in the scheme to recover the magical rings; so the isn't on the train which crashes, so she doesn't die. Since she isn't dead she doesn't go to heaven.
It is also quite untrue to say that Susan is sent to hell. By the end of the book Narnia has come to an end, and all the Narnian talking animals have been judged by Aslan. Those which don't please him are turned into dumb beasts, and disappear into Aslan's shadow. This is a sort of Narnian last judgment. But there's no hint that Susan has met this kind of fate. Our world hasn't yet come to an end; and Susan is presumably still alive and will have every opportunity of coming to Aslan's country by a more circuitous route. (When Lucy asks Aslan if he will tell her how to get into his country from our world, he replies "I shall be telling you all the time".)
Susan is not blamed for becoming an adult. We are told that of the seven "friends", only Jill and Eustace are young enough to be at school. It follows that Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensies must be at least 16 when she comes to Aslan's country. In fact, according to Lewis's "Outline of Narnian History" Peter is 22, Susan is 21, Edmund is 19 and Lucy is 17. So Aslan can hardly be singling Susan out because she has hit puberty.
Certainly we are told that children beyond a certain age can't enter Narnia; this is why the younger Eustace and Jill encounter King Tirian in the "old" Narnia, but the other four only see him in Aslan's country(3). However, this exclusion from Narnia does not represent any kind of punishment or loss of paradise. On the contrary, they are being sent back to their own world to learn to know Aslan under a different name and so find their way back to his country. (Lucy, incidentally, has taken this seriously: when she is shown the magic stable which in some way contains Aslan's country she immediately says "In our world too, a stable once had something in it that was bigger than the whole world": the only explicit reference to Christ in the whole saga.)
Granted, Jill says that Susan is "too keen on being grown up." (Not "grown up" or "keen on being grown up" but too keen on being grown up.) But Jill is herself still a child. Polly, a very old lady, corrects her immediately and says Susan's problem is not maturity but immaturity. ("Grown-up, indeed... I wish she would grow up.") Polly thinks that Susan was the kind of school girl who would rather have been in her 20s, and will carry on behaving like a 20 year old when she is 50.
So, we are left with the actual reasons that Lewis gives for Susan's absence from Aslan's country:
1: She denies that she ever really came to Narnia; she says that her experiences there were only part of a game that she and her siblings used to play as children.
2: She is interested in consumer beauty products and parties to the exclusion of everything else.
3: She is an air-head, fixated with staying at a "silly age", probably 21.
Susan has lived in Narnia; she has reigned as Queen of Narnia during its golden age. She and Lucy have had an intimacy with Aslan that ever Peter does not experience(4). She comforted Aslan during his agony before going to the Stone Table, and he let her stroke his mane. After his resurrection, she celebrated with him and he let her ride on his back. However, she now denies that any of this ever happened, and instead seeks joy exclusively through beauty products. Pullman wants us to believe that "Susan became interested in lipstick, and is therefore thrown out of Narnia." I think Lewis is really saying "Susan ceased to love Narnia, and therefore, became a pathetic figure -- a woman of 50, trying to be a girl of 21, capable of loving nothing apart from lipstick."
Susan is committing Lewis's cardinal sin: getting confused about what is real and what not. She choses to believe that Narnia is only a play-world, something which she and her three siblings made up. This reminds us of the scene in "The Silver Chair" where the Witch imprisons Prince Rillian in a cave and tries to convince him that there is nothing outside it: that Narnia was only ever a figment of his imagination. Indeed, there is a certain similarity between Susan's voice and that of the Witch:
.
'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
'Well, 'tis pretty make-believe thou to say truth it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. As for you, My Lord Prince, thou art a man full grown. Fie upon you! Art thou not ashamed of such toys."
Prince Rillian is saved by Puddlegum who tells him that even if the Witch is right "the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones." Whether anyone wakes up Susan, we don't know.
Susan's state of mind is also an an ironic inversion of that of Peter and the others. Peter has discovered that Narnia is "not really real"; in the sense that it is only a shadow or reflection of the real Narnia in Aslan's kingdom. Susan thinks that Narnia is "not real", in the sense that it is something made up or copied from the real world. For Peter, Narnia is "not real" because there is something more substantial above it; for Susan is is "not real" because it was only ever a fantasy. Susan thinks that Narnia was "just a story"; from the point of view of Aslan's country, our world and Narnia are both just the first page of a story which is now beginning.
You might compare Susan's and Peter's perspectives to the contrasting viewpoints of "allegory" and "symbolism" suggest by "Lewis" in "The Allegory of Love". The allegorist takes something in a story to point to something in the world outside the story. ("The dragon represents the Spanish Armada"). The symbolist takes something in the real world to point to something outside it, ("The Pelican is a symbol of God's love.") "To the symbolist, it is we who are the allegory."
Lewis's parable is intended to provoke a response. Parables often work like that. They don't so much instruct us try to provoke us into seeing the point for ourselves. We listen to this part of the story and say – don't be absurd. No-one, having run their hands through Aslan's mane, could possibly decide that they prefer parties. Yes they could, says the story teller – and every day people give up heaven for equally trivial reasons -- sex, booze, money, power...
Even readers who don't share Lewis's conviction that there is a source of "joy" outside of the material world can surely go some way with him on this point. Doesn't most of the human race spend most of its time giving away things which they know will make them happy in return for things which they know will not?
6: ....and Finally.
At the end of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", the Pevensie children are crowned kings and queens of Narnia. For many years, they govern it along Tory lines:
They made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being cut down, and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live....And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them."
Peter becomes a "deep chested man and a great warrior". Edmund is a "graver and quieter man". And as for Susan -- the Susan who Lewis wants to keep as an infantilised, asexual angel; the Susan who Lewis blames for wanting to look pretty and damns for becoming sexual:
Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet, and the king of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage.
Game, set and match, I think
NOTES
(1) Genesis does not say that the Serpent is Satan; although certain New Testament passages imply that he is. Much depends, therefore, on the order in which you chose to read the books of the Bible.
