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Jan. 17th, 2008 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackWhat he said: "Lipstick on my Scholar", Andrew Rilstone on why[1] C. S. Lewis didn't send Susan Pevensie to hell
Do read all of it, and the comments (where some people disagree). It's quite long, but makes the case better, more humerously and more comrehensively than I can. (In fact, all of his essays are very interesting.)
My impression, although I might not make the case as clearly as he does, I'll attempt to be more bullet-pointed, is:
* Rilstone says nylon tights and lipstick were relatively new and "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."
* Several quotes make it clear that she's too interested in nylons and lipstick, or only interested in nylons and lipstick, the problem isn't that she's interested in them at all.
* As an Adult in Narnia she is a famous beauty and courted by kings. That's not in a sexual way, either because of Lewis's preferences or because it's a children's book, but while chasing after Rabadash was a mistake, it's not suggested she shouldn't have been interested in him at all, so Lewis isn't against her growing up at all.
* Susan doesn't die because she's not on the train. She missed out on a shortcut to heaven this time, but don't know what will happen -- presumably/hopefully she will mature later
* And she chose to ignore her Narnia experiences, and not come, she wasn't forbidden from doing so by Aslan/God
* Lucy says she's too grown up, but Poly corrects her and says she wishes she *would* grow up, she's stuck at one of the most stupid stages of her life.
* Even if she doesn't find her way to heaven, the extent she does to hell depends on what Lewis believes, and how he chose to incorporate that in Narnia, which is hard to know. Are the skeptic dwarves in hell? The animals who lose their intellgience and speech? Are they all dropped into fire later? Or not? Rilstone talks about this a bit, there's a lot more to be said if you're a Lewis scholar, which I'm not.
* Rilstone says to Lewis what's good about the real world, and Narnia, is the way they reflect the higher worlds, and Aslan's country/heaven above. And Susan's sin is loving the world for itself, ignoring that higher purpose.
* He suggests Lewis likely needed one of the children to be left out, and it couldn't really be any of the others. In fact, wasn't Susan previously one of the most sensible previously?
* However, he and several people in the comments point out that Lewis was rather old fasioned, and probably didn't approve of sex being important, and maybe (as people say about Tolkien) wasn't very in touch with women either. So it's possible that his choice that the way Susan became too trvially involved in the world was sexual, does indicate some prejudice on his part. But I don't think that invalidates what happened in the books.
[1] Or to me more exact, that.
Do read all of it, and the comments (where some people disagree). It's quite long, but makes the case better, more humerously and more comrehensively than I can. (In fact, all of his essays are very interesting.)
My impression, although I might not make the case as clearly as he does, I'll attempt to be more bullet-pointed, is:
* Rilstone says nylon tights and lipstick were relatively new and "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."
* Several quotes make it clear that she's too interested in nylons and lipstick, or only interested in nylons and lipstick, the problem isn't that she's interested in them at all.
* As an Adult in Narnia she is a famous beauty and courted by kings. That's not in a sexual way, either because of Lewis's preferences or because it's a children's book, but while chasing after Rabadash was a mistake, it's not suggested she shouldn't have been interested in him at all, so Lewis isn't against her growing up at all.
* Susan doesn't die because she's not on the train. She missed out on a shortcut to heaven this time, but don't know what will happen -- presumably/hopefully she will mature later
* And she chose to ignore her Narnia experiences, and not come, she wasn't forbidden from doing so by Aslan/God
* Lucy says she's too grown up, but Poly corrects her and says she wishes she *would* grow up, she's stuck at one of the most stupid stages of her life.
* Even if she doesn't find her way to heaven, the extent she does to hell depends on what Lewis believes, and how he chose to incorporate that in Narnia, which is hard to know. Are the skeptic dwarves in hell? The animals who lose their intellgience and speech? Are they all dropped into fire later? Or not? Rilstone talks about this a bit, there's a lot more to be said if you're a Lewis scholar, which I'm not.