(2) No, seriously. See "The Skeleton in the Wardrobe" by David Holbroke. This book also proves that Aslan is an unconscious portrait of the sadistic schoolteacher described in "Surprised by Joy". Oldie had a beard; Aslan has a mane. Q.E.D (I will grant you that "Pizzle" is the dialect term used in "Tess of the D'Urbevilles" to describe the "characteristic part" of a male pig.)
(3) If we go by the ages in the "Outline", then 13 would seem to be the cut off point: since Edmund and Lucy are 10 and 12 at the end of "Dawn Treader" when they learn that they are becoming too old to return to Narnia. (Peter and Susan, who missed that trip, are 14 and 15.) But this makes Eustace a full 4 years younger than Lucy, which is hard to reconcile with the rest of "Dawn Treader."
(4) My forthcoming book "The Cair Paravel Code" will conclusively prove that Lucy was Aslan's consort and the mother of his cubs.
The Devil I will leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I would wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. -- C.S Lewis "The Inner Ring"
According to the Bible, the first man and the first woman lived in a garden. God gave them only one rule:
"You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die."
But there's also a Talking Beast in the garden(1). The Beast misquotes the rule, and thereby hugely extends YHWH's list of prohibited substances:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say 'You must not eat from any tree in the Garden?' "
You may eat of any tree except... You may not eat of any tree. The serpent knew that you only need to change a couple of words to turn a text on its head. He knew that in the presence of a misquotation, people very rarely go back and check the original. And he knew that if you repeat them often enough and confidently enough, the misquoted words will eventually become better known than the real ones.
2: Being for The Benefit of Mr Pullman.
Phillip Pullman writes books. Some children seem to like them, which is nice; and so do some adults, which is okay. His books are better written than J.K Rowling's, although they don't sell nearly so many copies.
J.K Rowling's books have been turned into hugely successful movies, with the result that she is richer than the Queen. Phillip Pullman's books have been turned into very serious plays by the English National Theater, with the result that he is admired by the Times Literary Supplement and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
"His Dark Materials" has been compared with C.S Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" because it is a serious tale with literary and mythological allusions which uses symbolism to deal with profound religious questions. "Harry Potter" has been compared with the "Chronicles of Narnia" because there are seven books in the series.
When people ask Phillip Pullman what he thinks of C.S Lewis he always gives the same answer:
"Susan isn't allowed into the stable
"And it is a god who hates life because he denies children life. In the final Narnia book he gives the children the end-of-term treat of being killed in a railway accident so they can go to heaven. It's a filthy thing to do. Susan is shut out from salvation because she is doing what every other child who has ever been born has done - she is beginning to sense the developing changes in her body and its effect on the opposite sex."
J.K Rowling doesn't dislike C.S Lewis and God nearly as much Phillip Pullman does. After all, her books outsell Lewis's and she's richer than God. But her comments about Narnia have an oddly familiar ring:
"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex...I have a big problem with that."
Recently, the newspapers have been talking about C.S Lewis, because there is a new movie coming out, starring New Zealand and a computer. These articles become rather repetitive after a while.
"The reason Lewis gives for (Susan's) exclusion from paradise is that "she likes lipstick and nlyons and invitations". To Pullman this has suggested that Lewis considered a girl reaching sexual maturity to be such a terrible thing she should be banished to hell." (Times)
"Pullman has often spoken of his disgust at the exclusion of Susan from paradise at the end of the stories. She has started to become, not a sexless angel, but a young woman interested in evil snares such as "nylons and lipsticks and invitations." (Independent)
It's clear that nylons and lipstick are the most important things about which C.S Lewis ever wrote, and the offending passage deserves the closest possible analysis. It occurs at the end of chapter 12 of "The Last Battle", which is the final book in the Narnia series regardless of what order you read them in. Seven of the protagonists from the previous books have been re-united in Aslan's country, which they have entered through a magical doorway in Narnia.
"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? 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 you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.' "
"Oh Susan!" said Jill "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grow-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 all 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."
"Well, don't let's talk about that now," said Peter.
Can you see what has happened?
Lewis: "She's interested in nothing except nylons and lipstick and invitation."
Pullman: She's become far too interested in nylons and lipstick and invitations.
Rowling: She's lost to Narnia because she likes lipstick
Times: She's excluded from paradise because she likes nylons and lipsticks and invitations.
Independent: She's interested in evil snares such as nylons and lipsticks and invitations.
The sin of "liking nothing except lipstick..." has become the sin of liking it too much, which has become the sin of liking it at all. Finally, lipstick has become an intrinsic evil. It's rather as if you had read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and concluded that, since the White Witch uses Turkish Delight to bribe Edmund to betray his siblings, Lewis thinks that confectionery is a great evil.
Pullman, to be fair, is trying to make a sophisticated point. He doesn't say that, in the story itself, Susan's sexual maturity causes her to stop being a friend of Narnia. Rather, he thinks that the story allows us to to infer things about C.S Lewis's unconscious attitude to sex. This game - discovering feelings that writers didn't know they had on the basis of things they didn't say - is great fun, and anyone can play it. (There's is a bit-part player in "Prince Caspian" called Mrs Prizzle. Well then, the fact that Lewis chose this name proves that he had an unconscious desire to spank women using the penis of a bull (2). See how easy it is?)
But Rowling and the two journalists have not understood Pullman's subtle point about Lewis's unconscious motivations. They've reproduced his comments without going back and checking the book. As a result "Susan is sent to hell as a punishment for her sexuality" has become one of those things which "everybody knows".
Did God really say...? Did God really say....?
3: What did C.S Lewis say about lipstick?
Lady, a better sculptor far
Chiseled those curves your smudge and mar,
And God did more than lipstick can
To justify your mouth to man -- 'Epigrams and Epitaphs'
It is probably fair to say that Lewis did not spend much of his career thinking about lipstick. Women have been painting their mouths since ancient times; Desmond Morris helpfully points out that artificially reddened lips resemble a vagina and are therefore very sexually arousing to men. But modern "lipstick" was first sold in 1915, when Lewis was 17. Obviously, women's tights couldn't have been made from nylon until the 1930s; but once they became available, they were greatly preferred to the unattractive and inconvenient cotton variety. "Nylons" were hard to come by and therefore greatly sought after during the war and into the 1950s. (In the film "Vera Drake" one pair of nylons is swapped for eight packets of cigarettes.) Lewis must have regarded both of them as relatively new-fangled items.
Lewis may not have quite approved of women's make up in general. Arguing that something is not necessarily important because it is in a newspaper, he remarks in passing that "a very commonplace protest against make-up would be News if it came from a film star."("Letters to Malcolm" XXII) So he evidentially thought that disapproving of cosmetic products was a unremarkable thing to do.
Perhaps this simply shows that Lewis was a little old fashioned, and still believed, like his Victorian parents tthat make-up was appropriate for prostitutes and actresses, but not respectable women. But he also felt that the cosmetics and fashion industries "manipulated" men's sexual tastes and encouraged women to aspire to an imaginary idea of "beauty" that it's impossible to live up to.
It's all a fake, of course, the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full grown woman to be. ("Screwtape Letters" XX)
Feminists would probably agree with him about the falsification of women's bodies for commercial ends; although they might doubt whether the Devil is creating "the beauty myth" in order to stop people from marrying the partners with whom "spiritually helpful, happy and fertile marriages are most likely." (Screwtape is, incidentally, very proud of the fact that most women now dislike men with beards. "There is more in this than you might think." Occasionally, Lewis says something so off-the-wall that I actually can't imagine what he means.)
So, 'she likes lipstick and tights' doesn't mean 'she wants to look nice and attract men'. It means 'she wants silly, expensive, new-fangled consumer goods in order to conform with what the fashion industry says is pretty this season.' Do Pullman and Rowling have an – er – unconscious belief that the only way a person can make themselves look nice is by buying stuff? That would amuse Screwtape no end.
4: What did C.S Lewis say about heaven and hell?
"It's all in Plato; all in Plato, bless me what do they teach them in these schools." -- "The Last Battle".
Lewis believed in a literal heaven and (up to a point) a literal hell. He also believed in purgatory, but let's not worry about that for the time being. He thought that whenever you desire something on earth, you are really desiring heaven; but that nothing on earth can ever really satisfy that desire. He believed that if you love heaven more than anything else, you will in fact, go to heaven; but if you love anything more than heaven, then you won't.
The idea that we should desire heaven and nothing else could be very austere and puritanical. Pullman, typically, says that it is a life-hating creed. In fact, the opposite is true. Lewis can come across as almost cloyingly romantic. He rejects asceticism, the idea that they material world is evil and we should turn away from it and seek heaven. The material world is good, because it is heaven's reflection. His image of "visionary gleams" shining on us from another world is pure Wordsworth:
"There have been times when I think that we do not desire heaven; but more often I have found myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desire anything else?....All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.("The Problem of Pain" )
For Lewis, of course, these glimpses and promises came through Wagner, William Morris and the landscape of Southern Ireland; but he quite acknowledges that other people experience "joy" through different things -- through sport, or gardening, or hobbies such as woodworking or sailing. These are all Good Things. In "The Last Battle" it is strongly implied that Edmund is a railway enthusiast, and it isn't remotely suggested that this innocent pleasure is a barrier to him coming back to Narnia. They only become Bad Things when you start to love them instead of heaven. For Lewis, literally anything apart from heaven is an evil if it is allowed to become an end in itself, rather than the means to an end. The devil in Screwtape doesn't remotely care whether human beings are soldiers or pacifists, provided soldiering or pacifism become more important to them than heaven. Even love, according to Lewis, "ceases to a be a demon only when it ceases to be a God."
This idea is absolutely central to Lewis's thinking. You mustn't confuse means with ends; you mustn't confuse copies with realities; you mustn't confuse reflections for the original; you mustn't confuse a secondary, partial good with a primary or total good. "You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first." The idea pops up over and over again in different forms. He says that classical Paganism was a Good Thing in so far as it was a reflection or shadow of Christianity; but a bad thing otherwise. He say that, as a little boy he used to snaffle his father's tobacco, and because he wasn't an experienced smoker, came away with the idea that cigars are a second rate substitute for cigarettes. He says that the human race is like an ignorant child preferring to carry on making mud-pies in a slum because he has no conception of what is meant by a holiday at the seaside.
"The woman who makes the dog the center of he life loses, in the end, not only her human useful and dignity but even the proper pleasures of dog-keeping. The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication ....If Esau really got the pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception."
To be damned, then, means to turn away from heaven and instead pursue some little earthly substitute -- which can't, by definition, have satisfy you. Hell is populated by little people who have become so atrophied as human beings that they have become incapable of wanting any kind of happiness. On no possible view does Lewis send Susan to hell as a punishment for liking lipstick. He may, however, define hell as "That state in which you would rather have pretty red lips than be Queen of Narnia."
5: What happens to Susan?
"I think that there are in the end only two kinds of people: those who like happiness, and those who really don't"
It is untrue to say that Aslan expels Susan from Narnia. Susan isn't present at Polly and Diggory's re-union dinner; presumably, because she choses not to be there. Since she isn't there, she doesn't witness the the phantom of King Tirian calling for aid. Therefore, she doesn't play any part in the scheme to recover the magical rings; so the isn't on the train which crashes, so she doesn't die. Since she isn't dead she doesn't go to heaven.
It is also quite untrue to say that Susan is sent to hell. By the end of the book Narnia has come to an end, and all the Narnian talking animals have been judged by Aslan. Those which don't please him are turned into dumb beasts, and disappear into Aslan's shadow. This is a sort of Narnian last judgment. But there's no hint that Susan has met this kind of fate. Our world hasn't yet come to an end; and Susan is presumably still alive and will have every opportunity of coming to Aslan's country by a more circuitous route. (When Lucy asks Aslan if he will tell her how to get into his country from our world, he replies "I shall be telling you all the time".)