* Rilstone says to Lewis what's good about the real world, and Narnia, is the way they reflect the higher worlds, and Aslan's country/heaven above. And Susan's sin is loving the world for itself, ignoring that higher purpose.
* He suggests Lewis likely needed one of the children to be left out, and it couldn't really be any of the others. In fact, wasn't Susan previously one of the most sensible previously?
* However, he and several people in the comments point out that Lewis was rather old fasioned, and probably didn't approve of sex being important, and maybe (as people say about Tolkien) wasn't very in touch with women either. So it's possible that his choice that the way Susan became too trvially involved in the world was sexual, does indicate some prejudice on his part. But I don't think that invalidates what happened in the books.
[1] Or to me more exact, that.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-17 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-17 05:58 pm (UTC)I just always got annoyed when people said about Narnia "Oh, and then Susan is thrown out of Narnia for liking boys", a legitimate but incomplete problem, but not being able to articulate what my problem with them was, and then people going *on* saying that by default, not knowing I'd been trying to rebut it elsewhere. I think.
It's ironic because you might expect I'd be the sort of person to make those comments, but apparently that's not how I saw it. (Potentially because I didn't think it at the time (see above) and felt the need to justify that, I suppose.)
no subject
Date: 2008-01-17 07:53 pm (UTC)I don't think we really have enough evidence to say why Lewis thought that Susan wasn't worthy of coming back to Narnia. I think the point of view that you outline has some merit but I don't think we can prove it from the text.
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Date: 2008-01-17 08:21 pm (UTC)Oh yes, that makes sense. I didn't feel that way about them, but can imagine how one would.
I think the point of view that you outline has some merit but I don't think we can prove it from the text.
Maybe not. Though I think neither does the idea that Lewis just wrote Susan off entirely -- while he totally did just leave her out, which makes it feel that way, it seems one of many disturbing things about the Last Battle to me. And many people seem not annoyed at that for its own sake, but as a poster-child of their annoyance with the religion generally.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-17 06:41 pm (UTC)That's the final word.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-18 10:37 am (UTC)If you're interested, I wrote one of my better posts about the problem of Susan a while back. I also gathered some links to really thoughtful takes on it, and lots of good discussion happened in my comments section.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-18 01:51 pm (UTC)That says more than I did, I just covered the basics. I'll get onto thinking about it in more detail in a moment. Here I just wanted to drag everyone *I* knew up to the point where they know there is a discussion, rather than being able to just joke that "Susan damned" without realising there's more to say.
BTW, (non-sarcastically) I'm impressed that you are able to describe one of your posts as "one your better ones" :) You certainly tend to write well-thought-out/interesting (or at least, long) posts. I find of my posts the ones I think are interesting are *never* the ones anyone else does.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-18 10:58 am (UTC)I've been reading a similar one on the Ship of Fools recently: http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=010891
no subject
Date: 2008-01-18 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-21 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-18 01:58 pm (UTC)If you’ve read the rest of the Narnia books then Susan is a character whom you’ve come to care about: you want to know what happens to her. But in The Last Battle it is suddenly clear that Lewis does not care about her in the same way that you do: she is less important to him than the allegory. To make his point, someone has to be left behind, and it might as well be Susan as anyone else, and a few sentences are enough to dismiss her from the story. To the reader who cares about the characters more than the message, this comes as a rather unpleasant bait-and-switch, like a missionary who pretends to be your friend but only in order to convert you.
I think it may be hard for people to articulate exactly why this seems wrong, hence the complaints about sexism which (although they may be justified) are red herrings because it would seem just as much a betrayal if Lewis had chosen one of the male characters to be dismissed in the same kind of way.
Rilstone claims that, “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.” And this is where I think most readers disagree: fictional characters are worthwhile in themselves, not only as means to Christian evangelism.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-21 01:54 pm (UTC)