Susan is not blamed for becoming an adult. We are told that of the seven "friends", only Jill and Eustace are young enough to be at school. It follows that Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensies must be at least 16 when she comes to Aslan's country. In fact, according to Lewis's "Outline of Narnian History" Peter is 22, Susan is 21, Edmund is 19 and Lucy is 17. So Aslan can hardly be singling Susan out because she has hit puberty.
Certainly we are told that children beyond a certain age can't enter Narnia; this is why the younger Eustace and Jill encounter King Tirian in the "old" Narnia, but the other four only see him in Aslan's country(3). However, this exclusion from Narnia does not represent any kind of punishment or loss of paradise. On the contrary, they are being sent back to their own world to learn to know Aslan under a different name and so find their way back to his country. (Lucy, incidentally, has taken this seriously: when she is shown the magic stable which in some way contains Aslan's country she immediately says "In our world too, a stable once had something in it that was bigger than the whole world": the only explicit reference to Christ in the whole saga.)
Granted, Jill says that Susan is "too keen on being grown up." (Not "grown up" or "keen on being grown up" but too keen on being grown up.) But Jill is herself still a child. Polly, a very old lady, corrects her immediately and says Susan's problem is not maturity but immaturity. ("Grown-up, indeed... I wish she would grow up.") Polly thinks that Susan was the kind of school girl who would rather have been in her 20s, and will carry on behaving like a 20 year old when she is 50.
So, we are left with the actual reasons that Lewis gives for Susan's absence from Aslan's country:
1: She denies that she ever really came to Narnia; she says that her experiences there were only part of a game that she and her siblings used to play as children.
2: She is interested in consumer beauty products and parties to the exclusion of everything else.
3: She is an air-head, fixated with staying at a "silly age", probably 21.
Susan has lived in Narnia; she has reigned as Queen of Narnia during its golden age. She and Lucy have had an intimacy with Aslan that ever Peter does not experience(4). She comforted Aslan during his agony before going to the Stone Table, and he let her stroke his mane. After his resurrection, she celebrated with him and he let her ride on his back. However, she now denies that any of this ever happened, and instead seeks joy exclusively through beauty products. Pullman wants us to believe that "Susan became interested in lipstick, and is therefore thrown out of Narnia." I think Lewis is really saying "Susan ceased to love Narnia, and therefore, became a pathetic figure -- a woman of 50, trying to be a girl of 21, capable of loving nothing apart from lipstick."
Susan is committing Lewis's cardinal sin: getting confused about what is real and what not. She choses to believe that Narnia is only a play-world, something which she and her three siblings made up. This reminds us of the scene in "The Silver Chair" where the Witch imprisons Prince Rillian in a cave and tries to convince him that there is nothing outside it: that Narnia was only ever a figment of his imagination. Indeed, there is a certain similarity between Susan's voice and that of the Witch:
.
'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
'Well, 'tis pretty make-believe thou to say truth it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. As for you, My Lord Prince, thou art a man full grown. Fie upon you! Art thou not ashamed of such toys."
Prince Rillian is saved by Puddlegum who tells him that even if the Witch is right "the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones." Whether anyone wakes up Susan, we don't know.
Susan's state of mind is also an an ironic inversion of that of Peter and the others. Peter has discovered that Narnia is "not really real"; in the sense that it is only a shadow or reflection of the real Narnia in Aslan's kingdom. Susan thinks that Narnia is "not real", in the sense that it is something made up or copied from the real world. For Peter, Narnia is "not real" because there is something more substantial above it; for Susan is is "not real" because it was only ever a fantasy. Susan thinks that Narnia was "just a story"; from the point of view of Aslan's country, our world and Narnia are both just the first page of a story which is now beginning.
You might compare Susan's and Peter's perspectives to the contrasting viewpoints of "allegory" and "symbolism" suggest by "Lewis" in "The Allegory of Love". The allegorist takes something in a story to point to something in the world outside the story. ("The dragon represents the Spanish Armada"). The symbolist takes something in the real world to point to something outside it, ("The Pelican is a symbol of God's love.") "To the symbolist, it is we who are the allegory."
Lewis's parable is intended to provoke a response. Parables often work like that. They don't so much instruct us try to provoke us into seeing the point for ourselves. We listen to this part of the story and say – don't be absurd. No-one, having run their hands through Aslan's mane, could possibly decide that they prefer parties. Yes they could, says the story teller – and every day people give up heaven for equally trivial reasons -- sex, booze, money, power...
Even readers who don't share Lewis's conviction that there is a source of "joy" outside of the material world can surely go some way with him on this point. Doesn't most of the human race spend most of its time giving away things which they know will make them happy in return for things which they know will not?
6: ....and Finally.
At the end of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", the Pevensie children are crowned kings and queens of Narnia. For many years, they govern it along Tory lines:
They made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being cut down, and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live....And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them."
Peter becomes a "deep chested man and a great warrior". Edmund is a "graver and quieter man". And as for Susan -- the Susan who Lewis wants to keep as an infantilised, asexual angel; the Susan who Lewis blames for wanting to look pretty and damns for becoming sexual:
Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet, and the king of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage.
Game, set and match, I think
NOTES
(1) Genesis does not say that the Serpent is Satan; although certain New Testament passages imply that he is. Much depends, therefore, on the order in which you chose to read the books of the Bible.
(2) No, seriously. See "The Skeleton in the Wardrobe" by David Holbroke. This book also proves that Aslan is an unconscious portrait of the sadistic schoolteacher described in "Surprised by Joy". Oldie had a beard; Aslan has a mane. Q.E.D (I will grant you that "Pizzle" is the dialect term used in "Tess of the D'Urbevilles" to describe the "characteristic part" of a male pig.)
(3) If we go by the ages in the "Outline", then 13 would seem to be the cut off point: since Edmund and Lucy are 10 and 12 at the end of "Dawn Treader" when they learn that they are becoming too old to return to Narnia. (Peter and Susan, who missed that trip, are 14 and 15.) But this makes Eustace a full 4 years younger than Lucy, which is hard to reconcile with the rest of "Dawn Treader."
(4) My forthcoming book "The Cair Paravel Code" will conclusively prove that Lucy was Aslan's consort and the mother of his cubs.
119 comments:
*grin* awesome entry. It does annoy me when people do that "Aslan sent Susan to hell for liking lipstick" thing. Gah.
You're also way too good at puns. Grr, I don't know how long it would have taken me to think of "Lipstick on my scholar". Ah well.
This may be your most awesome post here yet.
Impressive entry.
I actually spent a good deal of time this summer trying to put into clear words Lewis' contrast between "allegory" and "symbolism" in The Allegory of Love. And there it is, clear as day.
Damn you, Andrew. You're coming dangerously close to making me forgive Lewis for what he did to Susan.
It's got nothing to do with thinking that he'd punished her for liking lipstick. I just thought it was a mean thing to do the character. She was sacrificed to Lewis' need to make one last point.
But then, The Last Battle has never been a book that sat well with me. The whole notion of being glad that all my favorite characters have just died (and yes, I know they've gone to heaven) doesn't appeal to me and in fact reminds me rather powerfully of the Left Behind ethos although, in all fairness, those books are so terrified of death that they insist on the fact that true believers are taken bodily into heaven before they die. At least Lewis has the guts to do the thing properly.
Whenever I think of The Last Battle, I think of Susan when she gets the news that her entire family has died in a train crash. I don't care how silly and frivolous she is, does she really deserve that kind of pain?
For Lewis, of course, these glimpses and promises came through Wagner, William Morris and the landscape of Southern Ireland; but he quite acknowledges that other people experience "joy" through different things -- through sport, or gardening, or hobbies such as woodworking or sailing. These are all Good Things. In "The Last Battle" it is strongly implied that Edmund is a railway enthusiast, and it isn't remotely suggested that this innocent pleasure is a barrier to him coming back to Narnia. They only become Bad Things when you start to love them instead of heaven. For Lewis, literally anything apart from heaven is an evil if it is allowed to become an end in itself, rather than the means to an end.
Um, setting aside for a moment the fact that I don't believe in heaven and hell, I'm not sure where the distinction is. How do you know that you, or anyone else, loves something for itself as opposed to loving it as a reflection of heaven? Is it simply a matter of degree? A casual Star Trek fan is OK, but someone who speaks only in Klingon has gone too far? Or what?
Excellent essay, with just one tragic error marring it.
I grew up in the County Down, sir, and it's not in Southern Ireland, so it isn't.
(misspelling corrected)
I really enjoyed this entry, and agree with nearly all of it...
But you haven't mentioned the short story "The Shoddy Lands", which I think provides more convincing evidence than anything in the Narnia books that Lewis felt uncomfortable around, and possibly contemptuous of, sexually-active or even sexually attractive young women. (I'm not saying it's the only possible reading -- it clearly isn't -- but reading the story without at least wondering about the possibility requires some pretty determined looking-the-other-way.)
I seem to remember getting a similar feeling from The Dark Tower as well, but it's far too long now since I read that so I could be misremembering. There's also the weirdly puritanical condemnation of Jane's use of contraception in That Hideous Strength.
Also, Pullman's other point -- that Lewis deprives Jill, Eustace and the other three Pevensies of the opportunity to experience the pleasures of ordinary life in order to send them to Aslan's land as children, or at least youths -- is also something which makes me uncomfortable. It's true that the mundane world can't possibly compare to Heaven, but it requires a very specific mindset to believe that children's deaths are therefore a good thing.
None of which is to say that I necessarily agree with Pullman's main point either.
Nicely argued, Mr Rilstone.
Whenever I think of The Last Battle, I think of Susan when she gets the news that her entire family has died in a train crash. I don't care how silly and frivolous she is, does she really deserve that kind of pain?
I can't help thinking this might answer the question "does anything wake Susan up?"
I grew up in the County Down, sir, and it's not in Southern Ireland, so it isn't.
I am an idiot. I know perfectly well what part of Ireland Lewis came from. Home rule, the Ulsterior Motive, and all that. Saying he came from the South would be as silly as describing him as an Englishman in (say) a FAQ.
Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet, and the king of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage.
So Susan grew into a desireable woman in Narnia and then became obsessed with being a desireable woman on Earth? Interesting.
So, 'she likes lipstick and tights' doesn't mean 'she wants to look nice and attract men'.It means 'she wants silly, expensive, new-fangled consumer goods in order to conform with what the fashion industry says is pretty this season.
That's 'nylons and lipstick and invitations'. She wants to be pretty and popular; which pricipally means being attractive to men. If her fault is being a slave to fasion then why lipstick and nylons (both icons of, specifically, desire) and not dresses and hats?
A better charitable reading might be that it's 'nylons and lipstick and invitations' because, as icons of desire, they're things that children aren't supposed to be interested in. The implied distaste is Jill's, and by extension the (child) reader's. Susan has lost Narnia because she thinks only 'grown-up' things are important, and has become shallow.
I don't think that's the whole truth, though. Why is it Susan who loses Narnia, and why through a desire to be 'popular'? There's a fairly obvious feminist reading here, if we consider the attitudes of the time.
In terms of those attitudes, the least ambiguous indicator of adulthood (or at least, the end of childhood) is interest in sex. But a young man who is interested only in chasing girls is an aberration. Romance is supposed to be a (pleasant and natural) distraction from the more serious business of making something of himself - that is, choosing a role in society. A young woman, on the other hand, already has a role - being a woman - and is just supposed to keep busy until she finds a husband. Moreover, because men are supposed to do the choosing sexuality is seen as fundamentally a female attribute -
it's the set of qualities that women use to attract men.(1)
So, if Lewis wants a character to grow up and lose touch with their childhood self then a girl is the natural choice. Boys grow up slowly as they find an adult role for themselves, and their childhood interests carry over and influence their choice of role. Girls enter their adult role as soon as they become marriageable, are expected to abandon childhood interests that don't fit it, and are defined by a quality (sexual attractiveness) that children aren't supposed even to be aware of.(2)
I can also take this further into a more critical reading. Susan hasn't got engaged to a nice young man; she's making herself attractive and going to parties. Social popularity was the one public way that women in her time and place could exercise power over men. Naturally, this could have no good result - if she isn't 'punished', it's at least clear that she's doing the wrong thing.
Did Lewis mean all this explicitly? I think not - he was just writing as a traditionalist within the attitudes of his time. But I wonder if misreadings of the "going to hell for liking lipstick" kind come from modern readers confusing the things that Lewis does deliberately with the attitudes that he takes for granted.
(1) Hence cooking as a metaphor for sex appeal in (particularly American) advertising and popular culture of the 50s. "Blueberry Boy Bait", anyone?
(2) Compare and contrast: "all men just boys at heart" and "that little tomboy has grown up into a beautiful woman".
Wow. Andrew, thank you. You've got a wonderful knack of saying exactly what I think I'm thinking, but much, much better than I would have said it. How none of the broadsheets have picked you up for a weekly column yet, I don't know.
Just one quibble. You summarise the final judgement of Narnia thus: "all the Narnian talking animals have been judged by Aslan. Those which don't please him are turned into dumb beasts, and disappear into Aslan's shadow". In fact the book seems to imply that that it those who he doesn't please, not those who don't please him, that go into the darkness. That seems to be a pretty central part of Lewis's thinking: the animals who want to be apart from Aslan in fact get what they want (just as those who want to be with him do).
As for your observation that "most of the human race spend[s] most of its time giving away things which they know will make them happy in return for things which they know will not" -- that would be poignant at any time, but coming a couple of says after George Best wore out his second liver, it's painfully cautionary.
--
Abigail wrote "The whole notion of being glad that all my favorite characters have just died (and yes, I know they've gone to heaven) doesn't appeal to me". I think Lewis's response to that would be that you've misread what he (and the LWW characters) consider to be Life.
And you also say "I think of Susan when she gets the news that her entire family has died in a train crash. I don't care how silly and frivolous she is, does she really deserve that kind of pain?" Not to want to put words in Lewis's mouth, but I think the real issue (as he perceived it) would be whether she needs that kind of pain. (Remember the megaphone quote from Problem of Pain?)
Good job. Now I might actually consider getting these books. So then, is this alledged racism in the books something that has also been misrepresented, or is its a product of old fashionedness too? Convice me, and I'll toddle along to Amazon to order LWW.
How disappointing for Mr. Pullman and Mrs. Rowling (especially after the "great 'shipping fiasco of 2005", I would have thought she'd value the meaning of adequate representation.)
Abigail wrote "The whole notion of being glad that all my favorite characters have just died (and yes, I know they've gone to heaven) doesn't appeal to me". I think Lewis's response to that would be that you've misread what he (and the LWW characters) consider to be Life.
I'm sure he would, but as someone who's always viewed the idea of heaven as, at the very least, bad asset management, I can't buy into his interpretation.
And you also say "I think of Susan when she gets the news that her entire family has died in a train crash. I don't care how silly and frivolous she is, does she really deserve that kind of pain?" Not to want to put words in Lewis's mouth, but I think the real issue (as he perceived it) would be whether she needs that kind of pain
Um, if those words ever came out of Lewis' mouth, I would feel obliged to hit him with something heavy.
Horrible things happen to us in life, but the notion of a God who makes those things happen as a sort of character-building exercise is too gruesome to consider. Not to mention that I don't really think Lewis cared about what happened to Susan, or how she reacted to the death of her family.
I think Sam Dodsworth is onto a something, by the way. That Susan is left behind for her actions is not misogynistic, but that Lewis chose her and not one of the boys to be the fallen Pevensie may very well be.
Horrible things happen to us in life, but the notion of a God who makes those things happen as a sort of character-building exercise is too gruesome to consider.
You have read The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, right?
I said "I think Lewis's response to that would be that you've misread what he (and the LWW characters) consider to be Life."
To which Abigail replied "I'm sure he would, but as someone who's always viewed the idea of heaven as, at the very least, bad asset management, I can't buy into his interpretation."
Well, if you're going to adopt a stance that flatly refuses to accept (even for literary purposes) the view of reality from which Lewis is writing, you can hardly be surprised if your evaluations don't match up with his! As Lewis wrote in another context, with poetic language you will get nothing out of it unless you're prepared to meet the poet half-way; and he goes on to imply that the same is true of what he terms "religious language" (as opposed to "theological language" which he regards as a special case of the scientific.)
To be quite clear, this a literary rather than religious point. What I am trying to express is that you don't have to believe in a Heaven yourself to understand and empathise with what Lewis is portraying as Heaven. It is quite clear from the books that Lewis is presenting a universe in which it is better to be what we call "dead" than "alive", because that death is the holiday at the end of term. It think it's a mistake to be tricked out of the literary power of what he's done by applying your own, incompatible, beliefs -- on a par with, say, my refusing to enjoy the Norse myths because I don't believe in Odin.
Mike, you're probably right in everything that you say, and I do accept that within Lewis' invented world, the ending of The Last Battle is a happy one. I just can't make myself feel it. It's one thing to meet an author half-way. Completely surrendering my own preconceptions is quite another.
SK, no, I haven't read those books. I probably should have made it clear that I'm a Lewis philistine.
Andrew, I keep forgetting to point this out: the numbering on the different sections is off. There are two number 3s.
Andrew, I keep forgetting to point this out: the numbering on the different sections is off. There are two number 3s.
I'll fix that, otherwise someone might read them in the wrong order...
I concur that one can't really fault Lewis as being sexist for Susan's lapse. It was either her or Peter who would go, and either way could be spun in some way as being wrong.
Ironically, I feel that Susan got the least attention of the four wardrobe children TLtWatW and PC, but due to her absence in tLB, many people pay more attention to her than to the other characters except for Aslan.
The scene still bothers me though, because it feels pointless. We never see the progress of her denial of Narnia. It's a classic case of ignoring "show, don't tell." The reader gets nothing out of it other than a sense of loss and incompleteness. Normally, such ambiguity would be fine, but in the big Apocalyptic closer it just feels out of place and poisons one's enjoyment of the characters' 'rapture.'
If you go back to "Prince Caspian" and "The Horse and His Boy," you can already see a certain ... lack of grip on Susan's part. She's rather airheaded in "Horse" and, in "Caspian," there's a point when she has trouble remembering what England is called while she's in Narnia. A creature of the moment, it seems.
Well, if you're going to adopt a stance that flatly refuses to accept (even for literary purposes) the view of reality from which Lewis is writing, you can hardly be surprised if your evaluations don't match up with his!
I think this might be one of the problems in discussing Lewis's work. I find it very difficult to create a meaningful response to something which is an allegory of a view of reality with which I don't agree.
I could ignore the allegorical element, but once I know it's there that's very difficult to do. I know the author is not just telling me a story but also telling me what he thinks is true. When I criticise the statement that it is good to be killed so that you can live in Narnia, I'm not criticising Lewis's imagination but his theology.
Now if he was writing a science fiction novel in which people turn out to be some form of caterpillar-variant and dying in rail crashes is the way that they hatch into a new life on another world, then I could consider that as an imaginative idea and (maybe!) suspend my disbelief to go along with the idea and see where it takes us. But I know Narnia is heaven, so I know that what Lewis is actually saying is that death is *in reality* a good thing. And I think he's wrong. I can imagine being someone who believed that was right, just about, but that's nothing like the suspension of disbelief that fiction brings.
re Susan
Andrew's essay is as usual meticulously argued but I think he is giving Lewis too much credit. Regardless of the precise phrasing of the reference to lipstick, Lewis paints a clear picture of the sort of girl Susan has become; frivolous, silly, a "party girl". And then he makes it clear that people like that don't go to Narnia. You can split hairs as much as you like about whether Lewis implied that she is too grown up or too childish, whether the problem is with the lipstick or the lifestyle. And clearly her rejection of Narnia was meant to be a major factor. But it comes across as a dismissal of a type of woman as not worth saving based on her superficial appearance and interests (remember both Edmund and Eustace, who both actively did dreadful things, were actively saved by Aslan.) For Susan we get "Oh, lets not talk about that now." End of story.
It seems to me that what she is being condemned for is not her sexuality but her frivolity. It's pure Vanity Fair. She is not the "tall and gracious woman" that she was in Narnia. She's in her early 20s and she's rather silly. And probably rather annoying to boot.
Fair enough in one way. It's Lewis's heaven, he can exclude who he likes from it. But it strikes me as a very superficial, sexist response. Do you have to be dignified and sensible to go to heaven?
What is being argued, it seems to me, is that Susan is too much of "this world" to go to the next. But it's a very male, very superficial way of judging who is too "worldly" for Heaven. You can certainly argue that she is unable to go there because she has lost sight of Heaven in her love of worldly things. But that's not well demonstrated by the examples picked; lipstick, nylons and invitations are a social life (and one that Lewis probably didn't understand or approve of), not a rejection of the spiritual. It's arguable that it is the equivalent of Peter staying behind because he was too involved with the Golf club. Except of course that it isn't because we are expected to picture Susan in high heels and make up, recoil at this travesty of gracious womanhood, and therefore accept her fate as inevitable.
It is a condemnation of a lifestyle, one that is essentially harmless (and often temporary)but which is easily misunderstood and disapproved of. It is possible to argue that what Lewis was condemning was the underlying rejection of the spiritual in this particular instance, but he makes no real attempt to make this clear. It is enough to dress Susan up in her modern, tasteless attire and let us shudder.
"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."
Compare Polly's summation (the last word on Susan, as far as Lewis is concerned) with everyone else's appearance. The oldsters are not simply rejuvenated; they, like the children, now look *timeless*, neither young nor old. I believe it was in "The Silver Chair" that Lewis remarks that, even in our world, it is the silliest children who are most childish and the silliest grownups who are most grown up.
By trying to concentrate on a single age that she considers ideal, Susan is rejecting both her earlier childhood and her later maturity. I think that is much more the point Lewis was trying to get across than anything in particular about the merits or demerits of lipstick. That is just mentioned in passing, and the "*all* she thinks of" part is the important bit, to indicate her shallowness.
Timeless people are something Lewis rather likes. George MacDonald, in "The Great Divorce," appears neither old nor young. Ransom, in "That Hideous Strength," combines features of youth and age. When the children return to Narnia in "Caspian," and at Caspian's resurrection at the end of "Silver Chair," the children mildly transcend their ages.
Kevin,
Why do you think that Lewis thought contraception was ‘a destructive agent in society’? As far as I can remember he never said or suggested any such thing. In ‘Mere Christianity’ he refuses to condemn all uses of contraception. In a letter written in 1947 he says: “I’ve never propounded a general position about contraception. As a bachelor I think I shd. be imprudent in attacking it: on the other hand I shd not like the job of defending it against almost unbroken Xtian disapproval.” Lewis took the argument from authority very seriously where morality was concerned but he never gave any other reason for disapproving of contraception.
Merlin may disapprove of Jane Studdock’s use of contraception but Merlin is a ‘bloodthirsty old man’ and I do not think that we should see everything he says as an expression of Lewis’ views. In any case, what really annoys Merlin is not that Jane has been using contraception but that she has not had a child, which is another matter entirely. Lewis certainly thought that Jane should have been making babies and keeping house instead of having some silly idea that she could write a thesis on Donne and have her own career.
That brings me to Lewis’ attitude to women. Lewis was certainly a sexist. Indeed, ‘sexist’ hardly seems strong enough to describe the way he felt. It was not only that he thought little of women’s abilities and considered that they should always be subservient to men; he seems to have felt some sort of fear of them. Anyone here who has read Lewis’ writings will know what I mean. The ancient, female thing in Dymer, Ungit, Fairy Hardcastle; they all seem to express Lewis’ horror of the ‘dominance of the female’ that he said was one of the things he most feared for the human race.
Women are really only acceptable when they are ruled by men. That is why Jane Studdock is scolded for not obeying her husband and why the Green Lady in Perelandra says: “The King is always older than I, and about all things.” Lewis’ attitude to women explains his very offensive suggestion that the man should be in charge of the household so as to protect the outside world from the woman. It also explains that embarrassing and carelessly researched essay ‘Priestesses in the Church.’
I am sure Lewis was not ‘just expressing the attitudes of his age’. His sexism was quite unusual even in his time, especially for such a kind-hearted man, although I suppose it may have been common among Oxbridge dons. Some of it comes from his religion of course; Christianity has always put women in second place. Some of it springs from his odd upbringing. I don’t know that any of that really explains it though.
If you haven't yet seen it, Neil Gaiman has written a short story titled "The Problem of Susan" which is well worth reading...
(Screwtape is, incidentally, very proud of the fact that most women now dislike men with beards. "There is more in this than you might think." Occasionally, Lewis says something so off-the-wall that I actually can't imagine what he means.)
If you can't interpret a Lewis passage, Andrew, then I really don't feel qualified to try. But coming to that cold, I take it as meaning that the devil has persuaded men to remove one of their sexual characteristics, thereby becoming effeminate, and women to like this, thereby disrupting the natural order of things and perhaps tending towards lesbianism.
Just don't tell people who think this way about the gay sub-sub-culture which favours beards and general rugged outdoorsy machismo.
Peter becomes a "deep chested man and a great warrior". Edmund is a "graver and quieter man". And as for Susan -- the Susan who Lewis wants to keep as an infantilised, asexual angel; the Susan who Lewis blames for wanting to look pretty and damns for becoming sexual:
Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet, and the king of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage.
Game, set and match, I think
Err, I think not, I'm afraid.
That passage describes a pretty woman, certainly - but it sounds to me like a small child's (and particularly a small girl's) image of adult feminine attractiveness. It's prettiness rather than beauty. I doubt that many adult women would really want hair down to their ankles, and I don't think that many adult men are especially attracted to it either. (How many pin-up images do you see with very long hair?) This appearance is described as attracting men, to be sure, but we note that the effect has only got as far as rather remote offers of dynastic alliance. There's no sense of sexuality there.
In other words, Susan has become a fairytale princess. It'd be cruel to say that she's turned into Princess Barbie, but the imagery is much the same as the look for which the makers of Princess Barbie seem to aim.
(I'm also tempted to invoke that Marks and Spencer commercial which rather brilliantly manages to depict a room full of attractive women in tight-fitting dresses or stripped to lacy lingerie, with no sense of lubriciousness whatsoever. The same company's food advertising is more pornographic. "Magic and Sparkle" indeed.)
Well, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is a children's fantasy novel in fairytale mode. It's thus absolutely no criticism of Lewis to say that it rewards one of its female protagonists by turning her into a fairytale princess. But a fairytale princess is not the same thing as a sexually mature woman.
I am sure Lewis was not ‘just expressing the attitudes of his age’.
I think perhaps I overstated my case on this. What I was trying to say was that Lewis' attitudes were conservative, but not so conservative in their time that he would have felt the need to justify them. So Susan's fate is probably better read as making a point about what it means to be 'grown-up' made in a sexist way than as a point about the role of women.
But don't underestimate the sexism of the time, either. When Joanna Russ was a student in the late 50s(*), she heard a lecturer tell the class that women shouldn't become writers and that the proper use of their creative energies was having the best and most healthy babies.
(*) In America, yes, but I wouldn't expect Britain to be less conservative.
It's thus absolutely no criticism of Lewis to say that it rewards one of its female protagonists by turning her into a fairytale princess. But a fairytale princess is not the same thing as a sexually mature woman.
And, arguably, being a 'party girl' is the closest she can get to being a fairytale princess on Earth. There's a story there, if Neil Gaiman hasn't done it already.
Abigail: You haven't read The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, okay, but it occurs to me that you only need to have read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to see that Lewis was not unaware of the issue you raise re: pain; otherwise, why all the emphasis on Aslan not being safe?
Aslan will not keep you from pain; he will even cause pain, if it's for your own good. See the removal of Eustace's scales in Voyage of the Dawn Treader for an example.
Lewis sees Aslan (and God) in some senses as like a doctor. The pain he causes is like the pain of resetting a dislocated joint, intense but necessary.
(And this shouldn't be used as ammunition for the sadism argument, either, as there's no evidence that Aslan enjoys inflicting pain and those on whom we see it inflicted certainly don't enjoy it).
Louise:
(1) Don't all stories (that are not simply time-passers) tell you what the author thinks is true? It seems odd to single Lewis out for something which is after all pretty much the point of literature.
(2) Narnia specifically isn't heaven. Aslan's country is heaven. Susan isn't banned from either alone: she's banned form Narnia for the same reaosn Peter, Lucy and Edmund are, and she doesn't go to Aslan's country with them because she wasn't on the train -- she might well go later ('don't let's talk about that now' can mean 'we'll talk about that later', remember).
(Christianity may have always put women in second place... but for a lot of its history the Church was Catholic, and a certain woman was a very very close second -- with all men other than Christ well below her. So I'm not sure how well that point stands).
I'm sure this is old ground for Lewis-ians, but I was thinking about the train crash on my way into work this morning (once I'd finished thinking about Neil Gaiman, which is a far nicer topic of contemplation while walking through the rain). It struck me that the sudden removal of almost all the family to Heaven as an act of Grace has more resonance with the Rapture than of death as normally perceived. Maybe it's too simplistic to assume that Lewis was using a rail crash to symbolise, well, a rail crash.
I'm not sure it makes it any more comprehensible from an atheistic viewpoint, Rapturing being one of the more peculiar elements of Christianity (our local Xian rock band associated with the Pentecostal church I briefly attended in my youth did a very catchy and frighteningly bleak song about those left behind, I remember) but it makes more sense than to assume that Lewis thought premature death might be a jolly nice thing.
And then of course there's no question of going back to save Susan because she's missed the boat, so to speak. Thinking about the wrong thing at the wrong time.
(Christianity may have always put women in second place... but for a lot of its history the Church was Catholic, and a certain woman was a very very close second -- with all men other than Christ well below her. So I'm not sure how well that point stands).
What roles did actual live women have within the Church in those times, and what attributes was Mary worshipped for? I don't think you've thought this through.